powers which, rightly trained, might have made him not less renowned
in council than in war;" but he gives us, though briefly, the
arguments used by Pausanias. He presents to us the image, always
interesting, of a man who grasps firmly the clear conception of a
definite but difficult policy, for success in which he is dependent on
the conscious or involuntary cooperation of men impenetrable to that
conception, and possessed of a collective authority even greater than
his own. To retain Sparta temporarily at the head of Greece was an
ambition quite consistent with the more criminal designs of Pausanias;
and his whole conduct at Byzantium is rendered more intelligible than
it appears in history, when he points out that "for Sparta to maintain
her ascendancy two things are needful: first, to continue the war
by land, secondly, to disgust the Ionians with their sojourn at
Byzantium, to send them with their ships back to their own havens, and
so leave Hellas under the sole guardianship of the Spartans and their
Peloponnesian allies." And who has not learned, in a later school, the
wisdom of the Spartan commissioners? Do not their utterances sound
familiar to us? "Increase of dominion is waste of life and treasure.
Sparta is content to hold her own. What care we, who leads the Greeks
into blows? The fewer blows the better. Brave men fight if they must:
wise men never fight if they can help it." Of this scene and some
others in the first volume of the present fragment (notably the scene
in which the Regent confronts the allied chiefs, and defends himself
against the charge of connivance at the escape of the Persian
prisoners), I should have been tempted to say that they could not have
been written without personal experience of political life; if
the interview between Wallenstein and the Swedish ambassadors in
Schiller's great trilogy did not recur to my recollection as I write.
The language of the ambassadors in that interview is a perfect manual
of practical diplomacy; and yet in practical diplomacy Schiller had