Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/216

194 HISTORY OF GREECE. no artifice was needed The universal and self-acting stimulants of intense human sympathy stand here so prominently marked, that it is not simply superfluous but even misleading, to look be- hind for the gold and machinations of a political instigator. The- ramenes might do all that he could to turn the public displeasure against the generals, and to prevent it from turning against him- self: it is also certain that he did much to annihilate their de- fence. He may thus have had some influence in directing the sentiment against them, but he could have had little or none in creating it. Nay, it is not too much to say that no factitious agency of this sort could ever have prevailed on the Athenian public to desecrate such a festival as the Apaturia, by all the insignia of mourning. If they did so, it could only have been through some internal emotion alike spontaneous and violent, such as the late event was well calculated to arouse. Moreover, what can be more improbable than the allegation that a great number of men were hired to personate the fathers or brothers of deceased Athenian citizens, all well known to theii really surviving kinsmen? What more improbable, than the story that numbers of men would suffer themselves to be hired, not merely to put on black clothes for the day, which might be taken off" in the evening, but also to shave their heads, thus stamping upon themselves an ineffaceable evidence of the fraud, until the hair had grown again ? That a cunning man, like The- ramenes, should thus distribute his bribes to a number of persons, all presenting naked heads which testified his guilt, when there were real kinsmen surviving to prove the fact of personation ? That having done this, he should never be arraigned or accused for it afterwards, neither during the prodigious reaction of feel- ing which took place after the condemnation of the generals, which Xenophon himself so strongly attests, and which fell so heavily upon Ivallixcnus and others, nor by his bitter enemy Kritias, under the government of the Thirty ? Not only The- ramenes is never mentioned as having been afterwards accused, but, for aught that appears, he preserved his political influence and standing, with little if any abatement. This is one forcible confess, that I see nothing to countenance this idea : but at all events, the cause here nanuyi is only secondary, not the grand and dominant fact of the period