Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/205

KLSTORED DEMOCRACY OF ATHENS. 183 paihized with her suffering exiles, and became disgusted with the self-willed encroachments of Sparta ; while the Spartan king Pausanias, together with some of the ephors, were also jealous of the arbitrary and oppressive conduct of Lysander. Instead of conducting the Lacedaemonian force to uphold at all price the Ly- sandrian oligarchy, Pausanias appeared rather as an equitable mediator to terminate the civil war. He refused to concur in any measure for obstructing the natural tendency towards a revival of the democracy. It was in this manner that Athens, rescued from that sanguinary and rapacious regime which has passed into history under the name of the Thirty Tyrants, was enabled to reappear as a humble and dependent member of the Spartan alliance, with nothing but the recollection of her former power, yet with her democracy again in vigorous and tutelary action for internal government. The just and gentle bearing of her democratical citizens, and the absence of reactionary antipathies, after such cruel ill-treatment, are among the most honorable features ic her history. The reader will find in my last volume, what I can only rapidly glance at here, the details of that system of bloodshed, spoliation, extinction of free speech and even of intellectual teaching, efforts to implicate innocent citizens as agents in judicial assassination, etc., which stained the year of Anarchy (as it was termed in Athenian annals 1 ) immediately following the surrender of the city. These details depend on evidence perfectly satisfactory ; for they are conveyed to us chiefly by Xenophon, whose sympathies are decidedly oligarchical. From him too we learn another fact, not less pregnant with instruction ; that the knights or horsemen, the body of richest proprietors at Athens, were the mainstay of the Thirty from first to last, notwithstanding all the enormities of their career. We learn from these dark, but well-attested details, to appreciate the auspices under which that period of history called the Lacedae- monian empire was inaugurated. Such phenomena were by no means confined within the walls of Athens. On the contrary, the year of Anarchy (using that term in the sense in which it was employed by the Athenians) arising out of the same combination 1 Xen. Hellcn ii, 3, 1.