prisoners to death. Thucydides’ [Thucydides (471?-?400 B.C.)] description
reminds us of Paris in 1792-93.
During seven days the Corcyreans were engaged in butchering those
of their fellow citizens whom they regarded as their enemies… Death
raged in every shape, and, as usually happens at such times, there was
no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their
fathers, and suppliants were dragged from the altar or slain on it…
Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places where it
arrived last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a
still greater excess the… atrocity of their reprisals… Corcyra gave the
first example of these crimes,… of the revenge exacted by the
governed (who had never experienced equitable treatment, or, indeed,
aught but violence, from their rulers) and… of the savage and pitiless
excesses into which men were hurried by their passions… Meanwhile
the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two [warring
groups]… The whole Hellenic world was convulsed.
In his Republic Plato made his mouthpiece, Socrates, condemn the
triumphant democracy of Athens as a chaos of class violence, cultural
decadence, and moral degeneration. The democrats contemptuously
rejected temperance as unmanliness… Insolence they term breeding, and
anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage… The
father gets accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them,
and the son to be on a level with his father, having no shame or fear of his
parents… The teacher fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars
despise their masters and tutors… The old do not like to be thought morose
and authoritative, and therefore they imitate the young… Nor must I forget
to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other…
The citizens chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at
length… they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten… And
this is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs dictatorship
[tyrannis]… The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the
