79
So public-spirited were they that even in their party struggles they opposed one another, not to see which faction should destroy the other and rule over the remnant, but which should outstrip the other in doing something good for the state; and they organized their political clubs, not for personal advantage, but for the benefit of the people.Political parties and clubs of that day are here no doubt idealized to point the contrast to the selfish intrigues of the present. Cf. Isoc. 4.168 and Thucydides’ picture of the evils of faction, Thuc. 3.82. These clubs, whatever they may have been in the Golden Age, were later sworn enemies of popular government and the centers of oligarchical conspiracies. See Thuc. 8.54; and Aristot. Ath. Pol. 34.
80
In the same spirit they governed their relations with other states. They treated the Hellenes with consideration and not with insolence, regarding it as their duty to command them in the field but not to tyrannize over them, desiring rather to be addressed as leaders than as masters, and rather to be greeted as saviors than reviled as destroyers; they won the Hellenic cities to themselves by doing kindness instead of subverting them by force,
81
keeping their word more faithfully than men now keep their oaths, and thinking it right to abide by their covenants as by the decrees of necessity; they exulted less in the exercise of power than they gloried in living with self-control, thinking it their duty to feel toward the weaker as they expected the stronger to feel toward themselves; and, while they regarded their home cities as their several places of abode, yet they considered Hellas to be their common fatherland.
