ABSTRACT
This chapter, like the preceding, deals with the fifth century and particularly with intellectual activity at Athens and its effect on political thought. But the thinkers here treated represent a somewhat different outlook. They differ among themselves, of course, but they take sides on questions which, though they may arise out of the problems faced by Democritus or Protagoras, are not identical with them. This separation is not chronological and the writers now to be dealt with are not necessarily junior to those described in Chapter IV or even to Herodotus in Chapter III; in many cases exact dating is impossible. But just as Herodotus in many ways typifies the early or early middle part of the century, when the victory over the Mede was still uppermost in men’s minds, and as Protagoras and Hippias are typical of the mid-fifth-century, so now we may without serious error speak of a third period, dominated by the war between the Athenian empire and the Peloponnesians (431–404 B.c.). This is the period of the ϕύσις doctrine and its varying applications to states and morals, of Antiphon and Thrasymachus; but it is also the age of Socrates and others who opposed it. It is also the time when Aristophanes and Euripides were at the height of their powers, using, the one the comic, the other the tragic stage, to attack from different standpoints the social evils of the day; the time when Thucydides was keeping a record of the events and speeches of the war, constantly reminded on the one hand of the weakened respect for law and morality and on the other of the magnitude, never before realised, of the problems of inter-state relationships in peace and in war. It is a period above all of constant antithesis, which it would be an error to think of as only a rhetorical device, of δισσσì λóγοι, of a’perpetual Zwiespältigkeit —the moralists and the immoralists, the weak and the strong, the Just Reason and the Unjust, and the prayers for concord and cohesion, the answers of faction and disintegration.
