To dwell much upon specific allegations of wrong, would not have suited the purpose of the Corinthian envoy; for against such, the thirty years’ truce expressly provided that recourse should be had to amicable arbitration,—to which recourse he never once alludes. He knew that, as between Corinth and Athens, war had already begun at Potidæa; and his business, throughout nearly all of a very emphatic speech is, to show that the Peloponnesian confederacy, and especially Sparta, is bound to take instant part in it, not less by prudence than by duty. He employs the most animated language to depict the ambition, the unwearied activity, the personal effort abroad as well as at home, the quick resolves, the sanguine hopes never dashed by failure,—of Athens; as contrasted with the cautious, home-keeping, indolent, scrupulous routine of Sparta. He reproaches the Spartans with their backwardness and timidity, in not having repressed the growth of Athens before she reached this formidable height,—especially in having allowed her to fortify her city after the retreat of Xerxes, and afterwards to build the long walls from the city to the sea.[131] The Spartans, he observes, stood alone among all Greeks, in the notable system of keeping down an enemy not by acting, but delaying to act,—not arresting his growth, but putting him down when his force was doubled. Falsely, indeed, had they acquired the reputation of being sure, when they were in reality merely slow:[132] in resisting Xerxes, as in resisting Athens, they had always been behindhand, disappointing and leaving their friends to ruin,—while both these enemies had only failed of complete success through their own mistakes.
After half apologizing for the tartness of these reproofs,—which, however, as the Spartans were now well-disposed to go to war forthwith, would be well-timed and even agreeable,—the Corinthian orator vindicates the necessity of plain-speaking by the urgent peril of the emergency, and the formidable character of the enemy who threatened them. “You do not reflect (he says) how thoroughly different the Athenians are from yourselves. They are innovators by nature; sharp both in devising, and in executing what they have determined: you are sharp only in keeping what you have got, in determining on nothing beyond, and in doing even less than absolute necessity requires.[133] They again dare beyond their means, run risks beyond their own judgment, and keep alive their hopes even in desperate circumstances: your peculiarity is, that your performance comes short of your power,—you have no faith even in what your judgment guarantees,—when in difficulties, you despair of all escape. They never hang back,—you are habitual laggards: they love foreign service,—you cannot stir from home: for they are always under the belief that their movements will lead to some farther gain, while you fancy that new projects will endanger what you have already. When successful, they make the greatest forward march; when defeated, they fall back the least. Moreover, they task their bodies on behalf of their city as if they were the bodies of others,—while their minds are most of all their own, for exertion in her service.[134] When their plans for acquisition do not come successfully out, they feel like men robbed of what belongs to them: yet the acquisitions when realized appear like trifles compared with what remains to be acquired. If they sometimes fail in an attempt, new hopes arise in some other direction to supply the want: for with them alone the possession and the hope of what they aim at is almost simultaneous, from their habit of quickly executing all that they have once resolved. And in this manner do they toil throughout all their lives amidst hardship and peril, disregarding present enjoyment in the continual thirst for increase,—knowing no other festival recreation except the performance of active duty,—and deeming inactive repose a worse condition than fatiguing occupation. To speak the truth in two words: such is their inborn temper, that they will neither remain at rest themselves, nor allow rest to others.[135]
“Such is the city which stands opposed to you, Lacedæmonians,—yet ye still hang back from action.... Your continual scruples and apathy would hardly be safe, even if ye had neighbors like yourselves in character: but as to dealings with Athens, your system is antiquated and out of date. In politics as in art, it is the modern improvements which are sure to come out victorious: and though unchanged institutions are best, if a city be not called upon to act,—yet multiplicity of active obligations requires multiplicity and novelty of contrivance.[136] It is through these numerous trials that the means of Athens have acquired so much more new development than yours.”
The Corinthians concluded by saying, that if, after so many previous warnings, now repeated for the last time, Sparta still refused to protect her allies against Athens,—if she delayed to perform her promise made to the Potidæans, of immediately invading Attica,—they, the Corinthians, would forthwith look for safety in some new alliance, and they felt themselves fully justified in doing so. They admonished her to look well to the case, and to carry forward Peloponnesus with undiminished dignity as it had been transmitted to her from her predecessors.[137]
Such was the memorable picture of Athens and her citizens, as exhibited by her fiercest enemy, before the public assembly at Sparta. It was calculated to impress the assembly, not by appeal to recent or particular misdeeds, but by the general system of unprincipled and endless aggression which was imputed to Athens during the past,—and by the certainty held out that the same system, unless put down by measures of decisive hostility, would be pushed still farther in future to the utter ruin of Peloponnesus. And to this point did the Athenian envoy—staying in Sparta about some other negotiation, and now present in the assembly—address himself in reply, after having asked and obtained permission from the magistrates. The empire of Athens was now of such standing that the younger men present had no personal knowledge of the circumstances under which it had grown up: and what was needed as information for them would be impressive as a reminder even to their seniors.[138]
He began by disclaiming all intention of defending his native city against the charges of specific wrong or alleged infractions of the existing truce: this was no part of his mission, nor did he recognize Sparta as a competent judge in disputes between Athens and Corinth. But he nevertheless thought it his duty to vindicate Athens against the general character of injustice and aggression imputed to her, as well as to offer a solemn warning to the Spartans against the policy towards which they were obviously tending. He then proceeded to show that the empire of Athens had been honorably earned and amply deserved,—that it had been voluntarily ceded, and even pressed upon her,—and that she could not abdicate it without emperiling her own separate existence and security. Far from thinking that the circumstances under which it was acquired needed apology, he appealed to them with pride as a testimony of the genuine Hellenic patriotism of that city which the Spartan congress now seemed disposed to run down as an enemy.[139] He then dwelt upon the circumstances attending the Persian invasion, setting forth the superior forwardness and the unflinching endurance of Athens, in spite of ungenerous neglect from Sparta and the other Greeks,—the preponderance of her naval force in the entire armament,—the directing genius of her general Themistoklês, complimented even by Sparta herself,—and the title of Athens to rank on that memorable occasion as the principal saviour of Greece. This alone ought to save her empire from reproach: but this was not all,—for that empire had been tendered to her by the pressing instance of the allies, at a time when Sparta had proved herself both incompetent and unwilling to prosecute the war against Persia.[140] By simple exercise of the constraining force inseparable from her presidential obligations, and by the reduction of various allies who revolted, Athens had gradually become unpopular, while Sparta too had become her enemy instead of her friend. To relax her hold upon her allies would have been to make them the allies of Sparta against her; and thus the motive of fear was added to those of ambition and revenue, in inducing Athens to maintain her imperial dominion by force. In her position, no Grecian power either would or could have acted otherwise: no Grecian power, certainly not Sparta, would have acted with so much equity and moderation, or given so little ground of complaint to her subjects. Worse they had suffered, while under Persia; worse they would suffer, if they came under Sparta, who held her own allies under the thraldom of an oligarchical party in each city; and if they hated Athens, this was only because subjects always hated the present dominion, whatever that might be.[141]
Having justified both the origin and the working of the Athenian empire, the envoy concluded by warning Sparta to consider calmly, without being hurried away by the passions and invectives of others, before she took a step from which there was no retreat, and which exposed the future to chances such as no man on either side could foresee. He called on her not to break the truce mutually sworn to, but to adjust all differences, as Athens was prepared to do, by the amicable arbitration which that truce provided. Should she begin war, the Athenians would follow her lead and resist her, calling to witness those gods under whose sanction the oaths were taken.[142]
The facts recounted in the preceding chapters will have shown, that the account given by the Athenian envoy at Sparta, of the origin and character of the empire exercised by his city, though doubtless the account of a partisan, is in substance correct and equitable; the envoys of Athens had not yet learned to take the tone which they assumed in the sixteenth and seventeenth years of the coming war, at Melos and Kamarina. At any time previous to the affair of Korkyra, the topics insisted upon by the Athenian would probably have been profoundly listened to at Sparta. But now the mind of the Spartans was made up. Having cleared the assembly of all “strangers,” and even all allies, they proceeded to discuss and determine the question among themselves. Most of their speakers held but one language,[143]—expatiating on the wrongs already done by Athens, and urging the necessity of instant war. There was, however, one voice, and that a commanding voice, raised against this conclusion: the ancient and respected king Archidamus opposed it.
The speech of Archidamus is that of a deliberate Spartan, who, setting aside both hatred to Athens and blind partiality to allies, looks at the question with a view to the interests and honor of Sparta only,—not, however, omitting her imperial as well as her separate character. The preceding native speakers, indignant against Athens, had probably appealed to Spartan pride, treating it as an intolerable disgrace that almost the entire land-force of Dorian Peloponnesus should be thus bullied by one single Ionic city, and should hesitate to commence a war which one invasion of Attica would probably terminate. As the Corinthians had tried to excite the Spartans by well-timed taunts and reproaches, so the subsequent speakers had aimed at the same objects by panegyric upon the well-known valor and discipline of the city. To all these arguments Archidamus set himself to reply. Invoking the experience of the elders his contemporaries around him, he impressed upon the assembly the grave responsibility, the uncertainties, difficulties, and perils, of the war into which they were hurrying without preparation.[144] He reminded them of the wealth, the population, greater than that of any other Grecian city, the naval force, the cavalry, the hoplites, the large foreign dominion of Athens,—and then asked by what means they proposed to put her down?[145] Ships, they had few; trained seamen, yet fewer; wealth, next to none. They could indeed invade and ravage Attica, by their superior numbers and land-force: but the Athenians had possessions abroad sufficient to enable them to dispense with the produce of Attica, while their great navy would retaliate the like ravages upon Peloponnesus. To suppose that one or two devastating expeditions into Attica would bring the war to an end, would be a deplorable error: such proceedings would merely enrage the Athenians, without impairing their real strength, and the war would thus be prolonged, perhaps, for a whole generation.[146] Before they determined upon war, it was absolutely necessary to provide more efficient means for carrying it on; and to multiply their allies, not merely among the Greeks, but among foreigners also: while this was in process, envoys ought to be sent to Athens to remonstrate and obtain redress for the grievances of the allies. If the Athenians granted this,—which they very probably would do, when they saw the preparations going forward, and when the ruin of the highly-cultivated soil of Attica was held over them in terrorem without being actually consummated,—so much the better: if they refused, in the course of two or three years war might be commenced with some hopes of success. Archidamus reminded his countrymen that their allies would hold them responsible for the good or bad issue of what was now determined;[147] admonishing them, in the true spirit of a conservative Spartan, to cling to that cautious policy which had been ever the characteristic of the state, despising both taunts on their tardiness and panegyric on their valor. “We, Spartans, owe both our bravery and our prudence to our admirable public discipline: it makes us warlike, because the sense of shame is most closely connected with discipline, as valor is with the sense of shame: it makes us prudent, because our training keeps us too ignorant to set ourselves above our own institutions, and holds us under sharp restraint so as not to disobey them.[148] And thus, not being overwise in unprofitable accomplishments, we Spartans are not given to disparage our enemy’s strength in clever speech, and then meet him with short-comings in reality: we think that the capacity of neighboring states is much on a par, and that the chances in reserve for both parties are too uncertain to be discriminated beforehand by speech. We always make real preparations against our enemies, as if they were proceeding wisely on their side: we must count upon security through our own precautions, not upon the chance of their errors. Indeed, there is no great superiority in one man as compared with another: he is the stoutest who is trained in the severest trials. Let us, for our parts, not renounce this discipline, which we have received from our fathers, and which we still continue, to our very great profit: let us not hurry on, in one short hour, a resolution upon which depend so many lives, so much property, so many cities, and our own reputation besides. Let us take time to consider, since our strength puts it fully in our power to do so. Send envoys to the Athenians on the subject of Potidæa, and of the other grievances alleged by our allies,—and that too, the rather as they are ready to give us satisfaction: against one who offers satisfaction, custom forbids you to proceed, without some previous application, as if he were a proclaimed wrong-doer. But, at the same time, make preparation for war; such will be the course of policy at once the best for your own power and the most terror-striking to your enemies.”[149]
The speech of Archidamus was not only in itself full of plain reason and good sense, but delivered altogether from the point of view of a Spartan; appealing greatly to Spartan conservative feeling and even prejudice. But in spite of all this, and in spite of the personal esteem entertained for the speaker, the tide of feeling in the opposite direction was at that moment irresistible. Stheneläidas—one of the five ephors, to whom it fell to put the question for voting—closed the debate; and his few words mark at once the character of the man, the temper of the assembly, and the simplicity of speech, though without the wisdom of judgment, for which Archidamus had taken credit to his countrymen.