George Grote

“ So long as the invading army was engaged in the Thriasian plain, the Athenians had some faint hope that it might—like Pleistoanax, 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. ”

“ Bound together by the strongest common feeling of active antipathy to Athens, the whole confederacy was full of hope and confidence for this immediate forward march,—so gratifying at once both to their hatred and to their love of plunder, by the hand of destruction laid upon the richest country in Greece,—and presenting a chance even of terminating the war at once, if the pride of the Athenians should be so intolerably stung as to provoke them to come out and fight. ”

“ We must help them speedily and with all our strength. Nor let any one tell us that we can with honor deliberate when we are actually suffering wrong,—it is rather for those who intend to do the wrong, to deliberate well beforehand. Resolve upon war then, Lacedæmonians, in a manner worthy of Sparta: suffer not the Athenians to become greater than they are: let us not betray our allies to ruin, but march, with the aid of the gods, against the wrong-doers. ”

“ But the elaborate preparations going on at Corinth were no secret to the Korkyræans, who well knew, besides, the numerous allies which that city could command, and her extensive influence throughout Greece. So formidable an attack was more than they could venture to brave, alone and unaided. They had never yet enrolled themselves among the allies either of Athens or of Lacedæmon: it had always been their pride and policy to maintain a separate line of action, which, by means of their wealth, their power, and their very peculiar position, they had hitherto been enabled to do with safety. ”

“ It was not the fault of the Korkyræans that this last idea was not instantly realized: for such of them as were near enough to hear, instigated the Athenians by violent shouts to kill the men in the boat. But the latter, far from listening to such an appeal, dismissed them with the answer: “We neither begin the war nor break the truce, Peloponnesians; we have come simply to aid these Korkyræans, our allies. If ye wish to sail anywhere else, we make no opposition: but if ye are about to sail against Korkyra, or any of her possessions, we shall use our best means to prevent you.” ”

“ His comedy depicts Kleon in the point of view in which he would appear to the knights of Athens,—a leather-dresser, smelling of the tan-yard,—a low-born brawler, terrifying opponents by the violence of his criminations, the loudness of his voice, the impudence of his gestures,—moreover, as venal in his politics, threatening men with accusations, and then receiving money to withdraw them; a robber of the public treasury, persecuting merit as well as rank, and courting the favor of the assembly by the basest and most guilty cajolery. ”

“ Suppose that an Athenian citizen or officer became involved in dispute with a Chian, would not the Athenian dikastery be the competent court, whichever of the two were plaintiff or defendant? Suppose a Chian citizen or magistrate to be suspected of fomenting revolt, would it not be competent to any accuser, either Chian or Athenian, to indict him before the dikastery at Athens? Abuse of power, or peculation, committed by Athenian officers at Chios, must of course be brought before the Athenian dikasteries, just as much as if the crime had been committed at Thasos or Naxos. ”

“ Myself and my soldiers have been sent, Akanthians, to realize the purpose which we proclaimed on beginning the war; that we took arms to liberate Greece from the Athenians. Let no man blame us for having been long in coming, or for the mistake which we made at the outset in supposing that we should quickly put down the Athenians by operations against Attica, without exposing you to any risk. Enough, that we are now here on the first opportunity, resolved to put them down if you will lend us your aid. ”

“ The Athenian citizens in Amphipolis, knowing themselves to be exposed to peculiar danger, were perfectly well pleased with his offer, as extricating them from a critical position and procuring for them the means of escape, with comparatively little loss; while the non-Athenian citizens, partakers in the same relief from peril, felt little reluctance in accepting a capitulation which preserved both their rights and their properties inviolate, and merely severed them from Athens, towards which city they felt, not hatred, but indifference. ”

“ But the Athenians committed the capital fault of taking the whole alliance into their own hands, and treating the allies purely as subjects, without seeking to attach them by any form of political incorporation or collective meeting and discussion,—without taking any pains to maintain community of feeling with the idea of a joint interest,—without admitting any control, real or even pretended, over themselves as managers. ”

“ Subject to these, and to those laws and sanctions which protect both the public and individuals against wrong, it is the pride of Athens to exhibit a rich and varied fund of human impulse,—an unrestrained play of fancy and diversity of private pursuit, coupled with a reciprocity of cheerful indulgence between one individual and another, and an absence even of those “black looks” which so much embitter life, even if they never pass into enmity of fact. ”

“ But when I consider the immense value of Amphipolis to Athens, combined with the conduct whereby it was lost, I cannot think that there was a single Athenian, or a single Greek, who would deem the penalty of banishment too severe.
It is painful to find such strong grounds of official censure [p. 420] against a man who, as an historian, has earned the lasting admiration of posterity,—my own, among the first and warmest. But in criticizing the conduct of Thucydidês the officer, we are bound in common justice to forget Thucydidês the historian. ”

“ To make up a common fund for this purpose, was indispensably necessary; for Athens was far more than a match for each of them single-handed, and nothing less than hearty union could save them all from successive enslavement,—the very supposition of which was intolerable to Peloponnesian freemen, whose fathers had liberated Greece from the Persian. Let them not shrink from endurance and sacrifice in such a cause,—it was their hereditary pride to purchase success by laborious effort. ”

“ And when we recollect the strict and narrow routine in which as a Spartan he had been educated, so fatal to the development of everything like original thought or impulse, and so completely estranged from all experience of party or political discussion, we are amazed at his resource and flexibility of character, his power of adapting himself to new circumstances and new persons, and his felicitous dexterity in making himself the rallying-point of opposite political parties in each of the various cities which he acquired. ”

“ In strengthening and ornamenting Athens, in developing the full activity of her citizens, in providing temples, religious offerings, works of art, solemn festivals, all of surpassing attraction,—he intended to exalt her into something greater than an imperial city with numerous dependent allies. He wished to make her the centre of Grecian feeling, the stimulus of Grecian intellect, and the type of strong democratical patriotism combined with full liberty of individual taste and aspiration. ”

“ Nowhere does the extraordinary value of that seamanship, which the Athenians had been gaining by years of improved practice, stand so clearly marked as in these first battles of Phormio. It gradually becomes less conspicuous as we advance in the war, since the Peloponnesians improve, learning seamanship as the Russians, under Peter the Great, learned the art of war from the Swedes, under Charles the Twelfth,—while the Athenian triremes and their crews seem to become less choice and effective, even before the terrible disaster at Syracuse, and are irreparably deteriorated after that misfortune. ”

“ In the eyes of the Pentakosiomedimni and the Hippeis, the two richest classes in Athens, he was one of themselves,—and on the whole, the best man, as being so little open to reproach or calumny, whom they could oppose to the leather-dressers and lamp-makers who often out-talked them in the public assembly. The hoplites, who despised Kleon,—and did not much regard even the brave, hardy, and soldierlike Lamachus, because he happened to be poor, [474] —respected in Nikias the union of wealth and family with honesty, courage, and carefulness in command. ”

“ If we follow the elaborate funeral harangue of Periklês, which Thucydidês, since he produces it at length, probably considered as faithfully illustrating the political point of view of that statesman, we shall discover a conception of democratical equality no less rational than generous; an anxious care for the recreation and comfort of the citizens, but no disposition to emancipate them from active obligation, either public or private,—and least of all, any idea of dispensing with such activity by abusive largesses out of the general revenue. ”

“ Having justified both the origin and the working of the Athenian empire, the envoy concluded by warning Sparta to consider calmly, without being hurried away by the passions and invectives of others, before she took a step from which there was no retreat, and which exposed the future to chances such as no man on either side could foresee. He called on her not to break the truce mutually sworn to, but to adjust all differences, as Athens was prepared to do, by the amicable arbitration which that truce provided. ”

“ The gigantic strides by which Athens had reached her maritime empire were now immediately succeeded by a series of works which stamped her as the imperial city of Greece, gave to her an appearance of power even greater than the reality, and especially put to shame the old-fashioned simplicity of Sparta. ”

“ This remarkable incident illustrates what I observed before, that the achievements, the self-relying march, the straightforward politics and probity of this illustrious man, who in character was more Athenian than Spartan, yet with the good qualities of Athens predominant, inspired a personal emotion towards him such as rarely found its way into Grecian political life. The sympathy and admiration felt in Greece towards a victorious athlete was not merely an intense sentiment in the Grecian mind, but was, perhaps of all others, the most wide-spread and Pan-Hellenic. ”

“ The battle of Amphipolis removed at once the two most pronounced individual opponents of peace, Kleon and Brasidas. Athens too was more than ever discouraged and averse to prolonged fighting; for the number of hoplites slain at Amphipolis doubtless filled the city with mourning, besides the unparalleled disgrace now tarnishing Athenian soldiership. The peace-party under the auspices of Nikias and Lachês, relieved at once from the internal opposition of Kleon, as well as from the foreign enterprise of Brasidas, were enabled to resume their negotiations with Sparta in a spirit promising success. ”

“ But Athens proclaimed herself a despot, effacing the autonomy of her allies not less in theory than in practice: far from being disposed to cultivate in them any sense of a real common interest with herself, she did not even cheat them with those forms and fictions which so often appease discontent in the absence of realities. Doubtless, the nature of her empire, at once widely extended, maritime, and unconnected, or only partially connected, with kindred of race, rendered the forms of periodical deliberation difficult to keep up ”

“ But the absence of military knowledge and precaution is not the worst of Kleon’s faults on this occasion. His want of courage at the moment of conflict is yet more lamentable, and divests his end of that personal sympathy which would otherwise have accompanied it. A commander who has been out-generalled is under a double force of obligation to exert and expose himself, to the uttermost, in order to retrieve the consequences of his own mistakes. He will thus at least preserve his own personal honor, whatever censure he may deserve on the score of deficient knowledge and judgment. ”

“ Looking to the war then raging between Athens and the Peloponnesians, such a declaration was self-contradictory: nor, indeed, did the oligarchical party intend it as anything else than a step to a more complete revolution, both foreign and domestic. They followed it up by a political prosecution against Peithias, the citizen of greatest personal influence among the people, who acted by his own choice as proxenus to the Athenians. They accused him of practising to bring Korkyra into slavery to Athens. ”

“ We ought to make up our minds that war is inevitable: the more cheerfully we accept it, the less vehement shall we find our enemies in their attack: and where the danger is greatest, there also is the final honor greatest, both for a state and for a private citizen. ”

“ It seems to be conceived by most historians as a mere piece of levity or folly in the Athenian people, who are supposed to have enjoyed the excellent joke of putting an incompetent man against his own will at the head of this enterprise, in order that they might amuse themselves with his blunders: Kleon is thus contemptible, and the Athenian people ridiculous. Certainly, if that people had been disposed to conduct their public business upon such childish fancies as are here implied, they would have made a very different figure from that which history actually presents to us. ”