Under such a state of facts, it is not surprising to learn that Pausanias encouraged solicitations for peace from Thrasybulus and the exiles, and that he granted them a truce to enable them to send envoys to Sparta. Along with these envoys went Kephisophon and Melitus, sent for the same purpose of entreating peace, by the party opposed to the Ten at Athens, under the sanction both of Pausanias and of the accompanying ephors. On the other hand, the Ten, finding themselves discountenanced by Pausanias, sent envoys of their own to outbid the others. They tendered themselves, their walls, and their city, to be dealt with as the Lacedæmonians chose; requiring that Thrasybulus, if he pretended to be the friend of Sparta, should make the same unqualified surrender of Peiræus and Munychia. All the three sets of envoys were heard before the ephors remaining at Sparta and the Lacedæmonian assembly; who took the best resolution which the case admitted, to bring to pass an amicable settlement between Athens and Peiræus, and to leave the terms to be fixed by fifteen commissioners, who were sent thither forthwith to sit in conjunction with Pausanias. This Board determined, that the exiles in Peiræus should be readmitted to Athens, that an accommodation should take place, and that no man should be molested for past acts, except the Thirty, the Eleven (who had been the instruments of all executions), and the Ten who had governed in Peiræus. But Eleusis was recognized as a government separate from Athens, and left, as it already was, in possession of the Thirty and their coadjutors, to serve as a refuge for all those who might feel their future safety compromised at Athens in consequence of their past conduct.[451]
As soon as these terms were proclaimed, accepted, and sworn to by all parties, Pausanias with all the Lacedæmonians evacuated Attica. Thrasybulus and the exiles marched up in solemn procession from Peiræus to Athens. Their first act was to go up to the acropolis, now relieved from its Lacedæmonian garrison, and there to offer sacrifice and thanksgiving. On descending from thence, a general assembly was held, in which—unanimously and without opposition, as it should seem—the democracy was restored. The government of the Ten, which could have no basis except the sword of the foreigner, disappeared as a matter of course; but Thrasybulus, while he strenuously enforced upon his comrades from Peiræus a full respect for the oaths which they had sworn, and an unreserved harmony with their newly acquired fellow-citizens, admonished the assembly emphatically as to the past events. “You city-men (he said), I advise you to take just measure of yourselves for the future; and to calculate fairly, what ground of superiority you have, so as to pretend to rule over us? Are you juster than we? Why the demos, though poorer than you, never at any time wronged you for purposes of plunder; while you, the wealthiest of all, have done many base deeds for the sake of gain. Since then you have no justice to boast of, are you superior to us on the score of courage? There cannot be a better trial, than the war which has just ended. Again, can you pretend to be superior in policy? you, who, having a fortified city, an armed force, plenty of money, and the Peloponnesians for your allies, have been overcome by men who had nothing of the kind to aid them? Can you boast of your hold over the Lacedæmonians? Why, they have just handed you over, like a vicious dog with a clog tied to him, to the very demos whom you have wronged, and are now gone out of the country. But you have no cause to be uneasy for the future. I adjure you, my friends from Peiræus, in no point to violate the oaths which we have just sworn. Show, in addition to your other glorious exploits, that you are honest and true to your engagements.”[452]
The archons, the senate of Five Hundred, the public assembly, and the dikasteries, appear to have been now revived, as they had stood in the democracy prior to the capture of the city by Lysander. This important restoration seems to have taken place some time in the spring of 403 B.C., though we cannot exactly make out in what month. The first archon now drawn was Eukleidês, who gave his name to this memorable year; a year never afterwards forgotten by Athenians.
Eleusis was at this time, and pursuant to the late convention, a city independent and separate from Athens, under the government of the Thirty, and comprising their warmest partisans. It was not likely that this separation would last; but the Thirty were themselves the parties to give cause for its termination. They were getting together a mercenary force at Eleusis, when the whole force of Athens was marched to forestall their designs. The generals at Eleusis came forth to demand a conference, but were seized and put to death; the Thirty themselves, and a few of the most obnoxious individuals, fled out of Attica; while the rest of the Eleusinian occupants were persuaded by their friends from Athens to come to an equal and honorable accommodation. Again Eleusis became incorporated in the same community with Athens, oaths of mutual amnesty and harmony being sworn by every one.[453]
We have now passed that short, but bitter and sanguinary interval, occupied by the Thirty, which succeeded so immediately upon the extinction of the empire and independence of Athens as to leave no opportunity for pause or reflection. A few words respecting the rise and fall of that empire are now required, summing up as it were the political moral of the events recorded in my last two volumes, between 477 and 405 B.C.
I related, in the forty-fifth chapter, the steps by which Athens first acquired her empire, raised it to its maximum, including both maritime and inland dominion, then lost the inland portion of it; which loss was ratified by the Thirty Years Truce concluded with Sparta and the Peloponnesian confederacy in 445 B.C. Her maritime empire was based upon the confederacy of Delos, formed by the islands in the Ægean and the towns on the seaboard immediately after the battles of Platæa and Mykalê, for the purpose not merely of expelling the Persians from the Ægean, but of keeping them away permanently. To the accomplishment of this important object, Sparta was altogether inadequate; nor would it ever have been accomplished, if Athens had not displayed a combination of military energy, naval discipline, power of organization, and honorable devotion to a great Pan-Hellenic purpose, such as had never been witnessed in Grecian history.
The confederacy of Delos was formed by the free and spontaneous association of many different towns, all alike independent; towns which met in synod and deliberated by equal vote, took by their majority resolutions binding upon all, and chose Athens as their chief to enforce these resolutions, as well as to superintend generally the war against the common enemy. But it was, from the beginning, a compact which permanently bound each individual state to the remainder. None had liberty either to recede, or to withhold the contingent imposed by authority of the common synod, or to take any separate step inconsistent with its obligations to the confederacy. No union less stringent than this could have prevented the renewal of Persian ascendency in the Ægean. Seceding or disobedient states were thus treated as guilty of treason or revolt, which it was the duty of Athens, as chief, to repress. Her first repressions, against Naxos and other states, were undertaken in prosecution of this duty, in which if she had been wanting, the confederacy would have fallen to pieces, and the common enemy would have reappeared.
Now the only way by which the confederacy was saved from falling to pieces, was by being transformed into an Athenian empire. Such transformation, as Thucydidês plainly intimates,[454] did not arise from the ambition or deep-laid projects of Athens, but from the reluctance of the larger confederates to discharge the obligations imposed by the common synod, and from the unwarlike character of the confederates generally, which made them desirous to commute military service for money-payment, while Athens on her part was not less anxious to perform the service and obtain the money. By gradual and unforeseen stages, Athens thus passed from consulate to empire: in such manner that no one could point out the precise moment of time when the confederacy of Delos ceased, and when the empire began. Even the transfer of the common fund from Delos to Athens, which was the palpable manifestation of a change already realized, was not an act of high-handed injustice in the Athenians, but warranted by prudential views of the existing state of affairs, and even proposed by a leading member of the confederacy.[455]
But the Athenian empire came to include (between 460-446 B.C.) other cities, not parties to the confederacy of Delos. Athens had conquered her ancient enemy the island of Ægina, and had acquired supremacy over Megara, Bœotia, Phocis, and Lokris, and Achaia in Peloponnesus. The Megarians joined her to escape the oppression of their neighbor Corinth: her influence over Bœotia was acquired by allying herself with a democratical party in the Bœotian cities, against Sparta, who had been actively interfering to sustain the opposite party and to renovate the ascendency of Thebes. Athens was, for the time, successful in all these enterprises; but if we follow the details, we shall not find her more open to reproach on the score of aggressive tendencies than Sparta or Corinth. Her empire was now at its maximum; and had she been able to maintain it,—or even to keep possession of the Megarid separately, which gave her the means of barring out all invasions from Peloponnesus,—the future course of Grecian history would have been materially altered. But her empire on land did not rest upon the same footing as her empire at sea. The exiles in Megara and Bœotia, etc., and the anti-Athenian party generally in those places,—combined with the rashness of her general Tolmidês at Korôneia,—deprived her of all her land-dependencies near home, and even threatened her with the loss of Eubœa. The peace concluded in 445 B.C. left her with all her maritime and insular empire, including Eubœa, but with nothing more; while by the loss of Megara she was now open to invasion from Peloponnesus.
On this footing she remained at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war fourteen years afterwards. I have shown that that war did not arise, as has been so often asserted, from aggressive or ambitious schemes on the part of Athens, but that, on the contrary, the aggression was all on the side of her enemies; who were full of hopes that they could put her down with little delay; while she was not merely conservative and defensive, but even discouraged by the certainty of destructive invasion, and only dissuaded from concessions, alike imprudent and inglorious, by the extraordinary influence and resolute wisdom of Periklês. That great man comprehended well both the conditions and the limits of Athenian empire. Athens was now understood, especially since the revolt and reconquest of the powerful island of Samos in 440 B.C., by her subjects and enemies as well as by her own citizens, to be mistress of the sea. It was the care of Periklês to keep that belief within definite boundaries, and to prevent all waste of the force of the city in making new or distant acquisitions which could not be permanently maintained. But it was also his care to enforce upon his countrymen the lesson of maintaining their existing empire unimpaired, and shrinking from no effort requisite for that end. Though their whole empire was now staked upon the chances of a perilous war, he did not hesitate to promise them success, provided that they adhered to this conservative policy.
Following the events of the war, we shall find that Athens did adhere to it for the first seven years; years of suffering and trial, from the destructive annual invasion, the yet more destructive pestilence, and the revolt of Mitylênê, but years which still left her empire unimpaired, and the promises of Periklês in fair chance of being realized. In the seventh year of the war occurred the unexpected victory at Sphakteria and the capture of the Lacedæmonian prisoners. This placed in the hands of the Athenians a capital advantage, imparting to them prodigious confidence of future success, while their enemies were in a proportional degree disheartened. It was in this temper that they first departed from the conservative precept of Periklês, and attempted to recover (in 424 B.C.) both Megara and Bœotia. Had the great statesman been alive,[456] he might have turned this moment of superiority to better account, and might perhaps have contrived even to get possession of Megara—a point of unspeakable importance to Athens, since it protected her against invasion—in exchange for the Spartan captives. But the general feeling of confidence which then animated all parties at Athens, determined them in 424 B.C. to grasp at this and much more by force. They tried to reconquer both Megara and Bœotia: in the former they failed, though succeeding so far as to capture Nisæa; in the latter they not only failed, but suffered the disastrous defeat of Delium.
It was in the autumn of that same year 424 B.C., too, that Brasidas broke into their empire in Thrace, and robbed them of Akanthus, Stageira, and some other towns, including their most precious possession, Amphipolis. Again, it seems that the Athenians, partly from the discouragement caused by the disaster at Delium, partly from the ascendency of Nikias and the peace party, departed from the conservative policy of Periklês; not by ambitious over-action, but by inaction, omitting to do all that might have been done to arrest the progress of Brasidas. We must, however, never forget that their capital loss, Amphipolis, was owing altogether to the improvidence of their officers, and could not have been obviated even by Periklês.
But though that great man could not have prevented the loss, he would assuredly have deemed no efforts too great to recover it; and in this respect his policy was espoused by Kleon, in opposition to Nikias and the peace party. The latter thought it wise to make the truce for a year; which so utterly failed of its effect, that Nikias was obliged, even in the midst of it, to conduct an armament to Pallênê in order to preserve the empire against yet farther losses. Still, Nikias and his friends would hear of nothing but peace; and after the expedition of Kleon against Amphipolis in the ensuing year, which failed partly through his military incapacity, partly through the want of hearty concurrence in his political opponents, they concluded what is called the Peace of Nikias in the ensuing spring. In this, too, their calculations are not less signally falsified than in the previous truce: they stipulate that Amphipolis shall be restored, but it is as far from being restored as ever. To make the error still graver and more irreparable, Nikias, with the concurrence of Alkibiadês contracts the alliance with Sparta a few months after the peace, and gives up the captives, the possession of whom being the only hold which Athens as yet had upon the Spartans.
We thus have, during the four years succeeding the battle of Delium (424-420 B.C.), a series of departures from the conservative policy of Periklês; departures, not in the way of ambitious over-acquisition, but of languor and unwillingness to make efforts even for the recovery of capital losses. Those who see no defects in the foreign policy of the democracy except those of over-ambition and love of war, pursuant to the jest of Aristophanês, overlook altogether these opposite but serious blunders of Nikias and the peace party.
Next comes the ascendency of Alkibiadês, leading to the two years’ campaign in Peloponnesus in conjunction with Elis, Argos, and Mantineia, and ending in the complete reëstablishment of Lacedæmonian supremacy. Here was a diversion of Athenian force from its legitimate purpose of preserving or reëstablishing the empire, for inland projects which Periklês could never have approved. The island of Melos undoubtedly fell within his general conceptions of tenable empire for Athens. But we may regard it as certain that he would have recommended no new projects, exposing Athens to the reproach of injustice, so long as the lost legitimate possessions in Thrace remained unconquered.
We now come to the expedition against Syracuse. Down to that period, the empire of Athens, except the possessions in Thrace, remained undiminished, and her general power nearly as great as it had ever been since 445 B.C. That expedition was the one great and fatal departure from the Periklean policy, bringing upon Athens an amount of disaster from which she never recovered; and it was doubtless an error of over-ambition. Acquisitions in Sicily, even if made, lay out of the conditions of permanent empire for Athens; and however imposing the first effect of success might have been, they would only have disseminated her strength, multiplied her enemies, and weakened her in all quarters. But though the expedition itself was thus indisputably ill-advised, and therefore ought to count to the discredit of the public judgment at Athens, we are not to impute to that public an amount of blame in any way commensurate to the magnitude of the disaster, except in so far as they were guilty of unmeasured and unconquerable esteem for Nikias. Though Periklês would have strenuously opposed the project, yet he could not possibly have foreseen the enormous ruin in which it would end; nor could such ruin have been brought about by any man existing, save Nikias. Even when the people committed the aggravated imprudence of sending out the second expedition, Demosthenês doubtless assured them that he would speedily either take Syracuse or bring back both armaments, with a fair allowance for the losses inseparable from failure; and so he would have done, if the obstinacy of Nikias had permitted. In measuring therefore the extent of misjudgment fairly imputable to the Athenians for this ruinous undertaking, we must always recollect, that first the failure of the siege, next the ruin of the armament, did not arise from intrinsic difficulties in the case, but from the personal defects of the commander.
After the Syracusan disaster, there is no longer any question about adhering to, or departing from, the Periklean policy. Athens is like Patroklus in the Iliad, after Apollo has stunned him by a blow on the back and loosened his armor. Nothing but the slackness of her enemies allowed her time for a partial recovery, so as to make increased heroism a substitute for impaired force, even against doubled and tripled difficulties. And the years of struggle which she now went through are among the most glorious events in her history. These years present many misfortunes, but no serious misjudgment, not to mention one peculiarly honorable moment, after the overthrow of the Four Hundred. I have in the two preceding chapters examined into the blame imputed to the Athenians for not accepting the overtures of peace after the battle of Kyzikus, and for dismissing Alkibiadês after the battle of Notium. On both points their conduct has been shown to be justifiable. And after all, they were on the point of partially recovering themselves in 408 B.C., when the unexpected advent of Cyrus set the seal to their destiny.
The bloodshed after the recapture of Mitylênê and Skionê, and still more that which succeeded the capture of Melos, are disgraceful to the humanity of Athens, and stand in pointed contrast with the treatment of Samos when reconquered by Periklês. But they did not contribute sensibly to break down her power; though, being recollected with aversion after other incidents were forgotten, they are alluded to in later times as if they had caused the fall of the empire.[457]
I have thought it important to recall, in this short summary, the leading events of the seventy years preceding 405 B.C., in order that it may be understood to what degree Athens was politically or prudentially to blame for the great downfall which she then underwent. That downfall had one great cause—we may almost say, one single cause—the Sicilian expedition. The empire of Athens both was, and appeared to be, in exuberant strength when that expedition was sent forth; strength more than sufficient to bear up against all moderate faults or moderate misfortunes, such as no government ever long escapes. But the catastrophe of Syracuse was something overpassing in terrific calamity all Grecian experience and all power of foresight. It was like the Russian campaign of 1812 to the emperor Napoleon; though by no means imputable, in an equal degree, to vice in the original project. No Grecian power could bear up against such a death-wound, and the prolonged struggle of Athens after it is not the least wonderful part of the whole war.
Nothing in the political history of Greece is so remarkable as the Athenian empire; taking it as it stood in its completeness, from about 460-413 B.C., the date of the Syracusan catastrophe, or still more, from 460-421 B.C., the date when Brasidas made his conquests in Thrace. After the Syracusan catastrophe, the conditions of the empire were altogether changed; it was irretrievably broken up, though Athens still continued an energetic struggle to retain some of the fragments. But if we view it as it had stood before that event, during the period of its integrity, it is a sight marvellous to contemplate, and its working must be pronounced, in my judgment, to have been highly beneficial to the Grecian world. No Grecian state except Athens could have sufficed to organize such a system, or to hold in partial though regulated, continuous, and specific communion, so many little states, each animated with that force of political repulsion instinctive in the Grecian mind. This was a mighty task, worthy of Athens, and to which no state except Athens was competent. We have already seen in part, and we shall see still farther, how little qualified Sparta was to perform it, and we shall have occasion hereafter to notice a like fruitless essay on the part of Thebes.
As in regard to the democracy of Athens generally, so in regard to her empire, it has been customary with historians to take notice of little except the bad side. But my conviction is, and I have shown grounds for it, in chap. xlvii, that the empire of Athens was not harsh and oppressive, as it is commonly depicted. Under the circumstances of her dominion, at a time when the whole transit and commerce of the Ægean was under one maritime system, which excluded all irregular force; when Persian ships of war were kept out of the waters, and Persian tribute-officers away from the seaboard; when the disputes inevitable among so many little communities could be peaceably redressed by the mutual right of application to the tribunals at Athens, and when these tribunals were also such as to present to sufferers a refuge against wrongs done even by individual citizens of Athens herself, to use the expression of the oligarchical Phrynichus,[458] the condition of the maritime Greeks was materially better than it had been before, or than it will be seen to become afterwards. Her empire, if it did not inspire attachment, certainly provoked no antipathy, among the bulk of the citizens of the subject-communities, as is shown by the party-character of the revolts against her. If in her imperial character she exacted obedience, she also fulfilled duties and insured protection to a degree incomparably greater than was ever realized by Sparta. And even if she had been ever so much disposed to cramp the free play of mind and purpose among her subjects,—a disposition which is no way proved,—the very circumstances of her own democracy, with its open antithesis of political parties, universal liberty of speech, and manifold individual energy, would do much to prevent the accomplishment of such an end, and would act as a stimulus to the dependent communities, even without her own intention.
Without being insensible either to the faults or to the misdeeds of imperial Athens, I believe that her empire was a great comparative benefit, and its extinction a great loss, to her own subjects. But still more do I believe it to have been a good, looked at with reference to Pan-Hellenic interests. Its maintenance furnished the only possibility of keeping out foreign intervention, and leaving the destinies of Greece to depend upon native, spontaneous, untrammelled Grecian agencies. The downfall of the Athenian empire is the signal for the arms and corruption of Persia again to make themselves felt, and for the reënslavement of the Asiatic Greeks under her tribute-officers. What is still worse, it leaves the Grecian world in a state incapable of repelling any energetic foreign attack, and open to the overruling march of “the man of Macedon,” half a century afterwards. For such was the natural tendency of the Grecian world to political non-integration or disintegration, that the rise of the Athenian empire, incorporating so many states into one system, is to be regarded as a most extraordinary accident. Nothing but the genius, energy, discipline, and democracy of Athens, could have brought it about; nor even she, unless favored and pushed on by a very peculiar train of antecedent events. But having once got it, she might perfectly well have kept it; and, had she done so, the Hellenic world would have remained so organized as to be able to repel foreign intervention, either from Susa or from Pella. When we reflect how infinitely superior was the Hellenic mind to that of all surrounding nations and races; how completely its creative agency was stifled, as soon as it came under the Macedonian dictation; and how much more it might perhaps have achieved, if it had enjoyed another century or half-century of freedom, under the stimulating headship of the most progressive and most intellectual of all its separate communities, we shall look with double regret on the ruin of the Athenian empire, as accelerating, without remedy, the universal ruin of Grecian independence, political action, and mental grandeur.