chapter 17.

{163}

ATHENS: B. C. 445-429. The Age of Pericles: Law and its Administration. Contrast with the Romans.

"It is remarkable ... that the 'equality' of laws on which the Greek democracies prided themselves--that equality which, in the beautiful drinking song of Callistratus, Harmodius and Aristogiton are said to have given to Athens--had little in common with the 'equity' of the Romans. The first was an equal administration of civil laws among the citizens, however limited the class of citizens might be; the last implied the applicability of a law, which was not civil law, to a class which did not necessarily consist of citizens. The first excluded a despot; the last included foreigners, and for some purposes slaves. ... There are two special dangers to which law, and society which is held together by law, appear to be liable in their infancy. One of them is that law may be too rapidly developed. This occurred with the codes of the more progressive Greek communities, which disembarrassed themselves with astonishing facility from cumbrous forms of procedure and needless terms of art, and soon ceased to attach any superstitious value to rigid rules and prescriptions. It was not for the ultimate advantage of mankind that they did so, though the immediate benefit conferred on their citizens may have been considerable. One of the rarest qualities of national character is the capacity for applying and working out the law, as such, at the cost of constant miscarriages of abstract justice, without at the same time losing the hope or the wish that law may be conformed to a higher ideal. The Greek intellect, with all its nobility and elasticity, was quite unable to confine itself within the strait waistcoat of a legal formula; and, if we may judge them by the popular courts of Athens, of whose working we possess accurate knowledge, the Greek tribunals exhibited the strongest tendency to confound law and fact. The remains of the Orators and the forensic commonplaces preserved by Aristotle in his Treatise on Rhetoric, show that questions of pure law were constantly argued on every consideration which could possibly influence the mind of the judges. No durable system of jurisprudence could be produced in this way. A community which never hesitated to relax rules of written law whenever they stood in the way of an ideally perfect decision on the facts of particular cases, would only, if it bequeathed any body of judicial principles to posterity, bequeath one consisting of the ideas of right and wrong which happened to be prevalent at the time. Such jurisprudence would contain no framework to which the more advanced conceptions of subsequent ages could be fitted. It would amount at best to a philosophy, marked with the imperfections of the civilisation under which it grew up. ... The other liability to which the infancy of society is exposed has prevented or arrested the progress of far the greater part of mankind. The rigidity of primitive law, arising chiefly from its earlier association and identification with religion, has chained down the mass of the human race to those views of life and conduct which they entertained at the time when their usages were first consolidated into a systematic form. There were one or two races exempted by a marvellous fate from this calamity, and grafts from these stocks have fertilised a few modern societies; but it is still true that, over the larger part of the world, the perfection of law has always been considered as consisting in adherence to the ground plan supposed to have been marked out by the original legislator. If intellect has in such cases been exercised on jurisprudence, it has uniformly prided itself on the subtle perversity of the conclusions it could build on ancient texts without discoverable departure from their literal tenour. I know no reason why the law of the Romans should be superior to the laws of the Hindoos, unless the theory of Natural Law had given it a type of excellence different from the usual one."

_H. S. Maine, Ancient Law, ch, 3-4._

"But both the Greek and the English trial by jury were at one time the great political safeguard against state oppression and injustice; and, owing to this origin, free nations become so attached to it that they are blind to its defects. And just as Ireland would now benefit beyond conception by the abolition of the jury system, so the secured Athenian (or any other) democracy would have thriven better had its laws been administered by courts of skilled judges. For these large bodies of average citizens, who, by the way, were not like our jurymen, unwilling occupants of the jury-box, but who made it a paid business and an amusement, did not regard the letter of the law. They allowed actions barred by the reasonable limits of time; they allowed arguments totally beside the question, though this too was illegal, for there was no competent judge to draw the line; they allowed hearsay evidence, though that too was against the law; indeed the evidence produced in most of the speeches is of the loosest and poorest kind. Worse than all, there were no proper records kept of their decisions, and witnesses were called in to swear what had been the past decisions of a jury sitting in the same city, and under the same procedure. This is the more remarkable, as there were state archives, in which the decrees of the popular assembly were kept. ... There is a most extraordinary speech of Lysias against a man called Nichomachus, who was appointed to transcribe the laws of Solon in four months, but who kept them in his possession for six years, and is accused of having so falsified them as to have substituted himself for Solon. Hence there can have been no recognized duplicate extant, or such a thing could not be attempted. So again, in the Trapeziticus of Isocrates, it is mentioned as a well known fact, that a certain Pythodorus was convicted of tampering with state documents, signed and sealed by the magistrates, and deposited in the Acropolis. All these things meet us in every turn in the court speeches of the Attic orators. We are amazed at seeing relationships proved in will cases by a man coming in and swearing that such a man's father had told him that his brother was married to such a woman, of such a house. We find the most libellous charges brought against opponents on matters totally beside the question at issue, and even formal evidence of general bad character admitted. We find some speakers in consequence treating the jury with a sort of mingled deference and contempt which is amusing. 'On the former trial of this case,' they say, 'my opponent managed to tell you many well devised lies; of course you were deceived, how could it be otherwise, and you made a false decision;' or else, 'You were so puzzled that you got at variance with one another, you voted at sixes and sevens, and by a small majority you came to an absurd decision.' {164} 'But I think you know well,' says Isocrates, 'that the city has often repented so bitterly ere this for decisions made in passion and without evidence, as to desire after no long interval to punish those who misled it, and to wish those who had been calumniated were more than restored to their former prosperity. Keeping these facts before you, you ought not to be hasty in believing the prosecutors, nor to hear the defendants with interruption and ill temper. For it is a shame to have the character of being the gentlest and most humane of the Greeks in other respects, and yet to act contrary to this reputation in the trials which take place here. It is a shame that in other cities, when a human life is at stake, a considerable majority of votes is required for conviction, but that among you those in danger do not even get an equal chance with their false accusers. You swear indeed once a year that you will attend to both plaintiff and defendant, but in the interval only keep your oath so far as to accept whatever the accusers say, but you sometimes will not let those who are trying to refute them utter even a single word. You think those cities uninhabitable, in which citizens are executed without trial, and forget that those who do not give both sides a fair hearing are doing the very same thing.'"

_J. P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, chapter 13._

ATHENS: B. C. 445-429. The Age of Pericles: Political life. The democracy.

"The real life of Athens lasted at the most for 200 years: and yet there are moments in which all that we have won by the toils of so many generations seems as if it would be felt to be but a small thing beside a single hour of Periklês. The Democracy of Athens was in truth the noblest fruit of that self-developing power of the Greek mind which worked every possession of the common heritage into some new and more brilliant shape, but which learned nothing, nothing of all that formed its real life and its real glory, from the Barbarians of the outer world. Men tell us that Greece learned this or that mechanical invention from Phœnicia or Egypt or Assyria. Be it so; but stand in the Pnyx; listen to the contending orators; listen to the ambassadors of distant cities; listen to each side as it is fairly hearkened to, and see the matter in hand decided by the peaceful vote of thousands--here at least of a truth is something which Athens did not learn from any Assyrian despot or from any Egyptian priest. And we, children of the common stock, sharers in the common heritage, as we see man, Aryan man, in the full growth of his noblest type, we may feel a thrill as we think that Kleisthenês and Periklês were, after all, men of our own blood--as we think that the institutions which grew up under their hands and the institutions under which we ourselves are living are alike branches sprung from one stock, portions of one inheritance in which Athens and England have an equal right. In the Athenian Democracy we see a popular constitution taking the form which was natural for such a constitution to take when it was able to run its natural course in a common-wealth which consisted only of a single city. Wherever the Assembly really remains, in truth as well as in name, an Assembly of the whole people in their own persons, it must in its own nature be sovereign. It must, in the nature of things, delegate more or less of power to magistrates and generals; but such power will be simply delegated. Their authority will be a mere trust from the sovereign body, and to that sovereign body they will be responsible for its exercise. That is to say, one of the original elements of the State, the King or chief, now represented by the elective magistracy, will lose its independent powers, and will sink into a body who have only to carry out the will of the sovereign Assembly. So with another of the original elements, the Council. This body too loses its independent being; it has no ruling or checking power; it becomes a mere Committee of the Assembly, chosen or appointed by lot to put measures into shape for more easy discussion in the sovereign body. As society becomes more advanced and complicated, the judicial power can no longer be exercised by the Assembly itself, while it would be against every democratic instinct to leave it in the arbitrary power of individual magistrates. Other Committees of the Assembly, Juries on a gigantic scale, with a presiding magistrate as chairman rather than as Judge, are therefore set apart to decide causes and to sit in judgment on offenders. Such is pure Democracy, the government of the whole people and not of a part of it only, as carried out in its full perfection in a single city. It is a form of government which works up the faculties of man to a higher pitch than any other; it is the form of government which gives the freest scope to the inborn genius of the whole community and of every member of it. Its weak point is that it works up the faculties of man to a pitch so high that it can hardly be lasting, that its ordinary life needs an enthusiasm, a devotion too highly strung to be likely to live through many generations. Athens in the days of her glory, the Athens of Periklês, was truly 'the roof and crown of things;' her democracy raised a greater number of human beings to a higher level than any government before or since; it gave freer play than any government before or since to the personal gifts of the foremost of mankind. But against the few years of Athenian glory we must set the long ages of Athenian decline. Against the city where Periklês was General we must set the city where Hadrian was Archon. On the Assemblies of other Grecian cities it is hardly needful to dwell. Our knowledge of their practical working is slight. We have one picture of a debate in the popular Assembly of Sparta, an Assembly none the less popular in its internal constitution because it was the assembly of what, as regarded the excluded classes of the State, was a narrow oligarchy. We see that there, as might be looked for, the chiefs of the State, the Kings, and yet more the Ephors, spoke with a degree of official, as distinguished from personal, authority which fell to the lot of no man in the Assembly of Athens. Periklês reigned supreme, not because he was one of Ten Generals, but because he was Periklês. ... In the Ekklêsia which listened to Periklês and Dêmosthenes we feel almost as much at home as in an institution of our own land and our own times. At least we ought to feel at home there; for we have the full materials for calling up the political life of Athens in all its fullness, and within our own times one of the greatest minds of our own or of any age has given its full strength to clear away the mists of error and calumny which so long shrouded the parent state of justice and freedom. {165} Among the contemporaries and countrymen of Mr. Grote it is shame indeed if men fail to see in the great Democracy the first state which taught mankind that the voice of persuasion could be stronger than a despot's will, the first which taught that disputes could be settled by a free debate and a free vote which in other lands could have been decided only by the banishment or massacre of the weaker side. ... It must be constantly borne in mind that the true difference between an aristocratic and a democratic government, as those words were understood in the politics of old Greece, lies in this. In the Democracy all citizens, all who enjoy civil rights, enjoy also political rights. In the aristocracy political rights belong to only a part of those who enjoy civil rights. But, in either case, the highest authority of the State is the general Assembly of the whole ruling body, whether that ruling body be the whole people or only a part of it. ... The slaves and strangers who were shut out at Athens were, according to Greek ideas, no Athenians; but every Athenian had his place in the sovereign assembly of Athens, while every Corinthian had not his place in the sovereign assembly of Corinth. But the aristocratic and the democratic commonwealth both agreed in placing the final authority of the State in the general Assembly of all who enjoy the highest franchise. ... The people, of its own will, placed at its head men of the same class as those who in the earlier state of things had ruled it against its will. Periklês, Nikias, Alkibiadês, were men widely differing in character, widely differing in their relations to the popular government. But all alike were men of ancient birth, who, as men of ancient birth, found their way, almost as a matter of course, to those high places of the State to which Kleôn found his way only by a strange freak of fortune. At Rome we find quite another story. There, no less than at Athens, the moral influence of nobility survived its legal privileges; but, more than this, the legal privileges of the elder nobility were never wholly swept away, and the inherent feeling of respect for illustrious birth called into being a younger nobility by its side. At Athens one stage of reform placed a distinction of wealth instead of a distinction of birth: another stage swept away the distinction of wealth also. But the reform, at each of its stages, was general; it affected all offices alike, save those sacred offices which still remained the special heritage of certain sacred families. ... In an aristocratic commonwealth there is no room for Periklês; there is no room for the people that hearkened to Periklês; but in men of the second order, skilful conservative administrators, men able to work the system which they find established, no form of government is so fertile. ... But everywhere we learn the same lesson, the inconsistency of commonwealths which boast themselves of their own freedom and exalt themselves at the cost of the freedom of others."

_E. A. Freeman, Comparative Politics, lecture 5-6._

"Dêmos was himself King, Minister, and Parliament. He had his smaller officials to carry out the necessary details of public business, but he was most undoubtedly his own First Lord of the Treasury, his own Foreign Secretary, his own Secretary for the Colonies. He himself kept up a personal correspondence both with foreign potentates and with his own officers on foreign service; the 'despatches' of Nikias and the 'notes' of Philip were alike addressed to no officer short of the sovereign himself; he gave personal audience to the ambassadors of other states, and clothed his own with just so great or so small a share as he deemed good of his own boundless authority. He had no need to entrust the care of his thousand dependencies to the mysterious working of a Foreign Office; he himself sat in judgment upon Mitylenaian rebels; he himself settled the allotment of lands at Chalkis or Amphipolis; he decreed by his own wisdom what duties should be levied at the Sound of Byzantion; he even ventured on a task of which two-and-twenty ages have not lessened the difficulty, and undertook, without the help of a Lord High Commissioner, to adjust the relations and compose the seditions even of Korkyra and Zakynthos. He was his own Lord High Chancellor, his own Lord Primate, his own Commander-in-Chief. He listened to the arguments of Kleôn on behalf of a measure, and to the arguments of Nikias against it, and he ended by bidding Nikias to go and carry out the proposal which he had denounced as extravagant or unjust. He listened with approval to his own 'explanations;' he passed votes of confidence in his own policy; he advised himself to give his own royal assent to the bills which he had himself passed, without the form of a second or third reading, or the vain ceremony of moving that the Prytaneis do leave their chairs. ... We suspect that the average Athenian citizen was, in political intelligence, above the average English Member of Parliament. It was this concentration of all power in an aggregate of which every citizen formed a part, which is the distinguishing characteristic of true Greek democracy. Florence had nothing like it; there has been nothing like it in the modern world: the few pure democracies which have lingered on to our own day have never had such mighty questions laid before them, and have never had such statesmen and orators to lead them. The great Democracy has had no fellow; but the political lessons which it teaches are none the less lessons for all time and for every land and people."

_E. A. Freeman, Historical Essays (volume 2): The Athenian Democracy._

"The individual freedom which was enjoyed at Athens and which is extolled by Pericles was plainly an exception to the common usage of Greece, and is so regarded in the Funeral Speech. The word 'freedom,' it should be remembered, bore an ambiguous meaning. It denoted on the one hand political independence,--the exercise of sovereign power by the State and of political rights by the citizens. In this sense every Greek citizen could claim it as his birthright. Even the Spartans could tell the Persian Hydarnes that he had not, like them, tasted of freedom, and did not know whether it was sweet or not. But the word also denoted personal and social liberty,--freedom from the excessive restraints of law, the absence of a tyrannous public opinion and of intolerance between man and man. Pericles claims for Athens 'freedom' in this double sense. But freedom so far as it implies the absence of legal interference in the private concerns of life was but little known except at Athens."

_S. H. Butcher, Some Aspects of Greek Genius, pages 70-71._

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"To Athens ... we look ... for an answer to the question, What does history teach in regard to the virtue of a purely democratic government? And here we may safely say that, under favourable circumstances, there is no form of government which, while it lasts, has such a virtue to give scope to a vigorous growth and luxuriant fruitage of various manhood as a pure democracy. ... But it does not follow that, though in this regard it has not been surpassed by any other form of government, it is therefore absolutely the best of all forms of government. ... Neither, on the other hand, does it follow from the shortness of the bright reign of Athenian democracy--not more than 200 years from Clisthenes to the Macedonians--that all democracies are short-lived, and must pay, like dissipated young gentlemen, with premature decay for the feverish abuse of their vital force. Possible no doubt it is, that if the power of what we may call a sort of Athenian Second Chamber, the Areiopagus, instead of being weakened as it was by Aristides and Pericles, had been built up according to the idea of Æschylus and the intelligent aristocrats of his day, such a body, armed, like our House of Lords, with an effective negative on all outbursts of popular rashness, might have prevented the ambition of the Athenians from launching on that famous Syracusan expedition which exhausted their force and maimed their action for the future. But the lesson taught by the short-lived glory of Athens, and its subjugation under the rough foot of the astute Macedonian, is not that democracies, under the influence of faction, and, it may be, not free from venality, will sell their liberties to a strong neighbour--for aristocratic Poland did this in a much more blushless way than democratic Greece--but that any loose aggregate of independent States, given more to quarrel amongst themselves than to unite against a common enemy, whether democratic, or aristocratic, or monarchical in their form of government, cannot in the long run maintain their ground against the firm policy and the well-massed force of a strong monarchy. Athens was blotted out from the map of free peoples at Chæronea, not because the Athenian people had too much freedom, but because the Greek States had too little unity. They were used by Philip exactly in the same way that Napoleon used the German States at the commencement of the present century."

_J. S. Blackie, What does History Teach? pages 28-31._

"In Herodotus you have the beginning of the age of discussion. ... The discourses on democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, which he puts into the mouth of the Persian conspirators when the monarchy was vacant, have justly been called absurd, as speeches supposed to have been spoken by those persons. No Asiatic ever thought of such things. You might as well imagine Saul or David speaking them as those to whom Herodotus attributes them. They are Greek speeches, full of free Greek discussions, and suggested by the experience, already considerable, of the Greeks in the results of discussion. The age of debate is beginning, and even Herodotus, the least of a wrangler of any man, and the most of a sweet and simple narrator, felt the effect. When we come to Thucydides, the results of discussion are as full as they have ever been; his light is pure, 'dry light,' free from the 'humours' of habit, and purged from consecrated usage. As Grote's history often reads like a report to Parliament, so half Thucydides reads like a speech, or materials for a speech, in the Athenian Assembly."

_W. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, pages 170-171._

ATHENS: B. C. 440-437. New settlements of Klerouchoi. The founding of Amphipolis.-- Revolt and subjugation of Samos.

"The great aim of Perikles was to strengthen the power of Athens over the whole area occupied by her confederacy. The establishment of settlers or Klerouchoi [see KLERUCHS]. who retained their rights as Athenian citizens, had answered so well in the Lelantian plain of Euboia that it was obviously good policy to extend the system. The territory of Hestiaia in the north of Euboia and the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, were thus occupied; and Perikles himself led a body of settlers to the Thrakian Chersonesos where he repaired the old wall at the neck of the peninsula, and even to Sinope which now became a member of the Athenian alliance. A generation had passed from the time when Athens lost 10,000 citizens in the attempt to found a colony at the mouth of the Strymon. The task was now undertaken successfully by Hagnon, and the city came into existence which was to be the cause of disaster to the historian Thucydides and to witness the death of Brasidas and of Kleon [see AMPHIPOLIS]. ... Two years before the founding of Amphipolis, Samos revolted from Athens. ... In this revolt of Samos the overt action comes from the oligarchs who had seized upon the Ionian town of Priene, and defeated the Milesians who opposed them. The latter appealed to the Athenians, and received not only their aid but that of the Samian demos. The latter now became the ruling body in the island, fifty men and fifty boys being taken from the oligarchic families and placed as hostages in Lemnos, which, as we have seen, was now wholly occupied by Athenian Klerouchoi. But the Samian exiles (for many had fled rather than live under a democracy) entered into covenant with Pissouthnes, the Sardian satrap, crossed over to Samos and seized the chief men of the demos, then falling on Lemnos succeeded in stealing away the hostages; and, having handed over to Pissouthnes the Athenian garrison at Samos, made ready for an expedition against Miletos. The tidings that Byzantion had joined in this last revolt left to the Athenians no room to doubt the gravity of the crisis. A fleet of sixty ships was dispatched to Samos under Perikles and nine other generals, of whom the poet Sophokles is said to have been one. Of these ships sixteen were sent, some to gather the allies, others to watch for the Phenician fleet which they believed to be off the Karian coast advancing to the aid of the Samian oligarchs. With the remainder Perikles did not hesitate to engage the Samian fleet of seventy ships which he encountered on its return from Miletos off the island of Tragia. The Athenians gained the day; and Samos was blockaded by land and sea. But no sooner had Perikles sailed with sixty ships to meet the Phenician fleet, than the Samians, making a vigorous sally, broke the lines of the besiegers and for fourteen days remained masters of the sea. {167} The return of Perikles changed the face of things. Soon after the resumption of the siege the arrival of sixty fresh ships from Athens under five Strategoi in two detachments, with thirty from Chios and Lesbos, damped the energy of the Samian oligarchs; and an unsuccessful effort at sea was followed by their submission in the ninth month after the beginning of the revolt, the terms being that they should raze their walls, give hostages, surrender their ships, and pay the expenses of the war. Following their example, the Byzantines also made their peace with Athens. The Phenician fleet never came. ... The Athenians escaped at the same time a far greater danger nearer home. The Samians, like the men of Thasos, had applied for aid to the Spartans, who, no longer pressed by the Helot war, summoned a congress of their allies to discuss the question. For the truce which had still five-and-twenty years to run Sparta cared nothing: but she encountered an opposition from the Corinthians which perhaps she now scarcely expected. ... The Spartans were compelled to give way; and there can be no doubt that when some years later the Corinthians claimed the gratitude of the Athenians for this decision, they took credit for an act of good service singularly opportune. Had they voted as Sparta wished, Athens might by the extension of revolt amongst her allied cities have been reduced now to the condition to which, in consequence perhaps of this respite, she was not brought until the lifetime of a generation had been spent in desperate warfare."

_G. W. Cox, History of Greece, book 3, chapter 1 (volume 2)._

ATHENS: B. C. 431. Beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Its Causes.

"In B. C. 431 the war broke out between Athens and the Peloponnesian League, which, after twenty-seven years, ended in the ruin of the Athenian empire. It began through a quarrel between Corinth and Kerkyra, in which Athens assisted Kerkyra. A congress was held at Sparta; Corinth and other States complained of the conduct of Athens, and war was decided on. The real cause of the war was that Sparta and its allies were jealous of the great power that Athens had gained [see GREECE: B. C. 435-132 and 432-431]. A far greater number of Greek States were engaged in this war than had ever been engaged in a single undertaking before. States that had taken no part in the Persian war were now fighting on one side or the other. Sparta was an oligarchy, and the friend of the nobles everywhere; Athens was a democracy, and the friend of the common people; so that the war was to some extent a struggle between these classes all over Greece, and often within the same city walls the nobles and the people attacked one another, the nobles being for Sparta and the people for Athens. On the side of Sparta, when the war began, there was all Peloponnesus except Argos and Achæa, and also the oligarchical Bœotian League under Thebes besides Phokis, Lokris, and other States west of them. They were very strong by land, but the Corinthians alone had a good fleet. Later on we shall see the powerful State of Syracuse with its navy, acting with Sparta. On the side of Athens there were almost all the Ægæan islands, and a great number of the Ægæan coast towns as well as Kerkyra and certain States in the west of Greece. The Athenians had also made alliance with Sitalkes, the barbarian king of the interior of Thrace. Athens was far stronger by sea than Sparta, but had not such a strong land army. On the other hand it had a large treasure, and a system of taxes, while the Spartan League had little or no money."

_C. A. Fyffe, History of Greece (History Primers), page 84._

The Ionian cities, called "allies" of Athens, were subjects in reality, and held in subjection by tyrannical measures which made the yoke odious, as is plainly explained by Xenophon, who says: "Some person might say, that it is a great support to the Athenians that their allies should be in a condition to contribute money to them. To the plebeians, however, it seems to be of much greater advantage that every individual of the Athenians should get some of the property of the allies, and that the allies themselves should have only so much as to enable them to live and to till the ground, so that they may not be in a condition to form conspiracies. The people of Athens seem also to have acted injudiciously in this respect, that they oblige their allies to make voyages to Athens for the decision of their lawsuits. But the Athenians consider only, on the other hand, what benefits to the state of Athens are attendant on this practice; in the first place they receive their dues throughout the year from the prytaneia; in the next place, they manage the government of the allied states while sitting at home, and without sending out ships; they also support suitors of the lower orders, and ruin those of an opposite character in their courts of law; but if each state had its own courts, they would, as being hostile to the Athenians, be the ruin of those who were most favourable to the people of Athens. In addition to these advantages, the Athenian people have the following profits from the courts of justice for the allies being at Athens; first of all the duty of the hundredth on what is landed at the Peiræeus affords a greater revenue to the city; next, whoever has a lodging-house makes more money by it, as well as whoever has cattle or slaves for hire; and the heralds, too, are benefited by the visits of the allies to the city. Besides, if the allies did not come to Athens for law, they would honour only such of the Athenians as were sent over the sea to them, as generals, and captains of vessels, and ambassadors; but now every individual of the allies is obliged to flatter the people of Athens, knowing that on going to Athens he must gain or lose his cause according to the decision, not of other judges, but of the people, as is the law of Athens; and he is compelled, too, to use supplication before the court, and, as anyone of the people enters, to take him by the hand. By these means the allies are in consequence rendered much more the slaves of the Athenian people."

_Xenophon, On the Athenian Government (Minor Works, translated by Reverend J. S. Watson), page 235._

The revolt of these coerced and hostile "allies," upon the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, was inevitable.--The prominent events of the Peloponnesian war, in which most of the Greek States were involved, are properly narrated in their connection with Greek history at large (see GREECE: B. C. 431-429, and after). In this place it will only be necessary to take account of the consequences of the war as they affected the remarkable city and people whose superiority had occasioned it by challenging and somewhat offensively provoking the jealousy of their neighbors.

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ATHENS: B. C. 431. Peloponnesian invasions of Attica. Siege of Athens.

"While the Peloponnesians were gathering at the Isthmus, and were still on their way, but before they entered Attica, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus, who was one of the ten Athenian generals, ... repeated [to the Athenians] his previous advice; they must prepare for war and bring their property from the country into the city; they must defend their walls but not go out to battle; they should also equip for service the fleet in which lay their strength. ... The citizens were persuaded, and brought into the city their children and wives, their household goods, and even the wood-work of their houses, which they took down. Their flocks and beasts of burden they conveyed to Euboea and the adjacent islands. The removal of the inhabitants was painful; for the Athenians had always been accustomed to reside in the country. Such a life had been characteristic of them more than of any other Hellenic people, from very early times. ... When they came to Athens, only a few of them had houses or could find homes among friends or kindred. The majority took up their abode in the vacant spaces of the city, and in the temples and shrines of heroes. ... Many also established themselves in the turrets of the walls, or in any other place which they could find; for the city could not contain them when they first came in. But afterwards they divided among them the Long Walls and the greater part of the Piraeus. At the same time the Athenians applied themselves vigorously to the war, summoning their allies, and preparing an expedition of 100 ships against the Peloponnese. While they were thus engaged, the Peloponnesian army was advancing: it arrived first of all at Oenoe," where Archidamus, the Spartan king, wasted much time in a fruitless siege and assault. "At last they marched on, and about the eightieth day after the entry of the Thebans into Plataea, in the middle of the summer, when the corn was in full ear, invaded Attica: ... They encamped and ravaged, first of all, Eleusis and the plain of Thria. ... At Acharnae they encamped, and remained there a considerable time, ravaging the country." It was the expectation of Archidamus that the Athenians would be provoked to come out and meet him in the open field; and that, indeed, they were eager to do; but the prudence of their great leader held them back. "The people were furious with Pericles, and, forgetting all his previous warnings, they abused him for not leading them to battle." But he was vindicated by the result. "The Peloponnesians remained in Attica as long as their provisions lasted, and then, taking a new route, retired through Boeotia. ... On their return to Peloponnesus the troops dispersed to their several cities." Meantime the Athenian and allied fleets were ravaging the Peloponnesian coast. "In the same summer [B. C. 431] the Athenians expelled the Aeginetans and their families from Aegina, alleging that they had been the main cause of the war. ... The Lacedaemonians gave the Aeginetan exiles the town of Thyrea to occupy and the adjoining country to cultivate. ... About the end of the summer the entire Athenian force, including the metics, invaded the territory of Megara. ... After ravaging the greater part of the country they retired. They repeated the invasion, sometimes with cavalry, sometimes with the whole Athenian army, every year during the war until Nisaea was taken [B. C. 424]."

_Thucydides, History; translated by B. Jowett,