READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

ATHENS . 478—401 B.C.

CHAPTER XII

THE FALL OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE

I

LAW AND POLITICS IN ATHENS

THE mutilation of the Hermae became a topic of public jesting in Athens within five years of its occurrence, but the baying of the citizen pack while on the scent, true or false, of the mutilators echoed long in the memories of men in fashionable circles of the community. The union of political clubs effected in 411 b.c. had given way under the strain of cross-purposes, but men of popular sympathies did not soon forget how fear and death had stalked in their midst while it had lasted. The rule of the Four Hundred had cleft the aristocracy in twain, and its misdeeds hung like mill-stones on the necks even of those aristocrats who had done most to destroy it. The very existence of the Five Thousand had signified degradation for thousands of Athenians who in 410 b.c. obtained the capacity to avenge it; and they showed their resent­ment by depriving the soldiers who had remained in Athens under the Four Hundred of the right to speak in assembly or sit on the Council.

The disintegration of the body politic had proceeded so far that extraordinary measures were needed to check it. The state resorted to the methods of secret associations—the pledging of each member individually by a solemn oath. All citizens vowed to uphold democracy, and to treat as foreign enemies any who thenceforward should serve an undemocratic government, slaying them if they got the chance, rewarding the slayers as tyrannicides were rewarded. To legislate that, in the case of political opponents, killing was no murder was thought necessary to overawe future revolutionists, but for democrats themselves fuller knowledge of the constitution which they were pledged to uphold was found desirable. In view of the recklessness with which this had been flouted and altered of late, one of the first steps taken after the restoration was to have the laws, as emended and completed, published in enforceable form. The registrars (anagrapheis) to whom the task was entrusted seem to have had little energy or authority. They simply inscribed on stone slabs the laws in sections as instructed by the people—Draco’s ordinance on homicide in whole or part, the Cleisthenean statute concerning the Council of Five Hundred, the rules governing grants of maintenance in the prytaneum, etc. For six years they dilly-dallied at their task, unable of themselves to complete the codification and deprived, by other cares, of the sustained interest of the people.

Notwithstanding these measures the demos felt that the price of safety was unrelenting vigilance. The sole guardian of the laws was now the popular courts; and so widespread was the feeling that ‘aristocrats’ were at heart traitors, and so manifest the inability of the treasury to furnish jurors’ allowances unless it were replenished by confiscations, that these tribunals gave ear to all kinds of charges against men of prominence and property. The legal system of Athens encouraged delation. It put the responsibility upon private individuals not only to seek legal redress for their own wrongs, but to initiate proceedings for the punishment of all who in any wav seemed remiss in the per­formance of their public duties. Where the community was so small and privacy so limited, the consequences were, not so much collusions to foil justice, as an excess of litigiousness. Since, too, everyone was required to plead his own case, persons who made a profession of suit-bringing had a decided advantage in the courts; and this was only partially compensated by the practice of litigants to deliver speeches written for them by professional speech-writers.

In the administration of Athenian justice politicians, sycophants, and men of letters played a role that accords little with modern conceptions. Judges and jurists in the strict sense of these terms there were none. Magistrates with only the average citizen’s knowledge of the law (which was, however, far from inconsiderable) decided the admissibility of cases and conducted proceedings in court; and the verdicts emanated from large bodies of men tolerably proficient but unspecialized in law. The law consisted of two elements—the code of ‘Draco and Solon,’ and the decrees of the Council and Assembly. The latter had been multiplied under the democracy. They were easier of enactment than new laws, and the authority which enacted them could amend or cancel them without ceremony. Constitutionally they could neither contradict nor duplicate laws, but they could enter in to cover cases, such as the creation of a new office or the formu­lation of a general rule, not dealt with by laws; and, in the absence of any public authority obligated and interested to look after the rights of the code, they tended steadily to trespass on its legi­timate territory. The code consisted of a collection of statutes of varying dates and sources, couched in language that at times was shot with archaic names and phrases—statutes by the terms of which, in case acts of a specified kind were committed, penalties were imposed and the rules of procedure to be followed were indicated. The acts, whether treated individually, or grouped and sub-grouped according to their character under comprehensive statutes, were described in simple concrete language; and both they and their groupings reflected actual experience and testing. The statutes were arranged under the heads of the public authorities (first the Council—after 403 B.c. at least—then the magistrates generally and then the magistrates individually beginning with the archons) for the guidance of which they were in fact the official instructions. The recognition of wrongs, both public and private, was made with fulness of detail rather than through the application of general principles, with acuteness and clarity rather than with system; and the indications of procedure were at times casual and incomplete (set practice being taken for granted), at times minutely specific. The underlying rule was that officials should handle cases that arose out of their executive functions, but this was crossed by the allocation of types of cases to magistrates who, like the euthyni, thesmothetae, eisagogeis, and Thirty, had no executive duties whatsoever; and it was subordinated to the democratic requirement that, except in certain carefully defined instances (fines of 500 drachmae or less imposed by the Council, the punishment of criminals caught in the act, charges involving sums under ten drachmae, the reference of private disputes to an agreed private arbitrator), the people itself, as represented, in case of homicide by the Areopagus or one of its subsidiaries, in other cases by the jury-courts, and exceptionally by the Assembly, should render the actual judgment.

The jury courts at Athens were so empanelled (by the drawing by lot of a large group locally distributed) that the justice emanating from them was the justice that animated at the moment the Athenian people. I he unlikeness in deciding like cases which is the essence of injustice must, in these circumstances, have vitiated legal decisions if a national familiarity with law had not been cultivated and sustained by the democratic judicial system. It also served to steady the action of the courts that, as a result of discussions carried on for two centuries, citizens had come to possess a valuable common stock of juridical ideas. Except for the uniqueness of their legal education, equity must have broken with strict law altogether. In the administration of justice there was little chance to bring in the past to correct the animus of the present. For, though both in public and private suits the complaint and, if there was one, the demurrer were put in writing by the magistrate who entered the case, the pleadings, including the evidence, were as yet presented orally, and the practice was still in its infancy for professional speech-writers to issue their speeches in permanent form. Neither, then, in legal records nor in the training, learning, and experience of those who held court was there much hope of previous decisions making themselves felt in determining verdicts. Indeed, the jurors were under oath to give their judgments (with due regard to laws and decrees and, these failing, to their own sense of right) purely on the merits of the actual case. Precedents had no legal standing in Attic courts. They could not be invoked authoritatively to restrain the predatory instincts of the jurors when the Athenian people, as in 410—405 b.c., had become embittered against its citizens of wealth and standing by injury, suspicion and misery.

The consequences were, accordingly, deplorable. A set of acrid politicians and sycophants, headed by Epigenes, Demophantus, and Cleigenes, encompassed the exile, disfranchisement, or judicial murder of many persons. Others they blackmailed by threats of indictment. Not only did the practice arise of buying off prosecutors, but worried holders of property or office took pettifoggers into their employ on the theory that it takes a thief to catch a thief; and Anytus, who showed himself later to be a good citizen, having detected a weakness in the organization of the jury courts, disclosed a possibility of judicial corruption by bribing in wholesale fashion the panel before which he was hauled for failure to rescue Pylos. Thus many Athenians suffered total or partial loss of civil rights. The shrinkage in the volume of trade and the loss of agricultural values affected holders of public franchises and leases as well as those engaged in private business, so that the ranks of the unfortunate who had suffered capitis deminutio were swollen by state-debtors and their bondsmen who were unable to make their payments when due. Novel kinds of disabilities were devised—exclusion from the agora, or from the Hellespont, or from Ionia.

This was the Athens from which Euripides and Agathon departed to enjoy the bounty and grace of the court of Archelaus of Macedon; in which Sophocles and Aristophanes remained, sure of intelligent appreciation of their matchless artistry. It was in this Athens that Plato became of age to consider the plan and purpose of his life, and of it he was probably thinking when long afterwards he wrote that there was in it ‘but a very small remnant of honest followers of wisdom.’ These, he thought, ‘might be compared to a man who has fallen among wild beasts: he will not be one of them but he is too unaided to make head against them; and before he can do any good to society or his friends, he will be overwhelmed and perish miserably. When he considers this he will resolve to keep still, and to mind his own business; as it were standing aside under a wall in a storm of dust and hurricane of driving wind.’ If he were of Plato’s mind but not an honest follower of wisdom, he might await his chance to introduce the Spartans in order with their assistance to play the wild beast in turn.

II.       

THE DICTATORSHIP OF ALCIBIADES

In the autumn of 407 b.c. Alcibiades, now officially commander-in-chief of the Athenian forces, set out for the scene of operations with a fleet of 100 ships and an army of 1500 hoplites and 150 horsemen. He took with him extravagant hopes, bitter hatred, profound misgivings. His past and his personality made his place in the Athens we have described altogether dependent upon what some feared most—the success with which he should handle the military situation. His task, as the Athenians envisaged it during this summer of reunion and relaxation, was to continue the reconquest of the rebels. But the problem had changed meanwhile. Sparta was once more in possession of a naval force (70 ships) which, when concentrated at Ephesus, was strong enough to distract the main Athenian fleet from the consecutive isolation and leaguer of individual cities; and what was even more important, Sparta had at length found a leader equal to the complications of combined Peloponnesian-Persian warfare.

The nauarch chosen for 408—7 b.c., Lysander, son of Aristocritus, realized that the factors which were now decisive in the war were, not Sparta and its continental allies, but Persia and the Greek communities won or to be won from Athens. So he set himself studiously to win the favour of Cyrus; and he was enough of the soldier to attract, enough of the courtier to please, and enough of the statesman to impress, the gallant young Persian prince. Tissaphernes pleaded with his new overlord not to make the greatest Greek land power supreme on the sea also; but Cyrus had come to Asia Minor to crush the Athenians at all costs. He gave Lysander sufficient money to increase to 90 ships the fleet he had concentrated in Ephesus, to pay to his crews all their arrears of wages, and to make service with Sparta thenceforth distinctly more lucrative than service with Athens. Thus subsidized, Lysander got in touch with suitable persons in the ‘liberated’ cities, through whom he enhanced his personal in­fluence and converted his money into ships, supplies and sailors.

Confronted with this development, Alcibiades had to pass on from Andros before he had mastered the revolt which had occurred there. But on his arrival at Samos he could do nothing. And in the following spring the situation was unchanged, except that his crews were weaker through desertions and those of Lysander stronger in discipline and morale. Yet he brought his fleet to Notium, whence it controlled the passage in and out of Ephesus; while Thrasybulus proceeded with a subsidiary squadron to invest Phocaea. Chafing at his enforced inactivity, which was undermining his reputation at home, Alcibiades left Notium, taking with him his land forces alone, and associated himself with the operations of Thrasybulus, for the success of which his hoplites were probably essential. This was sound strategy. But he had left the fleet in wrong hands. His lieutenant, Antiochus, disobeyed orders; and provoking an engagement, in which his ships entered action piecemeal, he was beaten and lost 15 vessels (March 406 b.c.). Alcibiades hurried to Samos, whither the Athenian ships had withdrawn, and again offered battle. But Lysander had nothing to gain by precipitancy.

The Athenians profited by this vicarious defeat of Alcibiades to rid themselves of the shadow of tyranny which his super-eminent figure was casting upon their city. From every quarter assailants rose against him. He had handed over,’ so a spokesman from the field said, ‘the duties of commander to men who won his confidence merely by drinking deep and reeling off sailors’ yarns, in order that he himself might be free to cruise about collecting moneys and committing excesses of drunkenness and revelry with courtezans of Abydos and Ionia.’ It was the eve of the annual elections for 406—5 b.c. The campaign of vituperation succeeded. Alcibiades was not among the ten chosen to be generals. On his return to Athens in the heyday of success in 407 b.c. he had feared for his life. To return now would have been suicide; but since his treatment at home undermined com­pletely his military authority, to remain with the fleet was equally impossible. Hence he took a trireme and went quietly off to Thrace where he had acquired castles, in view of some such contingency, at Pactye and Bisanthe. The great war swept back and forth in his neighbourhood; but, feared and distrusted in Athens, Sparta, and Persia alike, the most brilliant man of action of his generation, whose judgment of public policies was as un­erring as his personal aims, methods, and conduct were wrong, found outlet for his restless energy only in waging private war on the ‘kingless’ Thracians. Had Athens been able to trust him he might have saved her Empire and destroyed her liberty.

III.     

ARGINUSAE AND THE TRIAL OF THE GENERALS

The Spartan who, from now on, was to take Alcibiades’ place in the centre of the stage had to leave it temporarily at about the same time as his discomfited rival (March 406 b.c.). His term as nauarch had ended long since and the Spartan system did not permit reappointment. The rule against iteration was devised to enable the home authorities to retain control of operations abroad, and Lysander was precisely the sort of person it envisaged; but its application to him now crossed the plans of others besides himself. It was disturbing to the partisans whom he was helping to power in the ‘liberated’ cities, and unintelligible to Cyrus. In his disappointment Lysander left nothing undone to embarrass his successor—a downright, old-fashioned, young Spartan named Callicratidas. Notably he returned to Cyrus the balances in his possession at the time, thus forcing Calli­cratidas to go at once to Sardes for money. There the new admiral was kept waiting so ignominiously in the prince’s antechamber that he left without an audience, confirmed in his feelings that the quarrels among the Greeks should be ended as speedily as possible with a view to putting the Persians again in their place; and in this spirit he went ahead with the war. Assembling fifty additional ships, which had been got ready in Rhodes (lately the scene of a concerted movement of population from the three ancient towns to a new city, which took the name and consolidated the resources of the island), Chios, and elsewhere, he shifted his base to Miletus, where he was more independent of Persia. Then, having brought his fleet up to the imposing total of 170 vessels, he proceeded to Lesbos, where he attacked Methymna and took it by storm. This brought the Athenians on the scene.

To take Alcibiades’ place Conon had come to Samos. He found the crews so impaired in quality and depleted in numbers that he put out of commission over one-third of the triremes and took the sea with only 70 ships. Athens was not in a position to do much to help him; for Agis had once again summoned the entire confederate army to Attica and had even tried to take the city by a night attack. Hence Conon made shift to support his fleet by plundering the enemy’s territory, using the sea (Callicratidas declared) in the absence of its lord like a skulking adulterer; but he could not leave Lesbos utterly in the lurch. Thus he encountered the Spartan fleet, which, cutting him off from his base at Samos, chased him into Mitylene, capturing 30 of his triremes and driving the rest ashore (June 406 b.c.). With the aid of the townsfolk Conon beat off the enemy’s assaults on the inner harbour, to which he retired when the outer proved untenable; but he was without resources against a blockade. His only hope was of getting help from Athens, to which he contrived to send news of his desperate situation; and to be of any use this must be both speedy and adequate. Callicratidas’ policy of a vigorous offensive seemed thus on the point of being crowned by success. So Cyrus had a change of heart and renewed his subsidies.

Athens was at length face to face with the danger at which it had shuddered in 413 b.c.; and now it had no reserve of money to fall back upon. Yet the people never faltered. Mad the multitude may have been and ungovernable, but it was superb in the resolution with which it faced a world in arms. A maximum levy on private income was, doubtless, imposed. The silver plate in the temples was converted into currency; from their statues of Victory gold coins were minted; and the credit of the state was drawn on in the form of token money of copper (June-July 406 b.c.). Triremes were not lacking; and to man them citizens and subjects, metics and slaves were impressed without regard to persons or status. By these revolutionary methods—for slave oarsmen were as abnormal in Athens as cavalry oarsmen or coins of gold or plated copper—within the space of thirty days, I io ships were got under way, and after they reached Samos over 40 others joined them. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that all Athens was on these vessels.

The battle that ensued (August 406 b.c.) took place at the Arginusae Islands, between Mitylene and the mainland. The fleet of Callicratidas was smaller—he had had to leave his lieutenant Eteonicus with 50 ships to watch Conon—but better trained and faster; and it was he who forced the fighting. The weather was unsettled and the wind came up strong from the north in the course of the day. The Spartans advanced in a single line but the plan they had formed of breaking through the enemy’s front and turning his flanks so as, by using their superior speed in getting about, to catch his ships sidewise, the Athenians frus­trated by arranging their triremes checker-board fashion in two lines. The brunt of the fighting fell on the wings, and there too the decision was reached. The death of Callicratidas—he fell overboard as his ship rammed an enemy—demoralized his left. His right the Athenians defeated; whereupon, when over 69 ships had been lost, the survivors fled, part to Phocaea and part to Chios. In a few hours Sparta had sent to an abhorred death five times as many Hellenic sailors as it itself had citizens.

The Athenians were led on this occasion by eight of the board of generals elected in succession to Alcibiades: Aristocrates, Diomedon, Pericles, Erasinides, Protomachus, Thrasyllus, Lysias, and Aristogenes, each of whom commanded a squadron of 15 ships in the action. Had they been able to act as one man at the moment of victory, the decision they reached, to proceed themselves to Mitylene to crush Eteonicus and detail trierarchs—among them Theramenes and Thrasybulus—to rescue survivors from the hulks of triremes still afloat (there were 12 of these; thirteen had already sunk), might perhaps have been executed. As it was, the sea became so rough before they were ready to undertake either task that no one could venture far from the Islands, whither unfortunately they had rowed without first picking up their shipwrecked comrades. Thus the casualties of the Athenians were doubled; and the squadron blockading Conon escaped to Chios, so that when reunited the Spartan fleet still comprised 100 ships.

There was no discounting the exploit of the Athenian sailors in winning again for Athens the mastery of the sea; and this the people recognized by giving to the slaves engaged liberty and  ‘Plataean’ citizenship as promised to them when they had enlisted. But it was felt that the generals had bungled badly in letting so many precious citizens drown and so many ships escape. So they deposed the entire eight of them, and concentrated the command of the fleet in the hands of Conon and two new generals. Two of the generals, Protomachus and Aristogenes, saw how the wind was blowing and went into exile. The other six returned and all eight were impeached. In the official report of the battle the generals had attributed to the storm the failure to rescue the survivors. This neither was nor seemed a wholly satisfactory excuse. It was to be foreseen that the clamour for victims, natural in the circumstances, would be directed against the trierarchs if it was not fixed on the generals. Hence Theramenes and Thrasybulus threw the weight of their political influence against their superior officers. Their thought was probably first and foremost to save themselves, i.e., their lives and their political future. Of the two Theramenes, in view of his past, had the more to fear.

The Council it was that inaugurated proceedings in such cases and the Assembly that passed judgment. On their first appearance before the people, though Theramenes held them to their own excuse, the violence of the storm, and denied its validity, imputing criminal negligence instead, they made a good im­pression, and at the end of the day the Council was instructed to bring in a motion at a later meeting specifying how they should be tried. The delay proved fatal. In the interval the Festival of Kinsmen (Apaturia) occurred (October, 406 b.c.), at which the relatives of the men who had perished appeared on this wonted occasion of family reunion and rejoicing clad in black with their heads shaven. They were prevailed upon by Theramenes to bring their mourning with them to the trial. The effect was over­whelming. The Council was stampeded into proposing that without further discussion the people decide by a single ballot the guilt or innocence of all eight defendants with death and confiscation of property as the penalty. Lashed to fury by a councillor named Callixenus, who acted throughout as the mouthpiece of the mob spirit, the Assembly forced the withdrawal of a protest of illegality that would have stayed action, rejected alternate procedures safeguarding the right, based unfortunately on a decree—that of a certain Cannonus—and not on a law, of the accused to further hearings and individual trials, and bullied the prytaneis (with the single exception of Socrates) into putting the iniquitous motion, thus affirming in fact, if not, as Xenophon reports, in so many words, that it was intolerable for the demos not to be permitted to do what it pleased. The motion being declared carried (the voting seems to have been close), the ballot thus authorized was taken and the verdict reached was guilty. It did not matter that those condemned had gained a victory that saved Athens from destruction in the greatest naval battle theretofore fought by Greeks against Greeks. Those who had braved the anger of the people were executed, among them Diomedon and Thrasyllus, than whom none had done more for the salvaging of democracy in Samos and Athens in 411 b.c.; and Pericles, son of Pericles and Aspasia. Their chief fault, perhaps, was to have been eight when one alone was needed.

IV.     

AEGOSPOTAMI

Cleophon seems not to have had a hand in this ‘act of violent injustice and illegality,’ by which the citizen ranks, closed temporarily by the naval crisis, were again rent into factions freshly embittered. Archedemus, the Blear-Eyed, and not he, was now (406—5 b.c.) the dispenser of the dole (diobelia); and at least for the moment he seems to have ousted Cleophon from the favour of the people. But what was needed for leadership was not their favour but their confidence, and the Athenians had lost confidence in all their leaders. But not in themselves. What they remembered was not the terror of June but the triumph of August. And in this respect Cleophon was a representative man. The Spartans had made Callicratidas admiral with the set purpose of freeing themselves of Athens in order to free themselves from Persia. They had failed to win release by battle; and, though not crushed as in 410 b.c., they could continue the war only as dependents of Persia. Rather than accept longer this humiliation they tried again to make peace, and again they offered Athens the only conditions possible—for them to give up Decelea and then for each to retain what it held. The situation on both sides was such as to command acceptance. For Athens had already staked its last drachma on the fleet which, though victorious at Arginusae, could not settle down for the recovery of any one of the lost allies because it had to keep plundering many in order to subsist; while the crews of Sparta’s ships, after having been forced to become agricultural labourers on the estates of the Chians in order to avoid starvation, were with difficulty prevented from massacring and looting their hosts when this resource ended. But the folly of the Athenians is explicable only on their own theory that those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad. Cleophon mounted the bema without laying aside his armour and persuaded them to reject the tender of peace unless the Spartans should ‘let go all the cities.’ Rather than do this the Spartans came to terms with the Persians.

What Cyrus requested was the reappointment of Lysander, and in this he had the support of all those in the Greek cities with whom this skilful organizer had done business in 407—6 b.c. A conference was held at Ephesus and a formal request was preferred for Lysander’s nomination. There were many in Sparta whom his inordinate ambition and the dubious policy that inspired his intrigues troubled; and among them was the new king, Pausanias, who in 408 B.C. succeeded his father Pleistoanax on the throne of the Agiadae. But the refusal of Athens left no alternative. To avoid the constitutional difficulty, yet achieve the desired object, Lysander was given the subordinate office of epistoleus and to it were transferred the powers of the nauarch.

He again made Ephesus his headquarters, and since Cyrus not only gave him money, but, on going to Media to attend his father on his death-bed, turned over to him the revenues of his pro­vince, he succeeded in a few months in doubling the number of his triremes and attracting to his service rowers in abundance, including many deserters from the enemy’s ships and terri­tories. Miletus he punished for its independent spirit by treacherously contriving the massacre of the adherents of the popular party and putting the government into the hands of a blood-stained subservient oligarchy. His plan of campaign, concerted with Cyrus, was to avoid fighting, and reduce the Athenians to extremities by attacking their empire at its most vulnerable points, taking pains that if driven to port it should be where he could get supplies. So he slipped away from Ephesus and took by storm a place on the Ceramic Gulf. Then, after a detour to Rhodes, he doubled back and followed the coast of Asia Minor to the Hellespont, which had probably been his objective from the start. He found it unguarded. Supported by an army that had been assembled at Abydos, he attacked and captured Lampsacus. There ensconced, he would intercept the Pontic grain-ships for the arrival of which Athens waited im­patiently, if he were not completely contained by the Athenian fleet.

The Athenians now had six generals, Conon, Adeimantus, Philocles, Menander, Tydeus, and Cephisodotus, of whom Conon alone, and possibly Menander, had the experience necessary for so responsible a position. Their best leaders, Theramenes and Thrasybulus, they did not trust. Alcibiades ‘the city loved and hated and wished to have again: it felt that in him it had reared a lion’s whelp and should humour it: it detested one whose quickness in doing his country harm contrasted with his sluggishness in helping it. And thus distracted by conflicting impressions it left him in Thrace. What the Athenians needed, Aristophanes told them in the Frogs (January 405 b.c.), was to cease employing scoundrels, forgive the victims of ‘Phrynichus’ wiles,’ and, discarding their silly airs of superiority and ex­clusiveness, admit to their civic family not the Arginusae slaves alone but all who were ready to fight with them in the naval war. But they estimated Aristophanes more highly as a poet than as a statesman. They were now too poor to compete with the enemy in the market of naval reserves by offers of wages. Yet they could not require all Athens to continue sitting on the rowers’ benches. Hence to deter the Greeks from serving with the enemy they authorized their generals, despite the protests of Adeimantus, to amputate the right hands of captured seamen. Philocles carried this policy to its logical conclusion by putting to death the crews of two enemy triremes he had taken. And so strong was the impression that Athens was invincible on the sea that during this summer the Athenian generals brought up the total of non­citizens in their service to more than 30,000.

They were engaged in an attack on Chios when they learned of Lysander’s presence in the Hellespont. Since the grain-supply of Athens was a life interest, they hurried with their entire fleet of 180 ships to safeguard it. On discovering the enemy’s position and purpose they brought their fleet to Aegospotami, and drew it up on the strand nearly opposite Lampsacus about five miles away. For four successive days they crossed the strait and found the Spartans in the harbour, in battle-order but unwilling to engage. Alcibiades, who knew from experience the craft and enterprise of Lysander and the thoroughness with which he had his fleet in hand, came down from his nearby castle and counselled the generals to withdraw their ships to Sestos, where supplies would be accessible and the danger of a surprise elimi­nated. But he was told to be gone, that they were in command and not he. They thought they had Lysander cornered. And in their eagerness not to let him go and their solicitude to keep the Straits open, misinterpreting his restraint as fear, they neglected the most elementary precautions. Every evening, on the with­drawal of the Athenians, Lysander had had them followed, and on the fifth day, on learning that they had disembarked as usual and had straggled inland for their food, he launched a swift attack (September 1,405), and caught the entire Beet, with the exception of Conon’s squadron, off its guard. Almost without a blow he captured 160 triremes and shortly afterwards he ‘collected’ most of their crews. As an act of bloody reprisals the 3000 Athenians among the prisoners were executed. Of the generals captured Adeimantus alone was spared. Conon made his escape with a few ships.

Thus with the suddenness and unexpectedness of a clap of thunder from a clear sky the great war was over.

The Delian confederacy was a voluntary association, the Athenian Empire a creation of force. The Empire was destroyed not by force majeure but by bad management. The issue of the Peloponnesian War was not predictable at the beginning. Nor was it a certainty at any time prior to Aegospotami. But after the disaster in Sicily the most that Athens could do was to stave off defeat. The failure of the demos to realize this made the contest from then on a gamble, in which Athens risked not only the remnants of its Empire but its very existence, Sparta fleets to which it contributed virtually nothing but the command. In 407 b.c. Persia became the real adversary of Athens. It was a formidable adversary not so much because of its inexhaustible supply of money—though without this it would have been negligible—nor yet because it disposed of the services of Sparta, indispensable though these were for cloaking its designs and confining the war to the sea: it was formidable because with these advantages it was able to mobilize the naval resources of the Aegean basin lost to Athens by revolt and unpopularity. By mismanagement of the war, due, as Thucydides takes pains to point out, to defects of leadership, Athens gave its allies a chance to revolt. They were predisposed to take this chance by the oppressiveness of Athenian government. Whether they would have taken it earlier if the policy of Athens in their regard had been conciliatory instead of authoritative is a matter of opinion. By failure to make peace, due fundamentally to the incapacity of the demos (and of other less censured body politics for that matter) to gauge the foreign situation at critical moments more wisely than the statesmen to whom it gave its confidence, Athens continued the war until defeat became total and irremediable. Defects of leadership are not a peculiarity of any one system of government; nor is democracy the only polity which has shown itself incapable of managing an empire. The profound significance of Aegospotami is that it divorced the cultural and political headship of Hellas.

V.      

THE SIEGE OF ATHENS

Two tasks confronted the victor. One—the creation of something to replace the fallen empire—will be considered elsewhere. The other was to liquidate the war with Athens itself. As a first step to a siege, which he considered inevitable, Lysander gave all Athenians scattered, settled, or serving abroad, the option of returning home at once or of suffering the fate of their fellow-citizens recently captured. Having every reason to take Lysander at his word, they did not hesitate, and the sea was quickly filled with shipping engaged in the transport to Athens, not of the supplies it needed, but of a population it could neither feed nor reject. Its most considerable element consisted of the colonists from Scione, Torone, Potidaea, Histiaea, Melos, Aegina, Lesbos, Naxos—men, women, and children, to make place for whom thousands of Greeks had been killed or enslaved.

After his escape from Aegospotami Conon went to Cyprus and entered into the service of Evagoras of Salamis, but he sent to Athens the dispatch boat Paralus with the appalling tidings. It was dark when it arrived at the Piraeus, and long afterwards one present on the occasion described how ‘a sound of wailing marked the passage of the news from man to man up between the Long Walls from the harbour to the city. At Athens that night none slept.’ The fate in store for them seemed to be the one they themselves had canonized for such occasions, the slaughter of adult males and the sale of women and children into slavery. This being so, they naturally decided to resist to the utmost; and to give effect to this decision they chose new generals, among them Eucrates, Nicias’ brother.

The enemy’s armies appeared first. The second Spartan king, Pausanias, levied the troops of the entire coalition (excepting those of Argos) and joined Agis, who moved forward from Decelea, in investing the city closely on the land side. Lysander’s fleet approached more deliberately, driving before it as into a net a school of fugitives and finally anchoring off the Piraeus, 150 ships strong. The city had no defence against the weapon employed for its reduction—starvation; yet it stood firm, hoping, like Nicias before Syracuse, for a miracle. Meanwhile it consolidated its ranks. By an act as rare as it was merited it bestowed its citizen­ship on the Samians en bloc because they alone of their allies (fearing the vengeance of their oligarchs) held out against the common enemy. It reduced the likelihood of betrayal and at the same time sought to effect an union sacreée by restoring full citizen­status to all the many who had lost it for any reason other than blood-guiltiness or treason.

The miracle was not forthcoming, only the terrible reality of starvation; and negotiations had to be opened. Athens offered to join the Spartan alliance if left in possession of its walls and land—a proposal which the ephors refused even to consider, requiring instead the tearing down of 2000 yards of each ‘leg’ of the Long Walls. But the Athenians regarded it as intolerable to be put thus permanently at the mercy of any superior land power, and imprisoned a Councillor, Archestratus by name, who urged acceptance. Cleophon, to whom dependence on Sparta signified the end of democracy and incidentally of his own political career, threatened to slay with his own hand anyone who mooted surrender and on his motion the people voted not to consider the matter. Cooler heads saw the unwisdom of slamming the door to thus definitely, and with their support I heramenes succeeded in having himself sent as an envoy to Lysander for the alleged purpose of sounding the Spartans further. His real object was to arrange with Lysander and the Athenian exiles in his train for the installation in Athens of a new government; and to reopen negotiations for the salvation of the city as soon as Athens was ready to see reason.

For three months he stayed away—detained against his will, according to outward appearances. Thus famine had full time to operate. Deaths became appallingly frequent. The union sacrée too broke down completely, if indeed it had ever come into being. The citizens fell apart into two distinct groups (each with a recognizable bifurcation into a right and left wing), the point of divergence being rather the form of government which submission to Sparta portended than the terms of submission themselves. To one group the abrogation of radical democracy, desired in differing degrees by Sparta and Lysander, was also desirable; and to make ground for it the oligarchic clubs, which had again got into touch with one another, set over themselves an invisible committee of five, styled ephors, with subordinates whose special mission was to organize the knights—now, as always, the part of the military establishment most amenable to ‘aristocratic’ intrigue. They made such headway, with starvation as their adjutant, in detaching men of moderation and men of no character from the democratic group that they won the Council for their purposes; and on being denounced by Cleophon as a nest of traitors, this body accepted a flimsy indictment brought against him and procured his condemnation by associating itself with the jurors designated to try the case.

Thus Cleophon paid for his mistakes with his life; and a politician who gambled as recklessly as he did with his country’s existence earned his fate. But those who profited by having him removed from their path had less human sympathy and less honesty and patriotism than he had; and for all their superior training, knowledge, and insight, they too, with one apparent exception, erred in their judgment of the political situation. The one exception was Theramenes, who by studying Sparta as well as Lysander, his fellows as well as his experiences, mapped out a course that harmonized his own ambitions and principles with the public welfare—and proceeded to his death. The time was one of too much violence and uncertainty even for cunning, intelligence, and moderation.

On his return from Lysander, Theramenes, with nine others, was sent to Sparta with full powers to conclude a peace. That meant virtually the acceptance of Sparta’s terms whatever they should prove to be. They were in fact harsher than those previously submitted—the dismantling of the Piraeus as well as the destruction of the Long Walls, the cession of all their cities (including Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros), the return of their exiles, and the surrender of all their triremes beyond a number to be determined by Lysander on the spot, who subsequently fixed it at twelve. These conditions were in reality not ungenerous; and when Sparta submitted them to the Congress of its allies they were opposed by the Thebans, Corinthians, and many others, who demanded the uprooting of the entire Athenian population; and it was the insistence of Sparta alone that saved Athens from this fate. It was, Sparta affirmed, intolerable that a community should be destroyed which had done so much for Greece during the Persian invasions. That she left out of consideration who should occupy Attica if not the Athenians is hardly likely. At any rate she arranged to add further strength to her league by concluding on her own account an alliance with Athens, the terms of which Theramenes and his associates also carried back with them—that Athens should accept the military leadership of Sparta and make contributions of men and money as required, being otherwise self governing as of old. The ambassadors were met on their return by an anxious multitude; and though some opposition developed, the people were too overjoyed to be relieved from their sufferings not to ratify the treaties as they stood. And so it happened that on the 16th of Munychion (April) 404 b.c. ‘Lysander sailed into the Piraeus, the exiles returned, and with much enthusiasm, to the music of flute-girls, the) began to demolish the walls, thinking that that day was the beginning of freedom for Greece.’

VI.     

THE OLIGARCHY IN ATHENS

Operations against Samos required the presence of Lysander before he had found time to arrange matters in Athens to his liking; but the men whom the peace restored both of their own volition and to please their patron joined with the clubs in the city that were confederated under ephors, and, with Theramenes and his partisans, to establish an oligarchy there. The most reckless and gifted of the exiles was Critias, the son of Callaeschrus. He had been an associate of Alcibiades, and, like him, he had been accused of complicity in the mutilation of the Hermae. Like him too he had consorted with Socrates, acquiring dexterity in argument rather than solidity of thinking. He had dabbled in literature and wrote prose and verse with equal facility—elegies and tragedies, orations and treatises on government and science. His course during the revolution of 411 b.c. fell short of treason, not because of the moderation of his views, but because of the rupture of the conspirators with Alcibiades; on the setting-up of the Five Thousand it was on his motion that Alcibiades’ enemy Phrynichus was attainted and Alcibiades himself recalled. On the restoration of democracy his leader either could not or did not protect him—an omission which Critias remembered later. In these circumstances a man with his past and connections—he belonged to the royal clan of the Codridae—was ‘as one who had fallen among wild beasts,’ to use the colourful language of his kinsman Plato, and he was exiled at the instigation of Cleophon. We next hear of him as fomenting a servile insurrection in Thessaly—an activity irreconcilable with his Athenian career, but not with his sophistic philosophy. He returned home infuriated at the canaille which had exiled him and ruined Athens; and he embraced the view, so agreeable to his lust for power, that the demos should be put down and kept down by the most merciless violence. Resolute and knowing his own mind, he forced his way into the management of the clubs and quickly became the real director of their activities.

He at first figured as a lieutenant of the peace-maker Theramenes, to whom naturally the task fell of inaugurating the ‘ancestral constitution’, alluded to doubtless, but not actually prescribed, in the treaty of alliance with Sparta, as the concomitant of autonomy. It was not easy to stamp out democracy in Athens. Even when the multitude was perishing from starvation, opposition on its behalf had developed to the acceptance of the peace; and significantly enough, it had centred in the military authorities, the generals and taxiarchs of the siege, respectable democrats like Strombichides, Eucrates, Dionysodorus and others. Theramenes, accordingly, judged it unwise to proceed with his task until the walls were cast down and the city completely isolated from the sea. The delay encouraged the friends of democracy to form a ‘conspiracy’ for its preservation, and as the weeks passed the danger grew that they would raise the people against the Council and seize control of affairs. Hence, when the work of demolition was finished, on an information laid by a certain Agoratus, the Council had the group of ‘seditious’ democrats arrested, and at a meeting of the people held at Munychia, they were formally impeached.

It was probably at this same meeting, held, as on the inaugura­tion of the Four Hundred seven years before, outside the walls of Athens, and in the presence of the foreign soldiers garrisoning the Piraeus, that the attack on democracy was pushed home. Nor was the seizure of the popular leaders the only act of intimidation practised. Lysander and a fleet had been sent for from Samos to be present on the occasion. Thus safeguarded, Dracontides introduced a motion to create a commission of Thirty to draft anew ‘the ancient constitution’ and govern the state meanwhile; and when Theramenes, making little of the clamour that ensued, ‘ordered’ the people to accept the proposal, the Spartan con­queror intervened to say that, since Athens had failed to demolish the walls within the specified time, it had broken the peace, and could escape the consequences only by changing its government. The Thirty (three from each tribe; ten nominated by Theramenes, ten by the ephors, and ten by those present) were thus constituted (summer 404 b.c., perhaps at the end of the official year 405—4). They were to be the instrument in Athens, corresponding to decarchies elsewhere by means of which Lysander planned to keep in his own hands the control of the ‘liberated’ world. The Thirty substituted new members for those Councillors on whom they could not depend and continued the rest in office for the coming year. To the Council thus recast and voting openly under their presidency they conferred jurisdiction in high political cases. They filled the magistracies with men of their own choosing, and they created a committee of Ten, with Charmides at its head, to act for them in the Piraeus, now virtually a separate city. They annulled the laws by which in 461 b.c. the power of the Areopagus w as destroyed and the authority of the courts extended; and they cancelled ambiguous provisions in Solon’s code. But they did not address themselves seriously to the task of constitution-making, on the completion of which their own power was to end.

Once in the saddle they fell to and cleansed the city of low politicians and sycophants, to the satisfaction of right-minded people generally; and, to strike at the root of professionalism in public life, they’ forbade anyone to teach the art of speaking—an interdict which was used to suppress criticism generally, notably in the case of Socrates. They also had the democratic leaders put to death. The task of maintaining the autocratic authority they had assumed the Thirty thought too much for the corps of 300 Floggers they' had organized. Hence against the judgment of Theramenes they used the good offices of Lysander to have Sparta put at their disposal a garrison of 700 Lacedaemonian troops. Its commander (harmost), Callibius, a Spartan, made the Acropolis his barracks. Even if the Thirty’ had not been his paymaster he was too definitely Lysander’s man not to support the oligarchy through thick and thin.

The stage was now set for Critias and the majority of the Thirty, which proved to be of his way’ of thinking, to carry out their programme of violence. They were not purely bloodthirsty and resentful: cruel from policy also, they struck down citizens whose sole offence was that they’ were qualified to become leaders of opposition. This was to treat as enemies men whom Theramenes and the moderates among the oligarchs regarded as actual or potential friends. And it raised squarely the issue, on which the opponents of democracy, now as in 411 b.c., were irrecon­cilably divided, whether the Thirty should rule tyrannically, or as the mandatory’ of a majority’ of citizens consisting of men qualified by property’ really’ to serve the state. It also brought to a head the struggle for power between Critias and Theramenes. Ousted from leadership in the Thirty by his more violent lieutenant, Theramenes looked to outside support. But Critias now held the whip-hand. He too conceded the necessity of surrounding the Thirty’ by’ a circle of citizen supporters; but he limited it, and with it citizenship, to 3000 trustworthy’ persons, of whom accordingly a catalogue was prepared. The clients of Theramenes were for the most part left outside. The next step was to disarm the dis­franchised; and by trickery and the aid of the garrison this was done. With the concurrence, doubtless, of the Council and the Three Thousand a fiendish law was passed enabling the Thirty to put to death on their own authority anyone not on the catalogue and to confiscate his property, the privileged being safeguarded by the right to a trial before the Council.

To passion for revenge and political calculation, fiscal necessity—the Spartan troops had to be paid—and private greed came to be added as motives for the massacre and spoliation of defenceless Athenians. Nor were the resident aliens spared. The richest among them were assigned for seizure by the Thirty personally, In general, the practice was adopted of entrusting the most odious arrests to men whom the oligarchy wished to compromise. Lysias was one of the metics singled out for death, but by bribing his captor he escaped. Socrates quietly ignored the order given him to arrest Leon of Salamis. In a few months the number of victims rose to 1500—among them individuals universally respected like the Leon just mentioned and Niceratus, Nicias’ son.

Against all this Theramenes protested. He could not doubt that he was taking his life in his hands; for he must have known that he would hardly be allowed twice to wreck a tyranny. But he believed that he could count on a majority of the Council. And so it proved. For the Five Hundred, before whom he was called to answer to the accusation of plotting to overthrow the government, were much more favourably impressed by the charges of ferocious folly he launched against Critias than by those of turncoat {cothurnus) and traitor preferred by Critias against him. But Critias did not allow them to acquit him. He brought armed men into the chamber, and, after striking Theramenes’ name off the list of the Three Thousand, he pronounced the death-sentence on him in the name of the Thirty. The Eleven executed it. The leader of the moderates died with a jest on his lips—‘a health’— of hemlock—To the gentle Critias.’ At the same time that they murdered Theramenes the Thirty purged the catalogue of all who had had a hand in the overthrow of the Four Hundred. There­after none but the privileged felt safe. Others fled from the city as opportunity offered, and the Thirty denied re-entry within the walls to all who left. The Piraeus became a place of refuge, but thither, as well as to their estates, the victims were followed, and the stream of fugitives was strengthened which flooded Thebes, Megara, Chalcis, Oropus and Argos with Athenians of every class and description.

Among those on whom the Thirty pronounced a decree of exile were Alcibiades and Thrasybulus. Others might live in Attica in the condition of Helots: for those put under the ban there was to be no asylum anywhere. To this end Sparta was found ready to collaborate with the government Lysander had established. It issued an order requiring under heavy penalties all the states in its Empire to hand over to the thirty the Athenian exiles in their territories. Realizing his danger, Alcibiades fled from his stronghold in Thrace and sought the hospitality of Pharnabazus. But he was too dangerous a man to be allowed to live; and, notwithstanding that he and his host had recently exchanged pledges, when Lysander asked for his life, the Persian satrap was unable to refuse (404 b.c.). The Greek cities had more courage. Argos naturally declined to deliver up its exiles; and, in notable contrast to its vindictiveness toward Athens a few months earlier, Thebes did likewise. It was accordingly possible for Thrasybulus to find safety there—and assistance.

VII.    

THE FALL OF THE OLIGARCHY

In the early winter (December) of 404 b.c. Thrasybulus led a force of seventy men across the Boeotian frontier into Attica and seized Phyle, an impregnable position on Mt Parnes. The Thirty put the entire Three Thousand in motion against him, and (the futility of storming the place being at once disclosed) they set about enclosing Phyle with a wall, meaning, afterwards, to let a small force and starvation do the rest. But a heavy fall of snow forced them to give up the work. The respite permitted reinforcements to reach Phyle, and Thrasybulus soon had so many men—700—that he had need to take to plundering the country. To prevent this the Thirty stationed between him and Acharnae a force consisting of the Spartan garrison and two cavalry corps, but Thrasybulus attacked them at dawn after a night march and routed them, slaying one-sixth of the Lacedaemonians in the pursuit.

The Thirty tried to corrupt Thrasybulus, but without success. They then took two steps indicating alarm. They selected Eleusis as a place of refuge in case Athens should become too hot for them. To prepare it for future occupation they moved from it its adult male population, and to bind the entire Three Thousand by complicity in atrocious crime they required them to pass sentence of death on the whole body. 'The act was impolitic as well as inhuman; for instead of uniting to themselves all their fellow citizens it alienated a considerable fraction of them completely. Their other step was to evacuate to the Piraeus all the non-privileged inhabitants of the city who had not yet departed of their own volition—a precipitate expulsion of more than 5000 persons which removed one military danger by creating another. It furnished to Thrasybulus an objective and the raw material for an army. During the night of the fourth day after the surprise at Acharnae he led his force, now increased to 1000, down from Phyle, and, entering the Piraeus, he took possession of Munychia. Critias at once marched from Athens to eject him, but though his soldiers were much more numerous, they were met as they advanced up the slope leading to the citadel by such a shower of missiles that the hoplites of Thrasybulus were able to throw them back with heavy’ losses, Critias himself and Charmides being among the fallen. The death of their leaders ended the rule of the Thirty, eight months only after its establishment (February 403 b.c.). The Three Thousand, or rather the ‘innocent’ among them, did not care to bear responsibility for others’ crimes now that an accounting seemed due. They allowed their rulers to retire to Eleusis and chose in their place a board of Ten, including Pheidon, one of the Thirty, and Rhinon.

But the fear of an immediate débâcle proved groundless. The Ten grasped the reins of government firmly, and, secure in the knowledge that in combating Thrasybulus they had Sparta behind them, they succeeded in getting the Three Thousand, despite some desertions, to form an united front for the defence of their privileges. Notwithstanding that leaders of moderate tendencies, notably Theramenists like Anytus, Archinus and Phormisius, had associated themselves with Thrasybulus, some of them even from the Phyle days, there was not only too much bad blood, but also too serious a divergence in political ideas, between the two major parties for an attempt at reconciliation to be successful. So all through the spring and well into the summer of 403 b.c. the ‘men of the Piraeus’ and the ‘men of the city’ waged desultory warfare, while simultaneously the Thirty from Eleusis struck for their own hand.

While the struggle remained indecisive, the Spartans had nothing to gain by interfering. Eventually, however, the men of the Piraeus got the upper hand. On the occupation of Munychia they had opened their ranks to aliens, many of whom joined them on the promise of being given equality with citizens (isoteleia). And after repulsing the Thirty they had time to make soldiers out of the citizen rabble they had found in the Piraeus. The Ten were long formidable because of their superiority in cavalry, but the men of the Piraeus, continuously reinforced by additions from withinand without Attica, gradually mastered the open country and finally closed in on the city and attacke d the walls. There was nothing left for the Ten—and the Thirty—but to apply to Sparta for assistance; and there seemed nothing for Sparta to do but grant it. Such at least was Lysander’s opinion. To him, as the emissaries from Athens represented, revolt against the oligarchy was rebellion against Sparta. So he had a loan of 100 talents made to the Ten and himself designated to raise an army for the suppression of the democratic rising in Athens. He made Eleusis his base of operations, and simultaneously his brother Libys, nauarch for the year, blockaded the Piraeus by sea with 40 triremes. Thrasybulus would have been quickly starved into submission had not unlooked-for help arrived.

For reasons discussed elsewhere the power of Lysander was overthrown in Sparta at this moment. The new board of ephors for 403—2 b.c., contained a majority hostile to him. King Pausanias, to his great satisfaction, was authorized to raise a confederate army and take personal charge of the situa­tion in Attica. The one thing certain was that he would not reinstate Lysander’s men. This did not satisfy Corinth and Thebes. What they now desired, in view of the might and mien of Sparta, was that Athens should escape from Spartan dictation, i.e. become an adjunct to Boeotia. They therefore refused to take part in Pausanias’ expedition. On his arrival in Attica the king incorporated Lysander’s army with his own. Overtures from the Thirty he rejected. With the less intransigent leaders of the Three Thousand, some of whom (Rhinon, for example) had been negotiating with the Piraeus on their own account, he established unofficial relations; and he used this means of organizing (under a committee of ten perhaps) a large part of the men of the city for a policy of reconciliation.

His first dealing had been with the men of the Piraeus, whom he had ordered on his arrival to disperse to their homes. When this request was ignored, he had sought to bring them to reason by threatening demonstrations, in the course of which he got involved more deeply than he intended and had to fight a serious battle in order to regain his prestige and bring this section of the Athenians to a proper realization of their position. Then matters came quickly to a head. Pausanias suggested terms of peace to the Athenian belligerents and forwarded to Sparta envoys from the Piraeus and spokesmen for his correspondents in the city to lay the proposals before his government. The Ten tried to tempt the Spartans into making a settlement more in the sense of Lysander’s programme by putting themselves unreservedly in the hands of the Lacedaemonians and demanding that their adversaries do likewise. But the Spartan authorities stuck to their course and left the decision with Pausanias and fifteen Spartans whom they sent to join him in Athens. The terms of the settlement thus arrived at could not have consulted better the interests of Athens if they had been drawn up by its most sagacious and patriotic statesmen. In general they provided for the reinstatement of everybody in home and lands, with the hard, but necessary, proviso that sales of moveable property effected during the disturbance should be valid even when it had come on the market through confiscation; a complete amnesty for all that had happened during the suspension of democratic government, except in the case of the Thirty, the Ten, the Eleven, and the Decarchy in the Piraeus, who were, however, to enjoy it too provided they gave an accounting for their acts before courts empanelled from property owners; and in the case of those in the city ‘who were afraid’, liberty to move to Eleusis, without loss of property, within a specified time after announcing their intention so to do, there to live as full-fledged citizens, free from Athenian control and interference.

VIII.   

THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF DEMOCRACY

The men of the Piraeus had gained the objects for which they were fighting—repatriation and democracy; and this they signalized by marching under arms into the city to offer sacrifices to Athena on the Acropolis. But they had had to swear, with the Lacedaemonians as witnesses, to lay aside all thoughts of revenge for the terrible wrongs they had sustained. Since, for reasons best known to himself, Pausanias marched his whole army off before their triumphal entry, their honour and discipline, and the resourcefulness and authority of their leaders, were put to a severe strain on this occasion and for some time thereafter. But the right of secession to Eleusis was a wholesome regulator. It lay within the possibilities that the division between Piraeus and city should be perpetuated in a schism between Athenians and Eleusinians which would give the Peloponnesians a bridgehead in Attica and neutralize effectively the power of the country. And this may have been in the back of Pausanias’ mind. But the leaders of both parties joined to avert this disaster. The Ten stood their ground and, on submitting their accounts, they were acquitted—one of them, Rhinon, being elected general thereafter. Archinus above all others was the political strategist who fashioned the block of moderates—democrats and Theramenists—that carried Athens safely through this trying time. To allay the fears for their personal safety that were inclining many of the Three Thousand to emigrate to Eleusis, he suddenly shortened the time allowed to would-be secessionists to hand in their names, thus, at one and the same time, reducing the emigration to Eleusis to less nocuous proportions and strengthening the party in Athens opposed to democratic radicalism. The thought uppermost in the mind of Thrasybulus immediately after the return was to reward the non-citizens who had fought under his command. So without waiting for a Council to be constituted he laid before the Assembly a bill drafted in the non-chauvinistic spirit of Aristophanes, bestowing the franchise upon all of them—foreigners, metics, slaves. In the enthusiasm of the moment it was carried, but Archinus, mobilizing against it two kinds of exclusiveness— that of the aristocrats against the baser sort and that of the democrats against sharing their privileges with aliens—had it quashed on the score of unconstitutionality. The time was too critical to warrant any controversial innovations in the basis of citizenship. It was, of course, well known that Sparta viewed with disfavour the scope of the Athenian franchise; and, quite apart from oligarchs on principle, there were many in Athens too who, fearing for their own property if the vote and the ballot were left with the urban proletariat now that its means of subsistence was impaired by the loss of sea-power, sympathized with the Spartan desire to see citizenship withdraw n from the elements most likely to work for the recovery of empire. But notwithstanding that Phormisius, one of the chief artificers of the return, sponsored a measure for restricting citizenship to land owners, thus dis­franchising 5000 Athenians, one quarter approximately of the total number, the people rejected it. Athens was set on remaining democratic, undivided and uncontaminated. It re-enacted the Periclean law of 451 b.c., and took account of the bereavements sustained by many families during the war and its calamitous aftermath, solely by confining the requirement, that both parents of an applicant for citizenship should be Athenians, to children born after the memorable archonship of Eucleides (403—2 b.c.).

A committee of Twenty (ten from each party perhaps) arranged for the selection of new Councillors and magistrates for the balance of the year, and for the election by the Attic municipalities of 500 nomothetae to take in hand a revision of the laws of Draco and Solon which uncomplete codification, loss of empire, and recent events necessitated. The Council organized and assisted the nomothetae, and a group of expert registrars (anagrapheis)—among them, as in 410—04 b.c., a certain Nicomachus—attended to the work of publication, which, complicated by the continuance of the legislative process, was spread over four years. Neither the resultant code, for which, as for all public documents from then on, the Ionic alphabet was used, nor the one it replaced has reached us except in disconnected fragments, so that we cannot say what changes in financial and military organization the imperial debacle entailed, apart from the disappearance of Hellenotamiae, Hellespontophylaces, Episcopi, Phourarchs, etc.

Otherwise the alterations discernible concern the administra­tion of justice and reform of law. Their tendency was to remedy abuses which had appeared in the last days of democracy. By leaving the panels of jurors unassigned to specified tribunals till the moment of opening court and assigning them then by lot, the bribing of dicasts was rendered much more difficult, and the same end was served by introducing dicasts (if this was not done earlier) in place of ephetae into all the criminal courts except the one in which the Areopagus tried cases of wilful murder. A way was opened for impeaching evidence on the score of perjury before the verdict was returned and the sentence executed—a reform long overdue. The amnesty was covered without invalidating titles and adjudicated rights by making the laws applicable to public offences only when they were committed after the restoration, yet recognizing all legal decisions reached in private suits under the earlier democracy. To relieve the courts of the burden of civil cases, if not altogether, at least as concerned the sifting of pleas and the amassing of evidence, a well-articulated system of public arbitration was devised, the work being divided between a board of Forty, chosen annually by lot, and individuals, also designated for specific suits by lot from among all citizens in the sixtieth year of their age. Evolution must replace revolution. So to make sure that the laws were always fresh in the memories of citizens, and to guard against the accumulation once more outside the code, in the form of decrees, of what were virtually laws, the opportunity was taken, then or later, to adapt the existing machinery for amending the laws so as to ensure their being overhauled annually with a view to revision if need be, at a meeting of the Assembly held each year on the 11th day of the first month. Certain fundamental ordinances were reaffirmed with emphasis—that laws should overrule decrees of the Council or Assembly; that, except when 6000 citizens voting secretly had so decided, no law should be enacted in regard to single individuals; that account should not be taken of ordinances (laws and decrees) not included in the code. This done, Athens set out again on the great democratic adventure with an up-to-date, flexible constitution.

For two years the new regime laboured. Eleusis, where the rump of the Thirty ruled, made war on Athens. It was not easy tor the democrats to let bygones be bygones; yet to do otherwise was to play into the hands of the Eleusinians, and, perhaps, of the Spartans. The leaders of the reconciliation had to exercise great patience, watchfulness, and mutual forbearance. It cannot be denied that they acquitted themselves with credit, and that the Athenians as a whole responded intelligently and patriotically to their leadership. The loan from Sparta was assumed as a public obligation notwithstanding that it had been recognized in the conventions as an obligation of the 3000 alone. Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty who stood his audit, was acquitted. Archinus took the lead in repressing vindictiveness. The validation of legal decisions in civil suits having left a loophole for sycophancy, he had an ordinance passed requiring the officers of the law to accept the amnesty as a bar to private actions contravening it; and he gave a salutary warning to the rancorous by having the Council condemn to death summarily’ the first citizen who violated his oath not to bear malice—an affirmation of revolutionarv power on the part of this body’ which, on being repeated in the unlike case of Lysimachus, led to the enactment of a law, or more properly to the re-enactment of an old law, annulling the authority of the Council to pronounce sentences of death, imprisonment, or fines exceeding 500 drachmae, without appeal to the courts.

Finally in 401—0 b.c. the chance came to close the account with the Thirty. They were drawn into a trap and put to death; whereupon the Eleusinians too were amnestied, and reunited with their fellow Athenians. Then, and then only, the Athenians voted their thanks to the men who had overthrown the oligarchy—crowns of wild olive and 1000 drachmae for a monument to the hundred odd citizens who had initiated the movement; citizenship to the metics who had accompanied them on their daring night march to the Piraeus; equality with citizens (isoteleia), including rights of intermarriage, to metics who joined in the fighting thereafter; and lesser privileges, nicely adjusted to individual services, to the other aliens, free and unfree, who had deserved well of the republic. Thus Archinus (for this was his work) made at least partial amends for thwarting Thrasybulus in 403 b.c. Athens was again an undivided commonwealth.

CHAPTER XIII