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the most famous soldier and wealthiest man of all Hellas, died wretchedly, on the bare earth, of cold and famine.

It is not a picture to be dwelt upon; for, though it has a sad moral of the inconstancy of human things, even of human virtue it is one of so constant occurrence in the early republics of Hellas, that we are half induced to suspect some natural ill inherent to their constitutions, which rendered inevitable, if it might not palliate, these constantly recurring instances of the noblest patriotism, polluted by the basest treason, in the person of a single individual. Heaven be praised, if such acts of devotion are rare of occurrence in these latter days-such treasons are impossible

V.

XENOPHON,

THE ATHENIAN;

HIS RETREAT OF THE TEN THOUSAND; HIS CAMPAIGNS, CHARACTER, AND CONDUCT.

BORN an Athenian, in the borough of Ercheia, of the tribe Aigeis, this distinguished man came upon the stage of life at a busy and eventful period, both for his native city, and for the world at large--for it was in the second year of the eighty-third Olympiad, corresponding to four hundred and forty-five B.C., in the Archonship of Timarchides---the same year in which, after all the district of Attika had been devastated by the Lakedaimonians, and the city of Chaironeia fruitlessly captured by their own general Tolmides, who was afterwards defeated with the loss of his whole army, and himself slain at Koroneia, the Athenians were compelled to liberate all the cities they had gained in Boiotia, in order to procure the release of their own prisoners from the hands of the Thebans--that he first saw the light. His father's name was Gryllos; but little is known either of his family, or of his early years; beyond this, that while a very young man his personal beauty recommended him to Socrates, of whom he became perhaps the most favorite and distinguished pupil, certainly one of the very few, who neither

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disgraced the name and tenets of their preceptor by the grossness and immorality of their private lives, nor turned the profession of philosophy into sordid money-making charlatanry; for he, at least, used it rather as the daily guide and measure of an honorable, upright, and useful life, than as the means of dishonest profit, or the badge of vanity and arrogance.

A truce of thirty years was signed, on the year of Xenophon's birth, between the Athenians and Lakedaimonians; and so much were the former depressed by the results of the battle of Koroneia, that they moved but little in the public affairs of Greece for a considerable space of time; until, in the first year of the eighty-seventh Olympiad,* they became involved in a quarrel between the Korinthians and Kerkuraians, in the course of which they soon came to actual hostilities with the former people, at the siege of Potidaia, an Attik dependency which had been seduced from its allegiance by the joint influence of Korinth and Perdikkas of Makedonia, who was at this period actively revolutionizing all the Athenian colonies and conquests in Chalkidike.

Their blockade of Potidaia, by that able leader Phormion, was instantly seized as a pretext against Athens, by the Spartans and other Peloponnesians, who were anxiously seeking cause of war; and, after a mock examination at the isthmus, and the farce of sending evidently untenable demands and inadmissible propositions, they declared the truce to be broken by the Athenians, and so declared war upon them. In the following year, the Thebans commenced hostilities by the seizure of Plataia, the devastation of its territories, and the wholesale carnage of its rural population. This led to retaliation, and thence to the Peloponnesian war, which raged for twenty-seven years through every part of Greece, and at its close left Athens stripped of

* Diod. Sic. XII. 37. In the Archonship of Pythodoros, and the administration of Perikles.

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