Persia.[1] Of course, many causes of dispute, public as well as private, must have arisen among these wide-spread islands and seaports of the Ægean, connected with each other by relations of fellow-feeling, of trade, and of common apprehensions. the synod of Delos, composed of the deputies of all, was the natural board of arbitration for such disputes, and a habit must thus have been formed, of recognizing a sort of federal tribunal, to decide peaceably how far each ally had faithfully discharged its duties, both towards the confederacy collectively, and towards other allies with their individual citizens separately, as well as to enforce its decisions and punish refractory members, pursuant to the right which Sparta and her confederacy claimed and exercised also.[2] Now from the beginning, the Athenians were the guiding and enforcing presidents of this synod, and when it gradually died away, they were found occupying its place as well as clothed with its functions. It was in this manner that their judicial authority over the allies appears first to have begun, as the confederacy became changed into an Athenian empire, the judicial functions of the synod being transferred
- ↑ See the expression in Thucydides (v, 27) describing the conditions required when Argos was about to extend her alliances in Peloponnesus. The conditions were two. 1. That the city should be autonomous. 2. Next, that it should be willing to submit its quarrels to equitable arbitration,— ἣτις αὐτόνομός τέ ἐστι, καὶ δίκας ἴσας καὶ ὁμοίας δίδῳσι. In the oration against the Athenians, delivered by the Syracusan Hermokrates at Kamarina, Athens is accused of having enslaved her allies partly on the ground that they neglected to perform their military obligations, partly because they made war upon each other (Thucyd. vi, 76), partly also on other specious pretences. How far this charge against Athens is born out by the fact, we can hardly say; in all those particular examples which Thucydides mentions of subjugation of allies by Athens, there is a cause perfectly definite and sufficient, — not a mere pretence devised by Athenian ambition.
- ↑ According to the principle laid down by the Corinthians shortly before the Peloponnesian war,— τοὺς προσήκοντας ξυμμάχους αὐτόν τινά κολάζειν (Thucyd. i. 40-43). The Lacedæmonians, on preferring their accusation of treason against Themistokles, demanded that he should be tried at Sparta, before the common Hellenic synod which held its sitting there, and of which Athens was then a member: that is, the Spartan confederacy, or alliance, ἐπὶ τοῦ κοινοῦ συνεδρίου τῶν Ἑλλήνων (Diodor. xi. 55).
