HARSHNESS OF THE SPARTAN HEGEMONY
[405-353 B.C.]
The Peloponnesian War had been disastrous in its consequences to public morals. Its long duration and peculiarly bloody character, arousing everywhere mistrust, exciting passions, deifying brute force, had wrought a deterioration in the Greek nature from which it never fully recovered. There was ferocity on the battle-field, a ferocity in the party contests. “This,” says Aristotle, “is the oath administered to-day in several cities by the oligarchy: ‘I will be the enemy of the people and will do them all the evil I can.’” We may indeed place against this homicidal oath that taken by the heliasts of Athens after the tyranny: “I will forget all past ills and will permit no one else to remember and give them mention.” But Athens even in its decadence was always Athens liberal and generous, even as its mutilated statues remain beautiful in all their degradation.
Greek Urn
(In the British Museum)
The system of warfare had also changed. We have shown how one military revolution had already occurred; the replacing of the aristocratic army of former times by the democratic army of the fifth and sixth centuries. And now the age of mercenaries was being ushered in by the employment, in all Greek cities, of hired soldiers to fight beside their citizen troops. But to pay these hirelings money was required, and Greece applied to Persia, who alone had money; hence her mendicant attitude towards the Great King, and the continual intervention of Xerxes’ successors in Hellenic affairs. This dependence on a foreign power and harshness of the public temper were first observed during the last years of the war; they are found again in the year after peace was concluded, the Year of Anarchy, as the Greeks called the commencement of the Spartan dominion.
Blood flowed everywhere because everywhere were established oligarchical governments. A massacre occurred at Thasos. At Miletus eight hundred citizens belonging to the popularist party were lured from their retreats by Lysander and put to death. At Byzantium, Œtœa, and the greater part of the towns of Asia Minor similar outrages were committed. At Samos the inhabitants were all banished, with the privilege of taking away but a single garment. The defection of Chios and its navy had assured Sparta’s triumph; as a reward its most prominent citizens were sent into exile and all its triremes were seized. Lycophron, a Pheræan, made himself master of the province of Thessaly after desperate battles. “Thereafter,” relates Xenophon, “a Lacedæmonian’s lightest word was obeyed; even a citizen in private life could arrange everything to his will.” Xenophon himself appears to have shared this terror, since after the retreat of the Ten Thousand he refused the title of general-in-chief that his companions wished to bestow upon him, fearing that Sparta might view with disfavour the placing of command in the hands of an Athenian. The islanders, especially those who had betrayed the cause of Athens, hoped that with the accession to power of Lacedæmonia who was an ally of the Great King the duties established by Aristides and Pericles to protect their commerce would be removed. But they found they had simply changed masters, Sparta continuing to levy the former tribute, which amounted annually to 1000 talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000].
Athens, more adroit in establishing her empire, had proceeded without cruelty, violence, or spoliation, hence had not known, even in her time of greatest misfortune, the falling-off of her supports. Sparta was not so wise in the formation of kingdoms; force was the only instrument of which she knew the use, and with her the use of it was the abuse of it. Athens had also made use of force, but had always associated with it justice. Athens had made itself the political, military, and judiciary centre of the empire, and further, it was the metropolis of arts and letters for all Hellas. Nothing great or glorious, nothing useful or full of promise, could proceed from the Lacedæmonian dominion; it threatened to topple over in the hour of its erection. A thousand causes were at work to bring about a rapid dissolution; many of these were in Sparta or Greece, the rest in other lands.