Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/223

ATHENS AND SPARTA. 201 the sense of indignity arising from the fact of siujection was absorbed in the still more terrible suffering arising from the enor- mities of those individual rulers whom the imperial state had set up. Now Athens set up no local rulers, no native Ten or native Thirty, no resident Athenian harmosts or garrisons. This was of itself an unspeakable exemption, when compared with the con- dition of cities subject, not only to the Spartan empire, but also under that empire to native decemvirs like Kritias, and Spartan harmosts like Aristarchus or Aristodemus. A city subject to Athens had to bear definite burdens enforced by its own government, which was liable in case of default or delinquency to be tried before the popular Athenian Dikastery. But this same dikastery (as I have shown in a former volume, and as is distinctly stated by Thucydides) 1 was the harbor of refuge to each subject-city; not less against individual Athenian wrong-doers than against miscon- duct from other cities. Those who complained of the hardship suffered by a subject-city, from the obligation of bringing causes to be tried in the dikastery of Athens, even if we take the case as they state it, and overlook the unfairness of omitting those numerous instances wherein the city was thus enabled to avert or redress wrong done to its own citizens, would have complained both more loudly and with greater justice of an ever-present Athe- nian harmost ; especially if there were coexistent a native govern- ment of Ten oligarchs, exchanging with him guilty connivances, like the partnership of the Thirty at Athens with the Lacedaemo- nian harmost Kaliibius. 2 In no one point can it be shown that the substitution of Spartan empire in place of Athenian was a gain, either for the subject^cities or for Greece generally ; while in many points, it was a great and serious aggravation of suffering. And this abuse of power is the more deeply to be regretted, as Sparta enjoyed after the battle of -^Egospotami a precious opportunity, such as Athens had never had, and such as never again recurred, of reorganizing the Grecian world on wise principles, and with a view to Pan-hellenic stability and harmony. It is not her greatest sin to have refused 1 Sec the remarkable speech of Phrynichus in Thucyd. viii, 48, 5, which I have before referred to. 8 Xen. Hellen. ii, 3, 14. Compare the analogous case of Thebes, after the Lacedaemonians had got possession of the Kadmeia (v. 2, 34-36). 9*