certed by the revolution in favour of Athens eight years before.1 But, although they held out against a blockade of many months, the triumph of the Eupatrids was certain. The Demos agreed at length to surrender on condition of being allowed to depart each man with one garment. The city with all its contents was handed over to the oligarchs, who found themselves under the yoke of a board of ten Spartans, with Thorax for harmost or governor. So ended, in a distant island, the long struggle which had begun, nearly eight-and-twenty years earlier, with the surprise of Plataiai by the Thebans. But Lysandros had not merely ended the strife. He had secured for himself personally a power such as no Greek, thus far, had ever attained. The Dekarchiai, or Boards of Ten, left in the conquered cities, were all his creations, prepared to carry out his will to the uttermost, and to resist any men or any measures to which his inclinations might be opposed. He now sailed home with the prow-ornaments of all the ships captured at Aigospotamoi, with a vast assortment of golden crowns voted to him in different cities, and with the huge sum of 470 talents, the residue of the money which Cyrus had placed in his hands for the purpose of humiliating Athens. With his fleet came the whole Athenian navy with the exception of the twelve triremes which alone remained in the basin of Peiraieus. The empire of Sparta was established; but Lysandros was fully resolved that her empire should be empire for himself also.

The success of his plan depended, necessarily, on the continuance of the sentiment which had animated the allies of Sparta to the

March of Pausanias, the Spartan king, into Attica.

close of the Peloponnesian war. That sentiment had root in the notion of city autonomy, and was sustained simply by fear of Athens. With the fall of the imperial city, the bond which held Spartans, Thebans, and Corinthians together was really loosened, although, in the first moments of vindictive rage, the Theban and Corinthian leaders insisted that Athens should be treated as Plataiai had been treated by Archidamos. The feeling rapidly cooled down when it became apparent that the promises made by the Spartans were a mere cheat, that by means of the harmosts and the dekarchies Sparta carried out a system of tyranny such as the Hellenic world had not yet seen, and that Athens was needed as an instrument for counteracting the power which had overwhelmed her. They had further causes of offence. Sparta had used them freely to do her hard work; but, if she allowed them the empty honour of statues and inscriptions, she steadily refused to share with them the golden harvest which she had reaped during the war. Nor was it likely that the pre-eminent glory and power of Lysandros would be agree able to the Herakleid kings of his own city. The honours heaped 1 See p. 418.

on the successful leader roused the jealousy and the wrath of Pausanias, one of these kings; and Pausanias, when Lysandros had set out for Eleusis, prayed that he too might be allowed to lead a Spartan force into Attica. For this expedition contingents were furnished by all the allies except the Thebans and Corinthians. A few months had sufficed to strengthen in them the suspicion that Sparta meant to make Athens a mere dependency on herself, and so to encroach on the freedom of her neighbours. They refused therefore to join, on the plea that the convention made after the surrender of the city had not been violated.

Victory of Pausanias. and suppression of the

tyranny at

Athens.

The presence of Pausanias, although Lysandros stood by his side, encouraged many to express freely their opinion of the tyrants who had fled to Eleusis, as well as of those who still held sway in Athens. In the complaints thus made the king probably saw fresh evidence of the schemes which had awakened his jealousy; but his first act was to summon Thrasyboulos and his followers to disperse. Their refusal was followed by a series of slight engagements, ending with one in which the exiles lost 150 men. Pausanias was thus victorious, and he could therefore afford now to act on his better judgement. Under a truce granted by him envoys were sent by the exiles to Sparta, and with them went two citizens belonging to the party opposed to the Ten within the city. On their side the Ten, who in the opinion of Xenophon constituted the state, dispatched messengers offering the unconditional surrender of the city, and demanding the like submission from the exiles in Peiraieus, if these were sincere in their desire for peace. The Spartans answered by appointing fifteen commissioners to settle matters along with Pausanias. The convention agreed upon restored the exiles to their homes, and secured an amnesty to all except the Thirty with their Eleven executioners, and the Ten who had done what they could to carry on the work of the expelled tyrants. Eleusis was left as an independent town which might be used as a place of refuge by such as feared to remain at Athens. But if the exiles were ready to forgive, the Thirty were not disposed to abandon their conspiracy. The fact became known that they were enlisting an army of mercenaries, and the people, who had just restored the old democratic constitution as it stood before the surrender of the city, marched against them. Their generals who came out to ask for a conference were seized and slain; the survivors of the Thirty fled from Attica; and the other Athenians in Eleusis accepted the peace which the Demos again offered to them. The Athenian demos had been guilty of great crimes. They had fallen during the last generation into the perilous habit of mind which sets lightly by

403 B.C. Spring.

Restoration

of the de

mocracy.

constitutional forms, and by doing as they liked in the case of the victors of Argennoussai they had sealed their downfall: but both after the overthrow of the Four Hundred' and on the expulsion of the Thirty and the Ten, they behaved with a deliberate and settled moderation to which it is not easy to do full justice. The amnesty embraced all citizens except the tyrants themselves and their executioners; and even these might, if they pleased, resume their citizenship on passing the usual trial of magistrates at the end of their term of office. The assembly which restored the old constitution decreed also, by the Psephisma proposed by Tisamenos, that the laws which bore the names of Solon and of Drakon should be amended wherever their provisions were found inconsistent with the recent amnesty. All laws and decrees of the people passed before the suppression of the Demos were pronounced to be valid; all legislation effected during the usurpation of the Thirty and the Ten was declared to be illegal and void. By this decree all lands reverted at once to the owners who possessed them before the surrender of the city to Lysandros; but there remained, as rankling wounds in those who had suffered from them, the wholesale thefts of money and moveable property, by which the Thirty had enriched themselves and their partisans. With a moderation which by some might be mistaken for apathy, the people, who were at the moment smarting under the effects of these iniquities, decreed that no prosecutions for damages should be allowed which had reference to offences committed before the Archonship of Eukleides, which marked the new birth of the Athenian constitution-the archonship of Pythodoros during the rule of the despots being stigmatised as the Anarchy. Anyone against whom such an action might be brought might plead in bar of it the special provision of the amnesty, and if the plea were admitted, the accuser would not merely be debarred from proceeding with his suit, but would have to pay to the defendant one-sixth part of the amount of his claim. This decree, of course, interfered in no way with the decisions of cases settled under the old democracy; but it effectually sheltered the robbers of personal property who worshipped the Spartans as their saviours. The despots whom these men put down had glutted themselves with the spoils of the rich: the victorious exiles received no other reward than the wreath of olive which expressed the gratitude of their countrymen, together with the sum of a thousand drachmas for a common sacrifice to the gods. Finally, the Ten had borrowed from Sparta a hundred talents to be employed against the exiles in Peiraieus. It might fairly have been pleaded that this money should be repaid by those to whom it had been lent or by their representatives. The people insisted

1 See P. 443.

She was then

on treating the debt as a public one, and discharged it as soon as their treasury enabled them to do so. As a foil to this picture, than which we can find nothing more to the credit of any people in any age, we might be disposed to set the exclusive spirit which by the psephisma of Aristophon restricted the citizenship to the sons of parents who both were Athenian citizens. In the days of her maritime empire Athens had been content to insist only on the citizenship of the father, and had granted the right of intermarriage with people beyond the borders of Attica. carrying out a plan which slowly but surely would soften and remove the bitter feelings of exclusiveness inherited from the earliest Aryan society, and in the end make the distinctions between Spartans, Boiotians, Corinthians, and Athenians just those distinctions which exist between the men of Cornwall and Kent, of Sussex and Northumberland. That empire had fallen, and with it had faded away those larger aspirations which would in the end have unfolded themselves into the ideas of national unity in place of city autonomy. Athens was again a single city and nothing more; and the centrifugal spirit which marked all other Hellenic cities reasserted its dominion here.

Last schemes

and death of Alkibiades.

404 B.C.

Before the victory of Thrasy boulos had been achieved at Athens, the stormy life of Alkibiades had been ended by murder. After the disaster of Aigospotamoi he felt that his forts on the Thrakian Chersonese would be but a poor defence against his Spartan enemies, and taking refuge with Pharnabazos, he soon saw through the schemes of Cyrus for dethroning his brother Artaxerxes who had succeeded his father Dareios Nothos. These schemes he was eager to reveal to the monarch himself at Sousa, and for this purpose he besought the satrap to send him thither with the Athenian envoys who after a detention of three years had found their way down to the coast. With this request Pharnabazos, not liking the Spartans and specially jealous of Lysandros, was not indisposed to comply; and had he gone to the capital, it is probable that the attempt of Cyrus which led him to his death at Kunaxa would never have been made. But the eyes of that prince were as keenly watchful as those of Alkibiades: and the Spartans must have known the dangers which they might incur from his intercourse with the men expelled from the various cities by the Lysandrian Decemvirates. Yet it is not likely that Pharnabazos would be determined even by the most urgent remonstrances of Sparta to take the life of a man whom he had received as a guest and to whom he had assigned an abode within his satrapy. The command of Cyrus must have been added to the requests from Sparta: and in obedience to the

1 See p. 455.

K K

former the order was given for his assassination. The murderers, it is said, were afraid to enter the house where he lived in a Phrygian village, and set it on fire. Their victim rushed out armed only with a dagger, and was struck down by a shower of arrows.

General review of his career.

So died the greatest perhaps, and the most systematic, of traitors. From first to last, this brilliant and daring man was his own god; and in order to exalt the object of his worship he stuck at no crime and cared for no law. The most enormous treachery cost him no effort; the mot frightful calamities brought about by that treachery caused him no remorse. He had a right, which nothing could take away, to avenge himself of his enemies, and his vengeance must be on a scale proportioned to his own importance. Of any duty to his country or to her constitution he knew nothing. If the conferring of a benefit upon her should be to his own interest, the boon should be bestowed; nay, her generals should even have the benefit of his good advice, if no selfish considerations interfered with the giving of it. Down to the time when the Athenian camp was formed in Samos, his whole career may be described as uniformily infamous. From that time, as some have thought, he was animated by a real patriotism and deserved well of his country. How far such an opinion may be maintained, the facts related in the past history may perhaps show. He cheated his countrymen to the destruction of their constitution by telling them the lie that the Persian king longed for their friendship and was repelled only by their popular government.' In order to cover this falsehood, he was compelled to lie again when, taking him at his word, the Athenian envoys appeared before Tissaphernes. When he had found it convenient to take up the cause of the democracy which he had professed both to despise and to hate, he again cheated the Athenians by assurances, which he knew to be false, of the sincere and profound friendship felt for them by Tissaphernes. By falsehood, again, he took credit to himself for preventing the Phenician fleet from appearing on the side of the Spartans, when he knew that the satrap had made up his mind that it should not appear on the scene of war at all. In no one of these instances were his acts disinterested or his professions sincere; and with his long course of fraud and falsehood his conference with the generals at Aigospotamoi stands out in solitary contrast. Here beyond doubt he was right; but he was an exile from his country, he was under the ban of Sparta, and he knew that he had an enemy in Tissaphernes. From the two latter he had nothing to expect in Athens he might yet hope to gain a footing, and his own interest would prompt him to utter a protest against the infa427. 2 See p. 431. 3 See p. 438. 4 See p. 445.

1 See p.