XXXIX. SOCRATES AND THE SOPHISTS
It was not till the superior talents of Pericles had quieted the storms of war and faction that science, which had in the interval received great improvement among the Asian Greeks, revived at Athens with new vigour. Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, the preceptor and friend of Pericles, bred in all the learning of the Ionian school, is said first to have introduced what might properly be called philosophy there. To him is attributed the first introduction in European Greece of the idea of one eternal, almighty, and all-good Being, or, as he is said, after Thales, to have expressed himself, a perfect mind, independent of body, as the cause or creator of all things. The gods received in Greece, of course, were low in his estimation; the sun and moon, commonly reputed divinities, he held to be mere material substances, the sun a globe of stone, the moon an earth, nearly similar to ours. A doctrine so repugnant to the system on which depended the estimation of all the festivals, processions, sacrifices, and oracles, which so fascinated the vulgar mind, was not likely to be propagated without reprehension. Even the science which enabled men to calculate an eclipse was offensive, inasmuch as it lowered the importance, and interfered with the profits, of priests, augurs, interpreters, and seers. An accusation of impiety was therefore instituted against Anaxagoras; the general voice went with the prosecutors; and all that the power and influence of Pericles could do for his valued friend, was to procure him means of escape from Attica.
But while physical and metaphysical speculation engaged men of leisure, other learning had more attraction for the ambitious and needy. Athens always was the great field for acquiring fame and profit in this line; yet those who first attained eminence in it were foreigners there, Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily, Prodicus of the little island of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis. All these are said to have acquired considerable riches by their profession. Their success invited numbers to follow their example; and Greece, but far more especially Athens, shortly abounded with those who, under the name of sophists, professors of wisdom, undertook to teach every science. The scarcity and dearness of books gave high value to that learning which a man with a well-stored mind, and a ready and clear elocution could communicate. None, without eloquence, could undertake to be instructors; so that the sophists, in giving lessons of eloquence, were themselves the example. They frequented all places of public resort, the agora, the public walks, the gymnasia, and the porticoes; where they recommended themselves to notice by an ostentatious display of their abilities, in disputation among one another, or with whoever would converse with them.
The profession of sophist had not long flourished, and no Athenian had acquired fame in any branch of philosophy, when the singular talents, and singular manners and pursuits, of Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, engaged public attention. The father was a statuary, and is not mentioned as very eminent in his profession; but, as a man, he seems to have been respected among the most eminent of the commonwealth: he lived in particular intimacy with Lysimachus, son of the great Aristides. Socrates, inheriting a very scanty fortune, had a mind wholly intent upon the acquisition and communication of knowledge. The sublime principles of theology, taught by Anaxagoras, made an early impression upon his mind. They led him to consider what should be the duty owed by man to such a Being as Anaxagoras described his Creator; and it struck him that, if the providence of God interfered in the government of this world, the duty of man to man, little considered by poets or priests as any way connected with religion, and hitherto almost totally neglected by philosophers, must be a principal branch of the duty of man to God. It struck him further that, with the gross defects which he saw in the religion, the morality, and the governments of Greece, though the favourite inquiries of the philosophers, concerning the nature of the Deity, the formation of the world, the laws of the heavenly bodies, might, while they amused, perhaps also enlarge and improve the minds of a few speculative men, yet the investigation of the social duties was infinitely more important, and might be infinitely more useful, to mankind in general. Endowed by nature with a most discriminating mind, and a singularly ready eloquence, he directed his utmost attention to that investigation; and when, by reflection, assisted and proved by conversation among the sophists and other able men, he had decided an opinion, he communicated it, not in the way of precept, which the fate of Anaxagoras had shown hazardous, but by proposing a question, and, in the course of interrogatory argument, leading his hearers to the just conclusion.
We are informed by his disciple Xenophon how he passed his time. He was always in public. Early in the morning he went to the walks and the gymnasia: when the agora filled, he was there; and, in the afternoon, wherever he could find most company. Generally he was the principal speaker. The liveliness of his manner made his conversation amusing as well as instructive, and he denied its advantages to nobody. But he was nevertheless a most patient hearer; and preferred being the hearer whenever others were present able and disposed to give valuable information to the company. He did not commonly refuse invitations, frequently received, to private entertainments; but he would undertake no private instruction, nor could any solicitation induce him to relieve his poverty by accepting, like the sophists and rhetoricians, a reward for what he gave in public.
In the variety of his communication on social duties he could not easily, and perhaps he did not desire entirely, to avoid either religious or political subjects; hazardous, both of them, under the jealous tyranny of democracy. It remains a question how far he was subject to superstition; but his honesty is so authenticated that it seems fairer to impute to him some weakness in credulity than any intention to deceive. If we may believe his own account, reported by his two principal disciples, he believed himself divinely impelled to the employment to which he devoted his life, inquiring and teaching the duty of man to man. A divine spirit, in his idea, constantly attended him; whose voice, distinctly heard, never expressly commanded what he was indisposed to do, but frequently forbade what he had intended. To unveil the nature of Deity was not among his pretensions. He only insisted on the perfect goodness and perfect wisdom of the Supreme God, the creator of all things, and the constant superintendence of his providence over the affairs of men. As included in these, he held that everything done, said, or merely wished by men, was known to the Deity, and that it was impossible he could be pleased with evil. The unity of God, though implied in many of his reported discourses, he would not in direct terms assert; rather carefully avoiding to dispute the existence of the multifarious gods acknowledged in Greece; but he strongly denied the weaknesses, vices, and crimes commonly imputed to them. Far however from proposing to innovate in forms of worship and religious ceremonies, so various in the different Grecian states, and sources of more doubt and contention than any other circumstances of the heathen religion, he held that men could not, in these matters, do wrong if they followed the laws of their own country and the institutions of their forefathers. He was therefore regular in sacrifice, both upon the public altars and in his family. He seems to have been persuaded that the Deity, by various signs, revealed the future to men; in oracles, dreams, and all the various ways usually acknowledged by those conversant in the reputed science of augury. “Where the wisdom of men cannot avail,” he said, “we should endeavour to gain information from the gods; who will not refuse intelligible signs to those to whom they are propitious.” Accordingly he consulted oracles himself, and he recommended the same practice to others, in every doubt on important concerns.
The circumstances of the Athenian government, in his time, could not invite a man of his disposition to offer himself for political situations. He thought he might be infinitely more useful to his country in the singular line, it might indeed be called a public line, which he had chosen for himself. Not only he would not solicit office, but he would take no part in political contest. In the several revolutions which occurred he was perfectly passive. But he would refuse nothing: on the contrary, he would be active in everything that he thought decidedly the duty of a citizen. When called upon to serve among the heavy-armed, he was exemplary in the duties of a private soldier; and as such he fought at Potidæa, Amphipolis, and Delium. We find him mentioned in civil office; at one time president of the general assembly, and at another a member of the council of Five Hundred. In each situation he distinguished himself by his unbending uprightness. When president, he resisted the violence of the assembled people, who voted a decree, in substance or in manner, contrary to the constitution. Neither entreaties nor threats could move him to give it the necessary sanction of his office. As a member of the council we have already seen him, in the office of prytanis, at the trial of the six generals, persevering in resistance to the injustice of popular tyranny, rendered useless through the want of equal constancy in his colleagues, who yielded to the storm. Under the Thirty again we have seen him, not in office indeed, but daring to refuse office, unworthy and illegal office, which the tyranny of the all-powerful Critias would have put upon him.
We are not informed when Socrates first became distinguished as a sophist; for in that description of men he was in his own day reckoned. When the wit of Aristophanes was directed against him in the theatre he was already among the most eminent, but his eminence seems to have been then recent. It was about the tenth or eleventh year of the Peloponnesian War, when he was six or seven and forty years of age, that, after the manner of the old comedy, he was offered to public derision upon the stage, by his own name, as one of the persons of the drama, in the comedy of Aristophanes, called the Clouds, which is yet extant. The audience, accustomed to look on defamation with carelessness, and to hold as lawful and proper whatever might amuse the multitude, applauded the wit, and even gave general approbation to the composition; but the high estimation of the character of Socrates sufficed to prevent that complete success which the poet had looked for. The crown, which rewarded him whose drama most earned the public favour, and which Aristophanes had so often won, was on this occasion refused him.
Two or three and twenty years had elapsed since the first representation of the Clouds; the storms of conquest suffered from a foreign enemy and from four revolutions in the civil government of the country, had passed; nearly three years had followed of that quiet which the revolution under Thrasybulus produced, and the act of amnesty should have confirmed, when a young man, named Meletus, went to the king-archon, delivered, in the usual form, an information against Socrates, and bound himself to prosecute. The information ran thus: “Meletus, son of Meletus, of the borough of Pitthos, declares these upon oath against Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of the borough of Alopece: Socrates is guilty of reviling the gods whom the city acknowledges, and of preaching other new gods: moreover he is guilty of corrupting the youth. Penalty, death.”
THE PROSECUTION OF SOCRATES
[Sidenote: [399 B.C.]]
Xenophon begins his Memorabilia of his revered master with declaring his wonder how the Athenians could have been persuaded to condemn to death a man of such uncommonly clear innocence and exalted worth. Ælianus, though for authority not to be compared with Xenophon, has nevertheless, we think, given the solution. “Socrates,” he says, “disliked the Athenian constitution. For he saw that democracy is tyrannical, and abounds with all the evils of absolute monarchy.” But though the political circumstances of the times made it necessary for contemporary writers to speak with caution, yet both Xenophon and Plato have declared enough to show that the assertion of Ælianus was well founded; and further proof, were it wanted, may be derived from another early writer, nearly contemporary, and deeply versed in the politics of his age, the orator Æschines. Indeed, though not stated in the indictment, yet it was urged against Socrates by his prosecutors before the court, that he was disaffected to the democracy; and in proof they affirmed it to be notorious that he had ridiculed what the Athenian constitution prescribed, the appointment to magistracy by lot. “Thus,” they said, “he taught his numerous followers, youths of the principal families of the city, to despise the established government, and to be turbulent and seditious; and his success had been seen in the conduct of two, the most eminent, Alcibiades and Critias. Even the best things he converted to these ill purposes: from the most esteemed poets, and particularly from Homer, he selected passages to enforce his anti-democratical principles.”
Socrates, it appears indeed, was not inclined to deny his disapprobation of the Athenian constitution. His defence itself, as it is reported by Plato, contains matter on which to found an accusation against him of disaffection to the sovereignty of the people, such as, under the jealous tyranny of the Athenian democracy, would sometimes subject a man to the penalties of high treason. “You well know,” he says, “Athenians, that, had I engaged in public business, I should long ago have perished, without procuring any advantage either to you or to myself. Let not the truth offend you: it is no peculiarity of your democracy, or of your national character; but wherever the people is sovereign, no man who shall dare honestly to oppose injustice, frequent and extravagant injustice, can avoid destruction.”
Without this proof indeed we might reasonably believe that, though Socrates was a good and faithful subject of the Athenian government, and would promote no sedition, no political violence, yet he could not like the Athenian constitution. He wished for wholesome changes by gentle means; and it seems even to have been a principal object of the labours to which he dedicated himself, to infuse principles into the rising generation that might bring about the desirable change insensibly. His scholars were chiefly sons of the wealthiest citizens, whose easy circumstances afforded leisure to attend him; and some of these, zealously adopting his tenets, others merely pleased with the ingenuity of his arguments and the liveliness of his manner, and desirous to emulate his triumphs over his opponents, were forward, after his example, to engage in disputation upon all the subjects on which he was accustomed to discourse. Thus employed and thus followed, though himself avoiding office and public business, those who governed or desired to govern the commonwealth through their influence among the many, might perhaps not unreasonably consider him as one who was, or might become, a formidable adversary; nor might it be difficult to excite popular jealousy against him.
Meletus, who stood forward as his principal accuser, was, according to Plato, not a man of any great consideration. He was soon joined by Lycon, one of the most powerful speakers of his time, and the avowed patron of the rhetoricians, who, as well as the poets, thought their interest injured by the moral philosopher’s doctrine. But Anytus, a man scarcely second to any in the commonwealth in rank and general estimation, who had held high command with reputation in the Peloponnesian War, and had been the principal associate of Thrasybulus in the war against the Thirty and the restoration of the democracy, declared himself a supporter of the prosecution. Nothing in the accusation could, by any known law of Athens, affect the life of the accused. In England no man would be put upon trial on so vague a charge: no grand jury would listen to it. But in Athens, if the party was strong enough, it signified little what was the law. When Lycon and Anytus came forward, Socrates saw that his condemnation was already decided.
By the course of his life, however, and by the turn of his thoughts for many years, he had so prepared himself for all events, that the probability of his condemnation, far from being alarming, was to him rather matter for rejoicing, as, at his age, a fortunate occurrence. Xenophon says that, by condescending to a little supplication, Socrates might easily have obtained his acquittal. It was usual for accused persons, when brought before the court, to bewail their apprehended lot, with tears to supplicate favour, and by exhibiting their children upon the bema, to endeavour to excite pity. No admonition or entreaty of his friends however could persuade him to such an unworthiness. He thought it, he said, more respectful to the court, as well as more becoming himself, to omit all this; however aware that their sentiments were likely so far to differ from his that judgment would be given in anger for it. Accordingly, when put upon his defence, he told the people that he did not plead for his own sake, but for theirs, wishing them to avoid the guilt of an unjust sentence.
Condemnation pronounced wrought no change upon him. He again addressed the court, declared his innocence of the matters laid against him, and observed that, even if every charge had been completely proved, still altogether did not, according to any known law, amount to a capital crime. “But,” in conclusion he said, “it is time to depart: I to die, you to live: but which for the greater good, God only knows.”
It was usual at Athens for execution very soon to follow condemnation; commonly on the morrow. But it happened that the condemnation of Socrates took place on the eve of the day appointed for the sacred ceremony of crowning the galley which carried the annual offerings to the gods worshipped at Delos: and immemorial tradition forbade all executions till the sacred vessel’s return. Thus the death of Socrates was respited thirty days, while his friends had free access to him in the prison. During all that time he admirably supported his constancy. Means were concerted for his escape; the jailer was bribed, a vessel prepared, and a secure retreat in Thessaly provided. No arguments, no prayers could persuade him to use the opportunity. He had always taught the duty of obedience to the laws, and he would not furnish an example of the breach of it. To no purpose it was urged that he had been unjustly condemned: he had always held that wrong did not justify wrong. He waited with perfect composure the return of the sacred vessel, reasoned on the immortality of the soul, the advantage of virtue, the happiness derived from having made it through life his pursuit, and, with his friends about him, took the fatal cup, and died.
Writers who, after Xenophon and Plato, have related the death of Socrates, appear to have held themselves bound to vie with those who preceded them in giving pathos to the story. The purpose here has been rather to render it intelligible: to show its connection with the political history of Athens; to derive from it illustration of the political history. The magnanimity of Socrates, the principal factor of the pathos, surely deserves admiration; yet it is not that in which he has most outshone other men. The singular merit of Socrates lay in the purity and the usefulness of his manners and conversation; the clearness with which he saw, and the steadiness with which he practised, in a blind and corrupt age, all moral duties; the disinterestedness and the zeal with which he devoted himself to the benefit of others; and the enlarged and warm benevolence, whence his supreme and almost only pleasure seems to have consisted in doing good. The purity of Christian morality, little enough indeed seen in practice, nevertheless is become so familiar in theory that it passes almost for obvious, and even congenial to the human mind. Those only will justly estimate the merit of that near approach to it which Socrates made, who will take the pains to gather, as they may from the writings of his contemporaries and predecessors, how little conception was entertained of it before his time; how dull to a just moral sense the human mind has really been; how slow the progress in the investigation of moral duties, even where not only great pains have been taken, but the greatest abilities zealously employed; and, when discovered, how difficult it has been to establish them by proofs beyond controversy, or proofs even that should be generally admitted by the reason of men.
It is through the light which Socrates diffused by his doctrine enforced by his practice, with the advantage of having both the doctrine and the practice exhibited to highest advantage in the incomparable writings of disciples such as Plato and Xenophon, that his life forms an era in the history of Athens and of man.[b]
It is our great good fortune to possess a long and sympathetic description of the closing scenes of his life in the unsurpassed prose of his disciple Plato. Though told in the form of a dialogue and much too long for quotation in full, the presentation of Socrates is so vivid and veracious that a part of it must be given.[a]
PLATO’S ACCOUNT OF THE LAST HOURS OF SOCRATES
When we entered, we found Socrates just freed from his bonds, and Xantippe, you know her, holding his little boy and sitting by him. As soon as Xantippe saw us, she wept aloud and said such things as women usually do on such occasions, as “Socrates, your friends will now converse with you for the last time and you with them.” But Socrates, looking towards Crito, said, “Crito, let some one take her home.” Upon which some of Crito’s attendants led her away, wailing and beating herself.
But Socrates sitting up in bed, drew up his leg, and rubbed it with his hand, and as he rubbed it, said: “What an unaccountable thing, my friends, that seems to be, which men call pleasure; and how wonderfully is it related towards that which appears to be its contrary, pain, in that they will not both be present to a man at the same time, yet, if any one pursues and attains the one, he is almost always compelled to receive the other, as if they were both united together from one head.
“And it seems to me,” he said, “that if Æsop had observed this he would have made a fable from it, how the Deity, wishing to reconcile these warring principles, when he could not do so, united their heads together, and from hence whomsoever the one visits the other attends immediately after; as appears to be the case with me, since I suffered pain in my leg before from the chain, but now pleasure seems to have succeeded.
“‘A bypath, as it were, seems to lead us on in our researches undertaken by reason,’ because as long as we are encumbered with the body, and our soul is contaminated with such an evil, we can never fully attain to what we desire; and this, we say, is truth. For the body subjects us to innumerable hindrances on account of its necessary support, and moreover if any diseases befall us, they impede us in our search after that which is; and it fills us with longings, desires, fears, all kinds of fancies, and a multitude of absurdities, so that, as it is said in real truth, by reason of the body it is never possible for us to make any advances in wisdom.
“For nothing else but the body and its desires occasion wars, seditions, and contests; for all wars amongst us arise on account of our desire to acquire wealth; and we are compelled to acquire wealth on account of the body, being enslaved by its service; and consequently on all these accounts we are hindered in the pursuit of philosophy. But the worst of all is, that if it leaves us any leisure, and we apply ourselves to the consideration of any subject, it constantly obtrudes itself in the midst of our researches, and occasions trouble and disturbance, and confounds us so that we are not able by reason of it to discern the truth. It has then in reality been demonstrated to us, that if we are ever to know anything purely, we must be separated from the body, and contemplate the things themselves by the mere soul. And then, as it seems, we shall obtain that which we desire, and which we profess ourselves to be lovers of, wisdom, when we are dead, as reason shows, but not while we are alive. For if it is not possible to know anything purely in conjunction with the body, one of these two things must follow, either that we can never acquire knowledge, or only after we are dead; for then the soul will subsist apart by itself, separate from the body, but not before. And while we live, we shall thus, as it seems, approach nearest to knowledge, if we hold no intercourse or communion at all with the body, except what absolute necessity requires, nor suffer ourselves to be polluted by its nature, but purify ourselves from it, until God himself shall release us. And thus being pure, and freed from the folly of the body, we shall in all likelihood be with others like ourselves, and shall of ourselves know the whole real essence, and that probably is truth; for it is not allowable for the impure to attain to the pure. Such things, I think, Simmias, all true lovers of wisdom must both think and say to one another. Does it not seem so to you?”
“Most assuredly, Socrates.”
“If this, then,” said Socrates, “is true, my friend, there is great hope for one who arrives where I am going; there, if anywhere, to acquire that in perfection for the sake of which we have taken so much pains during our past life; so that the journey now appointed me is set out upon with good hope, and will be so by any other man who thinks that his mind has been as it were purified.”
“Certainly,” said Simmias.
“But does not purification consist in this, as was said in a former part of our discourse, in separating as much as possible the soul from the body, and in accustoming it to gather and collect itself by itself on all sides apart from the body, and to dwell, as far as it can, both now and hereafter, alone by itself, delivered as it were from the shackles of the body?”
“Certainly,” he replied.
“Is this then called death, this deliverance and separation of the soul from the body?”
“Assuredly,” he answered.
“But, as we affirmed, those who pursue philosophy rightly, are especially and alone desirous to deliver it, and this is the very study of philosophers, the deliverance and separation of the soul from the body, is it not?”
“It appears so.”
“Then, as I said at first, would it not be ridiculous for a man who has endeavoured throughout his life to live as near as possible to death; then, when death arrives, to grieve? Would not this be ridiculous?”
“How should it not?”
“In reality then, Simmias,” he continued, “those who pursue philosophy rightly study to die; and to them of all men death is least formidable. Judge from this. Since they altogether hate the body and desire to keep the soul by itself, would it not be irrational if, when this comes to pass, they should be afraid and grieve, and not be glad to go to that place, where on their arrival they may hope to obtain that which they longed for throughout life; but they longed for wisdom; and to be freed from association with that which they hated? How many of their own accord wished to descend into Hades, on account of human objects of affection, their wives and sons, induced by this very hope of there seeing and being with those whom they have loved; and shall one who really loves wisdom, and firmly cherishes this very hope, that he shall nowhere else obtain it in a manner worthy of the name, except in Hades, be grieved at dying, and not gladly go there? We must think that he would gladly go, my friend, if he be in truth a philosopher; for he will be firmly persuaded of this, that he will nowhere else but there attain wisdom in its purity; and if this be so, would it not be very irrational, as I just now said, if such a man were to be afraid of death?”
“Very much so, by Jupiter,” he replied.
“But it is right, my friends,” he said, “that we should consider this, that if the soul is immortal, it requires our care not only for the present time, which we call life, but for all time; and the danger would now appear to be dreadful, if one should neglect it. For if death were a deliverance from everything, it would be a great gain for the wicked, when they die, to be delivered at the same time from the body, and from their vices together with the soul: but now, since it appears to be immortal, it can have no other refuge from evils, nor safety, except by becoming as good and wise as possible. For the soul goes to Hades, possessing nothing else but its discipline and education, which are said to be of the greatest advantage or detriment to the dead, on the very beginning of his journey thither.
“When the dead arrive at the place to which their dæmon leads them severally, first of all they are judged, as well those who have lived well and piously, as those who have not. And those who appear to have passed a middle kind of life, proceeding to Acheron, and embarking in the vessels they have, on these arrive at the lake, and there dwell, and when they are purified, and have suffered punishment for the iniquities they may have committed, they are set free, and each receives the reward of his good deeds, according to his deserts: but those who appear to be incurable, through the magnitude of their offences, either from having committed many and great sacrileges, or many unjust and lawless murders, or other similar crimes, these a suitable destiny hurls into Tartarus, whence they never come forth. But those who appear to have been guilty of curable, yet great offences, such as those who through anger have committed any violence against father or mother, and have lived the remainder of their life in a state of penitence, or they who have become homicides in a similar manner, these must of necessity fall into Tartarus, but after they have fallen, and have been there for a year, the wave casts them forth, the homicides into Cocytus, but the parricides and matricides into Pyriphlegethon: but when, being borne along, they arrive at the Acherusian lake, there they cry out to and invoke, some those whom they slew, others those whom they injured, and invoking them, they entreat and implore them to suffer them to go out into the lake, and to receive them; and if they persuade them, they go out, and are freed from their sufferings, but if not, they are borne back to Tartarus, and thence again to the rivers, and they do not cease from suffering this until they have persuaded those whom they have injured, for this sentence was imposed on them by the judges. But those who are found to have lived an eminently holy life, these are they, who, being freed and set at large from these regions in the earth, as from a prison, arrive at the pure abode above, and dwell on the upper parts of the earth. And among these, they who have sufficiently purified themselves by philosophy shall live without bodies, throughout all future time, and shall arrive at habitations yet more beautiful than these.
“On account of these things, then, a man ought to be confident about his soul, who during this life has disregarded all the pleasures and ornaments of the body as foreign to his nature, and who, having thought that they do more harm than good, has zealously applied himself to the acquirement of knowledge, and who having adorned his soul not with a foreign but its own proper ornament, temperance, justice, fortitude, freedom, and truth, thus waits for his passage to Hades, as one who is ready to depart whenever destiny shall summon him. You then,” he continued, “Simmias and Cebes, and the rest, will each of you depart at some future time; but now destiny summons me, as a tragic writer would say, and it is nearly time for me to betake myself to the bath; for it appears to me to be better to drink the poison after I have bathed myself, and not to trouble the women with washing my dead body.”
When he had thus spoken, Crito said, “So be it, Socrates, but what commands have you to give to these or to me, either respecting your children, or any other matter, in attending to which we can most oblige you?”
“What I always say, Crito,” he replied, “nothing new; that by taking care of yourselves you will oblige both me and mine, and yourselves, whatever you do, though you should not now promise it; but if you neglect yourselves, and will not live as it were in the footsteps of what has been now and formerly said, even though you should promise much at present, and that earnestly, you will do no good at all.”
“We will endeavour then so to do,” he said; “but how shall we bury you?”
“Just as you please,” he said, “if only you can catch me, and I do not escape from you.” And at the same time smiling gently, and looking around on us, he said; “I cannot persuade Crito, my friends, that I am that Socrates who is now conversing with you, and who methodises each part of the discourse; but he thinks I am he whom he will shortly behold dead, and asks how he should bury me. But that which I sometime argued at length, that when I have drunk the poison I shall no longer remain with you, but shall depart to some happy state of the blessed, this I seem to have urged to him in vain, though I meant at the same time to console both you and myself. Be ye then my sureties to Crito,” he said, “in an obligation contrary to that which he made to the judges; for he undertook that I should remain; but do you be sureties that, when I die, I shall not remain, but shall depart, that Crito may more easily bear it, and when he sees my body either burnt or buried, may not be afflicted for me, as if I suffered some dreadful thing, nor say at my interment that Socrates is laid out, or is carried out, or is buried. For be well assured,” he said, “most excellent Crito, that to speak improperly is not only culpable as to the thing itself, but likewise occasions some injury to our souls. You must have a good courage then, and say that you bury my body, and bury it in such a manner as is pleasing to you, and as you think is most agreeable to our laws.”
When he had said thus he rose, and went into a chamber to bathe, and Crito followed him, but he directed us to wait for him. We waited, therefore, conversing among ourselves about what had been said, and considering it again, and sometimes speaking about our calamity, how severe it would be to us, sincerely thinking that, like those who are deprived of a father, we should pass the rest of our life as orphans. When he had bathed, and his children were brought to him, for he had two little sons and one grown up, and the women belonging to his family were come, having conversed with them in the presence of Crito, and given them such injunctions as he wished, he directed the women and children to go away, and then returned to us.
And it was now near sunset; for he spent a considerable time within. But when he came from bathing he sat down, and did not speak much afterwards; then the officer of the Eleven came in, and standing near him, said, “Socrates, I shall not have to find that fault with you that I do with others, that they are angry with me, and curse me, when, by order of the archons, I bid them drink the poison. But you, on all other occasions during the time you have been here, I have found to be the most noble, meek, and excellent man of all that ever came into this place; and, therefore, I am now well convinced that you will not be angry with me--for you know who are to blame--but with them. Now, then, for you know what I came to announce to you, farewell, and endeavour to bear what is inevitable as easily as possible.” And at the same time, bursting into tears, he turned away and withdrew.
And Socrates, looking after him, said, “And thou, too, farewell; we will do as you direct.” At the same time turning to us, he said, “How courteous the man is; during the whole time I have been here he has visited me, and conversed with me sometimes, and proved the worthiest of men; and now how generously he weeps for me. But come, Crito, let us obey him, and let some one bring the poison, if it is ready pounded; but if not, let the man pound it.”
Then Crito said, “But I think, Socrates, that the sun is still on the mountains, and has not yet set. Besides, I know that others have drunk the poison very late, after it had been announced to them, and have supped and drunk freely, and some even have enjoyed the objects of their love. Do not hasten then, for there is yet time.”
Upon this Socrates replied, “These men whom you mention, Crito, do these things with good reason, for they think they shall gain by so doing, and I too with good reason shall not do so; for I think I shall gain nothing by drinking a little later, except to become ridiculous to myself, in being so fond of life, and sparing of it when none any longer remains. Go, then,” he said, “obey, and do not resist.”
Crito having heard this, nodded to the boy that stood near. And the boy having gone out, and stayed for some time, came, bringing with him the man who was to administer the poison, who brought it ready pounded in a cup.
And Socrates, on seeing the man, said, “Well, my good friend, as you are skilled in these matters, what must I do?”
“Nothing else,” he replied, “than, when you have drunk it walk about, until there is a heaviness in your legs, then lie down; thus it will do its purpose.”
And at the same time he held out the cup to Socrates. And he having received it very cheerfully, neither trembling, nor changing at all in colour or countenance, but, as he was wont, looking steadfastly at the man, said, “What say you of this potion, with respect to making a libation to any one, is it lawful or not?”
“We only pound so much, Socrates,” he said, “as we think sufficient to drink.”
“I understand you,” he said, “but it is certainly both lawful and right to pray to the gods, that my departure hence thither may be happy; which therefore I pray, and so may it be.” And as he said this, he drank it off readily and calmly. Thus far, most of us were with difficulty able to restrain ourselves from weeping, but when we saw him drinking, and having finished the draught, we could do so no longer; but in spite of myself the tears came in full torrent, so that, covering my face, I wept for myself, for I did not weep for him, but for my own fortune, in being deprived of such a friend. But Crito, even before me, when he could not restrain his tears, had risen up.
But Apollodorus even before this had not ceased weeping, and then bursting into an agony of grief, weeping and lamenting, he pierced the heart of every one present, except Socrates himself. But he said, “What are you doing, my admirable friends? I, indeed, for this reason chiefly, sent away the women, that they might not commit any folly of this kind. For I have heard that it is right to die with good omens. Be quiet, therefore, and bear up.”
When we heard this we were ashamed, and restrained our tears. But he, having walked about, when he said that his legs were growing heavy, lay down on his back; for the man so directed him. And at the same time he who gave him the poison, taking hold of him, after a short interval examined his feet and legs; and then having pressed his foot hard, he asked if he felt it; he said that he did not. And after this he pressed his thighs; and thus going higher, he showed us that he was growing cold and stiff. Then Socrates touched himself, and said, that when the poison reached his heart he should then depart. But now the parts around the lower belly were almost cold; when, uncovering himself, for he had been covered over, he said, and they were his last words, “Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius; pay it, therefore, and do not neglect it.”
“It shall be done,” said Crito, “but consider whether you have anything else to say.”
To this question he gave no reply; but shortly after he gave a convulsive movement, and the man covered him, and his eyes were fixed; and Crito perceiving it, closed his mouth and eyes.
This was the end of our friend, a man, as we may say, the best of all of his time that we have known, and moreover, the most wise and just.[c]
GROTE’S ESTIMATE OF SOCRATES
Thus perished the “parens philosophiæ”--the first of ethical philosophers; a man who opened to science both new matter, alike copious and valuable, and a new method, memorable not less for its originality and efficacy, than for the profound philosophical basis on which it rests. Though Greece produced great poets, orators, speculative philosophers, historians, etc., yet other countries, having the benefit of Grecian literature to begin with, have nearly equalled her in all these lines, and surpassed her in some. But where are we to look for a parallel to Socrates, either in or out of the Grecian world? The cross-examining elenchus, which he not only first struck out, but wielded with such matchless effect, and to such noble purposes, has been mute ever since his last conversation in the prison; for even his great successor Plato was a writer and lecturer, not a colloquial dialectician. No man has ever been found strong enough to bend his bow; much less, sure enough to use it as he did. His life remains as the only evidence, but a very satisfactory evidence, how much can be done by this sort of intelligent interrogation; how powerful is the interest which it can be made to inspire, how energetic the stimulus which it can apply in awakening dormant reason and generating new mental power.
It has been often customary to exhibit Socrates as a moral preacher, in which character probably he has acquired to himself the general reverence attached to his name. This is, indeed, a true attribute, but not the characteristic or salient attribute, nor that by which he permanently worked on mankind. On the other hand, Arcesilaus, and the New Academy, a century and more afterwards, thought that they were following the example of Socrates (and Cicero seems to have thought so too) when they reasoned against everything--and when they laid it down as a system, that against every affirmative position, an equal force of negative argument might be brought up as counterpoise. Now this view of Socrates is, in my judgment, not merely partial, but incorrect. He entertained no such systematic distrust of the powers of the mind to attain certainty. He laid down a clear (though erroneous) line of distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. About physics, he was more than a sceptic; he thought that man could know nothing: the gods did not intend that man should acquire any such information, and therefore managed matters in such a way as to be beyond his ken, for all except the simplest phenomena of daily wants; moreover, not only man could not acquire such information, but ought not to labour after it. But respecting the topics which concern man and society, the views of Socrates were completely the reverse. This was the field which the gods had expressly assigned, not merely to human practice, but to human study and acquisition of knowledge; a field, wherein, with that view, they managed phenomena on principles of constant and observable sequence, so that every man who took the requisite pains might know them.
Nay, Socrates went a step further--and this forward step is the fundamental conviction upon which all his missionary impulse hinges. He thought that every man not only might know these things, but ought to know them; that he could not possibly act well, unless he did know them; and that it was his imperious duty to learn them as he would learn a profession; otherwise, he was nothing better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable being. Socrates felt persuaded that no man could behave as a just, temperate, courageous, pious, patriotic agent, unless he taught himself to know correctly what justice, temperance, courage, piety, patriotism, etc., really were. He was possessed with the truly Baconian idea, that the power of steady moral action depended upon, and was limited by, the rational comprehension of moral ends and means. But when he looked at the minds around him, he perceived that few or none either had any such comprehension, or had ever studied to acquire it--yet at the same time every man felt persuaded that he did possess it, and acted confidently upon such persuasion. Here, then, Socrates found that the first outwork for him to surmount, was, that universal “conceit of knowledge without the reality,” against which he declares such emphatic war; and against which, also, though under another form of words and in reference to other subjects, Bacon declares war not less emphatically, two thousand years afterwards--“Opinio copiæ inter causas inopiæ est.”
If then the philosophers of the New Academy considered Socrates either as a sceptic, or as a partisan of systematic negation, they misinterpreted his character, and mistook the first stage of his process--that which Plato, Bacon, and Herschel call the purification of the intellect--for the ultimate goal. The elenchus, as Socrates used it, was animated by the truest spirit of positive science, and formed an indispensable precursor to its attainment.
Though negative in his means, Socrates is strictly positive in his ends; his attack is undertaken only with distinct view to a positive result; in order to shame them out of the illusion of knowledge, and to spur them on and arm them for the acquisition of real, assured, comprehensive, self-explanatory, knowledge--as the condition and guarantee of virtuous practice. Socrates was indeed the reverse of a sceptic; no man ever looked upon life with a more positive and practical eye; no man ever pursued his mark with a clearer perception of the road which he was travelling; no man ever combined, in like manner, the absorbing enthusiasm of a missionary, with the acuteness, the originality, the inventive resource, and the generalising comprehension, of a philosopher.
His method yet survives, as far as such method can survive, in some of the dialogues of Plato. It is a process of eternal value and of universal application. That purification of the intellect, which Bacon signalised as indispensable for rational or scientific progress, the Socratic elenchus affords the only known instrument for at least partially accomplishing. However little that instrument may have been applied since the death of its inventor, the necessity and use of it neither have disappeared, nor ever can disappear. There are few men whose minds are not more or less in that state of sham knowledge against which Socrates made war: there is no man whose notions have not been first got together by spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious, uncertified association--resting upon forgotten particulars, blending together disparates or inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old and familiar phrases, and oracular propositions, of which he has never rendered to himself account: there is no man, who, if he be destined for vigorous and profitable scientific effort, has not found it a necessary branch of self-education, to break up, disentangle, analyse, and reconstruct, these ancient mental compounds--and who has not been driven to it by his own lame and solitary efforts, since the giant of the colloquial elenchus no longer stands in the market-place to lend him help and stimulus.
To hear of any man, especially of so illustrious a man, being condemned to death on such accusations as that of heresy and alleged corruption of youth, inspires at the present day a sentiment of indignant reprobation, the force of which I have no desire to enfeeble. The fact stands eternally recorded as one among the thousand misdeeds of intolerance, religious and political. But the sentiment now prevalent is founded upon a conviction that such matters as heresy and heretical teaching of youth are not proper for judicial cognisance. Even in the modern world, such a conviction is of recent date; and in the fifth century B.C. it was unknown. Socrates himself would not have agreed in it; and all Grecian governments, oligarchical and democratical alike, recognised the opposite. The testimony furnished by Plato is on this point decisive. When we examine the two positive communities which he constructs, in the treatises De Republica and De Legibus, we find that there is nothing about which he is more anxious, than to establish an unresisted orthodoxy of doctrine, opinion, and education. A dissenting and free-spoken teacher, such as Socrates was at Athens, would not have been allowed to pursue his vocation for a week, in the Platonic republic. Plato would not indeed condemn him to death; but he would put him to silence, and in case of need, send him away. This, in fact, is the consistent deduction, if you assume that the state is to determine what is orthodoxy, and orthodox teaching--and to repress what contradicts its own views. Now all the Grecian states, including Athens, held this principle of interference against the dissenting teacher. In any other government of Greece, as well as in the Platonic republic, Socrates would have been quickly arrested in his career, even if not severely punished; in Athens, he was allowed to talk and teach publicly for twenty-five or thirty years, and then condemned when an old man. Of these two applications of the same mischievous principle, assuredly the latter is at once the more moderate and the less noxious.
Secondly, the force of this last consideration, as an extenuating circumstance in regard to the Athenians, is much increased, when we reflect upon the number of individual enemies whom Socrates made to himself in the prosecution of his cross-examining process. Here were a multitude of individuals, including men personally the most eminent and effective in the city, prompted by special antipathies, over and above general convictions, to call into action the dormant state-principle of intolerance against an obnoxious teacher. If, under such provocation, he was allowed to reach the age of seventy, and to talk publicly for so many years, before any real Meletus stood forward--this attests conspicuously the efficacy of the restraining dispositions among the people, which made their practical habits more liberal than their professed principles.
Thirdly, whoever has read the account of the trial and defence of Socrates, will see that he himself contributed quite as much to the result as all the three accusers united. Not only he omitted to do all that might have been done without dishonour, to insure acquittal--but he held positive language very nearly such as Meletus himself would have sought to put in his mouth. He did this deliberately--having an exalted opinion both of himself and his own mission--and accounting the cup of hemlock, at his age, to be no calamity. It was only by such marked and offensive self-exaltation that he brought on the first vote of the dicastery, even then the narrowest majority, by which he was found guilty: it was only by a still more aggravated manifestation of the same kind, even to the pitch of something like insult, that he brought on the second vote, which pronounced the capital sentence. Now it would be uncandid not to allow for the effect of such a proceeding on the minds of the dicastery. They were not at all disposed, of their own accord, to put in force the recognised principle of intolerance against him. But when they found that the man who stood before them charged with this offence, addressed them in a tone such as dicasts had never heard before and could hardly hear with calmness, they could not but feel disposed to credit all the worst inferences which his accusers had suggested, and to regard Socrates as a dangerous man both religiously and politically, against whom it was requisite to uphold the majesty of the court and constitution.
In appreciating this memorable incident, therefore, though the mischievous principle of intolerance cannot be denied, yet all the circumstances show that that principle was neither irritable nor predominant in the Athenian bosom; that even a large body of collateral antipathies did not readily call it forth against any individual; that the more liberal and generous dispositions, which deadened its malignity, were of steady efficacy, not easily overborne; and that the condemnation ought to count as one of the least gloomy items in an essentially gloomy catalogue.
Let us add, that as Socrates himself did not account his own condemnation and death, at his age, to be any misfortune, but rather a favourable dispensation of the gods, who removed him just in time to escape that painful consciousness of intellectual decline, which induced Democritus to prepare the poison for himself--so his friend Xenophon goes a step further, and while protesting against the verdict of guilty, extols the manner of death as a subject of triumph; as the happiest, most honourable, and most gracious way, in which the gods could set the seal upon an useful and exalted life.
It is asserted by Diodorus, and repeated with exaggerations by other later authors, that after the death of Socrates the Athenians bitterly repented of the manner in which they had treated him, and that they even went so far as to put his accusers to death without trial. I know not upon what authority this statement is made, and I disbelieve it altogether. From the tone of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, there is every reason to presume that the memory of Socrates still continued to be unpopular at Athens when that collection was composed. Plato, too, left Athens immediately after the death of his master, and remained absent for a long series of years: indirectly, I think, this affords a presumption that no such reaction took place in Athenian sentiment as that which Diodorus alleges; and the same presumption is countenanced by the manner in which the orator Æschines speaks of the condemnation, half a century afterwards. I see no reason to believe that the Athenian dicasts, who doubtless felt themselves justified, and more than justified, in condemning Socrates after his own speech, retracted that sentiment after his decease.[d]
XL. THE RETREAT OF THE TEN THOUSAND
In the latter years of the Peloponnesian War the affairs of Greece became more than formerly implicated with those of Persia; and, during the short calm which succeeded the long troubles of the former country, some events in the latter will require attention. The detail will lead far from Greece; but, beside involving information of Grecian affairs not found elsewhere, it has a very important connection with Grecian history through the insight it affords into circumstances which prepared a revolution effected by Grecian arms, one of the greatest occurring in the annals of the world.
THE AFFAIRS OF PERSIA
By the event of the Peloponnesian War the Asian Greeks changed the dominion of Athens, not for that of Lacedæmon, the conquering Grecian power, but of a foreign, a barbarian master, the king of Persia, then the ally of Lacedæmon. Towards the end of the same year in which a conclusion was put to the war, by the taking of Athens, Darius, king of Persia, the second of the name, died. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Artaxerxes, also the second of his name, and, for his extraordinary memory, distinguished among the Greeks by the addition of Mnemon, “the Mindful.” The old king, in his last illness, desirous to see once more his favourite son Cyrus, sent for him from his government in Lydia. The prince, in obeying his father’s requisition, travelled in the usual manner of the Eastern great, with a train amounting almost to an army; and, to exhibit in his guard the new magnificence of troops so much heard of in the upper provinces, but never yet seen, he engaged by large pay the attendance of three hundred heavy-armed Greeks, under the command of Xenias of Parrhasia in Arcadia. As a friend and counsellor, he took with him Tissaphernes, satrap of Caria.
[Sidenote: [404-401 B.C.]]
On the decease of Darius, which followed shortly, a jealousy, scarcely separable from a despotic throne, but said to have been fomented by the unprincipled Tissaphernes, induced the new monarch to imprison his brother; whose death, it was supposed, in course would have followed, but for the powerful intercession of the queen-mother, Parysatis. Restored, through her influence, not only to liberty but to the great command entrusted to him by his indulgent father, Cyrus nevertheless resented highly the indignity he had suffered.
He seems indeed to have owed little to his brother’s kindness. Jealous of the abilities and popular character of Cyrus, apprehensive of his revenge, and perhaps not unreasonably also of his ambition, Artaxerxes practised that wretched oriental policy of exciting civil war between the commanders of his provinces, to disable them for making war against the throne. Orontes, a person related to the royal family, governor of the citadel of Sardis, was encouraged by the monarch’s councils to rebel against that superior officer, under whose immediate authority, by those very councils, he was placed, and ostensibly still required to act. Cyrus subdued and forgave him. A second opportunity occurring, Orontes again rebelled; again found himself, notwithstanding the secret patronage of the court, unable to support his rebellion; and, soliciting pardon, obtained from the generosity of Cyrus, not pardon only, but favour. But according to report, to which Xenophon gave credit, the queen-mother herself, Parysatis, whether urged by the known enmity of Artaxerxes to Cyrus, or by whatever other cause, incited her younger son to seek the throne and life of the elder. Thus much, however, appears certain, that, very soon after his return into Asia Minor, Cyrus began preparations with that criminal view. For a pretence, it must be allowed, he seems not to have been totally without what the right of self-defence might afford; yet his principal motives evidently were ambition and revenge.
The disjointed, tottering, and crumbling state of that empire, which, under the first Darius, appeared so well compacted, and really was so powerful and flourishing, favoured his views. Egypt, whose lasting revolt had been suppressed by the first Artaxerxes, was again in rebellion, and the fidelity of other distant provinces was more than suspected. Within his own extensive vice-royalty, the large province of Paphlagonia, governed by its own tributary prince, paid but a precarious obedience to the Persian throne; the Mysian and Pisidian mountaineers made open war upon the more peaceful subjects of the plains; and the Lycaonians, possessing themselves of the fortified places, held even the level country in independency, and refused the accustomed tribute. A large part of Lesser Asia was thus in rebellion, more or less avowed. Hence, on one hand, the attention of the king’s councils and the exertion of his troops were engaged; on the other, an undeniable pretence was ready for Cyrus to increase the military force under his immediate authority.
Cyrus, on his first arrival in the neighbourhood of the Grecian colonies, became, as we have seen, partial to the Grecian character.
As soon as the design against his brother’s throne was decided, the younger Cyrus, with increased sedulity, extended his connections among the Greeks. They alone, among the nations of that time, knew how to train armies so that thousands of men might act as one machine. Hence their heavy-armed had a power in the shock of battle that no number of more irregular troops, however brave, could resist. Through the long and extensive war lately concluded, Greece abounded with experienced officers, and with men of inferior rank, much practised in arms, and little in any peaceful way of livelihood. Opportunity was thus ready for raising a force of Grecian mercenaries, almost to any amount. What required circumspection was to avoid alarming the court of Susa; and this the defective principles and worse practice of the Persian administration made even easy. Cyrus therefore directed his Grecian commanders, in the several towns, to enlist Greeks, especially Peloponnesians, as many as they could; with the pretence of strengthening his garrisons against the apprehended attempts of Tissaphernes. In Miletus, so the popularity of his character prevailed, a conspiracy was formed for revolting to him; but before it could be carried into effect, it was discovered; and, by the satrap’s order, the ringleaders were executed, and many of their adherents banished. Cyrus not only protected the fugitives, but besieged Miletus by land and sea; and this new war furnished an additional pretence for levying troops.
Notwithstanding the character of frankness, honour, and strict regard for truth which Cyrus generally supported, the candour of Xenophon, his friend and panegyrist, has not concealed from us that he could stoop to duplicity when the great interest of his ambition instigated. So far from acknowledging any purpose of disobedience to the head of the empire, he condescended to request from that brother, against whose throne and life his preparations were already directed, the royal authority for adding Ionia to his immediate government. The request was granted; at the instance, it was said, of Parysatis, who preserved much influence with her elder son, while she incited the nefarious views of the younger against him.
Among the many Greeks admitted to the conversation and to the table of Cyrus, was Clearchus, a Lacedæmonian; who, after serving in the armies of his own commonwealth, through the Peloponnesian War, found himself, at the age of fifty, still uneasy in rest. Seeking opportunity for military employment, he thought he had discovered it in the Thracian Chersonesus, where the Greek settlers were harassed by incursions of the neighbouring barbarians; and he persevered in representation and solicitation to the ephors till he obtained a commission for a command there. Hastening his departure, at Corinth an order of recall overtook him. The disappointment was more than he could bear; he resolved to disobey the revered scytale; and proceeded, in defiance of it, to act in pursuance of his commission received. For this he was, in absence, condemned to death; a sentence operating to his banishment for life.
What fair hope now remained to Clearchus does not appear; but the need of military talents, continually and extensively occurring among the various warring commonwealths and scattered colonies of the Greeks, always offered some prospect for adventurers of any considerable military reputation; and, in the moment, a still more inviting field, possibly always in his view, appeared in the court of Cyrus. Thither he went, and, under a forbidding outside, a surly countenance, a harsh voice, and rough manners, the prince discovering in him a character he wanted, after short intercourse, made him a present of ten thousand darics, near eight thousand pounds sterling.
Clearchus did not disappoint this magnificent generosity. Employing the whole of the prince’s present in raising troops, he offered, as an individual adventurer, that protection to the Chersonesites which, as a general of the Lacedæmonian forces, he had been commissioned to give, but which the Lacedæmonian government, though claiming to be the protecting power of the Grecian name, had finally refused to afford. His service was accepted; and his success against the barbarians, together with the uncommon regularity and inoffensiveness of his troops in the friendly country, so gratified, not the Chersonesites only, but all the Hellespontine Greeks, that, while he generally found subsistence at the expense of the enemy, they provided large pay for his army by voluntary contribution. Hence, with a discipline severe sometimes to excess, he preserved the general attachment of those under him; and thus a body of troops was kept in the highest order, ready for the service of Cyrus.
The circumstances of Thessaly afforded another opportunity. Aristippus, a Thessalian of eminence, probably banished by faction, had been admitted to the prince’s familiarity. Returning afterwards to his own country, and becoming head of his party, divisions were still such that civil war followed. Then Aristippus thought he might profit from that claim which the ancient doctrine of hospitality gave him upon the generosity of Cyrus. He requested levy-money for two thousand men, with pay for three months. Cyrus granted them for four thousand, and six months; only stipulating that without previous communication with him no accommodation should be concluded with the adverse party. Thus another body of troops, unnoticed, was maintained for Cyrus.
Proxenus, a Theban of the first rank and highest connections, happy in his talents, cultivated under the celebrated Gorgias, of manners to win, and character to deserve esteem, dissatisfied with the state of things in his own city, passed, at the age of towards thirty, to the court of Cyrus, with the direct purpose of seeking employment, honour, and fortune; and, in Xenophon’s phrase, of so associating with men in the highest situations that he might earn the means of doing, rather than lie under the necessity of receiving favours. Recommended by such advantages, Proxenus not only obtained the notice, but won the friendship of Cyrus, who commissioned him to raise a Grecian force, pretended for a purpose which the Persian court could not disapprove, the reduction of the rebellious Pisidians.
Thus engaged in the prince’s service, it became the care of Proxenus to obtain in his foreign residence the society of a friend, of disposition, acquirements, and pursuits congenial to his own. With this view he wrote to a young Athenian, with whom he had long had intimacy, Xenophon, son of Gryllus, a scholar of Socrates, warmly urging him to come and partake of the prince’s favour, to which he engaged to introduce him. In the actual state of things at Athens enough might occur to disgust honest ambition. Xenophon therefore, little satisfied with any prospect there, accepted his friend’s invitation; and to these circumstances we owe his beautiful narrative of the ensuing transactions, which remains, like the Iliad, the oldest and the model of its kind.
For a Grecian land-force Cyrus contented himself with what might be procured by negotiation with individuals and the allurement of pay. But he desired the co-operation of a Grecian fleet, which, in the existing circumstances of Greece, could be obtained only through favour of the Lacedæmonian government. By a confidential minister therefore, despatched to Lacedæmon, he claimed a friendly return for his assistance in the war with Athens. The ephors, publicly acknowledging the justness of his claim, sent orders to Samius, then commanding on the Asiatic station, to join the prince’s fleet, and follow the directions of his admiral, Tamos, an Egyptian.
Preparation being completed, and the advantageous season for action approaching, all the Ionian garrisons were ordered to Sardis, and put under the command of Xenias, the Arcadian, commander of the Grecian guard, which had attended Cyrus into Upper Asia. The other Grecian troops were directed to join; some at Sardis, some at places farther eastward. A very large army of Asiatics, whom the Greeks called collectively Barbarians, was at the same time assembled. The pretence of these great preparations was to exterminate the rebellious Pisidians; and, in the moment, it sufficed for the troops. It could, however, no longer blind Tissaphernes; who, not choosing to trust others to report what he knew or suspected, set off, with all the speed that the way of travelling of an Eastern satrap would admit, with an escort of five hundred horse, to communicate personally with the king. Meanwhile Cyrus marched from Sardis, with the forces already collected, by Colossæ to Celænæ in Phrygia, a large and populous town, where he halted thirty days. There he was joined by the last division of his Grecian forces, which now amounted to about eleven thousand heavy-armed, and two thousand targeteers. His Asiatics or barbarians were near a hundred thousand.[b]
XENOPHON’S ACCOUNT OF CUNAXA
[Sidenote: [401 B.C.]]
Of the following famous battle-picture, Plutarch wrote glowingly: “Many historians have described this battle; but Xenophon has done it with such life and energy that we do not read an account of it--we see it and feel all the danger.” The praise is not undeserved, and yet as an illuminating example of the mental attitude of the ancient historian with his love of long digressions, it should be noted that in the very midmost of the battle, Xenophon pauses to insert a whole chapter reviewing the life of Cyrus. This chapter is omitted here, the rest of the description being given in the antiquated translation made in 1749 by Edward Spelman.[a]
From thence Cyrus proceeded through the Country of Babylon, and in three days’ march made twelve Parasangs.[5] When they were arrived at the end of the third day’s march, Cyrus reviewed his Forces, both Greeks and Barbarians in a Plain about Midnight (for he expected the King would appear the next Morning, at the Head of his Army, ready to give him Battle), and gave to Clearchus the Command of the right Wing, and to Menon the Thessalian that of the left, while he himself drew up his own Men. After the Review, and as soon as the Day appear’d, there came Deserters from the Great King, who brought Cyrus an account of his Army: then Cyrus, having called together the Generals and Captains of the Greeks, advis’d with them concerning the Order of Battle; when he encourag’d them by the following Persuasions:
“O Greeks! it is not from any want of Barbarians, that I make use of you as my Auxiliaries, but because I look upon you as superior to great Numbers of them; for that reason I have taken you also into my Service: Shew yourselves therefore worthy of that Liberty you enjoy, in the possession of which I think you extremely happy; for be assur’d that I would prefer Liberty before all things I possess. But, that you may understand what kind of Combat you are going to engage in, I shall explain it to you: Their Numbers are great, and they come on with mighty Shouts, which if you can withstand, for the rest I am almost asham’d to think what kind of Men you will find our Country produces. But you are Soldiers; behave yourselves with Bravery, and, if any one of you desires to return home, I will take care to send him back the Envy of his Country; but I am confident that my Behaviour will engage many of you rather to follow my Fortunes, than return home.”
Here Gaulites, a banish’d Samian, a Man of Fidelity to Cyrus, being present, spoke thus: “It is said by some, O Cyrus! that you promise many things now, because you are in such imminent Danger, which, upon any Success, you will not remember; and by others, that, though you should remember your Promises, and desire to perform them, it will not be in your power.”
Cyrus hearing this, said: “Gentlemen! my paternal Kingdom to the South, reaches as far as those Climates that are uninhabitable through Heat, and to the North, as far as those that are so through Cold: Every thing between is under the Government of my Brother’s Friends; and, if we conquer, it becomes me to put you, who are my Friends, in possession of it; so that I am under no apprehension, if we succeed, lest I should not have enough to bestow on each of my Friends; I only fear, lest I should not have Friends enow on whom to bestow it. But to each of you Greeks, besides what I have mention’d, I promise a Crown of Gold.” The Officers, hearing these things, espous’d his Cause with greater Alacrity, and made their Report to the rest. After this the Greek Generals, and some of the private Men came to him to know what they had to expect, if they were victorious; all whom he sent away big with hopes: and all who were admitted, advis’d him not to engage personally, but to stand in the Rear. And then it was that Clearchus put this Question to Cyrus: “Are you of Opinion, O Cyrus! that your Brother will hazard a Battle?” “Certainly,” answered Cyrus: “If he is the Son of Darius and Parysatis, and my Brother. I shall never obtain all this without a stroke.”
While the Soldiers were accomplishing themselves for the Action, the number of the Greeks was found to amount to ten thousand four hundred heavy-arm’d Men, and two thousand four hundred Targeteers; and that of the Barbarians in the Service of Cyrus, to one hundred thousand Men, with about twenty Chariots armed with Scythes. The Enemy’s Army was said to amount to twelve hundred thousand Men, and two hundred Chariots armed with Scythes: they had besides six thousand Horse, under the Command of Artagerses. These were drawn up before the King. The King’s Army was commanded by four Generals, Commanders and Leaders, who had each the Command of three hundred thousand Men; these were Abrocomas, Tissaphernes, Gobryas, and Arbaces. But of this Number nine hundred thousand only were present at the Battle, together with one hundred and fifty Chariots arm’d with Scythes: For Abrocomas coming out of Phœnicia, arrived five Days after the Action. This was the Account the Deserters gave to Cyrus before the Battle, which was afterwards confirm’d by the Prisoners. From thence Cyrus, in one day’s March, made three Parasangs, all his Forces, both Greeks and Barbarians, marching in Order of Battle; because he expected the King would fight that day: for in the middle of their March there was a Trench cut five Fathom broad, and three deep. This Trench extended twelve Parasangs upwards, traversing the Plain as far as the Wall of Media. In this Plain are the Canals deriv’d from the River Tigris; they are four in number, each one hundred Feet in breadth, and very deep, and barges laden with Corn sail in them: These Canals fall into the Euphrates; they are distant from one another one Parasang, and have Bridges over them.
Close to the Euphrates, there was a narrow Pass, between the River and the Trench, about twenty Feet in breadth. This Trench the Great King, as soon as he heard Cyrus was marching against him, caus’d to be made by way of Fortification; through this Pass Cyrus and his Army march’d, and were now within the Trench. That day the King did not engage, but many Tracks appear’d both of Horses and Men that retreated. Here Cyrus, sending for Silanus, the Soothsayer of Ambracia, gave him three thousand Darics,[6] because the eleventh Day before that, when he was offering Sacrifice, he told Cyrus that the King would not fight within ten Days: Upon which Cyrus said, “If he does not fight within ten Days, he will not fight at all: And, if what you say proves true, I’ll give you ten Talents;” which Sum, the ten Days being expir’d, he then paid him. Since therefore the King had suffer’d the Army of Cyrus to march through this Pass unmolested, both Cyrus and the rest concluded that he had given over all Thoughts of fighting: so that the next Day Cyrus march’d with less Circumspection; and the third day he rode on his Car, very few marching before him in their Ranks; great part of the Soldiers observ’d no Order, many of their Arms being carried in Waggons, and upon sumpter Horses.
It was now about the time of Day, when the Market is usually crowded, the Army being near the place, where they propos’d to encamp, when Patagyas, a Persian, one of those whom Cyrus most confided in, was seen riding towards them full speed, his Horse all in a Sweat, and immediately called to every one he met, both in his own Language, and in Greek, that the King was at hand with a vast Army, marching in Order of Battle. Upon this there was great Confusion, the Greeks and all the rest expecting he would charge them, before they had put themselves in Order: and Cyrus leaping from his Car, put on his Corslet, then mounting his Horse, took his Javelins in his Hand, and order’d all the rest to arm, and every Man to take his Post: They quickly form’d themselves, Clearchus on the right Wing, close to the Euphrates, and next to him Proxenus, and after him the rest: Menon and his Men were posted upon the left of the Greek Army. Of the Barbarians a thousand Paphlagonian Horse, with the Greek Targeteers, stood next to Clearchus on the right. Upon the left Ariæus, Cyrus’ Lieutenant-General, was plac’d with the rest of the Barbarians. Cyrus put himself in the Center with six hundred Horse: they had large Corslets, and Cuisses, and all of them Helmets, but Cyrus, who stood ready for the Charge, with his Head unarm’d; they say it is also customary for the rest of the Persians to expose themselves in a day of Action in the same manner: All the Horses in Cyrus’ Army had both Frontlets and Breast-plates, and the Horsemen Greek Swords.
It was now the middle of the Day, and no Enemy was yet to be seen. In the Afternoon there appear’d a Dust like a white Cloud, which not long after spread itself like a Darkness over the Plain; when they drew nearer, immediately the brazen Armour flash’d, and their Spears and Ranks appear’d: The Enemy had on their left a Body of Horse arm’d in white Corslets (these were said to be commanded by Tissaphernes), next came those with Persian Bucklers, and next to them heavy-arm’d Men with wooden Shields, reaching down to their Feet (these were said to be Egyptians); then other Horse and other Archers. All these marched according to their respective Countries, each Nation being drawn up in a solid oblong Square: And before them were disposed the Chariots arm’d with Scythes, at a considerable distance from one another. These Chariots had Scythes fix’d aslant at the Axle-Trees, with others under the Body of the Chariot, pointing downwards, that so they might cut asunder every thing they encounter’d. The Design of these Chariots was to break the Ranks of the Greeks.
It now appear’d that Cyrus, when he had exhorted the Greeks to withstand the Shouts of the Barbarians, was mistaken; for they did not come on with Shouts, but as silently and quietly as possible, and in an equal and slow March. Here Cyrus, riding along the Ranks with Pigres the Interpreter, and three or four others, called to Clearchus to bring his Men over-against the Center of the Enemy, because the King was there: And if we break that, says he, our Work is done. But Clearchus observing their Center, and understanding from Cyrus that the King was beyond the left Wing of the Greek Army (for the King was so much superior in number, that, when he stood in the Center of his own Army, he was beyond the left Wing of that of Cyrus) Clearchus, I say, would not however be prevail’d on to withdraw his right from the River, fearing to be surrounded on both sides: but answer’d Cyrus, He would take care that all should go well.
Now the Barbarians came regularly on: and the Greek Army standing on the same Ground, the Ranks were form’d, as the Men came up. In the mean time Cyrus, riding at a small distance before the Ranks, survey’d both the Enemy’s Army and his own: Whom Xenophon, an Athenian, observing from the Greek Army, he rode up to him, and ask’d him, whether he had any thing to command; Cyrus, stopping his Horse, order’d him to let them all know, that the Sacrifices and Victims promis’d success. While he was saying this, he heard a Noise running through the Ranks, and ask’d him what Noise it was; Xenophon answer’d, that the Word was now giving for the second time; Cyrus wonder’d who should give it, and ask’d him what the Word was; the other replied, Jupiter the Preserver, and Victory: Which Cyrus hearing, said, I accept it, let That be the Word. After he had said this, he return’d to his Post.
The two Armies being within three or four Stadia of each other, the Greeks sung the Pæan, and advanced: As this Motion occasion’d a small Fluctuation in the Line of Battle, those who were left behind, hasten’d their march, and at once they gave a general Shout, as their Custom is when they invoke the God of War, and all ran on. Some say they struck their Shields with their Pikes to frighten the Enemy’s Horses. But the Barbarians, before they came within the Reach of their Darts, turn’d their Horses and fled, and the Greeks pursued them as fast as they could, calling out to one another not to run, but to follow in their Ranks. Here some of the Chariots were borne through their own People without their Charioteers, others through the Greeks, some of whom seeing them coming, divided; while others being amaz’d, like Spectators in the Hippodrome, were taken unawares; but even these were reported to have received no harm, neither was there any other Greek hurt in the Action, except one upon the left Wing, who was said to have been wounded by an Arrow.
Cyrus seeing the Greeks victorious on their side, and in pursuit of the Enemy, rejoic’d, and was already worshipp’d as King by those about him; however, he was not so far transported as to leave his Post, and join in the Pursuit; but, keeping his six hundred Horse in a Body, he observ’d the King’s Motions; well knowing that he was in the Center of the Persian Army: for in all Barbarian Armies, the Generals ever place themselves in the Center, looking upon that Post as the safest, on each side of which their Strength is equally divided, and, if they have occasion to give out any Orders, these are receiv’d in half the time by the Army. The King therefore being at that time in the Center of his own Battle, was, however, beyond the left Wing of Cyrus; and, when he saw none oppos’d him in front, nor any Motion made to charge the Troops that were drawn up before him, he wheel’d to the left, in order to surround their Army. Upon this Cyrus, fearing he should get behind him, and cut off the Greeks, advanc’d against the King, and charging with his six hundred Horse, broke those who were drawn up before him, put the six thousand Men to flight, and, as they say, killed with his own Hand Artagerses, their Commander.
These being broken, the six hundred also belonging to Cyrus dispers’d themselves in the Pursuit, very few being left about him, and those almost all Persons who used to eat at his Table; being accompanied with these, he discovered the King, and those about him, and, unable to contain himself, immediately cried out, I see the Man; then ran furiously at him, and, striking him on the Breast, wounded him through his Corslet, as Ctesias the Physician says, who affirms that he cur’d the Wound. While he was giving the Blow, somebody threw a Javelin at him with great force, and wounded him under the Eye: and now the King and Cyrus engag’d hand to hand, and those about them, in defence of each. In this Action Ctesias (who was with the King) informs us how many fell on his side; on the other, Cyrus himself was killed, and eight the most considerable of his Friends lay dead upon him. When Artapates, who was in the greatest Trust with him of any of his scepter’d Ministers, saw Cyrus fall, they say, he leap’d from his Horse, and threw himself about him: some say, the King order’d Artapates to be slain upon the Body of Cyrus; others, that, drawing his Scimitar, he slew himself: for, he wore a golden Scimitar, a Chain, Bracelets, and other Ornaments, which are worn by the most considerable Persians; and was held in great esteem by Cyrus, both for his Affection and Fidelity.
When Cyrus was dead, his Head and right Hand were cut off upon the spot, and the King, with his Men, in the Pursuit, broke into his Camp; while those with Ariæus, no longer made a stand, but fled through their own Camp to their former Post, which was said to be four Parasangs from the Field of Battle. The King, with his Forces, among many other things, took Cyrus’ Mistress, a Phocæan, who was said to be a Woman of great Sense and Beauty. The other, a Milesian, who was the younger of the two, was also taken by the King’s Troops, but escap’d naked to the Quarter of the Greeks, who were left to guard the Baggage. These, forming themselves, kill’d many of those who were plundering the Camp, and lost some of their own Men; however, they did not fly, but sav’d the Milesian, with the Men and Effects, and, in general, every thing else that was in their Quarter. By this time the King and the Greeks were at the distance of about thirty Stadia from one another, these pursuing the Enemy that were opposite to them, as if they had gain’d a complete Victory; and the King’s Troops plundering the Camp of the Greeks, as if they also had been every where victorious. But, when the Greeks were inform’d, that the King, with his Men, was among their Baggage, and the King, on his side, heard from Tissaphernes, that the Greeks had put those before them to flight, and were gone forward in the Pursuit, he then rallied his Forces, and put them in order. On the other side, Clearchus consulted with Proxenus, who was nearest to him, whether they should send a Detachment, or should all march to relieve the Camp.
In the mean time the King was observ’d to move forward again, and seem’d resolved to fall upon their Rear; upon which the Greeks faced about, and put themselves in a posture to march that way, and receive him. However, the King did not advance that way; But, as before, he pass’d beyond their left Wing, so now he led his Men back the same Way, taking along with him those who had deserted to the Greeks during the Action, and also Tissaphernes with his Forces: for Tissaphernes did not fly at the first Onset, but penetrated with his Horse, where the Greek Targeteers were posted, quite as far as the River: However, in breaking through, he killed none of their Men, but the Greeks, dividing, wounded his People both with their Swords and Darts. Episthenes of Amphipolis commanded the Targeteers, and shewed great conduct upon this occasion.
Tissaphernes, therefore, sensible of his Disadvantage, departed, then; coming to the Camp of the Greeks, he found the King there, and reuniting their Forces, they advanc’d. When they came opposite to the left of the Greeks, these were afraid they should attack their Wing, and, by wheeling to the right and left, annoy them on both sides; to avoid which, they resolv’d to open that Wing, and cover the Rear with the River. While they were consulting upon this, the King marched by them, and drew up his Army opposite to theirs, in the same Order in which he first engag’d. When the Greeks saw them draw near in Order of Battle, they again sung the Pæan, and went on with much more Alacrity than before. However, the Barbarians did not stay to receive them, but fled sooner than the first time: and the Greeks pursued them to a Village. There they halted; for there was an Eminence above the Village, upon which the King’s Forces fac’d about. He had no Foot with him, but the Hill was cover’d with Horse in such a manner, that it was not possible for the Greeks to see what was doing: However, they said they saw the royal Ensign there, which was a golden Eagle with its Wings extended, resting upon a Spear.
When the Greeks advanc’d towards them, the Horse quitted the Hill, some running one way, and some another: However, the Hill was clear’d of them by degrees, and at last they all left it. Clearchus did not march up the Hill with his Men, but, halting at the Foot of it, sent Lycius the Syracusan, and another, with Orders to reconnoitre the place, and make their Report; Lycius rode up the Hill, and, having view’d it, brought Word that the Enemy fled in all haste. While these things were doing, it grew near Sunset. Here the Greeks halted, and lying under their Arms, rested themselves. In the mean time they wonder’d that neither Cyrus appear’d any where, nor any one from him; for they did not know he was dead; but imagin’d, that he was either led away by the Pursuit, or had rode forward to possess himself of some Post. Hereupon they consulted among themselves, whether they should stay where they were, and send for their Baggage, or return to their Camp. At last they resolv’d to return: And arriv’d at their Tents about Supper-time; And this was the end of that Day. There they found the greatest part of their Baggage plunder’d, with all the Provisions, and also the Carriages full of Flour and Wine, which Cyrus had prepar’d, in order to distribute them among the Greeks, if at any time his Army should labour under the want of Necessaries. It was said these Carriages amounted to four hundred: which were then all rifled by the King’s Troops, so that the greatest part of the Greeks had no Supper, neither had they eaten any Dinner; for, before the Army could halt in order to dine, the King appear’d. And in this Manner they passed the Night.[c]
THE RETREAT
When the battle of Cunaxa was over, the Greeks, whose camp meanwhile had been pillaged, rejected the Persian king’s demand for unconditional surrender, and, although their numbers by this time were reduced to ten thousand, determined to fight their way through to Asia Minor, a task which involved marching through a hostile country for a distance which measured 1850 miles by the route they had taken from Ephesus to Cunaxa.
Xenophon, one of their leaders, has made this march of the Greeks, which is commonly known as the Retreat of the Ten Thousand, the subject of a separate work. It is one of the most famous military exploits of antiquity and sets the superiority of Greece in the most brilliant light, for the bold and successful enterprise of these ten thousand Greeks does not redound to their glory alone. It is the common possession of their age, their nation, and the culture which it had attained; and marks in the most striking fashion the contrast of the relative values of Persian and Greek civilisation and political institutions. A handful of Greeks bid splendid defiance to the sovereign of the enormous Persian empire, to the sheer bulk of his army, and to all the intrigues of his satraps. It was the victory of Greek subtlety and skill over the rigid and mechanical organisation of Persia, of Greek science over the intellectual poverty of the East, of Greek tactics over Persian confusion; finally, of a genuine sense of honour and patriotic pride over craft, cowardice, and servility.
The route which the Ten Thousand took was not the same by which they had marched to Cunaxa; it lay through Mesopotamia, Media, Armenia, and along the southern shore of the Black Sea to Thrace. The valiant Greeks did not know their way through these countries; they had neither maps nor any trustworthy guide; they had to march through desert and wilderness, to cross mountains and ravines, to pass through barbarous tribes and whole provinces in arms; nevertheless they succeeded in reaching the frontier of their own land with comparatively slight loss.
Soon after they had begun their march, Artaxerxes concluded a treaty with them through the mediation of the satrap Tissaphernes, who had succeeded to the satrapy of Cyrus, in virtue of which they were to be allowed to proceed home undisturbed, escorted by the latter at the head of a Persian army, and supplied with the requisite provisions by the way. But Tissaphernes kept the Greeks waiting for more than twenty days before he returned from the king’s camp, and when at length he did return and set forth with them on their way through Media, he showed himself of so suspicious a temper and fostered such constant and increasing friction between the Greek troops and his own, that at last Clearchus, the Greek commander, begged for an interview with the satrap. This was granted, and Clearchus, confiding in the honour of the hostile leader, went to the Persian camp accompanied by all the twenty-four officers who composed his military council. As soon as they reached it they were treacherously taken prisoners and their guard cut down. They were presently carried off to the royal capital and there put to death together.
The Persians hoped to throw the Greeks into confusion by this treacherous blow, and so vanquish them without much trouble; but they were not a little amazed when (in striking contrast to the spirit and organisation of their own army) a new body of generals and new subordinate officers sprang immediately and, as it were, spontaneously into being from the ranks of the Greek privates and subalterns. For in the Greek army fresh appointments to all posts were made every year; there was no regular promotion and no officer held permanent rank; on the contrary, the man who one year occupied the position of an officer frequently served as a private soldier the next. By this means almost every private soldier was qualified to step into the place of an officer, and it was an easy matter to appoint fresh leaders to the large and small divisions of the army. Xenophon, who had hitherto accompanied the march, neither in the capacity of private nor officer, but merely as a friend and comrade of one of the generals, was the first after the treacherous act of Tissaphernes to urge his countrymen not to yield to the Persian demand for submission, but to fight their way sword in hand through the enemy’s country. Only one of the colonels and captains who gathered about him demurred to his proposal. This aroused the suspicions of the rest, and, marking him more narrowly, they perceived by his pierced ears that he was by birth no Greek but a Persian. He was promptly expelled, and Xenophon and four others were appointed to succeed the generals captured by the Persians.
From that day forward Xenophon was the soul of the Greek army, which owed its ultimate deliverance to him and in whom it rightly reposed absolute confidence. He was prudent enough not to command in his own name, but in that of Chirisophus of Sparta, though the latter was wholly devoid of the capacity and knowledge requisite for leading his countrymen home through the heart of the Persian empire. Xenophon’s motive in this was, on the one hand, to avoid making himself obnoxious to the Spartans, who had become masters of Greece by the Peloponnesian War, and on the other, to keep his own people under stricter discipline through the terror of a Spartan leader. Directed by an admirable tactical skill, which was equal to every fresh demand of place or circumstance, the Greeks continued their march, perpetually pursued and harassed by the Persians, to the rugged and inhospitable mountain country about the Upper Tigris. Here they came in contact with the fierce and warlike tribe of the Carduchi, who, like the Kurds of to-day who may be their descendants, had never been conquered, and who rejected all overtures for permission to pass through their territory in peace. The Persians, not daring to venture farther, now gave up the pursuit of the Ten Thousand, and the latter marched into the rugged and precipitous country of the Carduchi, and in spite of the constant attacks of the inhabitants succeeded by the superiority of their military discipline and experience in reaching the other side of the mountain range and the frontiers of Armenia in seven days. This march through the country of the Carduchi was the most arduous part of their journey and cost them more loss and suffering than all the attacks of the Persian army.[e] We turn again to the vivid description in Xenophon’s own words as Englished by Spelman.
XENOPHON’S PICTURE OF THE HARDSHIPS
In the country of the Taochians, their Provisions began to fail them: For the Taochians inhabited Fastnesses, into which they had convey’d all their Provisions. At last the army arriv’d at a strong Place, which had neither City nor Houses upon it, but where great Numbers of Men and Women with their Cattle were assembled. This Place Chirisophus order’d to be attack’d the Moment he came before it, and, when the first Company suffer’d another went up, and then another; for the Place being surrounded with Precipices, they could not attack it on all Sides at once. When Xenophon came up with the Rear-Guard, the Targeteers and heavy-arm’d Men, Chirisophus said to him, “You come very seasonably, for this Place must be taken, otherwise the Army will be starved.”
Upon this they call’d a Council of War, and Xenophon demanding, what could hinder them from carrying the Place; Chirisophus answer’d, “there is no other Access to it but This, and, when any of our Men attempt to gain it, they roll down Stones from the impending Rock, and those they light upon are treated as you see”; pointing at the same time to some of the Men, whose Legs and Ribs were broken. “But,” says Xenophon, “when they have consum’d all the Stones they have, what can hinder us then from going up? For I can see nothing to oppose us, but a few Men, and of these not above two or three that are arm’d. The Space, you see, through which we must pass expos’d to these Stones, is about one hundred and fifty Feet in Length, of which that of one hundred Feet is cover’d with large Pines, growing in Groups, against which, if our Men place themselves, what can they suffer, either from the Stones that are thrown, or rolled down by the Enemy? The remaining Part of this Space is not above fifty Feet, which, when the Stones cease, we must dispatch with all possible Expedition.” “But,” says Chirisophus, “the Moment we offer to go to the Place that is cover’d with the Trees, they will shower down Stones upon us.” “That,” replies Xenophon, “is the very Thing we want, for by this Means they will be consum’d the sooner. However,” continues he, “let us, if we can, advance to that Place, from whence we may have but a little Way to run, and from whence we may also, if we see convenient, retreat with Ease.”
Upon this, Chirisophus and Xenophon, with Callimachus of Parrhasia, one of the Captains, advanced (for the last had the command that Day of the Captains in the Rear), all the rest of the Officers standing out of Danger. Then about seventy of the Men advanc’d under the Trees, not in a Body, but one by one, each sheltering himself as well as he could: While Agasias the Stymphalian and Aristonymus of Methydria, who were also Captains belonging to the Rear, with some others, stood behind, without the Trees, for it was not safe for more than one Company to be there. Upon this Occasion Callimachus made Use of the following Stratagem. He advanc’d two or three Paces from the Tree under which he stood; but, as soon as the Stones began to fly, he quickly retir’d, and, upon every Excursion, more than ten Cart-Loads of Stones were consum’d. When Agasias saw what Callimachus was doing, and that the Eyes of the whole Army were upon him, fearing lest he should be the first Man who enter’d the Place, he, without giving any Notice to Aristonymus, who stood next to him, or to Eurylochus, of Lusia, both of whom were his friends, or to any other Person, advanc’d alone, with a Design to get before the rest. When Callimachus saw him passing by, he laid hold of the Border of his Shield. In the mean Time Aristonymus, and, after him, Eurylochus ran by them both: For all these were Rivals in Glory, and in constant Emulation of each other. And, by contending thus, they took the Place: For, the Moment one of them had gain’d the Ascent, there were no more Stones thrown from above.
And here followed a dreadful Spectacle indeed; for the Women first threw their Children down the Precipice, and then themselves. Then Men did the same. And here Æneas the Stymphalian, a Captain, seeing one of the Barbarians, who was richly dress’d, running with a Design to throw himself down, caught hold of him, and the other drawing him after, they both fell down the Precipice together, and were dashed to Pieces. Thus we made very few Prisoners, but took a considerable Quantity of Oxen, Asses, and Sheep.
From thence the Greeks advanc’d, through the Country of the Chalybians, and, in seven Marches, made fifty Parasangs. These being the most valiant People they met with in all their March, they came to a close engagement with the Greeks. They had linen Corslets that reach’d below their Navel, and, instead of Tassels, thick Cords twisted. They had also Greaves and Helmets, and at their Girdle a short Faulchion, like those of the Lacedæmonians, with which they cut the Throats of those they over-power’d, and afterwards, cutting off their Heads, carried them away in Triumph. It was their Custom to sing and dance, whenever they thought the Enemy saw them. They had Pikes fifteen Cubits in length, with only one Point. They staid in their Cities till the Greeks march’d past them, and then followed harassing them perpetually. After that they retir’d to their strong Holds, into which they had conveyed their Provisions: So that the Greeks could supply themselves with nothing out of their Country, but liv’d upon the Cattle they had taken from the Taochians.
They now came to the River Harpasus, which was four hundred Feet broad. And from thence advanc’d through the Country of the Scythinians, and, in four Days’ March, made twenty Parasangs, passing through a Plain into some Villages; in which they staid three Days, and made their Provisions. From this Place they made, in four Days’ March, twenty Parasangs, to a large and rich City well inhabited: It was called Gymnias. The Governour of this Country sent a Person to the Greeks, to conduct them through the Territories of his Enemies. This Guide, coming to the Army, said he would undertake, in five Days, to carry them to a Place, from whence they should see the Sea. If not, he consented to be put to death. And, when he had conducted them into the Territories belonging to his Enemies, he desired them to lay waste the Country with Fire and Sword. By which it was evident that he came with this View, and not from any Good-will he bore to the Greeks. The fifth Day they arriv’d at the holy Mountain called Theches. As soon as the Men, who were in the Vanguard, ascended the Mountain, and saw the Sea, they gave a great Shout, which, when Xenophon and those in the Rear, heard, they concluded that some other Enemies attack’d them in Front, for the People belonging to the Country they had burn’d, follow’d their Rear, some of whom those who had Charge of it, had killed, and taken others Prisoners in an Ambuscade. They had also taken twenty Bucklers made of raw Ox-hides with the hair on.
The Noise still increasing as they came nearer, and the Men, as fast as they came up, running to those who still continued Shouting, their Cries swelled with their Numbers, so that Xenophon, thinking something more than ordinary had happen’d, mounted on Horse-back, and, taking with him Lycius and his Horse, rode up to their Assistance: And presently they heard the Soldiers calling out “The Sea! The Sea!” and cheering one another. At this they all set a running, the Rear-guard as well as the rest, and the Beasts of Burden, and Horses were driven forward. When they were all come up to the Top of the Mountain, they embraced one another, and also their Generals and Captains with Tears in their Eyes. And Immediately the Men, by whose Order it is not known, bringing together a great many Stones, made a large Mount, upon which they plac’d a great Quantity of Shields made of raw Ox-hides, Staves, and Bucklers taken from the Enemy. The Guide himself cut the Bucklers in Pieces, and exhorted the rest to do the same. After this the Greeks sent back their Guide, giving him Presents out of the publick Stock, these were a Horse, a silver Cup, a Persian Dress, and ten Darics. But, above all Things the Guide desir’d the Soldiers to give him some of their Rings, many of which they gave him. Having therefore shewn them a Village, where they were to Quarter, and the Road that led to the Macronians, when the Evening came on, he departed, setting out on his Return that Night.[c]
END OF THE MARCH
[Sidenote: [401-399 B.C.]]
At length, four months after the battle of Cunaxa, they entered Trapezus, the first Greek city they came to, and celebrated their safe arrival among their kindred with sacrifices and games. From this point they continued their retreat, some by sea and some by land. But when the air of Greece breathed upon them once more and the fear of the barbarians was overpast, discord and greed crept in amongst them, and they proved such troublesome guests that even the inhabitants of the Greek colonies along the southern shore of the Black Sea tried to get rid of them as speedily as possible. Making many raids in search of booty and suffering no small loss on the way, they came through Bithynia to Byzantium, and thence proceeded to the interior of Thrace, where Seuthes, who then ruled the country, engaged the rude and bellicose adventurers into whom the remnant of the Ten Thousand had degenerated. For some months they assisted him to extend his sovereignty over various Thracian tribes. Finally they were enlisted by the Spartans, who were then at war with the Persian empire, and so went back to Asia.
The remnant of the whole force amounted to six thousand men, the distance they had traversed from the battle-field of Cunaxa to about the middle of the south coast of the Black Sea to not less than two thousand miles. This they had done in eight months. But the whole march, from Ephesus to Cunaxa and thence to this region on the Black Sea, occupied fifteen months (from February, 401, to the beginning of June, 400 B.C.), and the march from the latter place to the spot where they joined the Spartan army in Asia Minor (March, 399 B.C.) took nine months.
Xenophon, who had rendered the most conspicuous service on this memorable march, returned to Greece after he had led the remnant of the Ten Thousand to the Spartan army in Asia Minor. Some years later he took part in the expedition against the Persians conducted by his friend the Spartan king, Agesilaus, and after the return of the latter fought at the battle of Coronea. While he was in Asia with Agesilaus he was banished from his native city by a vote of the people, because he had taken part in a war against the Persian king, who was at that time an ally of Athens, and because his aristocratic opinions and his preference for the political system of Sparta had earned him the hatred of the demagogues and the jealousy of the populace. After the battle of Coronea he accompanied Agesilaus to Sparta and remained there for a while, and then settled on a country estate in the neighbourhood of Olympia, which he had either received as a gift from the Spartans or bought with the great wealth he had amassed in Asia. Here and in Corinth he wrote some part of his works. The sentence of banishment from Athens was soon repealed, but it does not seem probable that he ever returned to his native city, though at a later time he induced his son Gryllus to take part in one of the military expeditions of the Athenians. Gryllus fell at the battle of Mantinea, and the story goes that the news of his death was brought to his aged father as he was standing by an altar, sacrificing to the gods. Xenophon was crowned with a garland, in accordance with the Greek custom of wearing wreaths upon festal occasions. He immediately took it from his head, but received the news of his son’s death with the utmost composure, saying that he knew he had only begotten a mortal. When he was told that Gryllus had fought with great valour, he put the garland on again, finished his sacrifice, and added to it a prayer in which he gave thanks to the gods for his son’s worthiness. Xenophon died at Corinth in (355 B.C.) the ninetieth year of his age.[e]
THE MEANING OF XENOPHON’S FEAT
[Sidenote: [399 B.C.]]
The world has never ceased to thrill with a sympathetic memory of that glad cry of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (The sea! The sea!) It has a kinship with the feelings of the foot-sore and heart-sore children of Israel reaching the edge of the Promised Land. It stands out from above the usual crises of history as a temple dome above a town. It takes its place among such peaks of emotion as the view that Attila took of Rome, and the crusaders of the minarets of Jerusalem, the cry of “Land ho!” on the ships of Columbus. It finds a strangely modern parallel in the first ocean-glimpse of the American soldiers in Sherman’s march to the sea.
Like all these picturesque incidents, it meant more than a merely dramatic moment to the history of mankind. It was a prelude in Greek history to the triumph of Alexander. It showed to the Greeks that their ambitions need not be confined to the small parishes they had dwelt in. It revealed the fact that the great realm of the Persian monarch, whom the Greeks always referred to as “The King,” was like Dead Sea fruit: brilliant in its shell, and hollow corruption at core. The only impetus the Greeks had felt towards a Panhellenic spirit had been inspired by the imminence of the Persian danger. They had with small bands of patriots dispersed the droves of oriental subjects brought against them, and yet they could not have dreamed that their success in an offensive war would be equal to the glory of the defensive struggle.
But here was a lessening body of ten thousand Greeks, bound together by no common sentiment except a desire for money--which they did not get. And this comparative handful of mercenaries had ransacked the very innermost recesses of the Persian empire, and had never found an army great enough or brave enough to withstand it in open assault. The conquest of such an empire seemed to be within the grasp of any Greek commander. The first to attempt it was a second-rate Spartan king, Agesilaus, who failed. And the Persian empire resisted attack for five generations more, till the new blood of Macedonia and the unlimited ambitions of Alexander made the attempt. Until he came, the blows of the others were only so much callisthenics. When he came he was not loath to acknowledge, on the eve of the battle of Issus, the inspiration he owed to the feat of the Ten Thousand.
Meanwhile, without reference to its remote bearings, the anabasis and catabasis of Xenophon’s army stand forth glorious in themselves. He himself sums up the achievement baldly at the conclusion of his work.
[Sidenote: [401-399 B.C.]]
“The governors of The King’s country, as much of it as we went through, were these: of Lydia, Artemas; of Phrygia, Artacamas; of Lycaonia and Cappadocia, Mithridates; of Cilicia, Syennesis; of Phœnicia and Arabia, Dernes; of Syria and Assyria, Belesys; of Babylon, Rhoparas; of Media, Arbaces; of the Phasiani and Hesperitæ, Tiribazus; the Carduchi, the Chalybes, the Chaldeans, the Macrones, the Colchians, the Mosynœci, the Cœtæ, and the Tibareni, were independent nations; of Paphlagonia, Corylas; of the Bithynians, Pharnabazus; and of the Thracians in Europe, Seuthes.
“The computation of the whole journey, the anabasis and catabasis, was 215 days’ march, 1155 parasangs, 34,650 stadia. The length of time occupied in the anabasis and catabasis was one year and three months.”
Reckoning the parasang at three and two-fifths miles, the total distance covered would therefore be 3927 miles in the course of fifteen months. The manuscripts do not all agree with regard to the numbers, but the total march may be accepted as nearly four thousand miles, through a country bristling with hostility and treachery, a country unmapped and unknown to the Greeks. This exploit of what might well be termed a pack of desperadoes looms high in history, both as an absolute feat of bravado and as a finger-post for Grecian ambition.[a]
FOOTNOTES
[5] [A parasang was equal to about 3⅖ English miles.]
[6] [A daric, named after Darius, was a gold coin of about the weight of a sovereign, or five dollars. An Attic talent was valued at about £200 or $1000.]
XLI. THE SPARTAN SUPREMACY
There is an inevitable bias in the minds of most people towards the brilliant and refined ideals of Athens as opposed to the obstinate and barren creed of the Spartans. We have heard, therefore, more of the Athenian side than of the Spartan in their wars together. As we approach a period of Spartan glory, it is well to make a quick review and summary of her ideals and achievements down to this period, when, as the Spartophile Müller notes, Sparta won her advancement by discarding her venerable creeds. What follows must be read with the knowledge that it is from the pen of a Spartan partisan.[a]
Sparta, by the conquest of Messenia and Tegea, had obtained the first rank in the Peloponnese, which character she confirmed by the expulsion of the tyrants, and the overthrow of Argos. From about the year 580 B.C. she acted as the recognised commander, not only of the Peloponnese, but of the whole Greek name. The confederacy itself, however, was formed by the inhabitants of that peninsula alone, on fixed and regular laws; whereas the other Greeks only annexed themselves to it temporarily. The order of precedence observed by the members of this league may be taken from the inscription on the footstool of the statue of Jupiter, which was dedicated at Olympia after the Persian War, the Ionians, who were only allied for a time, being omitted. It is as follows: Lacedæmon, Corinth, Sicyon, Ægina, Megara, Epidaurus, Tegea, Orchomenos, Phlius, Trœzen, Hermione, Tiryns, Mycenæ, Lepreum, and Elis; which state was contented with the last place, on account of the small share which it had taken in the war.
The defenders of the isthmus are enumerated as follows: Lacedæmonians, Arcadians, Eleans, Corinthians, Sicyonians, Epidaurians, Phliasians, Trœzenians, and Hermionians, nearly agreeing with the other list, only that the Arcadians, having been present with their whole force, and also the Eleans, occupy an earlier place; and the Megarians and Æginetans are omitted, as having had no share in the defence. This regular order of precedence is alone a proof of a firm union. The Tegeatæ, since they had joined the side of Lacedæmon, enjoyed several privileges, and especially the place of honour at the left wing of the allied army. Argos remained excluded from the nations of the Peloponnesus, as it never would submit to the command of Sparta; the Achæans, indifferent to external affairs, only joined themselves momentarily to the alliance: but the Mantineans, though latterly they followed the policy of Argos, were long attached to the Peloponnesian league; for at the end of the Persian War they sent an army, which arrived too late for the battle of Platæa: having before, together with the other Arcadians, helped to defend the isthmus; they had also been engaged in the first days of the action at Thermopylæ, and they were at this time still the faithful allies of the Lacedæmonians. Their subsequent defection from Sparta may be attributed partly to their endeavours to obtain the dominion of Parrhasia, which was protected by Lacedæmon, to their hostility with Tegea, which remained true to Sparta after the great war with Arcadia, which began about 470 B.C., and to the strengthening of their city, and the establishment of a democratic government, through the influence of Argos.
[Sidenote: [480-432 B.C.]]
The supremacy of Sparta was exercised in the expeditions of the whole confederacy, and in transactions of the same nature. In the first, the Spartan king--after it had been thought proper never to send out two together--was commander-in-chief, in whose powers there were many remains of the authority of the ancient Homeric princes. Occasionally, however, Sparta was compelled to give up her privilege to other commanders, especially at sea, as, for instance, the fleet at Salamis to Eurybiades. When any expedition was contemplated, the Spartans sent round to the confederate states, to desire them to have men and stores in readiness. The highest amount which each state could be called on to supply was fixed once for all, and it was only on each particular occasion to be determined what part of that was required. In like manner the supplies in money and stores were regularly appointed; so that an army, with all its equipment, could be collected by a simple summons. But agricultural labour, festivals, and the natural slowness of the Doric race, often very much retarded the assembling of this army. The contributions, chiefly perhaps voluntary, both of states and individuals, were registered on stone: and there is still extant an inscription, found at Tegea, in which the war-supplies of the Ephesians, Melians, etc., in money and in corn, are recorded. But the Lacedæmonians never exacted from the Peloponnesian confederacy a regular annual contribution, independent of circumstances; which would have been, in fact, a tribute: a measure of this kind being once proposed to King Archidamus, he answers, “that war did not consume according to rule.”
Pericles, however, properly considers it as a disadvantage to the Peloponnesians that they had no paid troops, and that they had amassed no treasure. The object of an expedition was publicly declared: occasionally, however, when secrecy was required, it was known neither to the states nor to their army. The single allied states, if necessity demanded it, could also immediately summon the army of the others; but it is not clear to what extent this call was binding upon them. The Spartan military constitution, which we will explain hereafter, extended to the whole allied army; but it was doubtless variously combined with the tactics of the several nations. To the council of war, which, moreover, only debated, and did not decide, the Spartan king summoned the leaders of the several states, together with other commanders, and generally the most distinguished persons in the army.
According to the constitution of the Peloponnesian league, every common action, such as a declaration of war, or the conclusion of a peace or treaty, was agreed on at a congress of the confederates. But, as there was no regular assembly of this kind, the several states sent envoys (ἄγγελοι), like the deputies (πρόβουλοι), of the Ionians, who generally remained together only for a short time. All the members had legally equal votes (ἰσόψηφοι); and the majority sometimes decided against a strong opposition; Sparta was often outvoted, Corinth being at all times willing to raise an opposition. We have, however, little information respecting the exact state of the confederacy; it is probable, from the aristocratic feelings of the Peloponnesians, that, upon the whole, authority had more weight than numbers; and for great undertakings, such as the Peloponnesian War, the assent of the chief state was necessary, in addition to the agreement of the other confederates. When the congress was summoned to Sparta, the envoys often treated with a public assembly of the Spartans.
But upon the internal affairs, laws, and institutions of the allied states, the confederacy had legally no influence. It was a fundamental law that every state should, according to its ancient customs, be independent and supreme; and it is much to the credit of Sparta, that, so long as the league was in existence, she never, not even when a favourable opportunity offered, deprived any Peloponnesian state of this independence. Nor were disputes between individual states brought before the congress of the allies, which, on account of the preponderance of Sparta, would have endangered their liberty; but they were commonly either referred to the Delphian oracle, or to arbitrators chosen by both states. For disputes between citizens of different states there was an entirely free and equal intercourse of justice. The jurisdiction of the states was also absolutely exempt from foreign interference. These are the chief features of the constitution of the Peloponnesian confederacy; the only one which in the flourishing times of Greece combined extensive powers with justice, and a respect for the independence of its weaker members.
[Sidenote: [580-479 B.C.]]
Sparta had not become the head of this league by agreement, and still less by usurpation; but by tacit acknowledgment she was the leader, not only of this, but of the whole of Greece; and she acted as such in all foreign relations from about the year 580 B.C. Her alliance was courted by Crœsus: and the Ionians, when pressed by Cyrus, had recourse to the Spartans, who, with an amusing ignorance of the state of affairs beyond the sea, thought to terrify the king of Persia by the threat of hostilities. It is a remarkable fact, that there were at that time Scythian envoys in Sparta, with whom a great plan of operations against Persia is said to have been concerted. In the year 520 B.C. the Platæans put themselves under the protection of Cleomenes, who referred them to Athens; a herald from Sparta drove the Alcmæonidæ from their city: afterwards Aristagoras sought from the protector of Greece aid against the national enemy: and when the Æginetans gave the Persians earth and water, the Athenians accused them of treachery before the Spartans: and lastly, during the Persian War, Greece found in the high character of that state the only means of effecting the union so necessary for her safety and success.
In this war a new confederacy was formed, which was extended beyond the Peloponnese; the community of danger and of victory having, besides a momentary combination, also produced a union destined for some duration. It was the assembly of this league--a fixed congress at Corinth during, and at Sparta after, the war--that settled the internal differences of Greece, that invited Argos, Corcyra, and Gelo to join the league, and afterwards called upon Themistocles to answer for his proceedings. So much it did for the present emergency. But at the same time Pausanias, the regent of Sparta, after the great victory of Platæa, prevailed upon the allies to conclude a further treaty. Under the auspices of the gods of the confederacy, particularly of the Eleutherian (or Grecian) Jupiter, they pledged themselves mutually to maintain the independence of all states, and to many other conditions, of which the memory has been lost. To the Platæans in particular security from danger was promised. The Ionians also, after the battle of Mycale, were received into this confederacy.
The splendid victories over the Persians had for some time taken Sparta, which was fitted for a quiet and passive existence, out of her natural sphere; and her king, Pausanias, had wished to betray his country for the glitter of an Asiatic prince. But this state soon perceived her true interest, and sent no more commanders to Asia, “that her generals might not be made worse”: she likewise wished to avoid any further war with the Persians, thinking that Athens was better fitted to carry it on than herself. If the speech were now extant in which Hetoëmaridas the Heraclid proved to the councillors that it was not expedient for Sparta to aim at the mastery of the sea, we should doubtless possess a profound view, on the Spartan side, of those things which we are now accustomed to look on with Athenian eyes. Nor is it true that the supremacy over the Greeks was in fact transferred at all from Sparta to Athens, if we consider the matter as Sparta considered it, however great the influence of this change may have been on the power of Athens. But Sparta continued to hold its pre-eminence in the Peloponnese, and most of the nations of the mother-country joined themselves to her: while none but the Greeks of Asia Minor and the islands, who had previously been subjects of Persia, and were then only partially liberated, perhaps too much despised by Sparta, put themselves under the command of Athens. But the complete liberation of Asia Minor from the Persian yoke, which has been considered one of the chief exploits of Athens, was in fact never effected. The Athenian empire did not prevent the vassals and subjects of the king of Persia from ruling over the Greeks of Asia Minor, even down to the very coast. We need not go any further to prove the entire falsehood of the account commonly given by the panegyrical rhetoricians of Athens.
[Sidenote: [479-465 B.C.]]
The Peloponnese took the less concern in these proceedings, as internal differences had arisen from some unknown cause, which led to an open war between Sparta and Arcadia. We only know that, between the battle of Platæa (in which Tegea, as also later still, showed great fidelity towards Sparta) and the war with the Helots (i.e. between 479 and 465 B.C.), the Lacedæmonians fought two great battles, the one against the Tegeatæ and Argives at Tegea, the other against all the Arcadians, with the exception of the Mantineans, at Dipæa (ἐν Διπαιεῦοιν), in the Mænalian territory. Tisamenus, an Elean, of the family of the Iamidæ, was in both battles in the Spartan army; and in both Sparta was victorious.
[Sidenote: [465-451 B.C.]]
This war had not been brought to a termination, when, in the year 465 B.C., a tremendous earthquake destroyed Sparta, and a sudden ruin threatened to overwhelm the chief state of Greece. For, in the hope of utterly annihilating their rulers, many helots revolted, and the war was called the Third Messenian War. Upon this the Lacedæmonians, foreseeing a tedious siege, called in the aid of their allies; and this call was answered among others by the Athenians; the Spartans, however, dismissed them, as we have seen, before the fortress was taken.
Immediately after the dismission of the Athenians from Ithome, the injured people of Athens annulled the alliance with Sparta, which had subsisted since the Persian War. Then followed the war with the maritime towns of Argolis, in which Athens, after many reverses, at length succeeded in destroying the fleet of Ægina, and subjugating that island (457 B.C.). The inactivity of Sparta during these astonishing successes of her enemy (for when she concluded the armistice with Athens she must have partly foreseen its consequences) seems to prove that she was entirely occupied with the final capture of Ithome, and the settlement of her interests in Arcadia.
The five years’ truce in 451 B.C. was only an armistice between Athens and the Peloponnesian confederacy, which left Bœotia to shake off the Athenian yoke by her own exertions. At the end of these five years Megara revolted from the Athenians, and in consequence an invasion of Attica by the Peloponnesians took place, which, though it did not produce any immediate result, was soon followed by the Thirty Years’ Truce, in which Athens ceded her conquests in Megaris and the Peloponnese, and on the mainland returned within her ancient boundaries.
If now we consider the events which have been briefly traced it will be perceived, that the principle on which the Lacedæmonians constantly acted was one of self-defence, of restoring what had been lost, or preserving what was threatened with danger; whereas the Athenians were always aiming at attack or conquest, or the change of existing institutions. While the Spartans during this period, even after the greatest victories, did not conquer a foot of land, subjugate one independent state, or destroy one existing institution; the Athenians, for a longer or for a shorter time, reduced large tracts of country under their dominion, extended their alliance (as it was called) on all sides, and respected no connection when it came in conflict with their plans of empire.
But the astonishing energy of the Athenians, which from one point kept the whole of Greece in constant vibration, almost paralysed Sparta; the natural slowness of that state became more and more apparent: which having been, as it were, violently transplanted into a strange region, only began by degrees to comprehend the policy of Athens. It is manifest that the maxims of the Athenian policy were directly at variance with the general feeling of justice entertained by the Greeks, and especially to the respect for affinity of blood; and this fundamental difference was the true cause of the Peloponnesian War. In the first place then, Dorians were opposed to Ionians; and hence in the well-known oracle it was called the Doric War. It was a union of the free Greeks against the evil ambition of one state: of land forces against sea forces: the fleet of the Peloponnesians was at the beginning of the war very inconsiderable. Hence it was some time before the belligerent parties even so much as encountered one another; the land was the means of communication for one party, the sea for the other: hence the states friendly to Athens were immediately compelled to build Long Walls for the purpose of connecting the chief city with the sea, and isolating it from the land. Large bodies of men practised in war fought against wealth: the Peloponnesians carried on the war with natives; whereas Athens manned her fleet--the basis of her power--chiefly with foreign seamen; so that the Corinthians said justly that the power of Athens was rather purchased than native. It was the main principle of Pericles’ policy, and it is also adopted by Thucydides in the famous introduction to his History, that it is not the country and people, but moveable and personal property in the proper sense of the word, which make states great and powerful. The war meant the maintenance of ancient custom as opposed to the desire for novelty: the former was the chief feature of the Doric, the latter of the Ionic race. The Dorians wished to preserve their ancient dignity and power, as well as their customs and religious feelings: the Ionians were commonly in pursuit of something new. It was a union of nations and tribes against one arbitrarily formed: aristocracy was pitted against democracy: this difference was manifested in the first half of the war by Athens changing, while Sparta only restored governments; for in this instance also the power of Sparta was in strictness only employed in upholding ancient establishments, as an aristocracy may indeed be overthrown, but cannot be formed in a moment.
These obvious points of difference are sufficient to substantiate the result which we wish to arrive at. The “honesty and openness” of the Doric character, the noble simplicity of the ancient times of Greece, soon disappeared in this tumultuous age. Sparta therefore and the Peloponnesians emerge from the contest, altered, and as it were reversed; and even before its termination appear in a character of which they had before probably contained only the first seeds.
[Sidenote: [460-405 B.C.]]
But in the second half of the war, when the Spartans gave up their great armaments by land, and began to equip fleets with hired seamen; when they had learnt to consider money as the chief instrument of warfare, and begged it at the court of Persia; when they sought less to protect the states joined to them by affinity and alliance, than to dissolve the Athenian confederacy; when they began to secure conquered states by harmosts of their own, and by oligarchs forced upon the people, and found that the secret management of the political clubs was more to their interest than open negotiation with the government; we see developed on the one hand an energy and address, which was first manifested in the enterprises of the great Brasidas, and on the other a worldly policy, as was shown in Gylippus, and afterwards more strongly in Lysander; when the descendants of Hercules found it advisable to exchange the lion’s for the fox’s skin. And since the enterprises conducted in the spirit of earlier times either wholly failed or else remained fruitless, this new system, though the state had inwardly declined, brought with it, by the mockery of fate, external fame and victory.[b]
Whatever nobility of creed the Sparta-loving Müller has, as above, claimed for Sparta up to this time, it is certain that the sudden accession of vast and unforeseen power changed her to a mood in which, as Bury says, “she cynically set aside her high moral professions and yielded to a lust for oppression.” Grote was no lover of Sparta and yet he substantiates well his accusations against her.[a]
GROTE’S COMPARISON OF SPARTAN AND ATHENIAN RULE
[Sidenote: [405-404 B.C.]]
The Spartan empire began with the decisive victory of Ægospotami in the Hellespont (September or October 405 B.C.). The whole power of Athens was thus annihilated, and nothing remained for the Lacedæmonians to master except the city itself and Piræus; a consummation certain to happen, and actually brought to pass in April 404 B.C., when Lysander entered Athens in triumph, dismantled Piræus, and demolished a large portion of the Long Walls. With the exception of Athens herself--whose citizens deferred the moment of subjection by an heroic, though unavailing, struggle against the horrors of famine--and of Samos, no other Grecian city offered any resistance to Lysander after the battle of Ægospotami; which in fact not only took away from Athens her whole naval force, but transferred it all over to him, and rendered him admiral of a larger Grecian fleet than had ever been seen together since the battle of Salamis.
The allies, especially Thebes and Corinth, not only relented in their hatred and fear of Athens, now that she had lost her power--but even sympathised with her suffering exiles, and became disgusted with the self-willed encroachments of Sparta; while the Spartan king Pausanias, together with some of the ephors, were also jealous of the arbitrary and oppressive conduct of Lysander.
We have learned from dark, but well-attested details, to appreciate the auspices under which that period of history called the Lacedæmonian empire was inaugurated. Such phenomena were by no means confined within the walls of Athens. On the contrary, the Year of Anarchy (using that term in the sense in which it was employed by the Athenians) arising out of the same combination of causes and agents, was common to a very large proportion of the cities throughout Greece. The Lacedæmonian admiral Lysander, during his first year of naval command, had organised in most of the allied cities factious combinations of some of the principal citizens, corresponding with himself personally. By their efforts in their respective cities he was enabled to prosecute the war vigorously, and he repaid them, partly by seconding as much as he could their injustices in their respective cities, partly by promising to strengthen their hands still further as soon as victory should be made sure.
In the greater number of cities, he established an oligarchy of ten citizens, or a decarchy, composed of his own partisans; while he at the same time planted in each a Lacedæmonian harmost or governor, with a garrison, to uphold the new oligarchy. The decarchy of ten Lysandrian partisans, with the Lacedæmonian harmost to sustain them, became the general scheme of Hellenic government throughout the Ægean, from Eubœa to the Thracian coast towns, and from Miletus to Byzantium. Lysander sailed round in person with his victorious fleet to Byzantium and Chalcedon, to the cities of Lesbos, to Thasos, and other places--while he sent Eteonicus to Thrace for the purpose of thus recasting the governments everywhere. Not merely those cities which had hitherto been on the Athenian side, but also those which had acted as allies of Sparta, were subjected to the same intestine revolution and the same foreign constraint. Everywhere the new Lysandrian decarchy superseded the previous governments, whether oligarchical or democratical.
In what spirit these new decarchies would govern, consisting as they did of picked oligarchical partisans distinguished for audacity and ambition--who, to all the unscrupulous lust of power which characterised Lysander himself, added a thirst for personal gain, from which he was exempt, and were now about to reimburse themselves for services already rendered to him--the general analogy of Grecian history would sufficiently teach us, though we are without special details. But in reference to this point, we have not merely general analogy to guide us; we have further the parallel case of the Thirty at Athens, the particulars of whose rule are well known and have already been alluded to.
Isocrates, who speaks with indignant horror of these decarchies, while he denounces those features which they had in common with the triacontarchy at Athens--extrajudicial murders, spoliations, and banishments--notices one enormity besides, which we do not find in the latter: violent outrages upon boys and women. Nothing of this kind is ascribed to Critias and his companions; and it is a considerable proof of the restraining force of Athenian manners, that men who inflicted so much evil in gratification of other violent impulses, should have stopped short here. The decemvirs named by Lysander, like the decemvir Appius Claudius at Rome, would find themselves armed with power to satiate their lusts as well as their antipathies, and would not be more likely to set bounds to the former than to the latter. Lysander, in all the overweening insolence of victory, while rewarding his most devoted partisans with an exaltation comprising every sort of licence and tyranny, stained the dependent cities with countless murders, perpetrated on private as well as on public grounds. No individual Greek had ever before wielded so prodigious a power of enriching friends or destroying enemies, as in this universal reorganisation of Greece; nor was there ever any power more deplorably abused.
Taking all these causes of evil together--the decarchies, the harmosts, and the overwhelming dictatorship of Lysander--and construing other parts of the Grecian world by the analogy of Athens under the Thirty, we shall be warranted in affirming that the first years of the Spartan empire, which followed upon the victory of Ægospotami, were years of all-pervading tyranny, and multifarious intestine calamity, such as Greece had never before endured. The hardships of war, severe in many ways, were now at an end, but they were replaced by a state of suffering not the less difficult to bear because it was called peace. And what made the suffering yet more intolerable was, that it was a bitter disappointment and a flagrant violation of promises proclaimed, repeatedly and explicitly, by the Lacedæmonians themselves.
For more than thirty years preceding--from times earlier than the commencement of the Peloponnesian War--the Spartans had professed to interfere only for the purpose of liberating Greece, and of putting down the usurped ascendency of Athens. Like the allied sovereigns of Europe in 1813, who, requiring the most strenuous efforts on the part of the people to contend against the Emperor Napoleon, promised free constitutions, and granted nothing after the victory had been assured--the Lacedæmonians held out the most emphatic and repeated assurances of general autonomy in order to enlist allies against Athens; disavowing, even ostentatiously, any aim at empire for themselves.
The victory of Ægospotami, with its consequences, cruelly undeceived every one. The language of Brasidas, sanctioned by the solemn oaths of the Lacedæmonian ephors, in 424 B.C., and the proceedings of the Lacedæmonian Lysander in 405-404 B.C., the commencing hour of Spartan omnipotence, stand in such literal and flagrant contradiction, that we might almost imagine the former to have foreseen the possibility of such a successor, and to have tried to disgrace and disarm him beforehand. There was no present necessity for conciliating allies--still less for acting up to former engagements; so that nothing remained to oppose the naturally ambitious inspirations of the Spartan ephors, who allowed the admiral to carry out the details in his own way. But former assurances, though Sparta was in a condition to disregard them, were not forgotten by others; and the recollection of them imparted additional bitterness to the oppressions of the decemvirs and harmosts. In perfect consistency with her misrule throughout eastern Greece, too, Sparta identified herself with the energetic tyranny of Dionysius at Syracuse, assisting both to erect and to uphold it; a contradiction to her former maxims of action which would have astounded the historian Herodotus.
[Sidenote: [405-371 B.C.]]
The empire of Sparta, thus constituted at the end of 405 B.C., maintained itself in full grandeur for somewhat above ten years, until the naval battle of Cnidus in 394 B.C. That defeat destroyed her fleet and maritime ascendency, yet left her in undiminished power on land, which she still maintained until her defeat by the Thebans, at Leuctra in 371 B.C. Throughout all this time, it was her established system to keep up Spartan harmosts and garrisons in the dependent cities on the continent as well as in the islands. Even the Chians, who had been her most active allies during the last eight years of the war, were compelled to submit to this hardship; besides having all their fleet taken away from them. But the native decarchies, though at first established by Lysander universally throughout the maritime dependencies, did not last as a system so long as the harmosts. Composed as they were to a great degree of the personal nominees and confederates of Lysander, they suffered in part by the reactionary jealousy which in time made itself felt against his overweening ascendency. After continuing for some time, they lost the countenance of the Spartan ephors, who proclaimed permission to the cities (we do not precisely know when) to resume their pre-existing governments. Some of the decarchies thus became dissolved, or modified in various ways, but several probably still continued to subsist, if they had force enough to maintain themselves; for it does not appear that the ephors ever systematically put them down as Lysander had systematically set them up.
Such then was the result throughout Greece when that long war, which had been undertaken in the name of universal autonomy, was terminated by the battle of Ægospotami. In place of imperial Athens was substituted, not the promised autonomy, but yet more imperial Sparta. An awful picture is given by the philo-Laconian Xenophon, in 399 B.C., of the ascendency exercised throughout all the Grecian cities, not merely by the ephors and the public officers, but even by the private citizens, of Sparta.
We have more than one picture of the Athenian empire in speeches made by hostile orators who had every motive to work up the strongest antipathies in the bosoms of their audience against it. We have the addresses of the Corinthian envoys at Sparta when stimulating the Spartan allies to the Peloponnesian War; that of the envoys from Mytilene delivered at Olympia to the Spartan confederates, when the city had revolted from Athens and stood in pressing need of support; the discourse of Brasidas in the public assembly at Acanthus; and more than one speech also from Hermocrates, impressing upon his Sicilian countrymen hatred as well as fear of Athens. Whoever reads these discourses, will see that they dwell almost exclusively on the great political wrong inherent in the very fact of her empire, robbing so many Grecian communities of their legitimate autonomy, over and above the tribute imposed. That Athens had thus already enslaved many cities, and was only watching for opportunities to enslave many more, is the theme upon which they expatiate. But of practical grievances--of cruelty, oppression, spoliation, multiplied exiles, etc., of high-handed wrong committed by individual Athenians--not one word is spoken. Had there been the smallest pretext for introducing such inflammatory topics, how much more impressive would have been the appeal of Brasidas to the sympathies of the Acanthians! How vehement would have been the denunciations of the Mytilenean envoys, in place of the tame and almost apologetic language which we now read in Thucydides! Athens extinguished the autonomy of her subject-allies, and punished revolters with severity, sometimes even with cruelty. But as to other points of wrong, the silence of accusers, such as those just noticed, counts as a powerful exculpation.
[Sidenote: [405-403 B.C.]]
The case is altered when we come to the period succeeding the battle of Ægospotami. Here indeed also, we find the Spartan empire complained of (as the Athenian empire had been before), in contrast with that state of autonomy to which each city laid claim, and which Sparta not merely promised to ensure, but set forth as her only ground of war. Yet this is not the prominent grievance--other topics stand more emphatically forward. The decemvirs and the harmosts (some of the latter being helots), the standing instruments of Spartan empire, are felt as more sorely painful than the empire itself; as the language held by Brasidas at Acanthus admits them to be beforehand. At the time when Athens was a subject city under Sparta, governed by the Lysandrian Thirty and by the Lacedæmonian harmost in the Acropolis--the sense of indignity arising from the fact of subjection was absorbed in the still more terrible suffering arising from the enormities of those individual rulers whom the imperial state had set up. Now Athens set up no local rulers--no native Ten or native Thirty--no resident Athenian harmosts or garrisons. This was of itself an unspeakable exemption, when compared with the condition of cities subject, not only to the Spartan empire, but also under that empire to native decemvirs like Critias, and Spartan harmosts like Aristarchus or Aristodemus. A city subject to Athens had to bear definite burdens enforced by its own government, which was liable in case of default or delinquency to be tried before the popular Athenian dicastery. But this same dicastery (as is distinctly stated by Thucydides) was the harbour of refuge to each subject city; not less against individual Athenian wrong-doers than against misconduct from other cities. In no one point can it be shown that the substitution of Spartan empire in place of Athenian was a gain, either for the subject cities or for Greece generally; while in many points it was a great and serious aggravation of suffering. And this abuse of power is the more deeply to be regretted, as Sparta enjoyed after the battle of Ægospotami a precious opportunity--such as Athens had never had, and such as never again recurred--of reorganising the Grecian world on wise principles, and with a view to Panhellenic stability and harmony.
She now stood without competitor as leader of the Grecian world, and might at that moment have reasonably hoped to carry the members of it along with her to any liberal and Panhellenic organisation, had she attempted it with proper earnestness. Unfortunately she took the opposite course, under the influence of Lysander; founding a new empire far more oppressive and odious than that of Athens, with few of the advantages, and none of the excuses, attached to the latter. As she soon became even more unpopular than Athens, her moment of high tide, for beneficent Panhellenic combination, passed away also--never to return.[c]
HARSHNESS OF THE SPARTAN HEGEMONY
[Sidenote: [405-353 B.C.]]
The Peloponnesian War had been disastrous in its consequences to public morals. Its long duration and peculiarly bloody character, arousing everywhere mistrust, exciting passions, deifying brute force, had wrought a deterioration in the Greek nature from which it never fully recovered. There was ferocity on the battle-field, a ferocity in the party contests. “This,” says Aristotle, “is the oath administered to-day in several cities by the oligarchy: ‘I will be the enemy of the people and will do them all the evil I can.’” We may indeed place against this homicidal oath that taken by the heliasts of Athens after the tyranny: “I will forget all past ills and will permit no one else to remember and give them mention.” But Athens even in its decadence was always Athens liberal and generous, even as its mutilated statues remain beautiful in all their degradation.
The system of warfare had also changed. We have shown how one military revolution had already occurred; the replacing of the aristocratic army of former times by the democratic army of the fifth and sixth centuries. And now the age of mercenaries was being ushered in by the employment, in all Greek cities, of hired soldiers to fight beside their citizen troops. But to pay these hirelings money was required, and Greece applied to Persia, who alone had money; hence her mendicant attitude towards the Great King, and the continual intervention of Xerxes’ successors in Hellenic affairs. This dependence on a foreign power and harshness of the public temper were first observed during the last years of the war; they are found again in the year after peace was concluded, the Year of Anarchy, as the Greeks called the commencement of the Spartan dominion.
Blood flowed everywhere because everywhere were established oligarchical governments. A massacre occurred at Thasos. At Miletus eight hundred citizens belonging to the popularist party were lured from their retreats by Lysander and put to death. At Byzantium, Œtœa, and the greater part of the towns of Asia Minor similar outrages were committed. At Samos the inhabitants were all banished, with the privilege of taking away but a single garment. The defection of Chios and its navy had assured Sparta’s triumph; as a reward its most prominent citizens were sent into exile and all its triremes were seized. Lycophron, a Pheræan, made himself master of the province of Thessaly after desperate battles. “Thereafter,” relates Xenophon, “a Lacedæmonian’s lightest word was obeyed; even a citizen in private life could arrange everything to his will.” Xenophon himself appears to have shared this terror, since after the retreat of the Ten Thousand he refused the title of general-in-chief that his companions wished to bestow upon him, fearing that Sparta might view with disfavour the placing of command in the hands of an Athenian. The islanders, especially those who had betrayed the cause of Athens, hoped that with the accession to power of Lacedæmonia who was an ally of the Great King the duties established by Aristides and Pericles to protect their commerce would be removed. But they found they had simply changed masters, Sparta continuing to levy the former tribute, which amounted annually to 1000 talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000].
Athens, more adroit in establishing her empire, had proceeded without cruelty, violence, or spoliation, hence had not known, even in her time of greatest misfortune, the falling-off of her supports. Sparta was not so wise in the formation of kingdoms; force was the only instrument of which she knew the use, and with her the use of it was the abuse of it. Athens had also made use of force, but had always associated with it justice. Athens had made itself the political, military, and judiciary centre of the empire, and further, it was the metropolis of arts and letters for all Hellas. Nothing great or glorious, nothing useful or full of promise, could proceed from the Lacedæmonian dominion; it threatened to topple over in the hour of its erection. A thousand causes were at work to bring about a rapid dissolution; many of these were in Sparta or Greece, the rest in other lands.
DEGENERACY OF SPARTA
[Sidenote: [353-240 B.C.]]
The results of Lycurgus’ institutions continued to be made manifest. The Spartan city diminished in population from day to day, as though worn away by the friction of its iron institutions. The narrow circle, which it had drawn round itself, never widening but always growing smaller, finally came to enclose but an insignificant number of Spartans. Great numbers had perished in the wars, others cast by poverty into the lower classes could no longer take their seats at the public tables. Aristotle says, “Whoever is without means to contribute to the expense of these tables must forfeit his political rights.” The Spartans knew that they were menaced with destruction through lack of citizens; the cry that arose when the four hundred and twenty Spartan soldiers were imprisoned on the island of Sphacteria, still rang in every ear. Aristotle further states: “The territory of Sparta that is capable of providing sustenance for fifteen hundred cavalry and thirty thousand hoplites, to-day barely supports a thousand warriors.” In the assemblies of four thousand, there were scarcely to be seen forty Spartans; moreover, inequality of conditions grew as the people decreased in number.
Gold and silver currency had for a long time ceased to be proscribed and the disinterestedness of the Lacedæmonians to be extolled. Numerous examples of their venality were known; Eurybiades had been bought by Themistocles, Plistoanax and Cleandridas by Pericles, Leotychides by the Aleuadæ, the admiral and captains of the fleet by Tissaphernes. The kings, the senators, the ephors, all had repeatedly received bribes, and Gylippus, the liberator of Syracuse, who had been charged to carry to Sparta the plunder of Athens, kept back for his own use thirty talents [£6000 or $30,000]. Hence the remark of an interlocutor in the Alcibiades: “There is more gold and silver in Lacedæmonia than in all the rest of Greece; money flows to it from all parts and once there remains; the country is like a lion’s cave, one sees the footprints of those who enter, but of footsteps leaving there is no trace.” The commanders who returned from ports in Asia brought with them great wealth, and more than that a taste for luxury and ease, in a word, corruption; every one plunged into wild extravagance and the vices engendered by the possession of riches.
[Sidenote: [405-240 B.C.]]
After the Peloponnesian War, the ephor Epitadeus had passed a law authorising citizens to dispose of their property and land. The effects of this rhetra were so prompt to appear that Aristotle was given cause to write: “The land has passed into the hands of a few.” In the time of Agis IV the entire territory was owned by a hundred Spartans. Thus the government had become more and more oligarchical. All the national affairs were carried on by the ephors and the senate, even the general assembly was rarely consulted, and in consequence the rulers, being few in number, were all the more jealous of the privileges of their station and less disposed to suffer them to be curtailed. To open their ranks, moreover, for the readmission of families that poverty had driven forth would have been to expose themselves, by relinquishing the majority, to some territorial reform tending toward a fresh division of the immense domains now concentrated in the possession of a few. Public interest might point this way but private interest decidedly opposed it, and private interest won.
There resulted from this a violent hatred between the privileged and the lower classes; the latter being formed of Spartans degraded from their ranks, enfranchised helots, Laconians to whom had been accorded certain rights, and the children of Spartan fathers of the higher order and alien mothers. These classes were given denominations that kept them separate and distinct; there was doubtless also a wide difference in conditions. Below the Equals, who formed a restricted oligarchy, were the Inferiors, or Spartans, who were excluded from the public tables, and the neodamodes or helots enfranchised for services rendered the state, and lastly the periœci. Though they had no share in the actual government of their country these men estimated highly the value of their services to the state; and at different times many prominent figures, sons of Spartan fathers and helot mothers, such as Lysander, Gylippus, and Callicratidas had issued from this class. In a vindictive address against Lacedæmon the Thebans at Athens declared that the Spartans recruited their military governors from among men who had helot blood in their veins; and indeed many of these people had amassed competencies that gave them the ambition to leave the inferior station in which custom held them. When Cleomenes III promised liberty to those among the helots who could pay into the public treasury the sum of five minæ [£21 or $108], six thousand presented themselves.
Lacedæmon’s two royal houses, however, had been retained, and it should have been the function of these to maintain discipline in the state. But the newly-acquired wealth of Sparta, coupled with the growing authority of the ephors, appreciably diminished the power of the kings. Reduced to the rôle of hereditary generals these monarchs could never depart on an expedition without being accompanied by ten supervisors, who, under the name of councillors, in reality directed all the military operations. During the last years of the Peloponnesian War the decisive battles had been fought on sea, and the fleets were commanded, captives sold, cities ransomed and subsidies received from the Great King by men who were not of pure Spartan blood. Aristotle in his Politics calls the office of admiral among them “a second royalty.”
Lysander was not obeying the dictates of ambition when, as Sparta’s leading citizen, he undertook to reform for his own advantage the political system of the city. “He could not,” says Plutarch, “see without regret a city whose glory he had done so much to increase governed by kings who had no more ability to rule than he, so he formed the plan of depriving the reigning houses of their dignity to make it the common appanage of all the Heraclids.” The discovery of the plot of Cinadon [described later] revealed an abyss of hatred yawning beneath the social system of Sparta, and at the same time an alarming unanimity of feeling between the inferior classes, both free and slaves. A civil war could easily have resulted from the situation; but Sparta, with that vigilance which continued distrust arouses in all oligarchies, discovered and baffled all the plots that were formed against her.
Yet in spite of this hostility between the classes, in spite of many other difficulties, such as strife between the kings on the one hand and the senators and the ephors on the other, in which the kings were reduced almost to the condition of subjects, and rivalry between the kings themselves, the Spartan government, by reason of concentration of authority in a few hands, was powerful enough for action against other states. At home and abroad the ephors and the harmosts, those so-called conciliators, exercised a permanent dictatorship, maintaining garrisons at Megara, Ægina, Tanagra, Pharsalus, Heraclea in Trachinia, at the entrance of Thermopylæ; also Dionysius of Syracuse was Sparta’s ally. But this power, widespread as it was, was scarcely more than an influence, and an influence that was already on the wane, since the nation that lacks citizens has no resources within itself.
Sparta’s exactions offended those who still loved liberty and had not, to console them for its loss, the advantages offered by Athens to her subjects--extensive commerce, and the splendour of public festivals, of arts and of poetry. Sparta, equally grasping and more oppressive, robbed her subjects of everything. She levied on them an annual tribute of one thousand talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000] which vanished in Lacedæmon never to be seen again, and those who had furnished her with troops, like the Achæans and Arcadians, or with vessels, like the Corinthians, or auxiliaries, like the Thebans, received nothing in return.
The weight of this heavy Dorian rule began shortly to be felt, and many regretted the Athenian supremacy that was kindly even in its excesses. That the Greeks from the coasts of Thrace or Asia, those people who had never known how to say “No,” should tremble at sight of a Spartan mantle or wand of office, was in no way remarkable, since they had been accustomed to obey. Not that a double servitude, that of the oligarchs, friends of Lysander, and that of the Lacedæmonian harmosts was not a great burden to bear, even for them. But Sparta must not count on such docility in the mother-country. She had not hesitated to speak as sovereign in the matter of the Athenian exiles, nor to make decrees, as sole authority, for all Greece. We have seen how Thebes responded.
Thebes, a continental power, had long aspired to play in central Greece the part played by Sparta in the Peloponnesus. Between this state and Athens there might be jealousy, but not necessarily a clash of interests as in her relations with Lacedæmonia. In the intoxication of victory Sparta had believed prudence no longer necessary, and, incensed that the Thebans should have taken at Decelea the tithe belonging to Apollo, had scornfully rejected their claims to a share in the spoils and treasures brought back by Lysander, fourteen hundred and seventy talents, the remainder of the advances made by Cyrus. Corinth, no better received, made common cause with Thebes, and this formed another ground of complaint to Sparta against that state. The Argives, in a discussion relative to the fixing of boundaries, maintained their reasons to be superior to those of their adversaries. “He who is strongest with this argument,” said Lysander, drawing his sword, “reasons best about boundary limits.” A Megarian, in conference, spoke in a very loud voice. “My friend,” said Lysander, addressing him, “your words need a city to make them good.” Still more unceremoniously Sparta dealt with the Eleans, as we shall see later.
To the imperious demands of the Spartan government were added individual acts of violence, which are often more odious because a single victim, even though obscure, excites more pity than a whole people bowed under defeat; and there is less peril in attacking public liberty which is the property of all, than in endangering, by contempt of truth and right, the honour or the life of an individual.
A kind and hospitable man of Leuctra, Scedadus, received in his house one day two young Lacedæmonians, who were greatly struck with the beauty of their host’s two daughters. Returning from a voyage to Delphi, whither they had gone to consult the oracle, these two Lacedæmonians found the daughters alone in the house and violated them, after which they murdered them and threw their bodies into the well. When Scedadus returned next day his daughters did not, to his surprise, come forth to meet him, and his dog, howling plaintively, ran back and forth from his master to the well. Alarmed, Scedadus looked into the well, discovered the crime, and learned from his neighbours who were its perpetrators. He departed at once for Lacedæmon. In Argolis he fell in with a man as unfortunate as himself, whose son had fallen a victim to the brutality of a Spartan. This father had believed in Lacedæmonian justice, but had had none accorded him. Nevertheless Scedadus continued on his journey, and when he arrived in Sparta, told his story to the ephors, to the kings, to all the citizens he met, but no one would give it heed. Then wishing to call the divine anger down upon Sparta he invoked all the gods of heaven and earth, especially the furies of revenge, and put an end to his life. A tomb was later erected at Leuctra to his unfortunate daughters.
As against the few facts of this nature that have come to our knowledge how many have escaped us? We realise this more fully when we reflect on the hatred Sparta everywhere inspired even in the Peloponnesus.
The Arcadians and the Achæans served her from motives of fear alone; she was, they declared, a citadel placed upon their flank to keep guard over the whole peninsula. At Lacedæmon their sentiments were well known. On his return from an expedition in which a whole Spartan corps had been lost, in the Corinthian War which we shall treat of shortly, Agesilaus entered the towns only at night, leaving them at break of day, that his men might not witness the joy exhibited by the inhabitants at this disaster.[f]