many to the few, or the few to the many. Such freedom would be harder than a foreign yoke: and we, the Lacedaemonians, should reap no thanks for our pains, but rather blame instead of honour and renown[1]." Now, what Brasidas protests that Sparta will not do, is precisely what Sparta actually did at the end of the war, with the result which he anticipates. Oligarchies of the narrowest type—boards of ten—were established by Lysander in most of the cities, with a Spartan governor and garrison in each to repress the popular party[2]. The many were literally enslaved to the few, and they found the freedom which Sparta had given them harder indeed than any foreign rule. It can scarcely be doubted that this speech of Brasidas—composed by Thucydides after the close of the war—was inserted by him here, just at the moment when Sparta was making the first advances to the democratic cities of Northern Greece, for the purpose of bringing out the glaring contrast between Spartan promise and Spartan performance.
9. In the conference between the Athenian and
- ↑ Thuc. iv. 86 § 3. In § 4 there is no doubt to my mind that οὐδ' ἂν σαφῆ [for οὐδὲ ἀσαφῆ] is the right reading, ἂν ἐπιφέρειν being the oblique of ἂν ἐπιφέροιμι.
- ↑ See Isocr. Panegyricus, §§ 110—114, where he denounces the partisans of the narrow Lacedaemonian oligarchies in the several States—οἱ τῶν δεκαρχιῶν κοινωνήσαντες—and speaks of the miseries which they inflicted on their own cities by "choosing to be enslaved to a Helot" (i.e. to the μόθαξ Lysander: ἡροῦντο δὲ τῶν Εἱλώτων ἑνὶ δοθλεύειν). The passage is a striking commentary on the Acanthian speech of Brasidas.
