Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/112

90 HISTORY OF GREECE. from Thucydides that their prudence and moderation were exem plary. The eulogy, which he bestows in such emphatic terms upon their behavior at this juncture, is indeed doubly remark- able : i first, because it comes from an exile, net friendly to the democracy, and a strong admirer of Antiphon ; next, because the juncture itself was one eminently trying to the popular morality. and likely to degenerate, by almost natural tendency, into excess of reactionary vengeance and persecution. The democracy was now one hundred years old, dating from Kleisthenes, and fifty years old, even dating from the final reforms of Ephialtes and Perikles ; so that self-government and political equality were a part of the habitual sentiment of every man's bosom, heightened in this case by the fact that Athens was not merely a democracy, but an imperial democracy, having dependencies abroad. 2 At a moment when, from unparalleled previous disasters, she is barely able to keep up the struggle against her foreign enemies, a small knot of her own wealthiest citizens, taking advantage of her weakness, contrive, by a tissue of fraud and force not less flagi- tious than skilfully combined, to concentrate in their own hands the powers of the state, and to tear from their countrymen the security against bad government, the sentiment of equal citizen ship, and the long-established freedom of speech. Nor is this all : these conspirators not only plant an oligarchical sovereignty in the senate-house, but also sustain that sovereignty by inviting a foreign garrison from without, and by betraying Athens to her Peloponnesian enemies. Two more deadly injuries it is impossi- may be mitigated ; partly on the ground that it was unmerited, being passed while his father was afraid to stand forward in his own defence, partly as recompense for distinguished military services of all the three sons. The speech was delivered at a time later than the battle of Kynossema, in the autumn of this year (sect. 31), but not very long after the overthrow of the Pour Hundred, and certainly, I think, long before the Thirty ; so that the assertion of Taylor (Vit. Lysiae, p. 55) that all the extant oration? of Lysias bear date after the Thirty, must be received with this exception. 1 This testimony of Thncydides is amply sufficient to refute the vague assertions in the Oration xxv, of Lysias ( A^uot KaraAvo-.'ATro/l. sects. 34, 35), about great enormities now committed by the Athenians ; though Mr. Mit- ford copies these assertions as if they were real history, referring them to a time four years afterwards (History of Greece, ch. xx, s. 1, fol. ir, p. 327). 1 Thucyd. viii, 68.