Chapter LXII (5)

The oration of Lysias pro Polystrato is on several points
obscure: but we make out that Polystratus was one of the Four
Hundred who did not come to stand his trial of accountability,
and was therefore condemned in his absence. Severe accusations
were made against him, and he was falsely asserted to be
the cousin, whereas he was in reality only fellow-demot, of
Phrynichus (sects. 20, 24, 11). The defence explains his
non-appearance, by saying that he had been wounded at the battle
of Eretria, and that the trial took place immediately after the
deposition of the Four Hundred (sects. 14, 24). He was heavily
fined, and deprived of his citizenship (sects. 15, 33, 38). It
would appear that the fine was greater than his property could
discharge; accordingly this fine, remaining unpaid, would become
chargeable upon his sons after his death, and unless they could
pay it, they would come into the situation of insolvent public
debtors to the state, which would debar them from the exercise of
the rights of citizenship, so long as the debt remained unpaid.
But while Polystratus was alive, his sons were not liable to the
state for the payment of his fine; and _they_ therefore still
remained citizens, and in the full exercise of their rights,
though _he_ was disfranchised. They were three sons, all of
whom had served with credit as hoplites, and even as horsemen,
in Sicily and elsewhere. In the speech before us, one of them
prefers a petition to the dikastery, that the sentence passed
against his father may be mitigated; partly on the ground that
it was unmerited, being passed while his father was afraid to
stand forward in his own defence, partly as recompense for
distinguished military services of all the three sons. The speech
was delivered at a time later than the battle of Kynossêma, in
the autumn of this year (sect. 31), but not very long after the
overthrow of the Four Hundred, and certainly, I think, long
before the Thirty; so that the assertion of Taylor (Vit. Lysiæ,
p. 55) that _all_ the extant orations of Lysias bear date after
the Thirty, must be received with this exception.

Indistinctly as we make out the particular proceedings of the Athenian people at this restoration of the democracy, we know from Thucydidês that their prudence and moderation were exemplary. The eulogy, which he bestows in such emphatic terms upon their behavior at this juncture, is indeed doubly remarkable:[128] first, because it comes from an exile, not friendly to the democracy, and a strong admirer of Antiphon; next, because the juncture itself was one eminently trying to the popular morality, and likely to degenerate, by almost natural tendency, into excess of reactionary vengeance and persecution. The democracy was now one hundred years old, dating from Kleisthenês, and fifty years old, even dating from the final reforms of Ephialtês and Periklês; so that self-government and political equality were a part of the habitual sentiment of every man’s bosom, heightened in this case by the fact that Athens was not merely a democracy, but an imperial democracy, having dependencies abroad.[129] At a moment when, from unparalleled previous disasters, she is barely able to keep up the struggle against her foreign enemies, a small knot of her own wealthiest citizens, taking advantage of her weakness, contrive, by a tissue of fraud and force not less flagitious than skilfully combined, to concentrate in their own hands the powers of the state, and to tear from their countrymen the security against bad government, the sentiment of equal citizenship, and the long-established freedom of speech. Nor is this all: these conspirators not only plant an oligarchical sovereignty in the senate-house, but also sustain that sovereignty by inviting a foreign garrison from without, and by betraying Athens to her Peloponnesian enemies. Two more deadly injuries it is impossible to imagine; and from neither of them would Athens have escaped, if her foreign enemy had manifested reasonable alacrity. Considering the immense peril, the narrow escape, and the impaired condition in which Athens was left, notwithstanding her escape, we might well have expected in the people a violence of reactionary hostility such as every calm observer, while making allowance for the provocation, must nevertheless have condemned; and perhaps somewhat analogous to that exasperation which, under very similar circumstances, had caused the bloody massacres at Korkyra.[130] And when we find that this is exactly the occasion which Thucydidês, an observer rather less than impartial, selects to eulogize their good conduct and moderation, we are made deeply sensible of the good habits which their previous democracy must have implanted in them, and which now served as a corrective to the impulse of the actual moment. They had become familiar with the cementing force of a common sentiment; they had learned to hold sacred the inviolability of law and justice, even in respect to their worst enemy; and what was of not less moment, the frequency and freedom of political discussion had taught them not only to substitute the contentions of the tongue for those of the sword, but also to conceive their situation with its present and prospective liabilities, instead of being hurried away by blind retrospective vengeance against the past.

[128] This testimony of Thucydidês is amply sufficient to
refute the vague assertions in the Oration xxv, of Lysias
(Δήμου Καταλυσ. Ἀπολ. sects. 34, 35), about great enormities
now committed by the Athenians; though Mr. Mitford copies these
assertions as if they were real history, referring them to a time
four years afterwards (History of Greece, ch. xx, s. 1, vol. iv,
p. 327).

[129] Thucyd. viii, 68.

[130] See about the events in Korkyra, vol. vi, ch. 1, p. 283.

There are few contrasts in Grecian history more memorable or more instructive, than that between this oligarchical conspiracy, conducted by some of the ablest hands at Athens, and the democratical movement going on at the same time in Samos, among the Athenian armament and the Samian citizens. In the former, we have nothing but selfishness and personal ambition, from the beginning: first, a partnership to seize for their own advantage the powers of government; next, after this object has been accomplished, a breach among the partners, arising out of disappointment alike selfish. We find appeal made to nothing but the worst tendencies; either tricks to practise upon the credulity of the people, or extra-judicial murders to work upon their fear. In the latter, on the contrary, the sentiment invoked is that of common patriotism, and equal, public-minded sympathy. That which we read in Thucydidês,—when the soldiers of the armament and the Samian citizens, pledged themselves to each other by solemn oaths to uphold their democracy, to maintain harmony and good feeling with each other, to prosecute energetically the war against the Peloponnesians, and to remain at enmity with the oligarchical conspirators at Athens,—is a scene among the most dramatic and inspiriting which occurs in his history.[131] Moreover, we recognize at Samos the same absence of reactionary vengeance as at Athens, after the attack of the oligarchs, Athenian as well as Samian, has been repelled; although those oligarchs had begun by assassinating Hyperbolus and others. There is throughout this whole democratical movement at Samos a generous exaltation of common sentiment over personal, and at the same time an absence of ferocity against opponents, such as nothing except democracy ever inspired in the Grecian bosom.

[131] Thucyd. viii, 75.

It is, indeed, true that this was a special movement of generous enthusiasm, and that the details of a democratical government correspond to it but imperfectly. Neither in the life of an individual, nor in that of a people, does the ordinary and every-day movement appear at all worthy of those particular seasons in which a man is lifted above his own level and becomes capable of extreme devotion and heroism. Yet such emotions, though their complete predominance is never otherwise than transitory, have their foundation in veins of sentiment which are not even at other times wholly extinct, but count among the manifold forces tending to modify and improve, if they cannot govern, human action. Even their moments of transitory predominance leave a luminous track behind, and render the men who have passed through them more apt to conceive again the same generous impulse, though in fainter degree. It is one of the merits of Grecian democracy that it _did_ raise this feeling of equal and patriotic communion: sometimes, and on rare occasions, like the scene at Samos, with overwhelming intensity, so as to impassion an unanimous multitude; more frequently, in feebler tide, yet such as gave some chance to an honest and eloquent orator, of making successful appeal to public feeling against corruption or selfishness. If we follow the movements of Antiphon and his fellow-conspirators at Athens, contemporaneous with the democratical manifestations at Samos, we shall see that not only was no such generous impulse included in it, but the success of their scheme depended upon their being able to strike all common and active patriotism out of the Athenian bosom. Under the “cold shade” of their oligarchy—even if we suppose the absence of cruelty and rapacity, which would probably soon have become rife had their dominion lasted, as we shall presently learn from the history of the second oligarchy of Thirty—no sentiment would have been left to the Athenian multitude except fear, servility, or at best a tame and dumb sequacity to leaders whom they neither chose nor controlled. To those who regard different forms of government as distinguished from each other mainly by the feelings which each tends to inspire in magistrates as well as citizens, the contemporaneous scenes of Athens and Samos will suggest instructive comparisons between Grecian oligarchy and Grecian democracy.