Chapter XXX: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PERICLES’ RECONCENTRATION POLICY

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

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

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

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

THE FIRST YEAR’S RAVAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES

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

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

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

(In the British Museum)]