By these ever-memorable enactments, all acts done prior to the nomination of the archon Eukleidês and his colleagues, in the summer of 403 B.C., were excluded from serving as grounds for criminal process against any citizen. To insure more fully that this should be carried into effect, a special clause was added to the oath taken annually by the senators, as well as to that taken by the Heliastic dikasts. The senators pledged themselves by oath not to receive any impeachment, or give effect to any arrest, founded on any fact prior to the archonship of Eukleidês, excepting only against the Thirty, and the other individuals expressly shut out from the amnesty, and now in exile.[473] To the oath annually taken by the Heliasts, also, was added the clause: “I will not remember past wrongs, nor will I abet any one else who shall remember them; on the contrary,[474] I will give my vote pursuant to the existing laws;” which laws proclaimed themselves as only taking effect from the archonship of Eukleidês.
A still farther precaution was taken to bar all actions for redress or damages founded on acts done prior to the archonship of Eukleidês. On the motion of Archinus, the principal colleague of Thrasybulus at Phylê, a law was passed, granting leave to any defendant against whom such an action might be brought, to plead an exception in bar, or paragraphê, upon the special ground of the amnesty and the legal prescription connected with it. The legal effect of this paragraphê, or exceptional plea, in Attic procedure, was to increase both the chance of failure, and the pecuniary liabilities in case of failure, on the part of the plaintiff; also, to better considerably the chances of the defendant. This enactment is said to have been moved by Archinus, on seeing that some persons were beginning to institute actions at law, in spite of the amnesty; and for the better prevention of all such claims.[475]
By these additional enactments, security was taken that the proceedings of the courts of justice should be in full conformity with the amnesty recently sworn, and that, neither directly nor indirectly, should any person be molested for wrongs done anterior to Eukleidês. And, in fact, the amnesty was faithfully observed: the reëntering exiles from Peiræus, and the horsemen with other partisans of the Thirty in Athens, blended again together into one harmonious and equal democracy.
Eight years prior to these incidents, we have seen the oligarchical conspiracy of the Four Hundred for a moment successful, and afterwards overthrown; and we have had occasion to notice, in reference to that event, the wonderful absence of all reactionary violence on the part of the victorious people, at a moment of severe provocation for the past and extreme apprehension for the future. We noticed that Thucydidês, no friend to the Athenian democracy, selected precisely that occasion—on which some manifestation of vindictive impulse might have been supposed likely and natural—to bestow the most unqualified eulogies on their moderate and gentle bearing. Had the historian lived to describe the reign of the Thirty and the restoration which followed it, we cannot doubt that his expressions would have been still warmer and more emphatic in the same sense. Few events in history, either ancient or modern, are more astonishing than the behavior of the Athenian people, on recovering their democracy after the overthrow of the Thirty: and when we view it in conjunction with the like phenomenon after the deposition of the Four Hundred, we see that neither the one nor the other arose from peculiar caprice or accident of the moment; both depended upon permanent attributes of the popular character. If we knew nothing else except the events of these two periods, we should be warranted in dismissing, on that evidence alone, the string of contemptuous predicates,—giddy, irascible, jealous, unjust, greedy, etc., one or other of which Mr. Mitford so frequently pronounces, and insinuates even when he does not pronounce them, respecting the Athenian people.[476] A people, whose habitual temper and morality merited these epithets, could not have acted as the Athenians acted both after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty. Particular acts may be found in their history which justify severe censure; but as to the permanent elements of character, both moral and intellectual, no population in history has ever afforded stronger evidence than the Athenians on these two memorable occasions.
If we follow the acts of the Thirty, we shall see that the horsemen and the privileged three thousand hoplites in the city had made themselves partisans in every species of flagitious crime which could possibly be imagined to exasperate the feelings of the exiles. The latter, on returning, saw before them men who had handed in their relations to be put to death without trial, who had seized upon and enjoyed their property, who had expelled them all from the city, and a large portion of them even from Attica; and who had held themselves in mastery not merely by the overthrow of the constitution, but also by inviting and subsidizing foreign guards. Such atrocities, conceived and ordered by the Thirty, had been executed by the aid, and for the joint benefit, as Kritias justly remarked,[477] of those occupants of the city whom the exiles found on returning. Now Thrasybulus, Anytus, and the rest of these exiles, saw their property all pillaged and appropriated by others during the few months of their absence: we may presume that their lands—which had probably not been sold, but granted to individual members or partisans of the Thirty[478]—were restored to them; but the movable property could not be reclaimed, and the losses to which they remained subject were prodigious. The men who had caused and profited by these losses[479]—often with great brutality towards the wives and families of the exiles, as we know by the case of the orator Lysias—were now at Athens, all individually well known to the sufferers. In like manner, the sons and brothers of Leon and the other victims of the Thirty, saw before them the very citizens by whose hands their innocent relatives had been consigned without trial to prison and execution.[480] The amount of wrong suffered had been infinitely greater than in the time of the Four Hundred, and the provocation, on every ground, public and private, violent to a degree never exceeded in history. Yet with all this sting fresh in their bosoms, we find the victorious multitude, on the latter occasion as well as on the former, burying the past in an indiscriminate amnesty, and anxious only for the future harmonious march of the renovated and all-comprehensive democracy. We see the sentiment of commonwealth in the Demos, twice contrasted with the sentiment of faction in an ascendent oligarchy;[481] twice triumphant over the strongest counter-motives, over the most bitter recollections of wrongful murder and spoliation, over all that passionate rush of reactionary appetite which characterizes the moment of political restoration. “Bloody will be the reign of that king who comes back to his kingdom from exile,” says the Latin poet: bloody, indeed, had been the rule of Kritias and those oligarchs who had just come back from exile: “Harsh is a Demos (observes Æschylus) which has just got clear of misery.”[482] But the Athenian Demos, on coming back from Peiræus, exhibited the rare phenomenon of a restoration, after cruel wrong suffered, sacrificing all the strong impulse of retaliation to a generous and deliberate regard for the future march of the commonwealth. Thucydidês remarks that the moderation of political antipathy which prevailed at Athens after the victory of the people over the Four Hundred, was the main cause which revived Athens from her great public depression and danger.[483] Much more forcibly does this remark apply to the restoration after the Thirty, when the public condition of Athens was at the lowest depth of abasement, from which nothing could have rescued her except such exemplary wisdom and patriotism on the part of her victorious Demos. Nothing short of this could have enabled her to accomplish that partial resurrection—into an independent and powerful single state, though shorn of her imperial power—which will furnish material for the subsequent portion of our History.
While we note the memorable resolution of the Athenian people to forget that which could not be remembered without ruin to the future march of the democracy, we must at the same time observe that which they took special pains to preserve from being forgotten. They formally recognized all the adjudged cases and all the rights of property as existing under the democracy anterior to the Thirty. “You pronounced, fellow-citizens (says Andokidês), that all the judicial verdicts and all the decisions of arbitrators passed under the democracy should remain valid, in order that there might be no abolition of debts, no reversal of private rights, but that every man might have the means of enforcing contracts due to him by others.”[484] If the Athenian people had been animated by that avidity to despoil the rich, and that subjection to the passion of the moment, which Mr. Mitford imputes to them in so many chapters of his history, neither motive nor opportunity was now wanting for wholesale confiscation, of which the rich themselves, during the dominion of the Thirty, had set abundant example. The amnesty as to political wrong, and the indelible memory as to the rights of property, stand alike conspicuous as evidences of the real character of the Athenian Demos.
If we wanted any farther proof of their capacity of taking the largest and soundest views on a difficult political situation, we should find it in another of their measures at this critical period. The Ten who had succeeded to the oligarchical presidency of Athens after the death of Kritias and the expulsion of the Thirty, had borrowed from Sparta the sum of one hundred talents, for the express purpose of making war on the exiles in Peiræus. After the peace, it was necessary that such sum should be repaid, and some persons proposed that recourse should be had to the property of those individuals and that party who had borrowed the money. The apparent equity of the proposition was doubtless felt with peculiar force at a time when the public treasury was in the extreme of poverty. But nevertheless both the democratical leaders and the people decidedly opposed it, resolving to recognize the debt as a public charge; in which capacity it was afterwards liquidated, after some delay arising from an unsupplied treasury.[485]
All that was required from the horsemen, or knights, who had been active in the service of the Thirty, was that they should repay the sums which had been advanced to them by the latter as outfit. Such advance to the horsemen, subject to subsequent repayment, and seemingly distinct from the regular military pay, appears to have been a customary practice under the previous democracy;[486] but we may easily believe that the Thirty had carried it to an abusive excess, in their anxiety to enlist or stimulate partisans, when we recollect that they resorted to means more nefarious for the same end. There were of course great individual differences among these knights, as to the degree in which each had lent himself to the misdeeds of the oligarchy. Even the most guilty of them were not molested, and they were sent, four years afterwards, to serve with Agesilaus in Asia, at a time when the Lacedæmonians required from Athens a contingent of cavalry;[487] the Demos being well pleased to be able to provide for them an honorable foreign service. But the general body of knights suffered so little disadvantage from the recollection of the Thirty, that many of them in after days became senators, generals, hipparchs, and occupants of other considerable posts in the state.[488]
Although the decree of Tisamenus—prescribing a revision of the laws without delay, and directing that the laws, when so revised, should be posted up for public view, to form the sole and exclusive guide of the dikasteries—had been passed immediately after the return from Peiræus and the confirmation of the amnesty, yet it appears that considerable delay took place before such enactment was carried into full effect. A person named Nikomachus was charged with the duty, and stands accused of having performed it tardily as well as corruptly. He, as well as Tisamenus,[489] was a scribe, or secretary; under which name were included a class of paid officers, highly important in the detail of business at Athens, though seemingly men of low birth, and looked upon as filling a subordinate station, open to sneers from unfriendly orators. The boards, the magistrates, and the public bodies were so frequently changed at Athens, that the continuity of public business could only have been maintained by paid secretaries of this character, who devoted themselves constantly to the duty.[490]
Nikomachus had been named, during the democracy anterior to the Thirty, for the purpose of preparing a fair transcript, and of posting up afresh, probably in clearer characters, and in a place more convenient for public view, the old laws of Solon. We can well understand that the renovated democratical feeling, which burst out after the expulsion of the Four Hundred, and dictated the vehement psephism of Demophantus, might naturally also produce such a commission as this, for which Nikomachus, both as one of the public scribes, or secretaries, and as an able speaker,[491] was a suitable person. His accuser, for whom Lysias composed his thirtieth oration, now remaining, denounces him as having not only designedly lingered in the business, for the purpose of prolonging the period of remuneration, but even as having corruptly tampered with the old laws, by new interpolations, as well as by omissions. How far such charges may have been merited, we have no means of judging; but even assuming Nikomachus to have been both honest and diligent, he would find no small difficulty in properly discharging his duty of anagrapheus,[492] or “writer-up” of all the old laws of Athens, from Solon downward. Both the phraseology of these old laws, and the alphabet in which they were written, were in many cases antiquated and obsolete;[493] while there were doubtless also cases in which one law was at variance, wholly or partially, with another. Now such contradictions and archaisms would be likely to prove offensive, if set up in a fresh place, and with clean, new characters; while Nikomachus had no authority to make the smallest alteration, and might naturally therefore be tardy in a commission which did not promise much credit to him in its result.