Note 5 — REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned—the author of the Politics—in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand." "Man when perfected (+teleôthén+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated from justice (+chôristhèn nómou kaì díkês+) the basest of all." "Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the destruction of a City." The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct from that which characterizes his earlier works. The shading-in of the life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears as difficult to imagine before Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato, Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult after Syracuse to imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.