“But Isocrates was too far-sighted to be at ease… [The Athenians] were thinking, he said, not of their duties as citizens, but of their rights. They were looking to the state to guarantee not freedom as in the old days, but privilege. Great danger lay in that course. Men bent on self-interest were always short-sighted. They could rise to long views, to where they could see the good of the whole country, only when they looked beyond their own affairs, and the state in which men did not do that is doomed. ‘You have no breadth of view,’ he told the Athenians. ‘You do not give equal attention to the men who address you, but really listen only to those who support your desires…you think those better friends of the people who dole out money to them than those who serve the state disinterestedly.’” From
The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton
“But Isocrates was too far-sighted to be at ease… [The Athenians] were thinking, he said, not of their duties as citizens, but of their rights. They were looking to the state to guarantee not freedom as in the old days, but privilege. Great danger lay in that course. Men bent on self-interest were always short-sighted. They could rise to long views, to where they could see the good of the whole country, only when they looked beyond their own affairs, and the state in which men did not do that is doomed. ‘You have no breadth of view,’ he told the Athenians. ‘You do not give equal attention to the men who address you, but really listen only to those who support your desires…you think those better friends of the people who dole out money to them than those who serve the state disinterestedly.’” From The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton
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