Alkibiades, a tale of the Great Athenian War

by Charles Hamilton Bromby

The famine was drawing closer. Hitherto it had been only the poor who had been caught by it, but now the rich suffered also. Theramenes was the first to break the new-made law. He was allowed to approach Lysandros—not to mention peace, of course, only to endeavour to find out what it was the Spartans wanted. He stayed away two months.

The famine was now king of Athens, dealing death out right and left on all classes, quite promiscuously, making little distinction between rich and poor, caring, it seemed, nothing at all for democrats or oligarchs. When Theramenes at length came back, he brought small consolation. He could not, for the life of him, make out what it was the Spartans wanted. He was sent back to make peace on any terms.

Then, at length, he found out what it was she and her allies did really want. He found them in session deliberating on the doom of Athens. A Theban deputy, speaking for the Boiotians, demanded that the Athenians should be slaughtered man by man, or sold as slaves; that the walls of Athens and all her splendid temples and public buildings should be destroyed, and that grass should be sown where she had stood. The Korinthians concurred in this demand. The pride of Athens in her days of glory made them forget what she had done for them in times of trouble. Sparta alone remembered it, and she could recollect it because it served her purpose to remember it. She declared that a city which had once deserved so well of Greece must not be utterly destroyed. She wanted to reduce it to dependency upon herself, not to crush it. She wished to make a subject-city of Athens, with a Spartan garrison and a military governor ruling as her Viceroy. The other states did not want that. It would have made Lakedaimon as strong, and perhaps much more offensive than Athens had ever been.

So they agreed upon a compromise, and settled the terms upon which peace might be given her. The fortifications of the Peiræus must be dismantled, the arsenals destroyed, the long walls, which she had built and cherished as her great security, must be pulled down. She must renounce all her possessions, own nothing out of Attika, give up her fleet, except such few ships as Lysandros might permit her to retain, and make alliance with Lakedaimon.

When Theramenes brought these terrible, heart-rending terms and read them out before the Assembly in the Pnyx, first an awful silence fell upon the multitude, then sobs were heard, then someone rose on tottering legs to utter a weak protest. A few others tried to speak against them, muttering that a people such as they were should hold out still, and should die within the walls, rather than yield on such terms. But hunger had done its work. Theramenes was sent once more to Lysandros to tell him that the gates of Athens stood open to his forces.

On an April day in 404, at the head of the allied armies, Lysandros made his entry into Athens. The last insults were inflicted on the miserable, vanquished citizens. Rude Spartan soldiers, dancing clumsily to the music which their women played upon their pipes, looked on and jested while free-born Athenians were made to toil with pick and spade at the destruction, stone by stone, of the strong defending walls.

The proud people had not yet reached the end of all their punishment and degradation. There was a secret clause in the terms of the capitulation which Theramenes had not thought it necessary to mention publicly, but which had been agreed upon between him and Lysandros,—one to which Theramenes, at least, did not object. As soon as the Spartans had made themselves masters of the city and the Akropolis, a meeting of the people was held, as usual, in the Pnyx, as though they were still a self-governing democracy. An agent of Theramenes, following the private convention made with the conqueror, contended before the Ekklesia that the people had shown itself unapt to manage the great affairs of state, and that its inconstancy had brought them to their present lamentable plight; and he suggested that it would be better, for the present, to make over the direction of its affairs to a chosen body of thirty of the wisest citizens.

The Athenians had lost their walls, their dependencies, their fleet,—all that could make them great and glorious; but they had not yet lost the semblance of their freedom: they had their Assembly. They declared they would never part with that. Who could tell but that some day fortune might return again, and bring back something of what they had thrown away? As long as they had their constitution, they might at least imagine that they were free; and when the dark time passed away, they would still have the Ekklesia in which to make their own laws and choose their own rulers, as in the past. They remembered the condition of the city when the four hundred were in power. It might be even worse if the whole government were in the hands of but thirty untried, possibly ambitious, men,—friends of such well-known and distrusted oligarchs as Theramenes. They rejected the proposal with indignation.

Lysandros was watching them. His sanguinary will was law in what had been free and stately Athens. He solemnly counselled the people to accept the proposed new constitution. He let them know that his counsel, if it was not accepted, would become something more urgent. A fresh session of the Ekklesia was called; the late decision was reversed. The people, under compulsion, voted themselves and their power away. Theramenes and twenty-nine other persons named by him were elected and had authority given them to reform the constitution.

The reforms made by the Thirty consisted chiefly in the murder of those who ventured to differ from them. They excelled the Four Hundred in their crimes. When Lysandros went off with his fleet for a short time to carry on the siege of Samos the people threatened to rise against their tyrants. Kritias, who now took the most active part amongst the thirty—Theramenes being too timid—sent in haste to the Spartan admiral for help against his outraged countrymen. Spartan soldiers were sent to prop up the usurpers and to disarm the people. Kritias was kept in power for a time by Spartan hoplites quartered in the Akropolis, who menaced the unarmed citizens from the sacred Parthenon.