Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/80

56 mSTORY OF GREECE. many speakers who would try to make themselves popular hy opposing this proposition and supporting the distribution, inso- much that the power of the people generally to feel the force of a distant motive as predominant over a present gain deserves notice as an earnest of their approaching greatness. Immense, indeed, was the recompense reaped for this self- denial, not merely by Athens but by Greece generally, when the preparations of Xerxes came to be matured, and his armament was understood to be approaching. The orders for equipment of ships and laying in of provisions, issued by the Great King to his subject Greeks in Asia, the -^gean, and Thrace, would of course become known throughout Greece Proper, — especially the vast labor bestowed on the canal of Mount Athos, which would be the theme of wondering talk with every Thasian or Akan- thian citizen who visited the festival games in Peloponnesus. All these premonitory evidences were public enough, without any need of that elaborate stratagem whereby the exiled Demaj-atus Cornelius Nepos as proving it : but he talks rather about the magistrates employing this money for jobbing purposes, — not about a regular distribu- tion: "Nam cum pecunia publica quae ex metallis redibat, largitione magis- tratuum quotannis periret." Com. Nep. Themist. c. 2. A story is told by Polysenus, from whomsoever he copied it, — of a sum of one hundred tal- ents in the treasury, which Themistokles persuaded the people to hand over to one hundred rich men, for the purpose of being expended as the latter might direct, with an obligation to reimburse the money in case the people were not satisfied with the expenditure : these rich men employed each the sum awarded to him in building a new ship, much to the satisfaction of the people (Poly sen. i, 30). This story differs materially from that of Herodo- tus, and we cannot venture either to blend the two together or to rely upon Polyaenus separately. I imagine that the sum of thirty three talents, or fifty talents, necessary for the distribution, fonned part of a larger sum lying in the treasury, arising from the mines. Themistokles persuaded the people to employ the whole sum in ship-building, which of course implied that the distribution was to be renounced. Whether there had been distributions of a similar kind in former years, as M. Boeckh affirms, is a matter on which we have no evidence. M. Boeckh seems to me not to have kept in view the fact, which he himself states just before, that there were two sources of receipt into the treasm-y, — original pm-chase-money paid down, and reserved annual rent. It is from the former source that I imagine the large sum lying in the treasury to have been derived : the small reserved rent probably went among the annual items of the state-budget.