Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/231

CONDUCT OF THE GfcNKRALS. 20'J the victorious fleet were sure to Le disabled. If these generals, after their victory, instead of sailing back to land, had employed themselves first of all in visiting the crippled ships, there would have been ample time to perform this duty, and to save all the living men aboard, before the storm came on. This is the natural inference, even upon their own showing ; this is what any Eng- lish, French, or American naval commander would have thought it an imperative duty to do. What degree of blame is imputable to Theramenes, and how far the generals were discharged by shifting the responsibility to him, is a point which we cannot now determine. But the storm, which is appealed to as a justification of both, rests upon evidence too questionable to serve that pur- pose, where the neglect of duty was so serious, and cost the lives probably of more than one thousand brave men. At least, the Athenian people at home, when they heard the criminations and recriminations between the generals on one side and Theramenes on the other, each of them in his character of accuser implying that the storm was no valid obstacle, though each, if pushed for a defence, fell back upon it as a resource in case of need, the Athenian people could not but look upon the storm more as an afterthought to excuse previous omissions, than as a terrible real- ity nullifying all the ardor and resolution of men bent on doing their duty. It was in this way that the intervention of Theramenes chiefly contributed to the destruction of the generals, not by those manoeuvres ascribed to him in Xenophon : he destroyed all belief in the storm as a real and all-covering hindrance. The general impression of the public at Athens in my opinion, a natural and unavoidable impression was, that there had been most culpable negligence in regard to the wrecks, through which neg- ligence alone the seamen on board perished. This negligence dishonors, more or less, the armament at Arginusae as well as the generals : but the generals were the persons responsible to the public at home, who felt for the fate of the deserted seamen more justly as well as more generously than their comrades in the Il.;et In spite, therefore, of the guilty proceeding to which a furioua exaggeration of this sentiment drove the Athenians, in spite of the sympathy which this has naturally and justly procured foi VOL. viu. 14oc.