cized, a younger statesman was at hand to take up his work and complete the fabric of which he had laid the foundations, and gone far towards raising the superstructure. The form of Ephialtes is overshadowed by the commanding figure of Perikles: but it is no light praise to say of him that he The reforms was both poor and trustworthy. With an earnestness of Ephialtes. equal to that of his great ally, he joined a keener sense of political wrongs and a more vehement impatience of political abuses. The legislation of Aristeides had made all citizens eligible for the Archonship: but the poorer citizens were little the nearer to being elected archons, and the reforms both of Aristeides and of Kleisthenes had left in the large judicial powers of public officers a source of evils which became continually less and less tolerable. The Strategoi, as well as the archons, dealt with all cases of disobedience to their own authority; and the practically irresponsible Court of Areiopagos, while it possessed a strictly religious jurisdiction in cases of homicide, exercised also a censorial authority over all the citizens, and superseded the Probouleutic council by its privilege of preserving order in the debates of the Ekklesia. This privilege involved substantially the determination of the subjects to be discussed, as inconvenient questions might for the most part without difficulty be ruled to be out of order. To Ephialtes first, and to Perikles afterwards, it became evident that attempts to redress individual cases of abuse arising from this state of things were a mere waste of time. The public officers must be deprived of their discretionary judicial powers; the Areiopagos must lose its censorial privileges and its authority in the public assembly of the citizens, while the people themselves must become the final judges in all criminal as well as civil causes. To carry out the whole of this scheme they had a machinery ready to hand. The Heliaia in its Dikasteries had partially exercised this jurisdiction already; and nothing more was needed now than to make these Dikasteries permanent courts, the members of which should receive a regular pay for all days spent on such service. The adoption of these measures would at once sweep away the old evils; and Ephialtes with the support of Perikles carried them all. The Athenian constitution thus reached its utmost growth; and the history of the times which follow tells only of its conservation or of its decay. The murder These measures were preceded, as we might expect, by the ostracism of Kimon; and all hindrances were removed of Ephialtes. from the path of Ephialtes. The formidable jurisdiction of the archons was cut down to the power of inflicting a 1 For the method by which these Dikasteries were annually supplied with Jurymen, see p. 89. small fine, and they became simply officers for managing the preliminary business of cases to be brought before the Jury Courts. The majesty of the Areiopagos faded away, and, retaining its jurisdiction only in cases of homicide, it became an assembly of average Athenian citizens who had been chosen archons by the lot. In short, the old times were gone; and the rage of the oligarchic faction (for such it must still be termed) could be appeased only with blood. Ephialtes was assassinated,-by a murderer hired, it is said, from the Boiotian Tanagra. Kimon was in banishment: and it is pleasant to think that this brave and able general had no hand in a dastardly crime, happily rare in Athenian annals. 1 See p. 90. S 258 ΒΟΟΚ ΙΙΙ. THE EMPIRE OF ATHENS. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN ATHENS AND SPARTA. EPHIALT Public works of Perikles. CHAPTER I. THE THIRTY YEARS' TRUCE. ALTES was dead; but the opposition, which had not shrunk from employing the weapon of assassination, became even more intense, as Perikles matured his designs for the embellishment of the imperial city. The place of Kimon was now filled by his kinsman Thoukydides the son of Melesias, who, like Kimon, held that the revenues of Athens should still be used in distant enterprises against the power of Persia. This policy was resisted by Perikles, whose influence with the people was probably strengthened by the remembrance that he had likewise opposed the rash expedition of Tolmides into Boiotia. The political atmosphere at Athens was now again so far clouded and threatening that both parties turned instinctively to the remedy of ostracism. Like Kimon, Thoukydides fully thought that the vote would send his great rival into exile. The result was his own 443 B.C. (?) banishment; and the way was cleared for the carrying out of the vast public works on which Perikles had set his mind. The long walls which joined Athens with her harbours inclosed between them a large space of ground, which, if occupied by an enemy, might be a source of serious danger as well as of annoyance. Hence a third wall was carried from the city parallel to the western or Peiraic wall, at a distance of 550 feet, turning to the south about 400 yards before it reached Mounychia, for the purpose of defending that harbour. But the costliest works of Perikles were confined within a much narrower circuit. A new theatre, called the Odeion, rose in the city, as a worthy home for the drama in the great Panathenaic festival, while under the name Propylaia gigantic portals guarded the entrance to the summit of the rock on which art of every kind achieved its highest triumphs. The Erechtheion, or shrine of Athênê Polias, which had been burnt during the Persian occupation of the city, rose to more than its ancient grandeur, in spite of the vow that the ruined temples should be left as memorials of the invader's sacrilege. But high above all the surrounding buildings towered the magnificent fabric of the Parthenon, the home of the virgin goddess, whose colossal form, standing in front of the temple, might be seen by the mariner as he doubled the Cape of Sounion. The worshipper, who passed within its massive walls, saw before him a statue of the goddess still more glorious, the work of the great sculptor, Pheidias, whose genius embodied in gold and ivory at Olympia the majesty of Zeus himself. Extension of Athenian settlements. The great aim of Perikles was to strengthen the power of Athens over the whole area occupied by her confederacy. The establishment of settlers or Klerouchoi, who retained their rights as Athenian citizens, had answered so well in the Lelantian plain of Euboia1 that it was obviously good policy to extend the system. The territory of Hestiaia in the north of Euboia, and the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, were thus occupied; and Perikles himself led a body of settlers to the Thrakian Chersonesos and even to Sinôpê which now became a member of the Athenian alliance. A generation had passed from the time when Athens lost 10,000 citizens in the attempt to found a colony at the mouth of the Strymon.2 The task was now undertaken successfully by Hagnon, and the city came into existence which was to be the cause of disaster to the historian Thucydides and to witness the death of Brasidas and of Kleon. Of less importance to the interests of Athens, yet notable in other ways, was the revival of the ruined Sybaris under the name of Thourioi, about seven years before the founding of Amphipolis. Among its citizens was the rhetor Lysias, and one far more illustrious man. Here Herodotos found a home for his latter years; here he wrote much, if not all, of his invaluable history; and here, after a life spent in the honest search of truth, he died. 437 B.C. 443 B.C. The revolt of Samos. 440 B.C. Two years before the founding of Amphipolis Samos revolted from Athens. In one sense it is true to say that this revolt was caused by a feeling of impatience under Athenian supremacy, and quite true also that Athenian citizens sometimes spoke of their relations with their allies as those of a tyrant with his subjects, and even made a exercising over them a despotic authority. But it is not the less true that this radical opposition of feeling and interest was confined for the most part to a small, although always powerful and parade of 3 Thục. iv. 102. sometimes preponderant, party in the subject cities. But there was also in every city a class which had not only no positive grievance against Athens, but a strong community of interest with her and this class, necessarily, was the Demos. In almost every case, therefore, we shall find the people passive or indifferent under Athenian supremacy so long as there was no opposition between the subject city and its mistress; but we shall also see that when the oligarchy broke out into open rebellion, the demos not unfrequently took the first opportunity of going over to their natural protectors. The tidings that Byzantion had joined in this revolt left to the Athenians no room to doubt the gravity of the crisis. A fleet of sixty ships was dispatched to Samos under Perikles and nine other generals, of whom the poet Sophokles is said to have been one; and the Samian oligarchy were compelled to submit in the ninth month after the beginning of the revolt, the terms being that they should raze their walls, give hostages, surrender their ships, and pay the expenses of the war. Following their example, the Byzantines also made their peace with Athens.2 The Athenians escaped at the same time a far greater danger nearer home. The Samians, like the men of Thasos,3 had applied for aid to the Spartans, who, no longer pressed by the Helot war, summoned a congress of their allies to discuss the question. For the truce which had still five-and-twenty years to run Sparta cared nothing but she encountered an opposition from the Corinthians which perhaps she now scarcely expected. In the synod at which Hippias had pleaded his cause the Corinthians had raised their voice not so much against the restoration of the despot, as against the principle of interference with the internal affairs of an autonomous city. They now insisted in a like spirit on the right of every independent state to deal as it pleased with its free or its subject allies. The Spartans were compelled to give way; and there can be no doubt that when some years later the Corinthians claimed the gratitude of the Athenians for this decision, they took credit for an act of good service singularly opportune. Had they voted as Sparta wished, Athens might by the extension of revolt amongst her allied cities have been reduced now to the condition to which, in consequence perhaps of this respite, she was not brought until the lifetime of a generation had been spent in desperate warfare. 1 This is emphatically asserted by Diodotos, whose argument. Thuc. iii. 47, is that the proposal of Kleon is not only unjust but most impolitic, as it confounds friends with foes. At present, Athens, he urges, may in every case of revolt count on having the Demos strongly in her favour. |