Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/79

INCREiV,SE OF THE ATHENIAN NAVY. 55 treasury, at the time when Themistokles made his proposition to enlarge the naval force, a great sum^ arising from the Laurian mines, out of which a distribution was on the point of being made among the citizens, — ten drachms to each man. This great amount in hand must probably have been the produce of the purchase-money or fines received from recent sales, since the small annual reserved rent can hardly have been accumulated during many successive years : new and enlarged enterprises in mines must be supposed to have been recently begun by indi- viduals under contract with the government, in order to produce at the moment so overflowing an exchequer and to furnish means for the special distribution contemplated. Themistokles availed himself of this precious opportunity, — set forth the necessities of the war with -^gina and the still more formidable menace from the great enemy in Asia, — and prevailed upon the people to forego the promised distribution for the purpose of obtaining an efficient navy .2 One cannot doubt that there must have been ' Herodot. vii, 144. "Ore 'A'&rjvai.oiac yevo/iEVuv xpVI^^tuv /leydTiuv tv rip KOivu, Tu. eK tQv fierciTiXuv a^L '7rp0Gr/X-&s tCiv and Aavpeiov, Efi£2.?iOv "ka^ea- •Sat hpxTjibv cKaarog SeKa Spaxf^ac. "All the information — unfortanately it is very scanty — which we possess respecting the ancient mines of Lauritim, is brought together in tha valuable Dissertation of M. Boeckh, translated and appended to the Eng- lish translation of his Public Economy of Athens. He discusses the fact stated in this chapter of Herodotus, in sect. 8 of that Dissertation : bul there are many of his remarks in which I cannot concur. After multiplying ten drachmae by the assumed number of twenty thou Band Athenian citizens, making a sum total distributed of thirty-three and one-third talents, he goes on : " That the distribution was made annually might have been presumed from the principles of the Athenian administra- tion, without the testimony of Cornelius Nepos. We are not, therefore, to suppose that the savings of several years are meant, nor merely a surplus ; but that all the public money arising from the mines, as it was not required for any other object, was divided among the members of the community," (p. 632.) "We are hardly authorized to conclude from the passage of Herodotus that all the sum received from the mines was about to be distributed : the treasury was very rich, and a distribution was about to be made, — but it does not follow that nothing was to be left in the treasury after the distribu- tion. Accordingly, all calculations of the total produce of the mines, based upon this passage of Herodotus, are uncertain. Nor is it clear that there vras any regular annual distribution, unless we are to take the passage of