WHAT CONSTITUTES A STATE P
[To sax Enema or ma "SPEC...R."1
SIR,—In your issue of February 6th Mr. Malleson has shown that he can claim priority for Thucydidee over Bishop Berkeley and Sir William Jones in respect of the use of the fine phrase that "it is not walls nor ships that make a city—it is men" (Thuc., VII., 77). But is be so sure that he can claim priority for Thucydides over Sophocles? In Ikea 56-7 of the Oedipus Tyrannus occur the famous lines :—
los sit& fever sire rUpyos oGm roils toneos hvbpian p.Ii feee,nehsar IOW.
Thuoydides certainly was older than Sophoelea; but according to Sir Richard Jebb the latest data that can be assigned to the Oedipus Tyrannus is the year 412 B.C. Thucydides, we know, was engaged in his history up to the end of his life (probably about 396 B.c.); and there is an allusion in Book I. which cannot have been written before 404 B.C.. Added to which the very form of the phrase in Thucydides seems to stamp it as a quotation from the dramatist : G8pEr 711, v6ats eel of reixn sill sires arapiiv seral.
Curiously enough, Tacitus puts into the mouth of Otho a somewhat florid expansion of the same idea in his speech rebuking the Pretorians for their outrageous conduct to the Senate :— " Quid vos pulchorrimam bane urbem domibus et tectis at congestu lapidum stare creditis Huta iota et Mania intercidere et reparari promises. aunt ; aeternitas rerum at pax gentium et lima cum veatra sales incolumitato senates firmatur."—(filet., IL, 83.)
am, Sir, &c., G. G. RAMSAY. The Athena-um, Pall Mall, S.W.
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