XXX. THE OUTBREAK OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR…

XXX. THE OUTBREAK OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

No admirer of Greek civilisation can turn from the peaceful age of Pericles and follow the next step in Grecian history without a feeling of sadness, for he has to see the most cultured people of antiquity torn by internal dissensions and interstate jealousies; he has to see the people who represent the acme of culture harassed for a generation by an imbecile strife, which shall leave it so weakened that it will become an easy prey to outside foes. In every succeeding generation, when men have studied the history of classical times, the same feeling of amazement has prevailed, and has often found expression in contemplating this period of the Peloponnesian War; but it remained for John Ruskin to invent the vivid phrase which in three words epitomises the entire story, when he speaks of this amazing conflict as the “suicide of Greece.” It was in truth nothing less than that.

There was no great question at issue between the Athenian and Spartan peoples that must be decided by the arbitrament of arms or otherwise. There was no reason outside the temperament of the people themselves why the Athenians on the one hand, and the Spartans on the other, might not have gone on indefinitely, each people pre-eminent in its own territory, and each standing aloof from the other; but that interstate jealousy which was responsible for so many things in Grecian history came as a determining influence which at last could not longer be controlled. Persian might, which dared not re-enter Greece, but which longed for the overthrow of an old enemy, urged on one side or the other, as seemed for the moment best to serve that end. The remaining Grecian cities took sides with Athens or Sparta according to their predilections, or their own personal enmities and jealousies, and there resulted a war which involved practically all the cities of Greece, and which, after continuing for a full generation, brought Hellas as a whole to destruction.

OUR SOURCES

The history of this war has been preserved to posterity in far greater detail than has the history of any preceding conflict anywhere in the world. The Athenian general Thucydides, who himself took an active part in the earlier stages of the war, commanding forces in the field until finally he suffered the displeasure of the Athenians, determined from the outset, as he himself tells us, to write a complete history of the conflict which he believed would be the most memorable of all in the annals of history. The work which he produced has probably been more widely celebrated and more universally applauded than any other piece of historical composition that was ever written. All manner of extravagant things have been said about it. Every one has heard, for example, of Macaulay’s saying that he felt he might perhaps equal any other piece of historical writing that had ever been done except the seventh book of Thucydides, before which he felt himself helpless. This eulogy is of a piece with much more that has been said in similar kind by a multitude of other critics. It has even been alleged that no historian of a later period has ever dealt out such impartial judgment as is to be found in the pages of Thucydides. Seemingly forgetful of the meaning of words, critics have even assured us that no period of like extent of the world’s history, ancient or modern, is so fully known to us as this period of the Peloponnesian War through the history of Thucydides.

To any one, who himself will take up the history of Thucydides, either in the original or in such a translation as the admirable one of Dale, two things will at once be apparent; in the first place it will not long be open to doubt, to any one who is familiar with the literature of antiquity, that this work of Thucydides, considered in relation to the time in which it was written, is really an extraordinary production; but, in the second place, it will be equally clear that if we are to consider the work not in comparison with the writings of ancient authors but as a part of world-literature, then much that has been said of it must be regarded as fulsome eulogy.

To say that this work covers the period of the Peloponnesian War as no modern period of history has been covered; to say that no modern historian has dealt with his topic with the calm impartiality of Thucydides; to say that no writer can hope to produce an historical narrative comparable to the seventh book, or to any other book, of Thucydides--to say such things as these is to abandon the broad impartial view from which alone criticism worthy of the name is possible, and to come under the spell of other minds. The History of the Peloponnesian War is a great book; as an historical composition it is one of the greatest ever written: but when one has said that one has said enough. Its style, by common consent, is not such as to make it a model, and its matter is very largely the recital of bald facts with evidence of an insight into the political motives beneath the surface, which seems extraordinary only because the predecessors of Thucydides and some of his successors had seemed so woefully to lack such insight. As to the impartiality of the narrative, we must not overlook the significance of Professor Mahaffy’s remark, that for most of the period covered in the history of Thucydides this history itself is our sole authority. That it does, nevertheless, evince a high degree of impartiality and a broad sweep of intellect on the part of its author will not be questioned; but Professor Mahaffy makes an estimate, which no one who is not fully under the spell of antiquity would think of disputing, when he asserts his belief that such modern historians as, for example, Thirlwall, must be accredited with at least as high a degree of impartiality as Thucydides can claim.

But all this must not be taken as in any sense denying that the work of Thucydides is a marvellous production. Considering the time when it was written, and that its author was a participant in many of the events which he describes, it is astonishing that his work should be measurably free from partiality. That it is so was, perhaps, at least in some measure, due to the fact that Thucydides was banished from Athens, and hence wrote his history not so much from the Athenian standpoint, as from the standpoint of a man without a country, who was at enmity with both Spartans and Athenians. But, partial or impartial, the history of Thucydides remains, and presumably must always remain, the sole contemporary record open to posterity of that great struggle through which Greece, as it were, voluntarily threw away her prestige and her power.

Thucydides, to be sure, did not complete his history of the war, or, if he did, his later chapters have not been preserved to us. The former supposition is doubtless the correct one, because the thread of the narrative, which Thucydides dropped so abruptly, was taken up by Xenophon, also a contemporary. It was a not unusual custom among the ancient authors to write important works as explicit continuations of the works of other writers. Xenophon’s narrative of the events of the later years of the Peloponnesian War is such a work. Like the history of Thucydides it is practically our sole authority for the period that it covers, but, by common consent of critics, it takes a much lower level than the work which it supplements.

Xenophon was also an exile from Athens; but he differed from Thucydides in being an ardent friend of Sparta, and his prejudices are well known to readers of his works. One must suppose, however, that the favourite pupil of Socrates may be depended upon for reasonable impartiality when he deals with matters of fact. But, be this as it may, it is Xenophon, and Xenophon alone, who tells us most that we know at first hand, not alone of the closing years of the Peloponnesian War, but of many in the period succeeding. We shall constantly support our narrative of the events of this period, therefore, by references to the pages of Xenophon, as well as to those of Thucydides.[a]

THE ORIGIN OF THE WAR

Even before the recent hostilities at Corcyra and Potidæa, it had been evident to reflecting Greeks that prolonged observance of the Thirty Years’ Truce was becoming uncertain, and that the mingled hatred, fear, and admiration which Athens inspired throughout Greece would prompt Sparta and the Spartan confederacy to seize any favourable opening for breaking down the Athenian power. That such was the disposition of Sparta was well understood among the Athenian allies, however considerations of prudence and general slowness in resolving might postpone the moment of carrying it into effect. Accordingly not only the Samians when they revolted had applied to the Spartan confederacy for aid, which they appear to have been prevented from obtaining chiefly by the pacific interests then animating the Corinthians--but also the Lesbians had endeavoured to open negotiations with Sparta for a similar purpose, though the authorities to whom alone the proposition could have been communicated, since it long remained secret and was never executed--had given them no encouragement.

The affairs of Athens had been administered, under the ascendency of Pericles, without any view to extension of empire or encroachment upon others, though with constant reference to the probabilities of war, and with anxiety to keep the city in a condition to meet it. But even the splendid internal ornaments, which Athens at that time acquired, were probably not without their effect in provoking jealousy on the part of other Greeks as to her ultimate views. The only known incident, wherein Athens had been brought into collision with a member of the Spartan confederacy prior to the Corcyræan dispute, was her decree passed in regard to Megara, prohibiting the Megarians, on pain of death, from all trade or intercourse as well with Athens as with all ports within the Athenian empire. This prohibition was grounded on the alleged fact, that the Megarians had harboured runaway slaves from Athens, and had appropriated and cultivated portions of land upon her border; partly land, the property of the goddesses of Eleusis; partly a strip of territory disputed between the two states, and therefore left by mutual understanding in common pasture without any permanent enclosure. In reference to this latter point, the Athenian herald Anthemocritus had been sent to Megara to remonstrate, but had been so rudely dealt with, that his death shortly afterwards was imputed to the Megarians. We may reasonably suppose that ever since the revolt of Megara fourteen years before--which caused to Athens an irreparable mischief--the feeling prevalent between the two cities had been one of bitter enmity, manifesting itself in many ways, but so much exasperated by recent events as to provoke Athens to a signal revenge. Exclusion from Athens and all the ports in her empire, comprising nearly every island and seaport in the Ægean, was so ruinous to the Megarians, that they loudly complained of it at Sparta, representing it as an infraction of the Thirty Years’ Truce; though it was undoubtedly within the legitimate right of Athens to enforce, and was even less harsh than the systematic expulsion of foreigners by Sparta, with which Pericles compared it.

[Sidenote: [432 B.C.]]

These complaints found increased attention after the war of Corcyra and the blockade of Potidæa by the Athenians. The sentiments of the Corinthians towards Athens had now become angry and warlike in the highest degree. It was not simply resentment for the past which animated them, but also the anxiety farther to bring upon Athens so strong a hostile pressure as should preserve Potidæa and its garrison from capture. Accordingly they lost no time in endeavouring to rouse the feelings of the Spartans against Athens, and in inducing them to invite to Sparta all such of the confederates as had any grievances against that city. Not merely the Megarians, but several other confederates, came thither as accusers; while the Æginetans, though their insular position made it perilous for them to appear, made themselves vehemently heard through the mouths of others, complaining that Athens withheld from them the autonomy to which they were entitled under the truce.

According to the Lacedæmonian practice, it was necessary first that the Spartans themselves, apart from their allies, should decide whether there existed a sufficient case of wrong done by Athens against themselves or against Peloponnesus--either in violation of the Thirty Years’ Truce, or in any other way. If the determination of Sparta herself were in the negative, the case would never even be submitted to the vote of the allies; but if it were in the affirmative, then the latter would be convoked to deliver their opinion also: and assuming that the majority of votes coincided with the previous decision of Sparta, the entire confederacy stood then pledged to the given line of policy--if the majority was contrary, the Spartans would stand alone, or with such only of the confederates as concurred. Even in the oligarchy of Sparta, such a question as this could only be decided by a general assembly of Spartan citizens, qualified both by age, by regular contribution to the public mess, and by obedience to Spartan discipline. To the assembly so constituted the deputies of the various allied cities addressed themselves, each setting forth his case against Athens. The Corinthians chose to reserve themselves to the last, after the assembly had been inflamed by the previous speakers.

Of this important assembly, on which so much of the future fate of Greece turned, Thucydides has preserved an account unusually copious. First, the speech delivered by the Corinthian envoys. Next, that of some Athenian envoys, who happening to be at the same time in Sparta on some other matters, and being present in the assembly so as to have heard the speeches both of the Corinthians and of the other complainants, obtained permission from the magistrates to address the assembly in their turn. Thirdly, the address of the Spartan king Archidamus, on the course of policy proper to be adopted by Sparta. Lastly, the brief, but eminently characteristic, address of the ephor, Sthenelaidas, on putting the question for decision. These speeches, the composition of Thucydides himself, contain substantially the sentiments of the parties to whom they are ascribed. Neither of them is distinctly a reply to that which has preceded, but each presents the situation of affairs from a different point of view.

To dwell much upon specific allegations of wrong, would not have suited the purpose of the Corinthian envoy; for against such, the Thirty Years’ Truce expressly provided that recourse should be had to amicable arbitration--to which recourse he never once alludes. He knew that, as between Corinth and Athens, war had already begun at Potidæa; and his business, throughout nearly all of a very emphatic speech, is to show that the Peloponnesian confederacy, and especially Sparta, is bound to take instant part in it, not less by prudence than by duty. He employs the most animated language to depict the ambition, the unwearied activity, the personal effort abroad as well as at home, the quick resolves, the sanguine hopes never dashed by failure--of Athens, as contrasted with the cautious, home-keeping, indolent, scrupulous routine of Sparta. He reproaches the Spartans with their backwardness and timidity, in not having repressed the growth of Athens before she reached this formidable height, especially in having allowed her to fortify her city after the retreat of Xerxes and afterwards to build the Long Walls from the city to the sea. The Spartans (he observes) stood alone among all Greeks in the notable system of keeping down an enemy, not by acting, but by delaying to act--not arresting his growth, but putting him down when his force was doubled. Falsely indeed had they acquired the reputation of being sure, when they were in reality merely slow. In resisting Xerxes, as in resisting Athens, they had always been behindhand, disappointing and leaving their friends to ruin; while both these enemies had only failed of complete success through their own mistakes.

After half apologising for the tartness of these reproofs--which however, as the Spartans were now well disposed to go to war forthwith, would be well-timed and even agreeable--the Corinthian orator vindicates the necessity of plain-speaking by the urgent peril of the emergency and the formidable character of the enemy who threatened them. “You do not reflect” he says “how thoroughly different the Athenians are from yourselves. They are innovators by nature, sharp both in devising, and in executing what they have determined: you are sharp only in keeping what you have got, in determining on nothing beyond, and in doing even less than absolute necessity requires. They again dare beyond their means, run risks beyond their own judgment, and keep alive their hopes in desperate circumstances: your peculiarity is, that your performance comes short of your power, you have no faith even in what your judgment guarantees, when in difficulties you despair of all escape. They never hang back, you are habitual laggards: they love foreign service, you cannot stir from home: for they are always under the belief that their movements will lead to some further gain, while you fancy that new products will endanger what you already have. When successful, they make the greatest forward march; when defeated, they fall back the least. Moreover they task their bodies on behalf of their city as if they were the bodies of others, while their minds are most of all their own, for exertion in her service. When their plans for acquisition do not come successfully out, they feel like men robbed of what belongs to them: yet the acquisitions when realised appear like trifles compared with what remains to be acquired. If they sometimes fail in an attempt, new hopes arise in some other direction to supply the want; for with them alone the possession and the hope of what they aim at are almost simultaneous, from their habit of quickly executing all that they have once resolved. And in this manner do they toil throughout all their lives amidst hardship and peril, disregarding present enjoyment in the continual thirst for increase, knowing no other festival recreation except the performance of active duty, and deeming inactive repose a worse condition than fatiguing occupation. To speak the truth in two words, such is their inborn temper that they will neither remain at rest themselves nor allow rest to others.

“Such is the city which stands opposed to you, Lacedæmonians--yet ye still hang back from action. Your continual scruples and apathy would hardly be safe, even if ye had neighbours like yourselves in character: but as to dealings with Athens, your system is antiquated and out of date. In politics as in art, it is the modern improvements which are sure to come out victorious; and though unchanged institutions are best, if a city be not called upon to act, yet multiplicity of active obligations requires multiplicity and novelty of contrivance. It is through these numerous trials that the means of Athens have acquired so much more new development than yours.”

The Corinthians concluded by saying, that if, after so many previous warnings, now repeated for the last time, Sparta still refused to protect her allies against Athens, if she delayed to perform her promise made to the Potidæans of immediately invading Attica, they (the Corinthians) would forthwith look for safety in some new alliance, which they felt themselves fully justified in doing. They admonished her to look well to the case, and to carry forward Peloponnesus, with undiminished dignity, as it had been transmitted to her from her predecessors.

Such was the memorable picture of Athens and her citizens, as exhibited by her fiercest enemy before the public assembly at Sparta. It was calculated to impress the assembly, not by appeal to recent or particular misdeeds, but by the general system of unprincipled and endless aggression which was imputed to Athens during the past, and by the certainty held out that the same system, unless put down by measures of decisive hostility, would be pushed still farther in future, to the utter ruin of Peloponnesus. And to this point did the Athenian envoy (staying in Sparta about some other negotiation and now present in the assembly) address himself in reply, after having asked and obtained permission from the magistrates. The empire of Athens was now of such standing that the younger men present had no personal knowledge of the circumstances under which it had grown up, and what was needed as information for them would be impressive as a reminder even to their seniors.

In her position, he asserted, no Grecian power either would or could have acted otherwise--no Grecian power, certainly not Sparta, would have acted with so much equity and moderation or given so little ground of complaint to her subjects. Worse they had suffered, while under Persia; worse they would suffer, if they came under Sparta, who held her own allies under the thraldom of an oligarchical party in each city; and if they hated Athens this was only because subjects always hated the present dominion, whatever that might be.

Having justified both the origin and the working of the Athenian empire, the envoy concluded by warning Sparta to consider calmly, without being hurried away by the passions and invectives of others, before she took a step from which there was no retreat, and which exposed the future to chances such as no man on either side could foresee. He called on her not to break the truce mutually sworn to, but to adjust all differences, as Athens was prepared to do, by the amicable arbitration which that truce provided. Should she begin war, the Athenians would follow her lead and resist her, calling to witness those gods under whose sanction the oaths were taken. At any time previous to the affair of Corcyra, the topics insisted upon by the Athenian would probably have been profoundly listened to at Sparta. But now the mind of the Spartans was made up. Having cleared the assembly of all “strangers,” and even all allies, they proceeded to discuss and determine the question among themselves. Most of their speakers held but one language--expatiating on the wrongs already done by Athens, and urging the necessity of instant war. There was however one voice, and that a commanding voice, raised against this conclusion: the ancient and respected king Archidamus opposed it.

The speech of Archidamus is that of a deliberate Spartan, who, setting aside both hatred to Athens and blind partiality to allies, looks at the question with a view to the interests and honour of Sparta only. He reminded them of the wealth, the population (greater than that of any other Grecian city), the naval force, the cavalry, the hoplites, the large foreign dominion of Athens--and then asked by what means they proposed to put her down. Ships, they had few; trained seamen, yet fewer; wealth, next to none. They could indeed invade and ravage Attica, by their superior numbers and land-force. But the Athenians had possessions abroad sufficient to enable them to dispense with the produce of Attica, while their great navy would retaliate the like ravages upon Peloponnesus. To suppose that one or two devastating expeditions into Attica would bring the war to an end, would be a deplorable error; such proceedings would merely enrage the Athenians, without impairing their real strength, and the war would thus be prolonged, perhaps for a whole generation. Before they determined upon war, it was absolutely necessary to provide more efficient means for carrying it on; and to multiply their allies not merely among the Greeks, but among foreigners also. While this was in process, envoys ought to be sent to Athens to remonstrate and obtain redress for the grievances of the allies. If the Athenians granted this--which they very probably would do, when they saw the preparations going forward, and when the ruin of the highly-cultivated soil of Attica was held over them in terrorem without being actually consummated--so much the better: if they refused, in the course of two or three years, war might be commenced with some hopes of success. Archidamus reminded his countrymen that their allies would hold them responsible for the good or bad issue of what was now determined; admonishing them, in the true spirit of a conservative Spartan, to cling to that cautious policy which had been ever the characteristic of the state, despising both taunts on their tardiness and panegyric on their valour.

The speech of Archidamus was not only in itself full of plain reason and good sense, but delivered altogether from the point of view of a Spartan; appealing greatly to Spartan conservative feeling and even prejudice. But in spite of all this, and in spite of the personal esteem entertained for the speaker, the tide of feeling in the opposite direction was at that moment irresistible. Sthenelaidas, one of the five ephors to whom it fell to put the question for voting, closed the debate. His few words mark at once the character of the man, the temper of the assembly, and the simplicity of speech, though without the wisdom of judgment, for which Archidamus had taken credit to his countrymen.

“I don’t understand,” he said, “these long speeches of the Athenians. They have praised themselves abundantly, but they have never rebutted what is laid to their charge--that they are guilty of wrong against our allies and against Peloponnesus. Now if in former days they were good men against the Persians, and are now evil-doers against us, they deserve double punishment as having become evil-doers instead of good. But we are the same now as we were then: we know better than to sit still while our allies are suffering wrong: we shall not adjourn our aid, while they cannot adjourn their sufferings. Others have in abundance wealth, ships, and horses--but we have good allies, whom we are not to abandon to the mercy of the Athenians: nor are we to trust our redress to arbitration and to words, when our wrongs are not confined to words. We must help them speedily and with all our strength. Nor let any one tell us that we can with honour deliberate when we are actually suffering wrong--it is rather for those who intend to do the wrong, to deliberate well beforehand. Resolve upon war then, Lacedæmonians, in a manner worthy of Sparta. Suffer not the Athenians to become greater than they are: let us not betray our allies to ruin, but march with the aid of the gods against the wrong-doers.”

With these few words, so well calculated to defeat the prudential admonitions of Archidamus, Sthenelaidas put the question for the decision of the assembly--which at Sparta was usually taken neither by show of hands, nor by deposit of balls in an urn, but by cries analogous to the ay or no of the English House of Commons--the presiding ephor declaring which of the cries predominated. On this occasion the cry for war was manifestly the stronger. Yet Sthenelaidas affected inability to determine which of the two was the louder, in order that he might have an excuse for bringing about a more impressive manifestation of sentiment and a stronger apparent majority--since a portion of the minority would probably be afraid to show their real opinions as individuals openly. He therefore directed a division--like the speaker of the English House of Commons when his decision in favour of ay or no is questioned by any member--“Such of you as think that the truce has been violated and that the Athenians are doing us wrong, go to that side; such as think the contrary, to the other side.” The assembly accordingly divided, and the majority was very great on the warlike side of the question.

The first step of the Lacedæmonians, after coming to this important decision, was to send to Delphi and inquire of the oracle whether it would be beneficial to them to undertake the war. The answer brought back (Thucydides seems hardly certain that it was really given) was--that if they did their best they would be victorious, and that the gods would help them, invoked or uninvoked. They at the same time convened a general congress of their allies to Sparta, for the purpose of submitting their recent resolution to the vote of all.

[Sidenote: [432-431 B.C.]]

If there were any speeches delivered at this congress in opposition to the war, they were not likely to be successful in a cause wherein even Archidamus had failed. After the Corinthian had concluded, the question was put to the deputies of every city, great and small indiscriminately: and the majority decided for war. This important resolution was adopted about the end of 432 B.C., or the beginning of January 431 B.C.: the previous decision of the Spartans separately, may have been taken about two months earlier, in the preceding October or November 432 B.C.

Reviewing the conduct of the two great Grecian parties at this momentous juncture, with reference to existing treaties and positive grounds of complaint, it seems clear that Athens was in the right. She had done nothing which could fairly be called a violation of the Thirty Years’ Truce: while for such of her acts as were alleged to be such, she offered to submit them to that amicable arbitration which the truce itself prescribed. The Peloponnesian confederates were manifestly the aggressors in the contest; and if Sparta, usually so backward, now came forward in a spirit so decidedly opposite, we are to ascribe it partly to her standing fear and jealousy of Athens, partly to the pressure of her allies, especially of the Corinthians. Thucydides, recognising these two as the grand determining motives, and indicating the alleged infractions of truce as simple occasions or pretexts, seems to consider the fear and hatred of Athens as having contributed more to determine Sparta than the urgency of her allies. That the extraordinary aggrandisement of Athens, during the period immediately succeeding the Persian invasion, was well-calculated to excite alarm and jealousy in Peloponnesus, is indisputable. But if we take Athens as she stood in 432 B.C., it deserves notice that she had neither made, nor (so far as we know) tried to make, a single new acquisition during the whole fourteen years which had elapsed since the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ Truce--and moreover that that truce marked an epoch of signal humiliation and reduction of her power. The triumph which Sparta and the Peloponnesians then gained, though not sufficiently complete to remove all fear of Athens, was yet great enough to inspire them with the hope that a second combined effort would subdue her. This mixture of fear and hope was exactly the state of feeling out of which war was likely to grow.

Moreover the confident hopes of the Peloponnesians were materially strengthened by the widespread sympathy in favour of their cause, proclaiming as it did the intended liberation of Greece from a despot city.

To Athens, on the other hand, the coming war presented itself in a very different aspect; holding out scarcely any hope of possible gain, and the certainty of prodigious loss and privation--even granting that at this heavy cost, her independence and union at home, and her empire abroad, could be upheld. By Pericles, and by the more long-sighted Athenians, the chance of unavoidable war was foreseen even before the Corcyræan dispute. But Pericles was only the first citizen in a democracy, esteemed, trusted, and listened to, more than any one else by the body of citizens, but warmly opposed in most of his measures, under the free speech and latitude of individual action which reigned at Athens--and even bitterly hated by many active political opponents. The formal determination of the Lacedæmonians, to declare war, must of course have been made known at Athens, by those Athenian envoys who had entered an unavailing protest against it in the Spartan assembly. No steps were taken by Sparta to carry this determination into effect until after the congress of allies and their pronounced confirmatory vote. Nor did the Spartans even then send any herald, or make any formal declaration. They despatched various propositions to Athens, not at all with a view of trying to obtain satisfaction, or of providing some escape from the probability of war; but with the contrary purpose--of multiplying demands, and enlarging the grounds of quarrel. Meanwhile the deputies retiring home from the congress to their respective cities carried with them the general resolution for immediate warlike preparations to be made with as little delay as possible.

PREPARATIONS FOR THE CONFLICT

The first requisition addressed by the Lacedæmonians to Athens was a political manœuvre aimed at Pericles, their chief opponent in that city. His mother Agariste belonged to the great family of the Alemæonids, who were supposed to be under an inexorable hereditary taint, in consequence of the sacrilege committed by their ancestor Megacles nearly two centuries before, in the slaughter of the Cylonian suppliants near the altar of the Venerable Goddesses. Ancient as this transaction was, it still had sufficient hold on the mind of the Athenians to serve as the basis of a political manœuvre: about seventy-seven years before, shortly after the expulsion of Hippias from Athens, it had been so employed by the Spartan king Cleomenes, who at that time exacted from the Athenians a clearance of the ancient sacrilege, to be effected by the banishment of Clisthenes (the founder of the democracy) and his chief partisans. This demand, addressed by Cleomenes to the Athenians at the instance of Isagoras, the rival of Clisthenes, had been then obeyed, and had served well the purposes of those who sent it. A similar blow was now aimed by the Lacedæmonians at Pericles (the grand-nephew of Clisthenes), and doubtless at the instance of his political enemies: religion required, it was pretended, that “the abomination of the goddess should be driven out.” If the Athenians complied with this demand, they would deprive themselves, at this critical moment, of their ablest leader. But the Lacedæmonians, not expecting compliance, reckoned at all events upon discrediting Pericles with the people, as being partly the cause of the war through family taint of impiety; and this impression would doubtless be loudly proclaimed by his political opponents in the assembly.

The influence of Pericles with the Athenian public had become greater and greater as their political experience of him was prolonged. But the bitterness of his enemies appears to have increased along with it; and not long before this period, he had been indirectly assailed, as we have seen, through the medium of accusations against three different persons, all more or less intimate with him--his mistress Aspasia, the philosopher Anaxagoras, and the sculptor Phidias. It is said also that Dracontides proposed and carried a decree in the public assembly, that Pericles should be called on to give an account of the money which he had expended, and that the dicasts, before whom the account was rendered, should give their suffrage in the most solemn manner from the altar: this latter provision was modified by Agnon, who, while proposing that the dicasts should be fifteen hundred in number, retained the vote by pebbles in the urn according to ordinary custom.

If Pericles was ever tried on such a charge, there can be no doubt that he was honourably acquitted: for the language of Thucydides respecting his pecuniary probity is such as could not have been employed if a verdict of guilty on a charge of peculation had been publicly pronounced. But we cannot be certain that he ever was tried; indeed, another accusation urged by his enemies, and even by Aristophanes in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War, implies that no trial took place: for it was alleged that Pericles, in order to escape this danger, “blew up the Peloponnesian War,” and involved his country in such confusion and peril as made his own aid and guidance indispensably necessary to her, especially that he passed the decree against the Megarians by which the war was really brought on. We know enough, however, to be certain that such a supposition is altogether inadmissible. The enemies of Pericles were far too eager, and too expert in Athenian political warfare, to have let him escape by such a stratagem. Moreover, we learn from the assurance of Thucydides that the war depended upon far deeper causes--that the Megarian decree was in no way the real cause of it; that it was not Pericles, but the Peloponnesians, who brought it on, by the blow struck at Potidæa.

All that we can make out, amidst these uncertified allegations, is that, in a year or two immediately preceding the Peloponnesian War, Pericles was hard pressed by the accusations of political enemies--perhaps even in his own person, but certainly in the persons of those who were most in his confidence and affection. And it was in this turn of his political position, that the Lacedæmonians sent to Athens the above-mentioned requisition, that the ancient Cylonian sacrilege might be at length cleared out; in other words, that Pericles and his family might be banished. Doubtless his enemies, as well as the partisans of Lacedæmon at Athens, would strenuously support this proposition. And the party of Lacedæmon at Athens was always strong, even during the middle of the war; to act as proxenus to the Lacedæmonians was accounted an honour even by the greatest Athenian families. On this occasion, however, the manœuvre did not succeed, nor did the Athenians listen to the requisition for banishing the sacrilegious Alcmæonids. On the contrary, they replied that the Spartans too had an account of sacrilege to clear off: for they had violated the sanctuary of Poseidon at Cape Tænarus, in dragging from it some helot suppliants; and the sanctuary of Athene Chalciœcus at Sparta, in blocking up and starving to death the guilty regent Pausanias. To require that Laconia might be cleared of these two acts of sacrilege, was the only answer which the Athenians made to the demand sent for the banishment of Pericles. Probably the actual effect of that demand was to strengthen him in the public esteem--very different from the effect of the same manœuvre when practised before by Cleomenes against Clisthenes.

Other Spartan envoys shortly afterwards arrived with fresh demands. The Athenians were now required: (1) to withdraw their troops from Potidæa; (2) to replace Ægina in its autonomy; (3) to repeal the bill of exclusion against the Megarians.

It was upon the latter that the greatest stress was laid; an intimation being held out that the war might be avoided if such repeal were granted. We see plainly from this proceeding that the Lacedæmonians acted in concert with the anti-Periclean leaders at Athens. To Sparta and her confederacy the decree against the Megarians was of less importance than the rescue of the Corinthian troops now blocked up in Potidæa; but on the other hand, the party opposed to Pericles would have much better chance of getting a vote of the assembly against him on the subject of the Megarians: and this advantage, if gained, would serve to enfeeble his influence generally. No concession was obtained however on either of the three points: even in respect to Megara, the decree of exclusion was vindicated and upheld against all the force of opposition. At length the Lacedæmonians--who had already resolved upon war and had sent three envoys in mere compliance with the exigencies of ordinary practice, not with any idea of bringing about an accommodation--sent a third batch of envoys with a proposition which at least had the merit of disclosing their real purpose without disguise. Rhamphias and two other Spartans announced to the Athenians the simple injunction: “The Lacedæmonians wish the peace to stand; and it may stand, if you will leave the Greeks autonomous.” Upon this demand, so very different from the preceding, the Athenians resolved to hold a fresh assembly on the subject of war or peace, to open the whole question anew for discussion, and to determine once for all on a peremptory answer.

The last demands presented on the part of Sparta, which went to nothing less than the entire extinction of the Athenian empire--combined with the character, alike wavering and insincere, of the demands previously made, and with the knowledge that the Spartan confederacy had pronounced peremptorily in favour of war--seemed likely to produce unanimity at Athens, and to bring together this important assembly under the universal conviction that war was inevitable. Such however was not the fact.

The reluctance to go to war was sincere amidst the majority of the assembly, while among a considerable portion of them it was so preponderant, that they even now reverted to the opening which the Lacedæmonians had before held out about the anti-Megarian decree, as if that were the chief cause of the war. There was much difference of opinion among the speakers, several of whom insisted upon the repeal of this decree, treating it as a matter far too insignificant to go to war about, and denouncing the obstinacy of Pericles for refusing to concede such a trifle. Against this opinion Pericles entered his protest, in an harangue decisive and encouraging, which Dionysius of Halicarnassus ranks among the best speeches in Thucydides: the latter historian may probably himself have heard the original speech.

“I continue, Athenians, to adhere to the same conviction, that we must not yield to the Peloponnesians. Now let none of you believe that we shall be going to war about a trifle if we refuse to rescind the Megarian decree--which they chiefly put forward, as if its repeal would avert the war--let none of you take blame to yourselves as if we had gone to war about a small matter. For this small matter contains in itself the whole test and trial of your mettle: if ye yield it, ye will presently have some other greater exaction put upon you, like men who have already truckled on one point from fear: whereas if ye hold out stoutly, ye will make it clear to them that they must deal with you upon a footing of equality.”

Pericles then examined the relative strength of parties and the chances of war. The Peloponnesians were a self-working population, with few slaves, and without wealth, either private or public: they had no means of carrying on distant or long-continued war: they were ready to expose their persons, but not at all ready to contribute from their very narrow means: in a border-war or a single land battle, they were invincible, but for systematic warfare against a power like Athens, they had neither competent headship, nor habits of concert and punctuality, nor money to profit by opportunities, always rare and accidental, for successful attack. They might perhaps establish a fortified post in Attica, but it would do little serious mischief; while at sea, their inferiority and helplessness would be complete, and the irresistible Athenian navy would take care to keep it so. Nor would they be able to reckon on tempting away the able foreign seamen from Athenian ships by means of funds borrowed from Olympia or Delphi. For besides that the mariners of the dependent islands would find themselves losers even by accepting a higher pay, with the certainty of Athenian vengeance afterwards, Athens herself would suffice to man her fleet in case of need, with her own citizens and metics: she had within her own walls steersmen and mariners better, as well as more numerous, than all Greece besides. There was but one side on which Athens was vulnerable: Attica unfortunately was not an island--it was exposed to invasion and ravage. To this the Athenians must submit, without committing the imprudence of engaging a land battle to avert it: they had abundant lands out of Attica, insular as well as continental, to supply their wants, and they could in their turn, by means of their navy, ravage the Peloponnesian territories, whose inhabitants had no subsidiary lands to recur to.

“Mourn not for the loss of land and house,” continued the orator: “reserve your mourning for men: houses and land acquire not men, but men acquire them. Nay, if I thought I could prevail upon you, I would exhort you to march out and ravage them yourselves, and thus show to the Peloponnesians that for them at least ye will not truckle. And I could exhibit many further grounds for confidently anticipating success, if ye will only be willing not to aim at increased dominion when we are in the midst of war, and not to take upon yourself new self-imposed risks; for I have ever been more afraid of our own blunders than of the plans of our enemy. But these are matters for further discussion, when we come to actual operations: for the present, let us dismiss these envoys with the answer--That we will permit the Megarians to use our markets and harbours, if the Lacedæmonians on their side will discontinue their summary expulsions of ourselves and our allies from their own territory; for there is nothing in the truce to prevent either one or the other: That we will leave the Grecian cities autonomous, if we had them as autonomous at the time when the truce was made; and as soon as the Lacedæmonians shall grant to their allied cities autonomy such as each of them shall freely choose, not such as is convenient to Sparta: That while we are ready to give satisfaction according to the truce, we will not begin war, but will repel those who do begin it. Such is the reply at once just and suitable to the dignity of this city. We ought to make up our minds that war is inevitable: the more cheerfully we accept it, the less vehement shall we find our enemies in their attack: and where the danger is greatest, there also is the final honour greatest, both for a state and for a private citizen. Assuredly our fathers, when they bore up against the Persians--having no such means as we possess to start from, and even compelled to abandon all that they did possess--both repelled the invader and brought matters forward to our actual pitch, more by advised operation than by good fortune, and by a daring courage greater than their real power. We ought not to fall short of them: we must keep off our enemies in every way, and leave an unimpaired power to our successors.”

These animating encouragements of Pericles carried with them the majority of the assembly, so that answer was made to the envoys, such as he recommended, on each of the particular points in debate. It was announced to them, moreover, on the general question of peace or war, that the Athenians were prepared to discuss all the grounds of complaint against them, pursuant to the truce, by equal and amicable arbitration, but that they would do nothing under authoritative demand. With this answer the envoys returned to Sparta, and an end was put to negotiation.

It seems evident, from the account of Thucydides, that the Athenian public was not brought to this resolution without much reluctance, and great fear of the consequences, especially destruction of property in Attica; and that a considerable minority took opposition on the Megarian decree--the ground skilfully laid by Sparta for breaking the unanimity of her enemy, and strengthening the party opposed to Pericles. But we may also decidedly infer from the same historian--especially from the proceedings of Corinth and Sparta as he sets them forth--that Athens could not have avoided the war without such an abnegation both of dignity and power as no nation under any government will ever submit to, and as would have even left her without decent security for her individual rights. It is common to ascribe the Peloponnesian War to the ambition of Athens, but this is a partial view of the case.

The aggressive sentiment, partly fear and partly hatred, was on the side of the Peloponnesians, who were not ignorant that Athens desired the continuance of peace, but were resolved not to let her stand as she was at the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ Truce. It was their purpose to attack her and break down her empire, as dangerous, wrongful, and anti-Hellenic. The war was thus partly a contest of principle, involving the popular proclamation of the right of every Grecian state to autonomy, against Athens: partly a contest of power, wherein Spartan and Corinthian ambition was not less conspicuous, and far more aggressive in the beginning than Athenian.

[Sidenote: [431 B.C.]]

Conformably to what is here said, the first blow of the war was struck, not by Athens, but against her. After the decisive answer given to the Spartan envoys, taken in conjunction with the previous proceedings, and the preparations actually going on, among the Peloponnesian confederacy, the truce could hardly be said to be in force, though there was no formal proclamation of rupture.

A few weeks undoubtedly passed in restricted and mistrustful intercourse; though individuals who passed the borders did not think it necessary to take a herald with them, as in time of actual war. Had the excess of ambition been on the side of Athens compared with her enemies, this was the time for her to strike the first blow, carrying with it of course greater probability of success, before their preparations were completed. But she remained strictly within the limits of the truce, while the disastrous series of mutual aggressions, destined to tear in pieces the entrails of Hellas, was opened by her enemy and her neighbour.

The little town of Platæa, still hallowed by the memorable victory over the Persians as well as by the tutelary consecration received from Pausanias, was the scene of this unforeseen enterprise which marks the opening of hostilities in the Peloponnesian war.[b]

THE SURPRISE OF PLATÆA

War had been only threatened, not declared; and peaceful intercourse, though not wholly free from distrust, was still kept up between the subjects of the two confederacies. But early in the following spring, 431 B.C., in the fifteenth year of the Thirty Years’ Truce, an event took place which closed all prospects of peace, precipitated the commencement of war, embittered the animosity of the contending parties, and prepared some of the most tragical scenes of the ensuing history. In the dead of night the city of Platæa was surprised by a body of three hundred Thebans, commanded by two of the great officers called Bœotarchs. They had been invited by a Platæan named Nauclides, and others of the same party, who hoped with the aid of the Thebans to rid themselves of their political opponents, and to break off the relation in which their city was standing to Athens, and transfer its alliance to Thebes. The Thebans, foreseeing that a general war was fast approaching, felt the less scruple in strengthening themselves by this acquisition, while it might be made with little cost and risk. The gates were unguarded, as in time of peace, and one of them was secretly opened to the invaders, who advanced without interruption into the marketplace. Their Platæan friends wished to lead them at once to the houses of their adversaries, and to glut their hatred by a massacre. But the Thebans were more anxious to secure the possession of the city, and feared to provoke resistance by an act of violence. Having therefore halted in the marketplace, they made a proclamation inviting all who were willing that Platæa should become again, as it had been in former times, a member of the Bœotian body, to join them.

The Platæans who were not in the plot, imagined the force by which their city had been surprised to be much stronger than it really was, and, as no hostile treatment was offered to them, remained quiet, and entered into a parley with the Thebans. In the course of these conferences they gradually discovered that the number of the enemy was small, and might be easily overpowered; and, as they were in general attached to the Athenians, or at least strongly averse to an alliance with Thebes, they resolved to make the attempt, while the darkness might favour them, and perplex the strangers. To avoid suspicion they met to concert their plan of operation by means of passages opened through the walls of their houses; and having barricaded the streets with wagons, and made such other preparations as they thought necessary, a little before daybreak they suddenly fell upon the Thebans.

The little band made a vigorous defence, and twice or thrice repulsed the assailants; but as these still returned to the charge, and were assisted by the women and slaves, who showered stones and tiles from the houses on the enemy, all at the same time raising a tumultuous clamour, and a heavy rain increased the confusion caused by the darkness, they at length lost their presence of mind, and took to flight. But most were unable to find their way in the dark through a strange town, and several were slain as they wandered to and fro in search of an outlet. The gate by which they were admitted had in the meanwhile been closed, and no other was open. Some, pressed by their pursuers, mounted the walls, and threw themselves down on the outside, but for the most part were killed by the fall. A few were fortunate enough to break open one of the gates in a lone quarter, with an axe which they obtained from a woman, and to effect their escape. The main body, which had kept together, entered a large building adjoining the walls, having mistaken its gates, which they found open, for those of the town, and were shut in. The Platæans at first thought of setting fire to the building; but at length the men within, as well as the rest of the Thebans who were still wandering up and down the streets, surrendered at discretion.

Before their departure from Thebes it had been concerted that as large a force as could be raised should march the same night to support them. The distance between the two places was not quite nine miles, and these troops were expected to reach the gates of Platæa before the morning; but the Asopus, which crossed their road, had been swollen by the rain, and the state of the ground and the weather otherwise retarded them, so that they were still on their way when they heard of the failure of the enterprise. Though they did not know the fate of their countrymen, as it was possible that some might have been taken prisoners, they were at first inclined to seize as many of the Platæans as they could find without the walls, and to keep them as hostages. The Platæans anticipated this design, and were alarmed, for many of their fellow citizens were living out of the town in the security of peace, and there was much valuable property in the country. They therefore sent a herald to the Theban army to complain of their treacherous attack, and call upon them to abstain from further aggression, and to threaten that, if any was offered, the prisoners should answer for it with their lives. The Thebans afterwards alleged that they had received a promise, confirmed by an oath, that, on condition of their retiring from the Platæan territory, the prisoners should be released; and Thucydides seems disposed to believe this statement. The Platæans denied that they had pledged themselves to spare the lives of the prisoners, unless they should come to terms on the whole matter with the Thebans; but it does not seem likely that, after ascertaining the state of the case, the Thebans would have been satisfied with so slight a security. It is certain however that they retired, and that the Platæans, as soon as they had transported their movable property out of the country into the town, put to death all the prisoners--amounting to 180, and including Eurymachus, the principal author of the enterprise, and the man who possessed the greatest influence in Thebes.

On the first entrance of the Thebans into Platæa a messenger had been despatched to Athens with the intelligence, and the Athenians had immediately laid all the Bœotians in Attica under arrest; and when another messenger brought the news of the victory gained by the Platæans, they sent a herald to request that they would reserve the prisoners for the disposal of the Athenians. The herald came too late to prevent the execution: and the Athenians, foreseeing that Platæa would stand in great need of defence, sent a body of troops to garrison it, supplied it with provisions, and removed the women and children and all persons unfit for service in a siege.

After this event it was apparent that the quarrel could only be decided by arms. Platæa was so intimately united with Athens, that the Athenians felt the attack which had been made on it as an outrage offered to themselves, and prepared for immediate hostilities. Sparta, too, instantly sent notice to all her allies to get their contingents ready by an appointed day for the invasion of Attica. Two-thirds of the whole force which each raised were ordered to march, and when the time came assembled in the isthmus, where King Archidamus put himself at their head. An army more formidable, both in numbers and spirit, had never issued from the peninsula; and Archidamus thought it advisable, before they set out, to call the principal officers together, and to urge the necessity of proceeding with caution and maintaining exact discipline, as soon as they should have entered the enemy’s territory; admonishing them not to be so far elated by their superior numbers as to believe that the Athenians would certainly remain passive spectators of their inroads. And though all except himself were impatient to move, he would not yet take the decisive step, without making one attempt more to avert its necessity. He still cherished a faint hope, that the resolution of the Athenians might be shaken by the prospect of the evils of war which were now so imminent, and he sent Melesippus to sound their disposition. But the envoy was not able to obtain an audience from the people, nor so much as to enter the walls. A decree had been made, at the instigation of Pericles, to receive no embassy from the Spartans while they should be under arms. Melesippus was informed that if his government wished to treat with Athens, it must first recall its forces. He himself was ordered to quit Attica that very day, and persons were appointed to conduct him to the frontier, to prevent him from holding communication with any one by the way. On parting with his conductors he exclaimed, “This day will be the beginning of great evils to Greece.”

Such a prediction might well occur to any one, who reflected on the nature of the two powers which were now coming into conflict, and on the great resources of both, which, though totally different in kind, were so evenly balanced that no human eye could perceive in which scale victory hung; and the termination of the struggle could seem near only to one darkened by passion. The strength of Sparta, as was implied in the observation of Sthenelaidas, lay in the armies which she could collect from the states of her confederacy. The force which she could thus bring into the field is admitted by Pericles, in one of the speeches ascribed to him by Thucydides, to be capable of making head against any that could be raised by the united efforts of the rest of Greece. Within the isthmus her allies included all the states of Peloponnesus, except Achaia and Argos; and the latter was bound to neutrality by a truce which still wanted several years of its term. Hence the great contest now beginning was not improperly called the Peloponnesian War. Beyond the isthmus she was supported by Megara and Thebes, which drew the rest of Bœotia along with it; and Attica would thus have been completely surrounded on the land side by hostile territories, if Platæa and Oropus had not been politically attached to it. The Locrians of Opus, the Dorians of the mother-country, and the Phocians (though these last were secretly more inclined to the Athenians, who had always taken their part in their quarrels with Delphi, the stanch friend of Sparta) were also on her side. Thessaly, Acarnania, and the Amphilochian Argos, were in alliance with her enemy; but for this very reason, and more especially from their hostility to the Messenians of Naupactus, the Ætolians were friendly to her; and she could also reckon on the Corinthian colonies, Anactorium, Ambracia, and Leucas.

The power which Sparta exerted over her allies was much more narrowly limited than that which Athens had assumed over her subjects. The Spartan influence rested partly on the national affinity by which the head was united to the Dorian members of the confederacy, but still more on the conformity, which she established or maintained among all of them, to her own oligarchical institutions. This was the only point in which she encroached on the independence of any. Every state had a voice in the deliberations by which its interests might be affected; and if Sparta determined the amount of the contributions required by extraordinary occasions, she was obliged carefully to adjust it to the ability of each community. So far was she from enriching herself at the expense of the confederacy, that at the beginning of the war there was, as we have seen, no common treasure belonging to it, and no regular tribute for common purposes. But, to compensate for these defects, her power stood on a more durable basis of goodwill than that of Athens; and though in every state there was a party attached to the Athenian interest on political grounds, yet on the whole the Spartan cause was popular throughout Greece; and while Athens was forced to keep a jealous eye on all her subjects, and was in continual fear of losing them, Sparta, secure of the loyalty of her own allies, could calmly watch for opportunities of profiting by the disaffection of those of her rival.

At home indeed her state was far from sound, and the Athenians were well aware of her vulnerable side; but abroad, and as chief of the Peloponnesian confederacy, she presented the majestic and winning aspect of the champion of liberty against Athenian tyranny and ambition: and hence she had important advantages to hope from states which were but remotely connected with her, and were quite beyond the reach of her arms. Many powerful cities in Italy and Sicily were thus induced to promise her their aid, and it was on this she founded her chief expectations of forming a navy, which might face that of Athens. Her allies in this quarter engaged to furnish her with money and ships, which, it was calculated, would amount to no less than five hundred, though for the present it was agreed that they should wear the mask of neutrality, and admit single Athenian vessels into their ports. But as she was conscious that she should still be deficient in the sinews of war, she already began to turn her eyes to the common enemy of Greece, who was able abundantly to supply this want, and would probably be willing to lavish his gold for the sake of ruining Athens, the object of his especial enmity and dread.

The extent of the Athenian empire cannot be so exactly computed. In the language of the comic stage, it is said to comprehend a thousand cities; and it is difficult to estimate what abatement ought to be made from this playful exaggeration. The subjects of Athens were in general more opulent than the allies of Sparta, and their sovereign disposed of their revenues at her pleasure. The only states to which she granted more than a nominal independence were some islands in the western seas, Corcyra, Zacynthus, and Cephallenia--points of peculiar importance to her operations and prospects in that quarter, though even there she was more feared than loved. At the moment of the revolt of Potidæa her empire had reached its widest range, and her finances were in the most flourishing condition; and at the outbreak of the war her naval and military strength was at its greatest height. Pericles, as one of the ten regular generals, or ministers of war, before the Peloponnesian army had reached the frontier, held an assembly, in which he gave an exact account of the resources which the republic had at her disposal.

Her finances, beside the revenue which she drew from a variety of sources, foreign and domestic, were nourished by the annual tribute of her allies, which now amounted to six hundred talents [£120,000 or $600,000]. Six thousand, in money, still remained in the treasury, after the great expenditure incurred on account of the public buildings, and the siege of Potidæa, before which the sum had amounted to nearly ten thousand. But to this, Pericles observed, must be added the gold and silver which, in various forms of offerings, ornaments, and sacred utensils, enriched the temples or public places, which he calculated at five hundred talents, without reckoning the precious materials employed in the statues of the gods and heroes. The statue of Athene in the Parthenon alone contained forty talents’ weight of pure gold, in the ægis, shield, and other appendages. If they should ever be reduced to the want of such a supply, there could be no doubt that their tutelary goddess would willingly part with her ornaments for their service, on condition that they were replaced at the earliest opportunity.

They could muster a force of 13,000 heavy-armed, beside those who were employed in their various garrisons, and in the defence of the city itself, with the long walls and the fortifications of its harbours, who amounted to 16,000 more; made up, indeed, partly of the resident aliens, and partly of citizens on either verge of the military age. The military force also included 1200 cavalry and 1600 bowmen, beside some who were mounted; and they had 300 galleys in sailing condition.

PERICLES’ RECONCENTRATION POLICY

After rousing the confidence of the Athenians by this enumeration, Pericles urged them without delay to transport their families and all their movable property out of the enemy’s reach, and, as long as the war should last, to look upon the capital as their home. To encourage a patriotic spirit by his example, and at the same time to secure himself from imputations to which he might be exposed, either by the Spartan cunning, or by an indiscreet display of private friendship, he publicly declared, that if Archidamus, who was personally attached to him by the ties of hospitality, should, either from this motive, or in compliance with orders which might be given in an opposite intention, exempt his lands from the ravages of war, they should from that time become the property of the state.

To many of his hearers that which he required was a very painful sacrifice. Many had been born, and had passed all their lives, in the country. They were attached to it, not merely by the profit or the pleasure of rural pursuits, but by domestic and religious associations. For though the incorporation of the Attic townships had for ages extinguished their political independence, it had not interrupted their religious traditions, or effaced the peculiar features of their local worship; and hence the Attic countryman clung to his deme with a fondness which he could not feel for the great city. In the period of increasing prosperity which had followed the Persian invasion, the country had been cultivated and adorned more assiduously than ever. All was now to be left or carried away. Reluctantly they adopted the decree which Pericles proposed; and, with heavy hearts, as if going into exile, they quitted their native and hereditary seats. If the rich man sighed to part from his elegant villa, the husbandman still more deeply felt the pang of being torn from his home, and of abandoning his beloved fields, the scenes of his infancy, the holy places where his forefathers had worshipped, to the ravages of a merciless invader. All however was removed: the flocks and cattle to Eubœa and other adjacent islands; all beside that was portable, and even the timber of the houses, into Athens, to which they themselves migrated with their families.

The city itself was not prepared for the sudden influx of so many new inhabitants. A few found shelter under the roofs of relatives or friends; but the greater part, on their arrival, found themselves houseless as well as homeless. Some took refuge in such temples as were usually open; others occupied the towers of the walls; others raised temporary hovels on any vacant ground which they could find in the city, and even resorted for this purpose to a site which had hitherto been guarded from all such uses by policy, aided by a religious sanction. It was the place under the western wall of the citadel, called, from the ancient builders of the wall, the Pelasgicum: a curse had been pronounced on any one who should tenant it; and men remembered some words of an oracle, which declared it better untrodden. The real motive for the prohibition was probably the security of the citadel; but all police seems to have been suspended by the urgency of the occasion. It was some time before the newcomers bethought themselves of spreading over the vacant space between the long walls, or of descending to Piræus. But this foretaste of the evils of war did not damp the general ardour, especially that of the youthful spirits, which began at Athens, as elsewhere, to be impatient of repose. Numberless oracles and predictions were circulated, in which every one found something that accorded with the tone of his feelings. Even those who had no definite hopes, fears, or wishes shared the excitement of men on the eve of a great crisis. The holy island of Delos had been recently shaken by an earthquake. It was forgotten, or was never known out of Delos itself, that this had happened already, just before the first Persian invasion. It was deemed a portent, which signified new and extraordinary events, and it was soon combined with other prodigies, which tended to encourage similar forebodings. Such was the state in which the Athenians awaited the advance of the Peloponnesian army.[c]

Adolf Holm[e] compares the Periclean policy of voluntary reconcentration with the acts of the Dutch, when in the sixteenth century they let the Spanish destroy their crops, and then opened the dikes and flooded their own country. We may compare also the compulsory reconcentration of the country people in the cities as carried out by General Weyler in Cuba, in 1897, and by Lord Kitchener in South Africa, in 1901.[a]

THE FIRST YEAR’S RAVAGE

Archidamus, as soon as the reception of his last envoy was made known to him, continued his march from the isthmus into Attica--which territory he entered by the road of Œnoe, the frontier Athenian fortress of Attica towards Bœotia. His march, was slow, and he thought it necessary to make a regular attack on the fort of Œnoe, which had been put in so good a state of defence that, after all the various modes of assault--in which the Lacedæmonians were not skilful--had been tried in vain, and after a delay of several days before the place, he was compelled to renounce the attempt.

The want of enthusiasm on the part of the Spartan king, his multiplied delays, first at the isthmus, next in the march, and lastly before Œnoe, were all offensive to the fiery impatience of the army, who were loud in their murmurs against him. He acted upon the calculation already laid down in his discourse at Sparta--that the highly cultivated soil of Attica was to be looked upon as a hostage for the pacific dispositions of the Athenians, who would be more likely to yield when devastation, though not yet inflicted, was nevertheless impending and at their doors. In this point of view, a little delay at the border was no disadvantage; and perhaps the partisans of peace at Athens may have encouraged him to hope that it would enable them to prevail.

After having spent several days before Œnoe without either taking the fort or receiving any message from the Athenians, Archidamus marched onward to Eleusis and the Thriasian plain--about the middle of June, eighty days after the surprise of Platæa. His army was of irresistible force, not less than sixty thousand hoplites, according to the statement of Plutarch, or of one hundred thousand, according to others. Considering the number of constituent allies, the strong feeling by which they were prompted, and the shortness of the expedition combined with the chance of plunder, even the largest of these two numbers is not incredibly great, if we take it to include not hoplites only, but cavalry and light armed also. But as Thucydides, though comparatively full in his account of this march, has stated no general total, we may presume that he had heard none upon which he could rely.

As the Athenians had made no movement towards peace, Archidamus anticipated that they would come forth to meet him in the fertile plain of Eleusis and Thria, which was the first portion of territory that he sat down to ravage. Yet no Athenian force appeared to oppose him, except a detachment of cavalry, who were repulsed in a skirmish near the small lakes called Rheiti. Having laid waste this plain without any serious opposition, Archidamus did not think fit to pursue the straight road which from Thria conducted directly to Athens across the ridge of Mount Ægaleos, but turned off to the eastward, leaving that mountain on his right hand until he came to Cropia, where he crossed a portion of the line of Ægaleos over to Acharnæ.

He was here about seven miles from Athens, on a declivity sloping down into the plain which stretches westerly and northwesterly from Athens, and visible from the city walls; and here he encamped, keeping his army in perfect order for battle, but at the same time intending to damage and ruin the place and its neighbourhood. Acharnæ was the largest and most populous of all the demes in Attica, furnishing no less than three thousand hoplites to the national line, and flourishing as well by its corn, vines, and olives, as by its peculiar abundance of charcoal burning from the forests of ilex on the neighbouring hills. Moreover, if we are to believe Aristophanes, the Acharnian proprietors were not merely sturdy “hearts of oak,” but peculiarly vehement and irritable. It illustrates the condition of a Grecian territory under invasion, when we find this great deme, which could not have contained less than twelve thousand free inhabitants of both sexes and all ages, with at least an equal number of slaves, completely deserted. Archidamus calculated that when the Athenians actually saw his troops so close to their city, carrying fire and sword over their wealthiest canton, their indignation would become uncontrollable, and they would march out forthwith to battle. The Acharnian proprietors especially (he thought) would be foremost in inflaming this temper, and insisting upon protection to their own properties--or if the remaining citizens refused to march out along with them, they would, after having been thus left undefended to ruin, become discontented and indifferent to the general weal.

Though his calculation was not realised, it was nevertheless founded upon most rational grounds. What Archidamus anticipated was on the point of happening, and nothing prevented it except the personal ascendency of Pericles, strained to its very utmost. So long as the invading army was engaged in the Thriasian plain, the Athenians had some faint hope that it might (like Plistoanax fourteen years before) advance no farther into the interior. But when it came to Acharnæ within sight of the city walls--when the ravagers were actually seen destroying buildings, fruit trees, and crops, in the plain of Athens, a sight strange to every Athenian eye except to those very old men who recollected the Persian invasion--the exasperation of the general body of citizens rose to a pitch never before known. The Acharnians first of all--next the youthful citizens, generally--became madly clamorous for arming and going forth to fight. Knowing well their own great strength, but less correctly informed of the superior strength of the enemy, they felt confident that victory was within their reach. Groups of citizens were everywhere gathered together, angrily debating the critical question of the moment; while the usual concomitants of excited feeling--oracles and prophecies of diverse tenor, many of them doubtless promising success against the enemy at Acharnæ--were eagerly caught up and circulated.

In this inflamed temper of the Athenian mind, Pericles was naturally the great object of complaint and wrath. He was denounced as the cause of all the existing suffering: he was reviled as a coward for not leading out the citizens to fight, in his capacity of general: the rational convictions as to the necessity of the war and the only practical means of carrying it on, which his repeated speeches had implanted, seemed to be altogether forgotten. This burst of spontaneous discontent was of course fomented by the numerous political enemies of Pericles, and particularly by Cleon,[47] now rising into importance as an opposition-speaker; whose talent for invective was thus first exercised under the auspices of the high aristocratical party, as well as of an excited public.

But no manifestations, however violent, could disturb either the judgment or the firmness of Pericles. He listened unmoved to all the declarations made against him, resolutely refusing to convene a public assembly, or any meeting invested with an authorised character, under the present irritated temper of the citizens. It appears that he as general, or rather the board of ten generals among whom he was one, must have been invested constitutionally with the power not only of calling the ecclesia when they thought fit, but also of preventing it from meeting, and of postponing even those regular meetings which commonly took place at fixed times, four times in the prytany. No assembly accordingly took place, and the violent exasperation of the people was thus prevented from realising itself in any rash public resolution. That Pericles should have held firm against this raging force, is but one among the many honourable points in his political character; but it is far less wonderful than the fact that his refusal to call the ecclesia was efficacious to prevent the ecclesia from being held. The entire body of Athenians were now assembled within the walls, and if he refused to convoke the ecclesia, they might easily have met in the Pnyx without him; for which it would not have been difficult at such a juncture to provide plausible justification. The inviolable respect which the Athenian people manifested on this occasion for the forms of their democratical constitution--assisted doubtless by their long-established esteem for Pericles, yet opposed to an excitement alike intense and pervading, and to a demand apparently reasonable, in so far as regarded the calling of an assembly for discussion--is one of the most memorable incidents in their history.

While Pericles thus decidedly forbade any general march out for battle he sought to provide as much employment as possible for the compressed eagerness of the citizens. The cavalry were sent forth, together with the Thessalian cavalry their allies, for the purpose of restraining the excursions of the enemy’s light troops, and protecting the lands near the city from plunder. At the same time he fitted out a powerful expedition, which sailed forth to ravage Peloponnesus, even while the invaders were yet in Attica. Archidamus, after having remained engaged in the devastation of Acharnæ long enough to satisfy himself that the Athenians would not hazard a battle, turned away from Athens in a northwesterly direction towards the demes between Mount Brilessus and Mount Parnes, on the road passing through Decelea. The army continued ravaging these districts until their provisions were exhausted, and then quitted Attica by the northwestern road near Oropus, which brought them into Bœotia. As the Oropians, though not Athenians, were yet dependent upon Athens--the district of Græa, a portion of their territory, was laid waste; after which the army dispersed and retired back to their respective homes. It would seem that they quitted Attica towards the end of July, having remained in the country between thirty and forty days.

Meanwhile, the Athenian expedition, under Caranus, Proteas, and Socrates, joined by fifty Corcyræan ships and by some other allies, sailed round Peloponnesus, landing in various parts to inflict damage, and among other places at Methone (Modon), on the southwestern peninsula of the Lacedæmonian territory. The place, neither strong nor well-garrisoned, would have been carried with little difficulty, had not Brasidas, the son of Tellis--a gallant Spartan now mentioned for the first time, but destined to great celebrity afterwards--who happened to be on guard at a neighbouring post, thrown himself into it with one hundred men by a rapid movement, before the dispersed Athenian troops could be brought together to prevent him. He infused such courage into the defenders of the place that every attack was repelled, and the Athenians were forced to re-embark--an act of prowess which procured for him the first public honours bestowed by the Spartans during this war. Sailing northward along the western coast of Peloponnesus, the Athenians landed again on the coast of Elis, a little south of the promontory called Cape Ichthys: they ravaged the territory for two days, defeating both the troops in the neighbourhood and three hundred chosen men from the central Elean territory. Strong winds on a harbourless coast now induced the captains to sail with most of the troops round Cape Ichthys, in order to reach the harbour of Phea on the northern side of it; while the Messenian hoplites, marching by land across the promontory, attacked Phea and carried it by assault. When the fleet arrived, all were re-embarked--the full force of Elis being under march to attack them. They then sailed northward, landing on various other spots to commit devastation, until they reached Sollium, a Corinthian settlement on the coast of Acarnania. They captured this place, which they handed over to the inhabitants of the neighbouring Acarnanian town of Palærus, as well as Astacus, from whence they expelled the despot Euarchus, and enrolled the town as a member of the Athenian alliance. From hence they passed over to Cephallenia, which they were fortunate enough also to acquire as an ally of Athens without any compulsion--with its four distinct towns or districts, Pale, Cranii, Same, and Proni. These various operations took up near three months from about the beginning of July, so that they returned to Athens towards the close of September--the beginning of the winter half of the year, according to the distribution of Thucydides.

This was not the only maritime expedition of the summer. Thirty more triremes, under Cleopompus, were sent through the Euripus to the Locrian coast opposite to the northern part of Eubœa. Some disembarkations were made, whereby the Locrian towns of Thronium and Alope were sacked, and further devastation inflicted; while a permanent garrison was planted, and a fortified post erected, in the uninhabited island of Atalante opposite to the Locrian coast, in order to restrain privateers from Opus and the other Locrian towns in their excursions against Eubœa. It was further determined to expel the Æginetan inhabitants from Ægina, and to occupy the island with Athenian colonists. This step was partly rendered prudent by the important position of the island midway between Attica and Peloponnesus. But a concurrent motive, and probably the stronger motive, was the gratification of ancient antipathy and revenge against a people who had been among the foremost in provoking the war and in inflicting upon Athens so much suffering. The Æginetans, with their wives and children, were all put on ship-board and landed in Peloponnesus, where the Spartans permitted them to occupy the maritime district and town of Thyrea, their last frontier towards Argos; some of them, however, found shelter in other parts of Greece. The island was made over to a detachment of Athenian cleruchs, or citizen proprietors, sent hither by lot.

To the sufferings of the Æginetans, which we shall hereafter find still more deplorably aggravated, we have to add those of the Megarians. Both had been most zealous in kindling the war, but upon none did the distress of war fall so heavily. Both probably shared the premature confidence felt among the Peloponnesian confederacy, that Athens could never hold out more than a year or two, and were thus induced to overlook their own undefended position against her. Towards the close of September, the full force of Athens, citizens and metics, marched into the Megarid, under Pericles, and laid waste the greater part of the territory; while they were in it, the hundred ships which had been circumnavigating Peloponnesus, having arrived at Ægina on their return, joined their fellow citizens in the Megarid, instead of going straight home. The junction of the two formed the largest Athenian force that had ever yet been seen together; there were ten thousand citizen hoplites (independent of three thousand others who were engaged in the siege of Potidæa), and three thousand metic hoplites, besides a large number of light troops. Against so large a force the Megarians could make no head, so that their territory was all laid waste, even to the city walls. For several years of the war, the Athenians inflicted this destruction once, and often twice in the same year. A decree was proposed in the Athenian ecclesia by Charinus, though perhaps not carried, to the effect that the strategi every year should swear, as a portion of their oath of office, that they would twice invade and ravage the Megarid. As the Athenians at the same time kept the port of Nisæa blocked up, by means of their superior naval force and of the neighbouring coast of Salamis, the privations imposed on the Megarians became extreme and intolerable. Not only their corn and fruits, but even their garden vegetables were rooted up, and their situation was that of a besieged city pressed by famine. Even in the time of Pausanias, many centuries afterward, the miseries of the town during these years were remembered and communicated to him, being assigned as the reason why one of their most memorable statues had never been completed.

To the various military operations of Athens during the course of this summer, some other measures of moment are to be added. Moreover, Thucydides notices an eclipse of the sun, which modern astronomical calculations refer to the third of August; had this eclipse happened three months earlier, immediately before the entrance of the Peloponnesians into Attica, it might probably have been construed as an unfavourable omen, and caused the postponement of the scheme. Expecting a prolonged struggle, the Athenians now made arrangements for placing Attica in a permanent state of defence, both by sea and land; what these arrangements were, we are not told in detail, but one of them was sufficiently remarkable to be named particularly. They set apart one thousand talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000] out of the treasure in the Acropolis as an inviolable reserve, not to be touched except on the single contingency of a hostile naval force about to assail the city, with no other means at hand to defend it. They further enacted that if any citizen should propose, or any magistrate put the question, in the public assembly, to make any different application of this reserve, he should be punishable with death. Moreover, they resolved every year to keep back one hundred of their best triremes, and trierarchs to command and equip them, for the same special necessity. It may be doubted whether this latter provision was placed under the same stringent sanction, or observed with the same rigour, as that concerning the money; which latter was not departed from until the twentieth year of the war, after all the disasters of the Sicilian expedition, and on the terrible news of the revolt of Chios. It was on that occasion that the Athenians first repealed the sentence of capital punishment against the proposer of this forbidden change, and next appropriated the money to meet the then imminent peril of the commonwealth.

The resolution here taken about this sacred reserve, and the rigorous sentence interdicting contrary propositions, is pronounced by Mitford[48] to be an evidence of the indelible barbarism of democratical government. But we must recollect, first, that the sentence of capital punishment was one which could hardly by possibility come into execution; for no citizen would be so mad as to make the forbidden proposition while this law was in force. Whoever desired to make it would first begin by proposing to repeal the prohibitory law, whereby he would incur no danger, whether the assembly decided in the affirmative or negative; and if he obtained an affirmative decision he would then, and then only, proceed to move the re-appropriation of the fund. To speak the language of English parliamentary procedure, he would first move the suspension or abrogation of the standing order whereby the proposition was forbidden; next, he would move the proposition itself; in fact, such was the mode actually pursued, when the thing at last came to be done. But though the capital sentence could hardly come into effect, the proclamation of it in terrorem had a very distinct meaning. It expressed the deep and solemn conviction which the people entertained of the importance of their own resolution about the reserve; it forewarned all assemblies and all citizens to come of the danger of diverting it to any other purpose; it surrounded the reserve with an artificial sanctity, which forced every man who aimed at the re-appropriation to begin with a preliminary proposition formidable on the very face of it, as removing a guarantee which previous assemblies had deemed of immense value, and opening the door to a contingency which they had looked upon as treasonable. The proclamation of a lighter punishment, or a simple prohibition without any definite sanction whatever, would neither have announced the same emphatic conviction, nor produced the same deterring effect. The assembly of 431 B.C. could not in any way enact laws which subsequent assemblies could not reverse; but it could so frame its enactments, in cases of peculiar solemnity, as to make its authority strongly felt upon the judgment of its successors, and to prevent them from entertaining motions for repeal except under necessity at once urgent and obvious.

Far from thinking that the law now passed at Athens displayed barbarism, either in the end or in the means, we consider it principally remarkable for its cautious and long-sighted view of the future--qualities the exact reverse of barbarism--and worthy of the general character of Pericles, who probably suggested it. Athens was just entering into a war which threatened to be of indefinite length, and was certain to be very costly. To prevent the people from exhausting all their accumulated fund, and to place them under a necessity of reserving something against extreme casualties, was an object of immense importance. Now the particular casualty, which Pericles (assuming him to be the proposer) named as the sole condition of touching this one thousand talents, might be considered as of all others the most improbable, in the year 431 B.C. So immense was then the superiority of the Athenian naval force, that to suppose it defeated, and a Peloponnesian fleet in full sail for Piræus, was a possibility which it required a statesman of extraordinary caution to look forward to, and which it is truly wonderful that the people generally could have been induced to contemplate. Once tied up to this purpose, however, the fund lay ready for any other terrible emergency: and we shall find the actual employment of it incalculably beneficial to Athens, at a moment of the gravest peril, when she could hardly have protected herself without some such special resource. The people would scarcely have sanctioned so rigorous an economy, had it not been proposed to them at a period so early in the war that their available reserve was still much larger. But it will be forever to the credit of their foresight as well as constancy, that they should first have adopted such a precautionary measure, and afterwards adhered to it for nineteen years, under severe pressure for money, until at length a case arose which rendered further abstinence really, and not constructively, impossible.

To display their force and take revenge by disembarking and ravaging parts of the Peloponnesus, was doubtless of much importance to Athens during this first summer of the war: though it might seem that the force so employed was quite as much needed in the conquest of Potidæa, which still remained under blockade, and of the neighbouring Chalcidians in Thrace, still in revolt. It was during the course of this summer that a prospect opened to Athens of subduing these towns, through the assistance of Sitalces, king of the Odrysian Thracians. That prince had married the sister of Nymphodorus, a citizen of Abdera; who engaged to render him, and his son Sadocus, allies of Athens. Sent for to Athens and appointed proxenus of Athens at Abdera, which was one of the Athenian subject allies, Nymphodorus made this alliance, and promised in the name of Sitalces that a sufficient Thracian force should be sent to aid Athens in the reconquest of her revolted towns: the honour of Athenian citizenship was at the same time conferred upon Sadocus. Nymphodorus further established a good understanding between Perdiccas II of Macedonia and the Athenians, who were persuaded to restore to him Therma, which they had before taken from him. The Athenians had thus the promise of powerful aid against the Chalcidians and Potidæans: yet the latter still held out, with little prospect of immediate surrender. Moreover, the town of Astacus in Acarnania, which the Athenians had captured during the summer, in the course of their expedition round Peloponnesus, was recovered during the autumn by the deposed despot Euarchus, assisted by forty Corinthian triremes and one thousand hoplites. This Corinthian armament, after restoring Euarchus, made some unsuccessful descents both upon other parts of Acarnania and upon the island of Cephallenia: in the latter they were entrapped into an ambuscade and obliged to return home with considerable loss.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[47] “Cleon,” says Thucydides, “attacked him with great acrimony, making use of the general resentment against Pericles, as a means to increase his own popularity, as Hermippus testifies in these verses:

“‘Sleeps then, thou king of Satyrs, sleeps the spear, While thundering words make war? Why boast thy prowess, Yet shudder at the sound of sharpened swords, Spite of the flaming Cleon?’”

[48] “A measure followed which, taking place at the time when Thucydides wrote and Pericles spoke, and while Pericles held the principal influence in the administration, strongly marks,” says Mr. Mitford, “both the inherent weakness and the indelible barbarism of democratical government. A decree of the people directed that a thousand talents should be set apart in the treasury in the citadel, as a deposit, not to be touched unless the enemy should attack the city by sea; a circumstance which implied the prior ruin of the Athenian fleet, and the only one, it was supposed, which could superinduce the ruin of the commonwealth. But in a decree so important, sanctioned only by the present will of that giddy tyrant, the multitude of Athens, against whose caprices, since the depression of the court of Areopagus, no balancing power remained, confidence so failed that the denunciation of capital punishment was added against whosoever should propose, and whosoever should concur in, any decree for the disposal of that money to any other purpose, or in any other circumstances. It was at the same time ordered, by the same authority, that a hundred triremes should be yearly selected, the best of the fleet, to be employed on the same occasion only.”

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XXXI. THE PLAGUE; AND THE DEATH OF PERICLES

THE ORATION OF PERICLES

It was towards the close of autumn that Pericles, chosen by the people for the purpose, delivered the funeral oration at the public interment of those warriors who had fallen during the campaign, on the occasion of the conquest of Samos. One of the remarkable features in this discourse is its business-like, impersonal character: it is Athens herself who undertakes to commend and to decorate her departed sons, as well as to hearten up and admonish the living.

After a few words on the magnitude of the empire and on the glorious efforts as well as endurance whereby their forefathers and they had acquired it--Pericles proceeds to sketch the plan of life, the constitution, and the manners, under which such achievements were brought about.

“We live under a constitution such as noway to envy the laws of our neighbours,--ourselves an example to others, rather than mere imitators. It is called a democracy, since its permanent aim tends towards the Many and not towards the Few: in regard to private matters and disputes, the laws deal equally with every man; while looking to public affairs, and to claims of individual influence, every man’s chance of advancement is determined not by party favour but by real worth, according as his reputation stands in his own particular department: nor does poverty, or obscure station, keep him back, if he really has the means of benefiting the city. And our social march is free, not merely in regard to public affairs, but also in regard to intolerance of each other’s diversity of daily pursuits. For we are not angry with our neighbour for what he may do to please himself, nor do we ever put on those sour looks, which, though they do no positive damage, are not the less sure to offend. Thus conducting our private social intercourse with reciprocal indulgence, we are restrained from wrong on public matters by fear and reverence of our magistrates for the time being and of our laws--especially such laws as are instituted for the protection of wrongful sufferers, and even such others as, though not written, are enforced by a common sense of shame.

“Besides this, we have provided for our minds numerous recreations from toil, partly by our customary solemnities of sacrifice and festival throughout the year, partly by the elegance of our private establishments, the daily charm of which banishes the sense of discomfort. From the magnitude of our city, the products of the whole earth are brought to us, so that our enjoyment of foreign luxuries is as much our own and assured as those which we grow at home. In respect to training for war, we differ from our opponents (the Lacedæmonians) on several material points. First, we lay open our city as a common resort: we apply no xenelasia to exclude even an enemy either from any lesson or any spectacle, the full view of which he may think advantageous to him; for we trust less to manœuvres and quackery than to our native bravery, for warlike efficiency. Next, in regard to education, while the Lacedæmonians even from their earliest youth subject themselves to an irksome exercise for the attainment of courage, we with our easy habits of life are not less prepared than they, to encounter all perils within the measure of our strength. The proof of this is, that the Peloponnesian confederates do not attack us one by one, but with their whole united force; while we, when we attack them at home, overpower for the most part all of them who try to defend their own territory. None of our enemies has ever met and contended with our entire force; partly in consequence of our large navy--partly from our dispersion in different simultaneous land expeditions. But when they chance to be engaged with any part of it, if victorious, they pretend to have vanquished us all--if defeated, they pretend to have been vanquished by all.

“Now if we are willing to brave danger, just as much under an indulgent system as under constant toil, and by spontaneous courage as much as under force of law--we are gainers in the end by not vexing ourselves beforehand with sufferings to come, yet still appearing in the hour of trial not less daring than those who toil without ceasing.

“In other matters, too, as well as in these, our city deserves admiration. For we combine elegance of taste with simplicity of life, and we pursue knowledge without being enervated: we employ wealth not for talking and ostentation, but as a real help in the proper season: nor is it disgraceful to any one who is poor to confess his poverty, though he may rather incur reproach for not actually keeping himself out of poverty. The magistrates who discharge public trusts fulfil their domestic duties also--the private citizen, while engaged in professional business, has competent knowledge on public affairs: for we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from these latter not as harmless, but as useless. Moreover, we always hear and pronounce on public matters, when discussed by our leaders--or perhaps strike out for ourselves correct reasonings about them: far from accounting discussion an impediment to action, we complain only if we are not told what is to be done before it becomes our duty to do it. For in truth we combine in the most remarkable manner these two qualities--extreme boldness in execution with full debate beforehand on that which we are going about: whereas with others, ignorance alone imparts boldness--debate introduces hesitation. Assuredly those men are properly to be regarded as the stoutest of heart, who, knowing most precisely both the terrors of war and the sweets of peace, are still not the less willing to encounter peril.

“In fine, I affirm that our city, considered as a whole, is the schoolmistress of Greece; while, viewed individually, we enable the same man to furnish himself out and suffice to himself in the greatest variety of ways and with the most complete grace and refinement. This is no empty boast of the moment, but genuine reality; and the power of the city, acquired through the dispositions just indicated, exists to prove it. Athens alone of all cities stands forth in actual trial greater than her reputation: her enemy when he attacks her will not have his pride wounded by suffering defeat from feeble hands--her subjects will not think themselves degraded as if their obedience were paid to an unworthy superior. Having thus put forth our power, not uncertified, but backed by the most evident proofs, we shall be admired not less by posterity than by our contemporaries. Nor do we stand in need either of Homer or of any other panegyrist, whose words may for the moment please, while the truth when known would confute their intended meaning. We have compelled all land and sea to become accessible to our courage, and have planted everywhere imperishable monuments of our kindness as well as of our hostility.

“Such is the city on behalf of which these warriors have nobly died in battle, vindicating her just title to unimpaired rights--and on behalf of which all of us here left behind must willingly toil. It is for this reason that I have spoken at length concerning the city, at once to draw from it the lesson that the conflict is not for equal motives between us and enemies who possess nothing of the like excellence--and to demonstrate by proofs the truth of my encomium pronounced upon her.”

Pericles pursues at considerable additional length the same tenor of mixed exhortation to the living and eulogy of the dead; with many special and emphatic observations addressed to the relatives of the latter, who were assembled around and doubtless very near him. But the extract which we have already made is so long, that no further addition would be admissible: yet it was impossible to pass over lightly the picture of the Athenian commonwealth in its glory, as delivered by the ablest citizen of the age. The effect of the democratical constitution, with its diffused and equal citizenship, in calling forth not merely strong attachment, but painful self sacrifice, on the part of all Athenians--is nowhere more forcibly insisted upon than in the words above cited of Pericles, as well as in others afterwards. “Contemplating as you do daily before you the actual power of the state, and becoming passionately attached to it, when you conceive its full greatness, reflect that it was all acquired by men daring, acquainted with their duty, and full of an honourable sense of shame in their actions”--such is the association which he presents between the greatness of the state as an object of common passion, and the courage, intelligence, and mutual esteem, of individual citizens, as its creating and preserving causes; poor as well as rich being alike interested in the partnership.

But the claims of patriotism, though put forward as essentially and deservedly paramount, are by no means understood to reign exclusively, or to absorb the whole of the democratical activity. Subject to these, and to those laws and sanctions which protect both the public and individuals against wrong, it is the pride of Athens to exhibit a rich and varied fund of human impulse--an unrestrained play of fancy and diversity of private pursuit coupled with a reciprocity of cheerful indulgence between one individual and another--and an absence even of those “black looks” which so much embitter life, even if they never pass into enmity of fact. This portion of the speech of Pericles deserves particular attention, because it serves to correct an assertion, often far too indiscriminately made, respecting antiquity as contrasted with modern societies--an assertion that the ancient societies sacrificed the individual to the state, and that only in modern times has individual agency been left free to the proper extent. This is preeminently true of Sparta--it is also true in a great degree of the ideal societies depicted by Plato and Aristotle: but it is pointedly untrue of the Athenian democracy, nor can we with any confidence predicate it of the major part of the Grecian cities.

Connected with this reciprocal indulgence of individual diversity, was not only the hospitable reception of all strangers at Athens, which Pericles contrasts with the xenelasia or jealous expulsion practised at Sparta--but also the many-sided activity, bodily and mental, visible in the former, so opposite to that narrow range of thought, exclusive discipline of the body, and never-ending preparation for war, which formed the system of the latter. His assertion that Athens was equal to Sparta even in her own solitary excellence--efficiency on the field of battle--is doubtless untenable. But not the less impressive is his sketch of that multitude of concurrent impulses which at this same time agitated and impelled the Athenian mind--the strength of one not implying the weakness of the remainder: the relish for all pleasures of art and elegance, and the appetite for intellectual expansion, coinciding in the same bosom with energetic promptitude as well as endurance: abundance of recreative spectacles, yet noway abating the cheerfulness of obedience even to the hardest calls of patriotic duty: that combination of reason and courage which encountered danger the more willingly from having discussed and calculated it beforehand: lastly, an anxious interest, as well as a competence of judgment, in public discussion and public action, common to every citizen rich and poor, and combined with every man’s own private industry. So comprehensive an ideal of many-sided social development, bringing out the capacities for action and endurance, as well as those for enjoyment, would be sufficiently remarkable, even if we supposed it only existing in the imagination of a philosopher: but it becomes still more so when we recollect that the main features of it at least were drawn from the fellow citizens of the speaker. It must be taken however as belonging peculiarly to the Athens of Pericles and his contemporaries; nor would it have suited either the period of the Persian War fifty years before, or that of Demosthenes seventy years afterwards.

At the former period, the art, letters, philosophy, adverted to with pride by Pericles, were as yet backward, while even the active energy and democratical stimulus, though very powerful, had not been worked up to the pitch which they afterwards reached: at the latter period, although the intellectual manifestations of Athens subsist in full or even increased vigour, we shall find the personal enterprise and energetic spirit of her citizens materially abated. As the circumstances, which we have already recounted, go far to explain the previous upward movement, so those which fill the coming chapters, containing the disasters of the Peloponnesian War, will be found to explain still more completely the declining tendency shortly about to commence. Athens was brought to the brink of entire ruin, from which it is surprising that she recovered at all--but noway surprising that she recovered at the expense of a considerable loss of personal energy in the character of her citizens.

And thus the season at which Pericles delivered his discourse lends to it an additional and peculiar pathos. It was delivered at a time when Athens was as yet erect and at her maximum: for though her real power was doubtless much diminished compared with the period before the Thirty Years’ Truce, yet the great edifices and works of art, achieved since then, tended to compensate that loss, in so far as the sense of greatness was concerned; and no one, either citizen or enemy, considered Athens as having at all declined. It was delivered at the commencement of the great struggle with the Peloponnesian confederacy, the coming hardships of which Pericles never disguised either to himself or to his fellow citizens, though he fully counted upon eventual success. Attica had been already invaded; it was no longer “the unwasted territory,” as Euripides had designated it in his tragedy Medea, represented three or four months before the march of Archidamus--and a picture of Athens in her social glory was well calculated both to arouse the pride and nerve the courage of those individual citizens, who had been compelled once, and would be compelled again and again, to abandon their country residences and fields for a thin tent or confined hole in the city. Such calamities might indeed be foreseen: but there was one still greater calamity, which, though actually then impending, could not be foreseen.[b]

[Sidenote: [430 B.C.]]

At the very beginning of the next summer the Peloponnesians and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces, as on the first occasion, invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, the son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedæmonians; and after encamping, they laid waste the country. When they had not yet been many days in Attica, the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians; though it was said to have previously lighted on many places, about Lemnos and elsewhere. Such a pestilence, however, and loss of life as this, was nowhere remembered to have happened. For neither were physicians of any avail at first, treating it as they did, in ignorance of its nature,--nay, they themselves died most of all, inasmuch as they most visited the sick,--nor any other art of man. And as to the supplications that they offered in their temples, or the divinations, and similar means, that they had recourse to, they were all unavailing; and at last they ceased from them, being overcome by the pressure of the calamity.

THUCYDIDES’ ACCOUNT OF THE PLAGUE

It is said to have first begun in the part of Ethiopia above Egypt, and then to have come down into Egypt, and Libya, and the greatest part of the king’s territory.[49] On the city of Athens it fell suddenly, and first attacked the men in the Piræus; so that it was even reported by them that the Peloponnesians had thrown poison into the cisterns; for as yet there were no fountains there. Afterwards it reached the upper city also; and then they died much more generally. Now let every one, whether physician or unprofessional man, speak on the subject according to his views; from what source it was likely to have arisen, and the causes which he thinks were sufficient to have produced so great a change from health to universal sickness. I, however, shall only describe what was its character; and explain those symptoms by reference to which one might best be enabled to recognise it through this previous acquaintance, if it should ever break out again; for I was both attacked by it myself, and had personal observation of others who were suffering with it.

That year then, as was generally allowed, happened to be of all years the most free from disease, so far as regards other disorders; and if any one had any previous sickness, all terminated in this. Others, without any ostensible cause, but suddenly, while in the enjoyment of health, were seized at first with violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation of the eyes; and the internal parts, both the throat and the tongue, immediately assumed a bloody tinge, and emitted an unnatural and fetid breath. Next after these symptoms, sneezing and hoarseness came on; and in a short time the pain descended to the chest, with a violent cough. When it settled in the stomach, it caused vomiting; and all the discharges of bile that have been mentioned by physicians succeeded, and those accompanied with great suffering. An ineffectual retching also followed in most cases, producing a violent spasm, which in some cases ceased soon afterwards, in others not until a long time later.

Externally the body was not very hot to the touch, nor was it pale; but reddish, livid, and broken out in small pimples and sores. But the internal parts were burnt to such a degree that they could not bear clothing or linen of the very lightest kind to be laid upon them, nor to be anything else but stark naked; but would most gladly have thrown themselves into cold water if they could. Indeed many of those who were not taken care of did so, plunging into cisterns in the agony of their unquenchable thirst: and it was all the same whether they drank much or little. Moreover, the misery of restlessness and wakefulness continually oppressed them. The body did not waste away so long as the disease was at its height, but resisted it beyond all expectation: so that they either died in most cases on the ninth or the seventh day, through the internal burning, while they had still some degree of strength; or if they escaped that stage of the disorder, then, after it had further descended into the bowels, and violent ulceration was produced in them, and intense diarrhœa had come on, the greater part were afterwards carried off through the weakness occasioned by it. For the disease, which was originally seated in the head, beginning from above, passed throughout the whole body; and if any one survived its most fatal consequences, yet it marked him by laying hold of his extremities; for it settled on the pudenda, and fingers, and toes, and many escaped with the loss of these, while some also lost their eyes. Others, again, were seized on their first recovery with forgetfulness of everything alike, and did not know either themselves or their friends.

For the character of the disorder surpassed description; and while in other respects also it attacked every one in a degree more grievous than human nature could endure, in the following way, especially, it proved itself to be something different from any of the diseases familiar to man.[50] All the birds and beasts that prey on human bodies, either did not come near them, though there were many lying unburied, or died after they had tasted them. As a proof of this, there was a marked disappearance of birds of this kind, and they were not seen either engaged in this way, or in any other; while the dogs, from their domestic habits, more clearly afforded opportunity of marking the result I have mentioned.

The disease, then, to pass over many various points of peculiarity, as it happened to be different in one case from another, was in its general nature such as I have described. And no other of those to which they were accustomed afflicted them besides this at that time; or whatever there was, it ended in this. And of those who were seized by it some died in neglect, others in the midst of every attention. And there was no one settled remedy, so to speak, by applying which they were to give them relief: for what did good to one, did harm to another. And no constitution showed itself fortified against it, in point either of strength or weakness: but it seized on all alike, even those that were treated with all possible regard to diet. But the most dreadful part of the whole calamity was the dejection felt whenever any one found himself sickening (for by immediately falling into a feeling of despair, they abandoned themselves much more certainly to the disease, and did not resist it), and the fact of their being charged with infection from attending on one another, and so dying like sheep. And it was this that caused the greatest mortality amongst them; for if through fear they were unwilling to visit each other, they perished from being deserted, and many houses were emptied for want of some one to attend to the sufferers; or if they did visit them, they met their death, and especially such as made any pretensions to goodness; for through a feeling of shame they were unsparing of themselves, in going into their friends’ houses when deserted by all others; since even the members of the family were at length worn out by the very moanings of the dying, and were overcome by their excessive misery. Still more, however, than even these, did such as had escaped the disorder show pity for the dying and the suffering, both from their previous knowledge of what it was, and from their being now in no fear of it themselves: for it never seized the same person twice, so as to prove actually fatal. And such persons were felicitated by others; and themselves, in the excess of their present joy, entertained for the future also, to a certain degree, a vain hope that they would never now be carried off even by any other disease.

In addition to the original calamity, what oppressed them still more was the crowding into the city from the country, especially the newcomers. For as they had no houses, but lived in stifling cabins at the hot season of the year, the mortality amongst them spread without restraint; bodies lying on one another in the death agony, and half-dead creatures rolling about in the streets and round all the fountains, in their longing for water. The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves, were full of the corpses of those that died there in them: for in the surpassing violence of the calamity, men not knowing what was to become of them, came to disregard everything, both sacred and profane, alike. And all the laws were violated which they before observed respecting burials; and they buried them as each one could. And many from want of proper means, in consequence of so many of their friends having died, had recourse to shameless modes of sepulture; for on the piles prepared for others, some, anticipating those who had raised them, would lay their own dead relatives and set fire to them; and others, while the body of a stranger was burning, would throw on the top of it the one they were carrying, and go away.

In other respects also the plague was the origin of lawless conduct in the city, to a greater extent than it had before existed. For deeds which formerly men hid from view, so as not to do them just as they pleased, they now more readily ventured on; since they saw the change so sudden in the case of those who were prosperous and quickly perished, and of those who before had had nothing, and at once came into possession of the property of the dead. So they resolved to take their enjoyment quickly, and with a sole view to gratification; regarding their lives and their riches alike as things of a day. As for taking trouble about what was thought honourable, no one was forward to do it; deeming it uncertain whether, before he had attained to it, he would not be cut off; but everything that was immediately pleasant, and that which was conducive to it by any means whatever, this was laid down to be both honourable and expedient. And fear of gods, or law of men, there was none to stop them; for with regard to the former they esteemed it all the same whether they worshipped them or not, from seeing all alike perishing; and with regard to their offences against the latter, no one expected to live till judgment should be passed on him, and so to pay the penalty of them; but they thought a far heavier sentence was impending in that which had already been passed upon them; and that before it fell on them, it was right to have some enjoyment of life.

Such was the calamity which the Athenians had met with, and by which they were afflicted, their men dying within the city, and their land being wasted without. In their misery they remembered this verse amongst other things, as was natural they should; the old men saying that it had been uttered long ago:

“A Dorian war shall come, and plague with it.”

Now there was a dispute amongst them, and some asserted that it was not “a plague” (loimos), that had been mentioned in the verse by the men of former times, but “a famine” (limos): the opinion, however, at the present time naturally prevailed that “a plague” had been mentioned: for men adapted their recollections to what they were suffering. But, I suppose, in case of another Dorian war ever befalling them after this, and a famine happening to exist, in all probability they will recite the verse accordingly. Those who were acquainted with it recollected also the oracle given to the Lacedæmonians, when on their inquiring of the god whether they should go to war, he answered, “that if they carried it on with all their might, they would gain the victory; and that he would himself take part with them in it.” With regard to the oracle then, they supposed that what was happening answered to it. For the disease had begun immediately after the Lacedæmonians had made their incursion; and it did not go into the Peloponnesus, worth even speaking of, but ravaged Athens most of all, and next to it the most populous of the other towns. Such were the circumstances that occurred in connection with the plague.

The Peloponnesians, after ravaging the plain, passed into the Paralian territory, as it is called, as far as Laurium, where the gold mines of the Athenians are situated. And first they ravaged the side which looks towards Peloponnesus; afterwards, that which lies towards Eubœa and Andros. Pericles being general at that time as well as before, maintained the same opinion as he had in the former invasion, about the Athenians not marching out against them.

While they were still in the plain, before they went to the Paralian territory, he was preparing an armament of a hundred ships to sail against the Peloponnesus; and when all was ready, he put out to sea. On board the ships he took four thousand heavy-armed of the Athenians, and three hundred cavalry in horse transports, then for the first time made out of old vessels: a Chian and Lesbian force also joined the expedition with fifty ships. When this armament of the Athenians put out to sea, they left the Peloponnesians in the Paralian territory of Attica. On arriving at Epidaurus, in the Peloponnesus, they ravaged the greater part of the land, and having made an assault on the city, entertained some hope of taking it; but did not, however, succeed. After sailing from Epidaurus, they ravaged the land belonging to Trœzen, Haliœ, and Hermione; all which places are on the coast of the Peloponnesus. Proceeding thence they came to Prasiæ, a maritime town of Laconia, and ravaged some of the land, and took the town itself, and sacked it. After performing these achievements, they returned home; and found the Peloponnesians no longer in Attica, but returned.

Now all the time that the Peloponnesians were in the Athenian territory, and the Athenians were engaged in the expedition on board their ships, the plague was carrying them off both in the armament and in the city, so that it was even said that the Peloponnesians, for fear of the disorder, when they heard from the deserters that it was in the city, and also perceived them performing the funeral rites, retired the quicker from the country. Yet in this invasion they stayed the longest time, and ravaged the whole country: for they were about forty days in the Athenian territory.

The same summer Hagnon, son of Nicias, and Cleopompus, son of Clinias, who were colleagues with Pericles, took the army which he had employed, and went straightway on an expedition against the Chalcidians Thrace-ward, and Potidæa, which was still being besieged: and on their arrival they brought up their engines against Potidæa, and endeavoured to take it by every means. But they neither succeeded in capturing the city, nor in their other measures, to any extent worthy of their preparations: for the plague attacked them, and this indeed utterly overpowered them there, wasting their force to such a degree, that even the soldiers of the Athenians who were there before were infected with it by the troops which came with Hagnon, though previously they had been in good health. Phormion, however, and his sixteen hundred, were no longer in the neighbourhood of the Chalcidians (and so escaped its ravages). Hagnon therefore returned with his ships to Athens, having lost by the plague fifteen hundred out of four thousand heavy-armed, in about forty days. The soldiers who were there before still remained in the country, and continued the siege of Potidæa.

After the second invasion of the Lacedæmonians, the Athenians, when their land had been again ravaged, and the disease and the war were afflicting them at the same time, changed their views, and found fault with Pericles, thinking that he had persuaded them to go to war, and that it was through him that they had met with their misfortunes; and they were eager to come to terms with the Lacedæmonians. Indeed they sent ambassadors to them, but did not succeed in their object. And their minds being on all sides reduced to despair, they were violent against Pericles. He therefore, seeing them irritated by their present circumstances, and doing everything that he himself expected them to do, called an assembly, (for he was still general) wishing to cheer them, and by drawing off the irritation of their feelings to lead them to a calmer and more confident state of mind.

The Lacedæmonians and their allies the same summer made an expedition with a hundred ships against the island of Zacynthus, which lies over against Elis. The inhabitants are a colony of the Achæans of the Peloponnesus, and were in alliance with the Athenians. On board the fleet were a thousand heavy-armed of the Lacedæmonians, and Cnemus, a Spartan, as admiral. Having made a descent on the country, they ravaged the greater part of it; and when they did not surrender, they sailed back home.

At the end of the same summer, Aristeus, a Corinthian, Aneristus, Nicolaus, and Stratodemus, ambassadors of the Lacedæmonians, Timagoras, a Tegean, and Pollis, an Argive in a private capacity, being on their way to Asia, to obtain an interview with the king, if by any means they might prevail on him to supply money and join in the war, went first to Thrace, to Sitalces the son of Teres, wishing to persuade him, if they could, to withdraw from his alliance with the Athenians. He gave orders to deliver them up to the Athenian ambassadors; who, having received them, took them to Athens. On their arrival the Athenians, being afraid that if Aristeus escaped he might do them still more mischief (for even before this he had evidently conducted all the measures in Potidæa and their possessions Thrace-ward) without giving them a trial, though they requested to say something in their own defence, put them to death that same day, and threw them into pits; thinking it but just to requite them in the same way as the Lacedæmonians had begun with; for they had killed and thrown into pits the merchants, both of the Athenians and their allies, whom they had taken on board trading vessels about the coast of the Peloponnesus. Indeed all that the Lacedæmonians took on the sea at the beginning of the war, they butchered as enemies, both those who were confederates of the Athenians and those who were neutral.

The following winter, the Athenians sent twenty ships round the Peloponnese, with Phormion as commander, who, making Naupactus his station, kept watch that no one either sailed out from Corinth and the Crissæan Bay, or into it. Another squadron of six they sent towards Caria and Lycia, with Melesander as commander, to raise money from those parts, and to hinder the privateers of the Peloponnesians from making that their rendezvous, and interfering with the navigation of the merchantmen from Phaselis and Phœnicia, and the continent in that direction. But Melesander, having gone up the country into Lycia with a force composed of the Athenians from the ships and the allies, and being defeated in a battle, was killed, and lost a considerable part of the army.

The same winter, when the Potidæans could no longer hold out against their besiegers, the inroads of the Peloponnesians into Attica having had no more effect towards causing the Athenians to withdraw, and their provisions being exhausted, and many other horrors having befallen them in their straits for food, and some having even eaten one another; under these circumstances, they made proposals for a capitulation to the generals of the Athenians who were in command against them, Xenophon, son of Euripides, Histiodorus, son of Aristoclides, and Phanomachus, son of Callimachus; who accepted them, seeing the distress of their army in so exposed a position, and the state having already expended 2000 talents [£400,000 or $2,000,000] on the siege. On these terms therefore they came to an agreement; that themselves, their children, wives, and auxiliaries, should go out of the place with one dress each--but the women with two--and with a fixed sum of money for their journey. According to this treaty, they went out to Chalcidice, or where each could: but the Athenians blamed the generals for having come to an agreement without consulting them; for they thought they might have got possession of the place on their own terms; and afterwards they sent settlers of their own to Potidæa and colonised it. These were the transactions of the winter; and so ended the second year of this war.[c]

LAST PUBLIC SPEECH OF PERICLES

In his capacity of strategus, Pericles convoked a formal assembly of the people, for the purpose of vindicating himself publicly against the prevailing sentiment, and recommending perseverance in his line of policy. The speeches made by his opponents, assuredly very bitter, are not given by Thucydides; but that of Pericles himself is set down at considerable length, and a memorable discourse it is. It strikingly brings into relief both the character of the man and the impress of actual circumstances--an impregnable mind conscious not only of right purposes but of just and reasonable anticipations, and bearing up with manliness, or even defiance, against the natural difficulty of the case, heightened by an extreme of incalculable misfortune. He had foreseen, while advising the war originally, the probable impatience of his countrymen under its first hardships, but he could not foresee the epidemic by which that impatience had been exasperated into madness; and he now addressed them not merely with unabated adherence to his own deliberate convictions, but also in a tone of reproachful remonstrance against their unmerited change of sentiment towards him--seeking at the same time to combat that uncontrolled despair which, for the moment, overlaid both their pride and their patriotism. Far from humbling himself before the present sentiment, it is at this time that he sets forth his titles to their esteem in the most direct and unqualified manner, and claims the continuance of that which they had so long accorded, as something belonging to him by acquired right.

His main object, throughout this discourse, is to fill the minds of his audience with patriotic sympathy for the weal of the entire city, so as to counterbalance the absorbing sense of private woe. If the collective city flourishes (he argues), private misfortunes may at least be borne: but no amount of private prosperity will avail, if the collective city falls (a proposition literally true in ancient times and under the circumstances of ancient warfare--though less true at present). “Distracted by domestic calamity, ye are now angry both with me who advised you to go to war, and with yourselves who followed the advice. Ye listened to me, considering me superior to others in judgment, in speech, in patriotism, and in incorruptible probity--nor ought I now to be treated as culpable for giving such advice, when in point of fact the war was unavoidable and there would have been still greater danger in shrinking from it. I am the same man, still unchanged--but ye in your misfortunes cannot stand to the convictions which ye adopt when yet unhurt. Extreme and unforeseen, indeed, are the sorrows which have fallen upon you: yet inhabiting as ye do a great city and brought up in dispositions suitable to it, ye must also resolve to bear up against the utmost pressure of adversity, and never to surrender your dignity. I have often explained to you that ye have no reason to doubt of eventual success in the war, but I will now remind you, more emphatically than before, and even with a degree of ostentation suitable as a stimulus to your present unnatural depression--that your naval force makes you masters not only of your allies, but of the entire sea--one-half of the visible field for action and employment. Compared with so vast a power as this, the temporary use of your houses and territory is a mere trifle--an ornamental accessory not worth considering: and this too, if ye preserve your freedom, ye will quickly recover. It was your fathers who first gained this empire, without any of the advantages which ye now enjoy; ye must not disgrace yourselves by losing what they acquired. Delighting as ye all do in the honour and empire enjoyed by the city, ye must not shrink from the toils whereby alone that honour is sustained: moreover ye now fight, not merely for freedom instead of slavery, but for empire against loss of empire, with all the perils arising out of imperial unpopularity. It is not safe for you now to abdicate, even if ye chose to do so; for ye hold your empire like a despotism--unjust perhaps in the original acquisition, but ruinous to part with when once acquired. Be not angry with me, whose advice ye followed in going to war, because the enemy have done such damage as might be expected from them; still less on account of this unforeseen distemper: I know that this makes me an object of your special present hatred, though very unjustly, unless ye will consent to give me credit also of any unexpected good luck which may occur. Our city derives its particular glory from unshaken bearing up against misfortune: her power, her name, her empire of Greeks over Greeks, are such as have never before been seen: and if we choose to be great, we must take the consequence of that temporary envy and hatred which is the necessary price of permanent renown. Behave ye now in a manner worthy of that glory; display that courage which is essential to protect you against disgrace at present, as well as to guarantee your honour for the future. Send no further embassy to Sparta, and bear your misfortunes without showing symptoms of distress.”

The irresistible reason, as well as the proud and resolute bearing of this discourse, set forth with an eloquence which it was not possible for Thucydides to reproduce--together with the age and character of Pericles--carried the assent of the assembled people; who, when in the Pnyx and engaged according to habit on public matters, would for a moment forget their private sufferings in considerations of the safety and grandeur of Athens. Possibly indeed, those sufferings, though still continuing, might become somewhat alleviated when the invaders quitted Attica, and when it was no longer indispensable for all the population to confine itself within the walls. Accordingly, the assembly resolved that no further propositions should be made for peace, and that the war should be prosecuted with vigour. But though the public resolution thus adopted showed the ancient habit of deference to the authority of Pericles, the sentiments of individuals taken separately were still those of anger against him as the author of that system which had brought them into so much distress. His political opponents--Cleon, Simmias, or Lacratidas, perhaps all three in conjunction--took care to provide an opportunity for this prevalent irritation to manifest itself in act, by bringing an accusation against him before the dicastery. The accusation is said to have been preferred on the ground of pecuniary malversation, and ended by his being sentenced to pay a considerable fine, fifteen, fifty, or eighty talents, according to different authors.[51]

The accusing party thus appeared to have carried their point, and to have disgraced, as well as excluded from re-election, the veteran statesman. But the event disappointed their expectations. The imposition of the fine not only satiated all the irritation of the people against him, but even occasioned a serious reaction in his favour, and brought back as strongly as ever the ancient sentiment of esteem and admiration. It was quickly found that those who had succeeded Pericles as generals neither possessed nor deserved in an equal degree the public confidence and he was accordingly soon re-elected, with as much power and influence as he had ever in his life enjoyed.

But that life, long, honourable, and useful, had already been prolonged considerably beyond the sixtieth year, and there were but too many circumstances, besides the recent fine, which tended to hasten as well as to embitter its close. At the very moment when Pericles was preaching to his countrymen, in a tone almost reproachful, the necessity of manful and unabated devotion to the common country, in the midst of private suffering--he was himself among the greatest of sufferers, and most hardly pressed to set the example of observing his own precepts. The epidemic carried off not merely his two sons (the only two legitimate, Xanthippus and Paralus), but also his sister, several other relatives, and his best and most useful political friends. Amidst this train of domestic calamities, and in the funeral obsequies of so many of his dearest friends, he remained master of his grief, and maintained his habitual self command, until the last misfortune--the death of his favourite son Paralus, which left his house without any legitimate representative to maintain the family and the hereditary sacred rites. On this final blow, though he strove to command himself as before, yet at the obsequies of the young man, when it became his duty to place a wreath on the dead body, his grief became uncontrollable, and he burst out, for the first time in his life, into profuse tears and sobbing.

In the midst of these several personal trials he received the intimation, through Alcibiades and some other friends, of the restored confidence of the people towards him, and his re-election to the office of strategus. But it was not without difficulty that he was persuaded to present himself again at the public assembly, and resume the direction of affairs. The regret of the people was formally expressed to him for the recent sentence--perhaps indeed the fine may have been repaid to him, or some evasion of it permitted, saving the forms of law--in the present temper of the city; which was further displayed towards him by the grant of a remarkable exemption from a law of his own original proposition. He had himself, some years before, been the author of that law, whereby the citizenship of Athens was restricted to persons born both of Athenian fathers and Athenian mothers, under which restriction several thousand persons, illegitimate on the mother’s side, are said to have been deprived of the citizenship, on occasion of a public distribution of corn. Invidious as it appeared to grant, to Pericles singly, an exemption from a law which had been strictly enforced against so many others, the people were now moved not less by compassion than by anxiety to redress their own previous severity. Without a legitimate heir, the house of Pericles, one branch of the great Alcmæonid gens by his mother’s side, would be left deserted, and the continuity of the family sacred rites would be broken--a misfortune painfully felt by every Athenian family, as calculated to wrong all the deceased members, and provoke their posthumous displeasure towards the city. Accordingly, permission was granted to Pericles to legitimise, and to inscribe in his own gens and phratry, his natural son by Aspasia, who bore his own name.

THE END AND GLORY OF PERICLES

[Sidenote: [430-429 B.C.]]

It was thus that Pericles was reinstated in his post of strategus as well as in his ascendency over the public counsels--seemingly about August or September--430 B.C. He lived about one year longer, and seems to have maintained his influence as long as his health permitted. Yet we hear nothing of him after this moment, and he fell a victim, not to the violent symptoms of the epidemic, but to a slow and wearing fever, which undermined his strength as well as his capacity. To a friend who came to ask after him when in this disease, Pericles replied by showing a charm or amulet which his female relations had hung about his neck--a proof how low he was reduced, and how completely he had become a passive subject in the hands of others. And according to another anecdote which we read, yet more interesting and equally illustrative of his character--it was during his last moments, when he was lying apparently unconscious and insensible, that the friends around his bed were passing in review the acts of his life, and the nine trophies which he had erected at different times for so many victories. He heard what they said, though they fancied that he was past hearing, and interrupted them by remarking, “What you praise in my life, belongs partly to good fortune; and is, at best, common to me with many other generals. But the peculiarity of which I am most proud, you have not noticed: no Athenian has ever put on mourning through any action of mine.”

Such a cause of self-gratulation, doubtless more satisfactory to recall at such a moment than any other, illustrates that long-sighted calculation, aversion to distant or hazardous enterprise, and economy of the public force, which marked his entire political career; a career long, beyond all parallel in the history of Athens--since he maintained a great influence, gradually swelling into a decisive personal ascendency, for between thirty and forty years. His character has been presented in very different lights by different authors, both ancient and modern, and our materials for striking the balance are not so good as we could wish. But his immense and long-continued supremacy, as well as his unparalleled eloquence, are facts attested not less by his enemies than by his friends--nay, even more forcibly by the former than by the latter. The comic writers, who hated him, and whose trade it was to deride and hunt down every leading political character, exhaust their powers of illustration in setting forth both the one and the other: Telecleides, Cratinus, Eupolis, Aristophanes, all hearers and all enemies, speak of him like Olympian Zeus hurling thunder and lightning--like Hercules and Achilles--as the only speaker on whose lips persuasion sat and who left his sting in the minds of his audience: while Plato the philosopher, who disapproved of his political working and of the moral effects which he produced upon Athens, nevertheless extols his intellectual and oratorical ascendency--“his majestic intelligence.” There is another point of eulogy, not less valuable, on which the testimony appears uncontradicted: throughout his long career, amidst the hottest political animosities, the conduct of Pericles towards opponents was always mild and liberal.[52]

The conscious self-esteem and arrogance of manner, with which the contemporary poet Ion reproached him, contrasting it with the unpretending simplicity of his own patron Cimon, though probably invidiously exaggerated, is doubtless in substance well founded, and those who read the last speech just given out of Thucydides will at once recognise in it this attribute. His natural taste, his love of philosophical research, and his unwearied application to public affairs, all contributed to alienate him from ordinary familiarity, and to make him careless, perhaps improperly careless, of the lesser means of conciliating public favour.

But admitting this latter reproach to be well founded, as it seems to be, it helps to negative that greater and graver political crime which has been imputed to him, of sacrificing the permanent well-being and morality of the state to the maintenance of his own political power--of corrupting the people by distributions of the public money. “He gave the reins to the people.” in Plutarch’s words, “and shaped his administration for their immediate spectacle or festival or procession, thus nursing up the city in elegant pleasures--and by sending out every year sixty triremes manned by citizen-seamen on full pay, who were thus kept in practice and acquired nautical skill.”

The charge here made against Pericles, and supported by allegations in themselves honourable rather than otherwise--of a vicious appetite for immediate popularity, and of improper concessions to the immediate feelings of the people against their permanent interests--is precisely that which Thucydides in the most pointed manner denies; and not merely denies, but contrasts Pericles with his successors in the express circumstance that they did so, while he did not. The language of the contemporary historian well deserves to be cited: “Pericles, powerful from dignity of character as well as from wisdom, and conspicuously above the least tinge of corruption, held back the people with a free hand, and was their real leader instead of being led by them. For not being a seeker of power from unworthy sources, he did not speak with any view to present favour, but had sufficient sense of dignity to contradict them on occasion, even braving their displeasure. Thus whenever he perceived them insolently and unseasonably confident, he shaped his speeches in such a manner as to alarm and beat them down; when again he saw them unduly frightened, he tried to counteract it and restore their confidence; so that the government was in name a democracy, but in reality an empire exercised by the first citizen in the state. But those who succeeded after his death, being more equal one with another, and each of them desiring pre-eminence over the rest, adopted the different course of courting the favour of the people and sacrificing to that object even important state interests. From whence arose many other bad measures, as might be expected in a great and imperial city, and especially the Sicilian expedition.”

It will be seen that the judgment here quoted from Thucydides contradicts, in the most unqualified manner, the reproaches commonly made against Pericles of having corrupted the Athenian people--by distributions of the public money, and by giving way to their unwise caprices--for the purpose of acquiring and maintaining his own political power. Nay, the historian particularly notes the opposite qualities--self-judgment, conscious dignity, indifference to immediate popular applause or wrath when set against what was permanently right and useful--as the special characteristic of that great statesman. A distinction might indeed be possible, and Plutarch professes to note such distinction, between the earlier and the later part of his long political career. Pericles began (so that biographer says) by corrupting the people in order to acquire power; but having acquired it, he employed it in an independent and patriotic manner, so that the judgment of Thucydides, true respecting the later part of his life, would not be applicable to the earlier.

The internal political changes at Athens, respecting the Areopagus and the dicasteries, took place when Pericles was a young man, and when he cannot be supposed to have yet acquired the immense personal weight which afterwards belonged to him (Ephialtes in fact seems in those early days to have been a greater man than Pericles, if we may judge by the fact that he was selected by his political adversaries for assassination)--so that they might with greater propriety be ascribed to the party with which Pericles was connected, rather than to that statesman himself. But next, we have no reason to presume that Thucydides considered these changes as injurious, or as having deteriorated the Athenian character. All that he does say as to the working of Pericles on the sentiment and actions of his countrymen is eminently favourable.

Though Thucydides does not directly canvass the constitutional changes effected in Athens under Pericles, yet everything which he does say leads us to believe that he accounted the working of that statesman, upon the whole, on Athenian power as well as on Athenian character, eminently valuable, and his death as an irreparable loss. And we may thus appeal to the judgment of an historian who is our best witness in every conceivable respect, as a valid reply to the charge against Pericles of having corrupted the Athenian habits, character, and government. If he spent a large amount of the public treasure upon religious edifices and ornaments, and upon stately works for the city--yet the sum which he left untouched, ready for use at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, was such as to appear more than sufficient for all purposes of defence, or public safety, or military honour. It cannot be shown of Pericles that he ever sacrificed the greater object to the less--the permanent and substantially valuable, to the transitory and showy--assured present possessions, to the lust of new, distant, or uncertain conquests. If his advice had been listened to, the rashness which brought on the defeat of the Athenian Tolmides at Coronea in Bœotia would have been avoided, and Athens might probably have maintained her ascendency over Megara and Bœotia, which would have protected her territory from invasion, and given a new turn to the subsequent history.

Pericles is not to be treated as the author of the Athenian character: he found it with its very marked positive characteristics and susceptibilities, among which, those which he chiefly brought out and improved were the best. The lust of expeditions against the Persians, which Cimon would have pushed into Egypt and Cyprus, he repressed, after it had accomplished all which could be usefully aimed at: the ambition of Athens he moderated rather than encouraged: the democratical movement of Athens he regularised, and worked out into judicial institutions which ranked among the prominent features of Athenian life, and worked with a very large balance of benefit to the national mind as well as to the individual security, in spite of the many defects in their direct character as tribunals. But that point in which there was the greatest difference between Athens, as Pericles found it and as he left it, is unquestionably, the pacific and intellectual development--rhetoric, poetry, arts, philosophical research, and recreative variety. To which, if we add great improvement in the cultivation of the Attic soil, extension of Athenian trade, attainment and laborious maintenance of the maximum of maritime skill (attested by the battles of Phormion), enlargement of the area of complete security by construction of the Long Walls, lastly, the clothing of Athens in her imperial mantle, by ornaments architectural and sculptural--we shall make out a case of genuine progress realised during the political life of Pericles, such as the evils imputed to him, far more imaginary than real, will go but little way to alloy. How little, comparatively speaking, of the picture drawn by Pericles in his funeral harangue of 431 B.C., would have been correct, if the harangue had been delivered over those warriors who fell at Tanagra twenty-seven years before!

Taking him altogether, with his powers of thought, speech, and action, his competence civil and military, in the council as well as in the field, his vigorous and cultivated intellect, and his comprehensive ideas of a community in pacific and many-sided development, his incorruptible public morality, caution, and firmness, in a country where all those qualities were rare, and the union of them in the same individual of course much rarer--we shall find him without a parallel throughout the whole course of Grecian history.[b]

WILHELM ONCKEN’S ESTIMATE OF PERICLES

Among the important personages of antiquity, there is none on whom posterity has so fully agreed in its judgment, as on Pericles. When we meet with this name in modern works, we find but one general voice acknowledging his greatness, one voice of admiration for the unusual qualities which distinguished him.

Even the opposers of his political administration were just to him, even those who, in the great rising of Athenian democracy, saw the beginning of a splendid misery, did not deny their respect to the man, who by this development was assigned a place in the first rank. Without wishing to do so they heaped praise on him, in which we must decline to join, although we are the last to wish to rob him of his well-deserved fame. In the political revolution which resulted in the sovereignty of the constitutional demos, and in checking the ruin which only too soon followed, they credited him with so much blame and merit, as even had he divided it with Ephialtes and others, would still have surpassed the power of any mortal, though he were the greatest of the great.

Such great political events as those here mentioned, are not the work of individual men, not the act of a party, however great may be the aggregate of the particular forces it may have at command. They have their root in the nature of the conditions, in the disposition of the circumstances, in the requirements of society, in alliance with which the individual, like Antæus, derives fresh strength out of every defeat, and without which he is but rolling the stone of Sisyphus.

For such a deeply rooted change in the forms of political life in a community, whether that change be for good or evil, elementary forces are necessary which are neither subject to the command nor to the violence of the individual, which human will can neither loose nor arrest, and in the present case we have to deal with a revolution to effect which the agitators employed but a single lever, a single weapon, the convincing word, the power of oratory, the weight of reason.

Also the advent of the internal decay which, as is supposed, followed so rapidly on the violent exertion of the power of the Athenian mob at home, would not, had the times really been ripe for it, have awaited the death of Pericles, an event usually regarded, in flattering enough recognition of the greatness of the man, as the thunderbolt which struck and came to set fire to the heaped-up seeds of corruption.

But the unsought-for praise which springs from this misunderstanding again strikingly proves how universally spread, how deeply rooted is the respect of posterity for this one great Athenian. It is remarkable, however, that his immediate and more remote contemporaries, held an opinion quite different. In examining their judgments on this statesman, we see that with all the deplorable incompleteness of tradition an almost complete unanimity of opinion is found, but this unanimity is not for, but against, Pericles. To our great surprise we discover that the most diverse channels which voiced public opinion, the most various representatives of the universal judgment, seem to have entered into a regular conspiracy against the memory of this man, against the fame of his public and of his personal character.

Highly gifted comic poets such as Cratinus and Eupolis, not to mention others, frivolous anecdote-mongers such as Stesimbrotus of Thasos and Idomeneus of Lampsacus, rhetorical historians like Ephorus, whom Diodorus follows, and earnest philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, are unanimous in repudiating and condemning Pericles. One would understand if they satisfied themselves with a truly Greek disparagement of his great qualities, and exaggeration of his defects, although one might wonder at the unanimity of this proceeding: but they do not stop at this; some at least even go so far as to stamp Pericles as a criminal.

Idomeneus of Lampsacus reproached him with an assassination of the worst kind, committed on his true friend and confederate Ephialtes. Ephorus accused him of embezzling public money and of extensive thefts of public property entrusted to his administration; and comparatively speaking Plato’s judgment is mild, when he consigns him to the ranks of those common demagogues who are not particular as to their means of fraudulently obtaining the favour of the populace. And Aristotle who had cleared him of many serious accusations does not admit him among the statesmen and patriots of the highest rank, but gives preference to such men as Nicias, Thucydides, and even Theramenes.

The reason of this extraordinary fact lies in the partisan spirit which though notorious is not always rightly estimated, and by which the overwhelming majority of the Greek writers whose works have come down to us were animated against the Athenian democracy, so that the champion of popular government which they condemned in principle, cannot possibly find favour in their sight.

On what then does the judgment of posterity repose, a judgment that is in direct opposition to such an imposing number of authorities? Is it a conjecture to which a tacit agreement of competent judges gave a legal authority? Is it the result of an arbitrary process which on grounds of innate probability and by an undisputed verdict clears the historical kernel of all the dross with which the hate and envy, mistakes and calumnies of contemporaries had surrounded it? Or if this judgment is based on the authentic foundation of evidence, is it surely not merely commended, by its innate rectitude, but also confirmed by an unequivocal testimony?

The latter is the case. Our judgment of Pericles is based on the immovable foundation of a testimony which stands alone, not only in this respect but also in the whole of Greek literature, the testimony of Thucydides. It is to Thucydides that his greatest contemporary owes the honour accorded to his name by posterity. His summing up amounts to this: Pericles owes the authoritative position which he occupies in the Athenian state, neither to cunning nor force, but exclusively to the trust of his fellow citizens: their trust in the tried greatness of his spirit, the universally recognised purity of his character, the immovable firmness of his will.

He stood, in truth, above the people, whom he ruled as a prince; raised even above the suspicion of dishonesty, raised above the reproach of cringing submissiveness, he stood firm in his superior influence on the resolution of the multitude, because he had not gained possession of it by the employment of unseemly means, but through the esteem of the citizens for his aptitude for government. He did not give way to the pressure of the changing fancies and moods of the moment. He met the anger of the multitude with unflinching pride, he brought the insolent to their senses, and encouraged the faint hearted to self-confidence. It was a democracy in appearance only, in deed and truth it was the rule of an individual man, of the greatest of the great, over the people.[e]

FOOTNOTES

[49] At the same time a plague was raging in Rome. The pestilence is believed to have been carried along the Carthaginian trade routes. It brought the population of Athens from 100,000 down below 80,000.

[50] According to Grote, “Diodorus mentions similar distresses in the Carthaginian army besieging Syracuse, during the terrible epidemic with which it was attacked in 395 B.C.; and Livy, respecting the epidemic at Syracuse when it was besieged by Marcellus and the Romans.”

[51] Bury[d] says: “He was found guilty of ‘theft’ to the trifling amount of five talents; the verdict was a virtual acquittal, though he had to pay a fine of ten times the amount.” But as an Attic talent was equal to £200 or $1000, the theft of five talents was hardly trifling and a fine of £10,000 or $50,000 was a rather unsatisfactory “acquittal.”

[52] “Pericles,” says Plutarch,[h] “undoubtedly deserved admiration, not only for the candour and moderation which he ever retained, amidst the distractions of business and the rage of his enemies, but for that noble sentiment which led him to think it his most excellent attainment, never to have given way to envy or anger, notwithstanding the greatness of his power, nor to have nourished an implacable hatred against his greatest foe. In my opinion, this one thing, I mean his mild and dispassionate behaviour, his unblemished integrity and irreproachable conduct during his whole administration, makes his appellation of Olympius, which would otherwise be vain and absurd, no longer exceptionable; nay, gives it a propriety.”

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XXXII. THE SECOND AND THIRD YEARS OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

Among students of Greek history the little town of Platæa takes a large hold upon the affections. We have seen how its old time devotion to Athens brought upon it a sudden descent from the arch-enemy Thebes at the very outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. It was a case of Greek against Greek, of Theban duplicity versus Platæan wile. The success of Platæa was so neat and exasperating as to inspire a desperate revenge. Now it was no longer a playtime for trickery, and on both sides the sterner elements of human nature were put to test. The siege of Platæa lasted from the summer of the third year of the war (429 B.C.) to the summer of the fifth year (427 B.C.) but it seems better to tell it in isolated continuity. Accordingly three separate portions of Thirlwall’s vivid history are here brought together.[a]

[Sidenote: [429 B.C.]]

In the beginning of the summer 429 B.C., a Peloponnesian army was again assembled at the isthmus, under the command of Archidamus. But instead of invading Attica, which was perhaps thought dangerous on account of the pestilence, he gratified the wishes of the Thebans, by marching into the territory of Platæa, where he encamped, and prepared to lay it waste. But before he had committed any acts of hostility, envoys from Platæa demanded an audience, and, being admitted, made a solemn remonstrance against his proceedings in the name of religion. They reminded the Spartans that, after the glorious battle which secured the liberty of Greece, Pausanias in the presence of the allied army, and in the public place of Platæa, where he had just offered a sacrifice in honour of the victory, formally reinstated the Platæans in the independent possession of their city and territory, which he placed under the protection of all the allies, with whom they had shared the common triumph, to defend them from unjust aggression. They complained that the Spartans were now about to violate this well-earned privilege, which had been secured to Platæa by solemn oaths, at the instigation of her bitterest enemies, the Thebans. And they adjured him, by the gods who had been invoked to witness the engagement of Pausanias, as well as by those of Sparta, and of their violated territory, to desist from his enterprise.

Archidamus in reply admitted the claim of the Platæans, but desired them to reflect that the rights on which they insisted implied some corresponding duties; that, if the Spartans were pledged to protect their independence, they were themselves no less bound to assist the Spartans in delivering those who had once been their allies in the struggle with Persia, from the tyranny of Athens. Yet Sparta, as she had already declared, did not wish to force them to take a part in the war which she was waging for the liberties of Greece, but would be satisfied if they would remain neutral, and would admit both parties alike to amicable intercourse, without aiding either. The envoys returned with this answer, and, after laying it before the people, came back, instructed to reply: that it was impossible for them to accede to the proposal of Archidamus, without the consent of the Athenians, who had their wives and children in their hands; and they should have reason to fear either the resentment of their present allies, who on the retreat of the Spartans might come and deprive them of their city; or the treachery of the Thebans, who under the cover of neutrality, might find another opportunity of surprising them. But the Spartan, without noticing the ties that bound them to Athens, met the last objection with a new offer.

“Let them commit their city, houses, and lands, to the custody of the Spartans, with an exact account of the boundaries, the number of their trees, and all other things left behind, which it was possible to number. Let them withdraw, and live elsewhere until the end of the war. The Spartans would then restore the deposit entrusted to them, and in the meanwhile would provide for the cultivation of the land, and pay a fair rent.”

It is possible that this proposal may have been honestly meant; though it is as likely that it was suggested by the malice of the Thebans. For it was evident that the Platæans could not accept it without renouncing the friendship of the Athenians, to whom they had committed their families, and in the most favourable contingency, which would be the fall of their old ally, casting themselves upon the honour of an enemy for their political existence; while nevertheless the speciously liberal offer, if rejected, would afford a pretext for treating them with the utmost rigour. This the Platæans probably perceived; and therefore, when their envoys returned with the proposal of the Spartans, requested an armistice, that they might lay it before the Athenians, promising to accept it if they could obtain their consent.

Archidamus granted their request; but the answer brought from Athens put an end, as might have been expected, to the negotiation. It exhorted them to keep their faith with their ally, and to depend upon Athenian protection. Thus urged and emboldened, they resolved, whatever might befall them, to adhere to the side of Athens, and to break off all parley with the enemy, by a short answer, delivered not through envoys, but from the walls: that it was out of their power to do as the Spartans desired.[53] Archidamus, on receiving this declaration, prepared for attacking the city. But first, with great solemnity, he called upon the gods and heroes of the land to witness, that he had not invaded it without just cause, but after the Platæans had first abandoned their ancient confederates; and that whatever they might hereafter suffer would be a merited punishment of the perverseness with which they had rejected his equitable offers.

THE SPARTANS AND THEBANS ATTACK PLATÆA

His first operation, after ravaging the country, was to invest the city with a palisade, for which the fruit trees cut down by his troops furnished materials. This slight inclosure was sufficient for his purpose, as he hoped that the overwhelming superiority of his numbers would enable him to take the place by storm. The mode of attack which he chiefly relied upon, was the same which we have seen employed by the Persians against the Ionian cities. He attempted to raise a mound to a level with the walls. It was piled up with earth and rubbish, wood and stones, and was guarded on either side by a strong lattice-work of forest timber. For seventy days and seventy nights the troops, divided into parties which constantly relieved each other, were occupied in this labour without intermission, urged to their tasks by the Lacedæmonians who commanded the contingents of the allies. But as the mound rose, the besieged devised expedients for averting the danger.

First they surmounted the opposite part of their wall with a superstructure of brick--taken from the adjacent houses which were pulled down for the purpose--secured in a frame of timber, and shielded from fiery missiles by a curtain of raw hides and skins, which protected the workmen and their work. But as the mound still kept rising as fast as the wall, they set about contriving plans for reducing it. And first, issuing by night through an opening made in the wall, they scooped out and carried away large quantities of the earth from the lower part of the mound. But the Peloponnesians, on discovering this device, counteracted it, by repairing the breach with layers of stiff clay, pressed down close on wattles of reed. Thus baffled, the besieged sank a shaft within the walls, and thence working upon a rough estimate, dug a passage under ground as far as the mound, which they were thus enabled to undermine. And against this contrivance the enemy had no remedy, except in the multitude of hands, which repaired the loss almost as soon as it was felt.

But the garrison, fearing that they should not be able to struggle long with this disadvantage, and that their wall would at length be carried by force of numbers, provided against this event, by building a second wall, in the shape of a half-moon, behind the raised part of the old wall, which was the chord of the arc. Thus in the worst emergency they secured themselves a retreat, from which they would be able to assail the enemy to great advantage, and he would have to recommence his work under the most unfavourable circumstances. This countermure drove the besiegers to their last resources. They had already brought battering engines to play upon the walls. But the spirit and ingenuity of the besieged had generally baffled these assaults; though one had given an alarming shock to the superstructure in front of the half-moon. Sometimes the head of an engine was caught up by means of a noose; sometimes it was broken off by a heavy beam, suspended by chains from two levers placed on the wall.

Now, however, after the main hope of the Peloponnesians, which rested on their mound, was completely defeated by the countermure, Archidamus resolved to try a last extraordinary experiment. He caused the hollow between the mound and the wall, and all the space which he could reach on the other side, to be filled up with a pile of faggots, which, when it had been steeped in pitch and sulphur, was set on fire. The blaze was such as had perhaps never before been kindled by the art of man; Thucydides compares it to a burning forest. It penetrated to a great distance within the city; and if it had been seconded, as the besiegers hoped, by a favourable wind, would probably have destroyed it. The alarm and confusion which it caused for a time in the garrison were great; a large tract of the city was inaccessible. Yet it does not appear that Archidamus made any attempt to take advantage of their consternation and disorder. He waited; but the expected breeze did not come to spread the flames, and--according to a report which the historian mentions, but does not vouch for--a sudden storm of thunder and rain arose to quench them.

Thus thwarted and disheartened, and perhaps unable to keep the whole of his army any longer in the camp, he reluctantly determined to convert the siege to a blockade, which it was foreseen would be tedious and expensive. A part of the troops were immediately sent home: the remainder set about the work of circumvallation, which was apportioned to the contingents of the confederates. Two ditches were dug round the town, and yielded materials for a double line of walls, which were built in the intermediate space on the edge of each trench. The walls were sixteen feet asunder; but the interval was occupied with barracks for the soldiers, so that the whole might be said to form one wall. At the distance of ten battlements from each other were large towers, which covered the whole breadth of the rampart. At the autumnal equinox the lines were completed, and were left, one-half in the custody of the Bœotians, the other in that of their allies. The troops who were not needed for this service were then led back to their homes. The garrison of the place at this time consisted of four hundred Platæans, and eighty Athenians; and 110 women who had been retained, when all the useless hands were sent to Athens, to minister to the wants of the men.

PART OF THE PLATÆANS ESCAPE; THE REST CAPITULATE

Athens could do nothing for the relief of Platæa. The brave garrison had begun to suffer from the failure of provisions; and, as their condition grew hopeless, two of their leading men, Theænetus a soothsayer, and Eupompidas, one of the generals, conceived the project of escaping across the enemy’s lines. When it was first proposed, it was unanimously adopted: but as the time for its execution approached, half of the men shrank from the danger, and not more than 220 adhered to their resolution. The contrivers of the plan took the lead in the enterprise. Scaling ladders of a proper height were the first requisite; and they were made upon a measurement of the enemy’s wall, for which the besieged had no other basis than the number of layers of brick, which were sedulously counted over and over again by different persons, until the amount, and consequently the height of the wall, was sufficiently ascertained. A dark and stormy night, in the depth of winter, was chosen for the attempt; it was known that in such nights the sentinels took shelter in the towers, and left the intervening battlements unguarded; and it was on this practice that the success of the adventure mainly depended. It was concerted, that the part of the garrison which remained behind should make demonstrations of attacking the enemy’s lines on the side opposite to that by which their comrades attempted to escape. And first a small party, lightly armed, the right foot bare, to give them a surer footing in the mud, keeping at such a distance from each other as to prevent their arms from clashing, crossed the ditch, and planted their ladders, unseen and unheard; for the noise of their approach was drowned by the wind. The first who mounted were twelve men armed with short swords, led by Ammeas son of Corœbus. His followers, six on each side, proceeded immediately to secure the two nearest towers. Next came another party with short spears, their shields being carried by their comrades behind them. But before many more had mounted, the fall of a tile, broken off from a battlement by one of the Platæans, as he laid hold of it, alarmed the nearest sentinels, and presently the whole force of the besiegers was called to the walls. But no one knew what had happened, and the general confusion was increased by the sally of the besieged. All therefore remained at their posts; only a body of three hundred men, who were always in readiness to move toward any quarter where they might be needed, issued from one of the gates in search of the place from which the alarm had arisen. In the meanwhile the assailants had made themselves masters of the two towers between which they scaled the wall, and, after cutting down the sentinels, guarded the passages which led through them, while others mounted by ladders to the roofs, and thence discharged their missiles on all who attempted to approach the scene of action. The main body of the fugitives now poured through the opening thus secured, applying more ladders, and knocking away the battlements: and as they gained the other side of the outer ditch, they formed upon its edge, and with their arrows and javelins protected their comrades, who were crossing, from the enemy above. Last of all, and with some difficulty--for the ditch was deep, the water high, and covered with a thin crust of ice--the parties which occupied the towers effected their retreat; and they had scarcely crossed, before the three hundred were seen coming up with lighted torches. But their lights, which discovered nothing to them, made them a mark for the missiles of the Platæans, who were thus enabled to elude their pursuit, and to move away in good order.

All the details of the plan seem to have been concerted with admirable forethought. On the first alarm fire signals were raised by the besiegers to convey the intelligence to Thebes. But the Platæans had provided against this danger, and showed similar signals from their own walls, so as to render it impossible for the Thebans to interpret those of the enemy. This precaution afforded additional security to their retreat. For instead of taking the nearest road to Athens, they first bent their steps toward Thebes, while they could see their pursuers with their blazing torches threading the ascent of Cithæron. After they had followed the Theban road for six or seven furlongs, they struck into that which led by Erythræ and Hysiæ to the Attic border, and arrived safe at Athens. Out of the 220 who set out together, one fell into the enemy’s hands, after he had crossed the outer ditch. Seven turned back panic-struck, and reported that all their companions had been cut off: and at daybreak a herald was sent to recover their bodies. The answer revealed the happy issue of the adventure.

[Sidenote: [427 B.C.]]

By this time the remaining garrison of Platæa was reduced to the last stage of weakness. The besiegers might probably long before have taken the town without difficulty by assault. But the Spartans had a motive of policy for wishing to bring the siege to a different termination. They looked forward to a peace which they might have to conclude upon the ordinary terms of a mutual restitution of conquests made in the war. In this case, if Platæa fell by storm, they would be obliged to restore it to Athens; but if it capitulated, they might allege that it was no conquest. With this view their commander protracted the blockade, until at length he discovered by a feint attack that the garrison was utterly unable to defend the walls. He then sent a herald to propose that they should surrender, not to the Thebans, but to the Spartans, on condition that Spartan judges alone should decide upon their fate. These terms were accepted, the town delivered up, and the garrison, which was nearly starved, received a supply of food. In a few days five commissioners came from Sparta to hold the promised trial. But instead of the usual forms of accusation and defence, the prisoners found themselves called upon to answer a single question: Whether in the course of the war they had done any service to Sparta and her allies. The spirit which dictated such an interrogatory was clear enough. The prisoners however obtained leave to plead for themselves without restriction; their defence was conducted by two of their number, one of whom, Lacon son of Aimnestus, was proxenus of Sparta.

The arguments of the Platæan orators, as reported by Thucydides, are strong, and the address which he attributes to them is the only specimen he has left of pathetic eloquence. They could point out the absurdity of sending five commissioners from Sparta, to inquire whether the garrison of a besieged town were friends of the besiegers; a question which, if retorted upon the party which asked it, would equally convict them of a wanton aggression. They could appeal to their services and sufferings in the Persian War, when they alone among the Bœotians remained constant to the cause of Greece, while the Thebans had fought on the side of the barbarians in the very land which they now hoped to make their own with the consent of Sparta. They could plead an important obligation which they had more recently conferred on Sparta herself, whom they had succoured with a third part of their whole force, when her very existence was threatened by the revolt of the Messenians after the great earthquake. They could urge that their alliance with Athens had been originally formed with the approbation, and even by the advice, of the Spartans themselves; that justice and honour forbade them to renounce a connection which they had sought as a favour, and from which they had derived great advantages; and that, as far as lay in themselves, they had not broken the last peace, but had been treacherously surprised by the Thebans, while they thought themselves secure in the faith of treaties. Even if their former merits were not sufficient to outweigh any later offence which could be imputed to them, they might insist on the Greek usage of war, which forbade proceeding to the last extremity with an enemy who had voluntarily surrendered himself; and as they had proved, by the patience with which they had endured the torments of hunger, that they preferred perishing by famine to falling into the hands of the Thebans, they had a right to demand that they should not be placed in a worse condition by their own act, but if they were to gain nothing by their capitulation, should be restored to the state in which they were when they made it.

But unhappily for the Platæans they had nothing to rely upon but the mercy or the honour of Sparta: two principles which never appear to have had the weight of a feather in any of her public transactions; and though the Spartan commissioners bore the title of judges, they came in fact only to pronounce a sentence which had been previously dictated by Thebes. Yet the appeal of the Platæans was so affecting, that the Thebans distrusted the firmness of their allies, and obtained leave to reply. They very judiciously and honestly treated the question as one which lay entirely between the Platæans and themselves. They attributed the conduct of their ancestors in the Persian War, to the compulsion of a small, dominant faction, and pleaded the services which they had themselves since rendered to Sparta. They depreciated the patriotic deeds of the Platæans, as the result of their attachment to Athens, whom they had not scrupled to abet in all her undertakings against the liberties of Greece. They defended the attempt which they had made upon Platæa during the peace, on the ground that they had been invited by a number of its wealthiest and noblest citizens, and they charged the Platæans with a breach of faith in the execution of their Theban prisoners, whose blood called for vengeance as loudly as they for mercy.

These were indeed reasons which fully explained and perhaps justified their own enmity to Platæa, and did not need to be aided by so glaring a falsehood, as the assertion that their enemies were enjoying the benefit of a fair trial. But the only part of their argument, that bore upon the real question, was that in which they reminded the Spartans that Thebes was their most powerful and useful ally. This the Spartans felt; and they had long determined that no scruples of justice or humanity should endanger so valuable a connection. But it seems that they still could not devise any more ingenious mode of reconciling their secret motive with outward decency, than the original question, which implied that if the prisoners were their enemies, they might rightfully put them to death; and in this sophistical abstraction all the claims which arose out of the capitulation, when construed according to the plainest rules of equity, were overlooked. The question was again proposed to each separately, and when the ceremony was finished by his answer or his silence, he was immediately consigned to the executioner. The Platæans who suffered amounted to two hundred; their fate was shared by twenty-five Athenians, who could not have expected or claimed milder treatment, as they might have been fairly excepted from the benefit of the surrender. The women were all made slaves. If there had been nothing but inhumanity in the proceeding of the Spartans, it would have been so much slighter than that which they had exhibited towards their most unoffending prisoners from the beginning of the war, as scarcely to deserve notice. All that is very signal in this transaction is the baseness of their cunning, and perhaps the dullness of their invention.

The town and its territory were, with better right, ceded to the Thebans. For a year they permitted the town to be occupied by a body of exiles from Megara, and by the remnant of the Platæans belonging to the Theban party. But afterwards--fearing perhaps that it might be wrested from them--they razed it to the ground, leaving only the temples standing. But on the site, and with the materials of the demolished buildings, they erected an edifice 200 feet square, with an upper story, the whole divided into apartments, for the reception of the pilgrims who might come to the quinquennial festival, or on other sacred occasions. They also built a new temple, which together with the brass and the iron found in the town, which were made into couches, they dedicated to Hera, the goddess to whom Pausanias was thought to have owed his victory. The territory was annexed to the Theban state lands, and let for a term of ten years. So, in the ninety-third year after Platæa had entered into alliance with Athens, this alliance became the cause of its ruin.[b]

NAVAL AND OTHER COMBATS

[Sidenote: [429 B.C.]]

While Archidamus was holding Platæa by the throat, other enterprises were meeting with varied success. Athens sent 2000 hoplites and 200 horse to Chalcidian Thrace under the Xenophon to whom Potidæa had surrendered. He made an assault on the town of Spartolus, only to lose a desperate battle, and to be crushed on his retreat; Xenophon and two associated generals were killed, and with them 430 hoplites, a loss of about 25 per cent.

In Thrace, Sitalces, king of an immense realm, came to the aid of Athens against the double-dealing Macedonian king, Perdiccas. He invaded Macedonia and the Chalcidian territory, and voyaged far and wide until the severity of winter and the failure of Athenian aid led him to retire.

Meanwhile, the Spartans had tried to wrest the Ionian Sea from Athens. Their expedition against Cephallenia and Zacynthus in 430 B.C. had failed, but now a powerful horde was gathered against Acarnania. Sparta sent a thousand hoplites under the admiral Cnemus. Corinth, Leucadia, Anactorium, and Ambracia furnished troops, and other bodies came from barbaric Epirots and Macedonian tribes otherwise obscure, including 1000 Chaonians, 1000 Orestæ besides Thesprotians, Molossians, Atintanes, and Paravæi. Even the Macedonian king, Perdiccas, a professed ally of Athens, sent 1000 Macedonians. These arrived, however, too late; fortunately for them, since the troops, without waiting for the fleet, marched against the Acarnanian city of Stratus in such disorderly pride that they fell into ambush, and, after a chaotic retreat, dispersed.

The fleet which was to have collaborated in the campaign hoped to evade the vigilance of the Athenian fleet as Cnemus had done, but the imperial fleet was under the command of the great and cunning Phormion, who was not deterred from attack by inferiority of numbers. Interesting naval chess-play followed.[a]

Now the fleet from Corinth and the rest of the confederates coming from the Crissæan Bay, which ought to have joined Cnemus, in order to prevent the Acarnanians on the coast from succouring their countrymen in the interior, did not do so; but they were compelled, about the same time as the battle was fought at Stratus, to come to an engagement with Phormion and the twenty Athenian vessels that kept guard at Naupactus. For Phormion kept watching them as they coasted along out of the gulf, wishing to attack them in the open sea. But the Corinthians and the allies were not sailing to Acarnania with any intention to fight by sea, but were equipped more for land service. When, however, they saw them sailing along opposite to them, as they themselves proceeded along their own coast, and on attempting to cross over from Patræ in Achaia to the mainland opposite, on their way to Acarnania observed the Athenians sailing against them from Chalcis and the river Evenus (for they had not escaped their observation when they had endeavoured to bring to secretly during the night); under these circumstances they were compelled to engage in the mid passage. They had separate commanders for the contingents of the different states that joined the armament, but those of the Corinthians were Machaon, Isocrates, and Agatharcidas.

And now the Peloponnesians ranged their ships in a circle, as large as they could without leaving any opening, with their prows turned outward and their sterns inward; and placed inside all the small craft that accompanied them, and their five best sailers, to advance out quickly and strengthen any point on which the enemy might make his attack.

On the other hand, the Athenians, ranged in a single line, kept sailing round them, and reducing them into a smaller compass; continually brushing past them, and making demonstrations of an immediate onset; though they had previously been commanded by Phormion not to attack them till he himself gave the signal. For he hoped that their order would not be maintained like that of a land-force on shore, but that the ships would fall foul of each other, and that the other craft would cause confusion; and if the wind should blow from the gulf, in expectation of which he was sailing round them, and which usually rose towards morning, that they would not remain steady an instant. He thought, too, that it rested with him to make the attack, whenever he pleased, as his ships were the better sailers; and that then would be the best time for making it. So when the wind came down upon them, and their ships, being now brought into a narrow compass, were thrown into confusion by the operation of both causes--the violence of the wind, and the small craft dashing against them--and when ship was falling foul of ship, and the crews were pushing them off with poles, and in their shouting, and trying to keep clear, and abusing each other, did not hear a word either of their orders or the boatswains’ directions; while, through inexperience, they could not lift their oars in the swell of the sea, and so rendered the vessels less obedient to the helmsmen; just then, at that favourable moment, he gave the signal.

And the Athenians attacked them, and first of all sank one of the admiral-ships, then destroyed all wherever they went, and reduced them to such a condition, that owing to their confusion none of them thought of resistance, but they fled to Patræ and Dyme, in Achaia. The Athenians having closely pursued them, and taken twelve ships, picking up most of the men from them, and putting them on board their own vessels, sailed off to Molycrium; and after erecting a trophy at Rhium, and dedicating a ship to Neptune, they returned to Naupactus. The Peloponnesians also immediately coasted along with their remaining ships from Dyme and Patræ to Cyllene, the arsenal of the Eleans; and Cnemus and the ships that were at Leucas, which were to have formed a junction with these, came thence, after the battle of Stratus, to the same port.

Then the Lacedæmonians sent to the fleet, as counsellors to Cnemus, Timocrates, Brasidas, and Lycophron; commanding him to make preparations for a second engagement more successful than the former, and not to be driven off the sea by a few ships. For the result appeared very different from what they might have expected (particularly as it was the first sea-fight they had attempted); and they thought that it was not so much their fleet that was inferior, but that there had been some cowardice; for they did not weigh the long experience of the Athenians against their own short practice of naval matters. They despatched them, therefore, in anger; and on their arrival they sent round, in conjunction with Cnemus, orders for ships to be furnished by the different states, while they refitted those they already had, with a view to an engagement. Phormion, too, on the other hand, sent messengers to Athens to acquaint them with their preparations, and to tell them of the victory they had gained; at the same time desiring them to send him quickly the largest possible number of ships, for he was in daily expectation of an immediate engagement. They despatched to him twenty; but gave additional orders to the commander of them to go first to Crete. For Nicias, a Cretan of Gortyn, who was their proxenus, persuaded them to sail against Cydonia, telling them that he would reduce it under their power; for it was at present hostile to them. His object, however, in calling them in was, that he might oblige the Polichnitæ, who bordered on the Cydonians. The commander, therefore, of the squadron went with it to Crete, and in conjunction with the Polichnitæ laid waste the territory of the Cydonians; and wasted no little time in the country, owing to adverse winds and the impossibility of putting to sea.

During the time that the Athenians were thus detained on the coast of Crete, the Peloponnesians at Cyllene, having made their preparations for an engagement, coasted along to Panormus in Achaia, where the land-force of the Peloponnesians had come to support them. Phormion, too, coasted along to the Rhium near Molycrium, and dropped anchor outside of it, with twenty ships, the same as he had before fought with. This Rhium was friendly to the Athenians; the other, namely, that in the Peloponnesus, is opposite to it; the distance between the two being about seven stadia of sea, which forms the mouth of the Crissæan Gulf. At the Rhium in Achaia, then, being not far from Panormus, where their land-force was, the Peloponnesians also came to anchor with seventy-seven ships, when they saw that the Athenians had done the same. And for six or seven days they lay opposite each other, practising and preparing for the battle; the Peloponnesians intending not to sail beyond the Rhia into the open sea, for they were afraid of a disaster like the former; the Athenians, not to sail into the straits, for they thought that fighting in a confined space was in favour of the enemy.

Now when the Athenians did not sail into the narrow part of the gulf to meet them, the Peloponnesians, wishing to lead them on even against their will, weighed in the morning, and having formed their ships in a column four abreast, sailed to their own land towards the inner part of the gulf, with the right wing taking the lead, in which position also they lay at anchor. In this wing they had placed their twenty best sailers; that if Phormion, supposing them to be sailing against Naupactus, should himself also coast along in that direction to relieve the place, the Athenians might not, by getting outside their wing, escape their advance against them, but that these ships might shut them in. As they expected, he was alarmed for the place in its unprotected state; and when he saw them under weigh, against his will, and in great haste too, he embarked his crews and sailed along shore; while the land-forces of the Messenians at the same time came to support him. When the Peloponnesians saw them coasting along in a single file, and already within the gulf and near the shore (which was just what they wished), at one signal they suddenly brought their ships round and sailed in a line, as fast as each could, against the Athenians, hoping to cut off all their ships. Eleven of them, however, which were taking the lead, escaped the wing of the Peloponnesians and their sudden turn into the open gulf; but the rest they surprised, and drove them on shore, in their attempt to escape, and destroyed them, killing such of the crews as had not swum out of them. Some of the ships they lashed to their own and began to tow off empty, and one they took men and all; while in the case of some others, the Messenians, coming to their succour, and dashing into the sea with their armour, and boarding them, fought from the decks, and rescued them when they were already being towed off.

To this extent then the Peloponnesians had the advantage, and destroyed the Athenian ships; while their twenty vessels in the right wing were in pursuit of those eleven of the enemy that had just escaped their turn into the open gulf. They, with the exception of one ship, got the start of them and fled for refuge to Naupactus; and facing about, opposite the temple of Apollo, prepared to defend themselves, in case they should sail to shore against them. Presently they came up, and were singing the pæan as they sailed, considering that they had gained the victory; and the one Athenian vessel that had been left behind was chased by a single Leucadian far in advance of the rest. Now there happened to be a merchant vessel moored out at sea, which the Athenian ship had time to sail round, and struck the Leucadian in pursuit of her amidship, and sunk her. The Peloponnesians therefore were panic-stricken by this sudden and unlooked-for achievement; and moreover, as they were pursuing in disorder, on account of the advantage they had gained, some of the ships dropped their oars, and stopped in their course, from a wish to wait for the rest--doing what was unadvisable, considering that they were observing each other at so short a distance--while others even ran on the shoals, through their ignorance of the localities.

The Athenians, on seeing this, took courage, and at one word shouted for battle, and rushed upon them. In consequence of their previous blunders and their present confusion, they withstood them but a short time and then fled to Panormus, whence they had put out. The Athenians pursued them closely, and took six of the ships nearest to them, and recovered their own, which the enemy had disabled near the shore and at the beginning of the engagement, and had taken in tow. Of the men, they put some to death, and made others prisoners. Now on board the Leucadian ship, which went down off the merchant vessel, was Timocrates the Lacedæmonian; who, when the ship was destroyed, killed himself, and falling overboard was floated into the harbour of Naupactus. On their return, the Athenians erected a trophy at the spot from which they put out before gaining the victory; and all the dead and the wrecks that were near their coast they took up, and gave back to the enemy theirs under truce. The Peloponnesians also erected a trophy, as victors, for the defeat of the ships they had disabled near the shore; and the ship they had taken they dedicated at Rhium, in Achaia, by the side of the trophy. Afterwards, being afraid of the reinforcement from Athens, all but the Leucadians sailed at the approach of night into the Crissæan Bay and the port of Corinth. Not long after their retreat, the Athenians from Crete arrived at Naupactus, with the twenty ships that were to have joined Phormion before the engagement. And thus ended the summer.

Before, however, the fleet dispersed which had retired to Corinth and the Crissæan Bay, Cnemus, Brasidas, and the rest of the Peloponnesian commanders wished, at the suggestion of the Megarians, to make an attempt upon Piræus, the port of Athens; which, as was natural from their decided superiority at sea, was left unguarded and open. It was determined, therefore, that each man should take his oar, and cushion, and tropoter, and go by land from Corinth to the sea on the side of Athens; and that after proceeding as quickly as possible to Megara, they should launch from its port, Nisæa, forty vessels that happened to be there, and sail straightway to Piræus. For there was neither any fleet keeping guard before it, nor any thought of the enemy ever sailing against it in so sudden a manner; and as for their venturing to do it openly and deliberately, they supposed that either they would not think of it, or themselves would not fail to be aware beforehand, if they should. Having adopted this resolution, they proceeded immediately to execute it; and when they had arrived by night, and launched the vessels from Nisæa, they sailed, not against Athens as they had intended, for they were afraid of the risk (some wind or other was also said to have prevented them), but to the headland of Salamis looking towards Megara; where there was a fort, and a guard of three ships to prevent anything from being taken in or out of Megara. So they assaulted the fort, and towed off the triremes empty; and making a sudden attack on the rest of Salamis, they laid it waste.

Now fire signals of an enemy’s approach were raised towards Athens, and a consternation was caused by them not exceeded by any during the whole war. For those in the city imagined that the enemy had already sailed into Piræus; while those in Piræus thought that Salamis had been taken, and that they were all but sailing into their harbours: which indeed, if they would but have not been afraid of it, might easily have been done; and it was not a wind that would have prevented it. But at daybreak the Athenians went all in a body to Piræus to resist the enemy; and launched their ships, and going on board with haste and much uproar, sailed with the fleet to Salamis, while with their land-forces they mounted guard at Piræus. When the Peloponnesians saw them coming to the rescue, after overrunning the greater part of Salamis, and taking both men and booty, and the three ships from the port of Budorum, they sailed for Nisæa as quickly as they could; for their vessels too caused them some alarm, as they had been launched after lying idle a long time, and were not at all water-tight. On their arrival at Megara they returned again to Corinth by land. When the Athenians found them no longer on the coast of Salamis, they also sailed back; and after this alarm they paid more attention in future to the safety of Piræus, both by closing the harbours, and by all other precautions.

[Sidenote: [429-428 B.C.]]

During this winter, after the fleet of the Peloponnesians had dispersed, the Athenians at Naupactus under the command of Phormion, after coasting along to Astacus, and there disembarking, marched into the interior of Acarnania, with four hundred heavy-armed of the Athenians from the ships and four hundred of the Messenians. From Stratus, Coronta, and some other places, they expelled certain individuals who were thought to be untrue to them; and having restored Cynes, son of Theolytus, to Coronta, returned again to their vessels and sailed home to Athens at the return of spring, taking with them such of the prisoners from the naval battles as were freemen (who were exchanged man for man), and the ships they had captured. And so ended this winter, and the third year of the war.[c]

Bury, following Grote, says, that after this, Phormion “silently drops out of history, and as we find his son Asopius sent out in the following summer at the request of the Acarnanians, we must conclude that his career had been cut short by death”: Duruy says he died in 428 B.C., and that “the city gave him an honourable funeral and placed his tomb beside that of Pericles.” Asopius after failing in an assault on Œniadæ, was killed before Leucas.[a]

FOOTNOTES

[53] [In the words of Thucydides,[c] “Never to desert the Athenians, to bear any devastation of their lands, nay, if such be the case, to behold it with patience, and to suffer any extremities to which their enemies might reduce them; that, further, no person should stir out of the city, but an answer be given from the walls; that it was impossible for them to accept the terms proposed by the Lacedæmonians.”]

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