during the years which had passed away since the great de-
feat of Tolmides. They knew also that, although in a single
instance the sting of a special injury had driven the Athenians
to pronounce a sentence of exclusion from her ports and
harbours, it was not to the interest of Athens to shut out the
products of inland states from the sea or to check the imports
which these states needed in return. Yet they could tell the
representatives of the central Peloponnesian cities that the
ascendency of Athens would deprive them of their markets
and cut them off from all foreign supplies. 1253 In short, now
that personal hatred had led them to abandon the principle
of non-interference on which they had so long insisted, they
felt that it would be foolish to stick at anything. It is pos-
sible that we may owe to the historian the contradictions
which may be found in some of their remarks. At least the
Corinthians could not have rated highly the intelligence of
their hearers, if they could assure them first that they stood
at an enormous advantage in respect both of numbers and
of military experience, 1254 and then warn them that Athens
was fully a match for the whole Peloponnesian confederacy,
and that against any smaller power her force would be over-
whelming, 1255
The rest of their speech was intended to
encourage them with convenient hopes and to quicken their
energies by wholesome terrors. The Delphian god had pro-
mised that if they went to war vigorously they would be
conquerors and that he himself would aid them with all his
might; 1256 and lastly they had a sacred mission to fulfil,
nothing less, namely, than the liberation of Hellas from an
all-embracing despotism. The dread of this supremacy is
the key-note of the speech: 1257 but the answer to these
terrible forebodings is furnished by the pithy remark of the
Athenian envoy that the allies of Athens had been worse off
before they were enrolled in the Delian league, than they were
now under her dominion, and that they would be worse off
again if they should pass under the still more real and search-

1254 Ib. i. 121, 2.

1255 Ib. i. 122, 3.

123 Thục. i. 120, 3. 1236 Thucydides, i. 118, 4, carefully guards himself against the conclusion that this answer was delivered at all. If it was given, it was not the first instance of a response extorted by political influence or bribery. See vol. i. pp. 275, 421, 491.

1257 Thuc. i. 120, 3. xây μéxpi σodov (the central Peloponnesian states) rò devov пpoedBev. They had practically nothing to fear at all.

CHAP.
I.

BOOK
III.

Beginning

of 431 B.C.

Efforts of the Spartans to

bring about the downfall of

Perikles.

ing despotism of Sparta.1258 It is possible that in the minds of the Corinthians there may have been a hope that another combined effort might inflict on the power of Athens a blow as serious in its effects as the defeat which had led to the evacuation of Boiotia. But if they felt this hope, they gave no expression to it. It would scarcely have suited their purpose to do so, for a reference to the downfall of Athenian empire by land would have pointed too clearly to the vastly different conditions of Athenian empire by sea. It was needless to say more. The spirit and the fears of the representatives had been excited to the necessary point; and the decree of the Spartan assembly was accepted by a large majority.

But neither the Spartans nor their allies were yet ready to go to war; and the time during which they were making ready for the struggle was further occupied in efforts to introduce disunion in the Athenian councils, and, if possible, to deprive them of their master-spirit, Perikles. These efforts were well seconded in Athens itself, for the old oligarchical temper was not so far extinct as to render the idea of Spartan hegemony intolerable to the Lakedaimonian party; and this party was not unnaturally animated by a vehement personal hatred of Perikles. No formal declaration of war had been yet sent to Athens. Indeed, it was never sent at all; but the Athenians must have been more or less fully informed of what had taken place at the last congress in Sparta, when the first blow was struck against the ascendency of the great Athenian leader. Perikles was an Alkmaionid; and the curse of Kylon, as the Spartans chose to say, still clave to that illustrious family.1259 This curse they now called on the Athenians to drive out: in other words, Perikles must be banished. The demand was met by the rejoinder that the Spartans must first drive out the curse which brooded over Tainaron for the murder of some Helots torn from the sanctuary of Poseidon, and more especially the curse which rested on them for the removal of Pausanias from the Brazen House of Athênê.1250 A second embassy insisted that the Athenians should raise the blockade of Potidaia, leave Aigina independent, and withdraw the decree of 1258 Thục. i. 77, 6–7. 1259 See vol. i. p. 233. 1260 See page 15.

I.

exclusion passed against the Megarians. To the last of these СНАР.
three requests the Athenians replied by specifying the
grounds on which the Megarians had been thus punished;1261
the other two they peremptorily refused. A third embassy
demanded briefly the autonomy of all Hellenes now included
in the Athenian confederacy: and on the receipt of this
sweeping demand, to which was added the expression of a
wish on the part of the Spartans for the maintenance of peace
on this one indispensable condition, a general assembly was
convened for the final reconsideration of the whole question.
The issue of the debate was determined by Perikles. To his
adherents the stress laid on the withdrawal of the Megarian
decree was perhaps no matter of surprise. They could
scarcely fail to know that the abandonment of the blockade
of Potidaia was a matter far more closely touching the
interests of Corinth and of the Peloponnesians generally; but
they knew also that the Spartans insisted on the less important
affairs of Megara as those on which they could most count on
the support of the Athenian oligarchs. This was a point of
which Perikles could take no notice; and in his speech he
simply expressed his unshaken conviction that the withdrawal
of the decree would not have the slightest effect on the
controversy, far less, as some supposed, that it would remove
all risk of war. The Spartans had persistently refused to
submit to arbitration, and even to look at facts as they really
were; and these demands were made merely in the temper of
a bully who wishes to learn how far he may go. Sparta was
at best no more than the equal of Athens, and the concession
of even the slightest demand from an equal not on the score
of justice but at his arbitrary fiat involved a subjection as
complete as if they surrendered everything at once.1262
was more befitting the dignity of Athens that they should
bear in mind the marked differences between the two great
Hellenic confederations. To the centralised empire of Athens
they could oppose only a number of units without any
cohesive power beyond that which was furnished by the
fancy or the desire of the moment. 1263 Depending for sup-
1261 See page 55.

1202 Thuc. i. 141, 1. See also Dr. Arnold's note on the passage.
1263 Ib. i. 141, 6.

It

BOOK
III.

Attica was

port almost wholly on the cultivation of their territories, they
had no great reserved funds without which long wars could
not be maintained. The establishment of a hostile settle-
ment on Attic ground might be threatened: 1264 but such a
settlement would probably suffer far greater harm than it
could ever inflict. To the Spartans moreover and to their
allies the lack of naval experience was a want which they
could not supply while Athens retained her present mastery
of the sea. The treasures of Olympia and Delphoi might
furnish means for hiring mercenaries: but Athenian subjects,
knowing that the imperial city could and would smite surely
and severely, would think twice before they suffered them-
selves to be tempted by the bait of larger pay. Lastly,
the Peloponnesians might invade Attica, and devastate
territories whose fertility and splendid cultivation were at
once the delight and the pride of their owners.
not an island, and to this risk they must remain liable; but
happily neither these lands nor their produce were essential
to their welfare. Athens from her colonies and allies could
obtain with ease more than all that she might need, while her
fleets would swoop down on the Peloponnesian coasts and
leave desolate whole districts whose devastation would mean
famine and death to their inhabitants. So clearly had Athens
in this respect the vantage that the counsel of Perikles to the
owners of the lands which lay between Athens and the
Megarian border would be to leave them stripped and bare
before a Spartan army could cross the isthmus, and thus to
teach their enemies that the loss of crops and of farm build-
ings would in no way affect the issue of the struggle. But
although he thus sought to encourage a confident and even a
fearless temper, Perikles was to the last careful that no pro-
vocation should come from Athens; and by his advice an
answer was given to the Spartan demands as moderate as it
was dignified. The Athenians were as fully justified by
Hellenic interpolitical law in excluding the Megarians from

1264 Five years later the Spartans founded Herakleia in Trachis to check the Thessa lians. Thuc. iii. 92. Megara itself was said to have been founded to repress the growth of Athens but the Roman colonies generally are familiar illustrations of this practice. Later on in the war the Athenians suffered severely from the establishment of a Spartan garrison in Dekeleia.

their ports, as were the Spartans in intrusting to the ephors the power of driving all strangers from Sparta at their will without assigning any reason for their decrees. If they would give up these Xenelasiai or expulsions of strangers, the decree against the Megarians should be withdrawn. The allies of Athens should also be left wholly free or autonomous, if they were in this condition at the time when the Thirty Years' Truce was made, and also if the Spartans would leave to their own allies generally the power of settling their internal affairs after their own inclinations; 1265 and lastly Athens was as ready now, as she had ever been, to refer the whole dispute to the judgement of arbiters approved by both the cities.

CHAP.
I.

tions of An

and

In the conduct of Perikles at this decisive crisis it is diffi- Prosecucult to determine whether we should admire most the axagoras, determined energy with which he prepared to meet a conflict Pheidias, assuredly terrible in its course even if it should be happy in Aspasia. its issue, or the generous and unselfish patriotism which could stir him to efforts thus sustained in spite of personal wrongs not easily to be forgotten. His own integrity was beyond attack; 1266 but he might be assailed through those

1263 We have already seen that Athens did not maintain democracies where the general opinion of a city went in another direction. See page 72. Her influence was, of course, thrown into the scale on the side of democracy. It would be absurd to suppose that it could be otherwise. But from the very force of the word it follows that the form of government which was most to her liking could be maintained only where it fell in with the desires of the main body of the people. This could very rarely, perhaps never, be said of Sparta; and it was obviously a monstrous iniquity that Sparta should retain the power of forcing one peculiar system on all cities of her alliance, while Athens should be debarred from exercising over her allies even that amount of authority, which, without interfering with their internal affairs, was absolutely necessary for keeping her confederation together at all.

1206 Plutarch in his Life of Perikles mentions a proposal made by Drakontides that the great statesman should be put upon his trial for embezzlement of public moneys, but he says nothing of the result of the trial or of its taking place at all. If he was brought before the Dikastery, he must have been acquitted; but Mr. Grote, Hist. Gr. vi. 141, urges very forcibly that Thucydides could not have ventured to speak as he has spoken of the incorruptibility of Perikles, if he knew that such a charge had been brought against him, and still more that the accusation is virtually set at nought by Aristophanes himself who tells us that Perikles precipitated the war with Sparta in order to escape being put upon his trial. The conduct of the Athenians in the case of Alkibiades is of itself proof that he would never have been allowed thus to escape like a cuttlefish by muddying the waters round him; and the whole history shows that neither Perikles nor the Megarian decree was in any way the cause of the war. Diodoros, xii. 38-40, gives quite another version in which he is represented as hurrying the Athenians into war by the advice of Alkibiades who, when Perikles spoke of the fears which he felt about his account of moneys shortly to be made to the people, suggested that he should devise some means for not making it at all. These conflicting versions prove with sufficient clearness that we are dealing simply with the gossip of the day; and, as it so happens, Aristophanes treats the notion that Perikles blew up the war' from such personal motives, as mere gossip which must be taken for what it may be worth. Peace, 614618.