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104
THE LYSISTRATA
the war until it ended in the ruin
prolonged
of the city and the irreparable debasement of
ancient civilization. These men, as may be
supposed, were the butts of our poet's bitterest
satire and most furious invective. Yet even
they, though incessantly attacked and exposed,
never succeeded in prohibiting, and perhaps
never wished to prohibit, the performance of
his plays.
It has been said that Athens attempted to
impose her civilization on the Hellenic world
and became barbarous in the attempt. There
is, of course, much truth in this. To wage
war successfully a state must make itself to
some extent barbarous ; and the Peloponnesian
War ended the progressive phase of
Greek culture. The state conquered by Rome
was something unrecognizably inferior to the
state that Pericles so recklessly jeopardized ;
and it is interesting to note that the conquest
of Greece by Rome did far more for the
spread of Greek civilization and culture than
any of those projects of aggrandizement and
expansion so artfully devised by Athenian
imperialists. No reader of Thucydides can
doubt that as the struggle intensified Athenian
civility diminished : yet, when we remember
that even in the throes of war the right of
the individual to live and speak freely was
not lost, that, on the contrary, during the