[75] Thucyd. viii, 89, 90. The representation of the character and motives of Theramenês, as given by Lysias in the Oration contra Eratosthenem (Orat. xii, sects. 66, 67, 79; Orat. xiii, cont. Agorat. sects. 12-17), is quite in harmony with that of Thucydidês (viii, 89): compare Aristophan. Ran. 541-966; Xenoph. Hellen. ii, 3, 27-30.
[76] Thucyd. viii, 89. ἦν δὲ τοῦτο μὲν σχῆμα πολιτικὸν τοῦ λόγου αὐτοῖς, κατ᾽ ἰδίας δὲ φιλοτιμίας οἱ πολλοὶ αὐτῶν τῷ τοιούτῳ προσέκειντο, ἐν ᾧπερ καὶ μάλιστα ὀλιγαρχία ἐκ δημοκρατίας γενομένη ἀπόλλυται. Πάντες γὰρ αὐθημερὸν ἀξιοῦσιν οὐχ ὅπως ἴσοι, ἀλλὰ καὶ πολὺ πρῶτος αὐτὸς ἕκαστος εἶναι· ἐκ δὲ δημοκρατίας αἱρέσεως γιγνομένης, ῥᾷον τὰ ἀποβαίνοντα, ὡς οὐκ ἀπὸ τῶν ὁμοίων, ἐλασσούμενός τις φέρει.
I give in the text what appears to me the proper sense of this passage, the last words of which are obscure: see the long notes of the commentators, especially Dr. Arnold and Poppo. Dr. Arnold considers τῶν ὁμοίων as a neuter, and gives the paraphrase of the last clause as follows: “Whereas under an old-established government, they (ambitious men of talent) are prepared to fail: they know that the weight of the government is against them, and are thus spared the peculiar pain of being beaten in a fair race, when they and their competitors start with equal advantages, and there is nothing to lessen the mortification of defeat. Ἀπὸ τῶν ὁμοίων ἐλασσούμενος, is, being beaten when the game is equal, when the terms of the match are fair.”
I cannot concur in Dr. Arnold’s explanation of these words, or of the general sense of the passage. He thinks that Thucydidês means to affirm what applies generally “to an opposition minority when it succeeds in revolutionizing the established government, whether the government be a democracy or a monarchy; whether the minority be an aristocratical party or a popular one.” It seems to me, on the contrary, that the affirmation bears only on the special case of an oligarchical conspiracy subverting a democracy, and that the comparison taken is applicable only to the state of things as it stood under the preceding democracy.
Next, the explanation given of the words by Dr. Arnold, assumes that “to be beaten in a fair race, or when the terms of the match are fair,” causes to the loser the maximum of pain and offence. This is surely not the fact: or rather, the reverse is the fact. The man who loses his cause or his election through unjust favor, jealousy, or antipathy, is more hurt than if he had lost it under circumstances where he could find no injustice to complain of. In both cases, he is doubtless mortified; but if there be injustice, he is offended and angry as well as mortified: he is disposed to take vengeance on men whom he looks upon as his personal enemies. It is important to distinguish the mortification of simple failure, from the discontent and anger arising out of belief that the failure has been unjustly brought about: it is this discontent, tending to break out in active opposition, which Thucydidês has present to his mind in the comparison which he takes between the state of feeling which precedes and follows the subversion of the democracy.
It appears to me that the words τῶν ὁμοίων are masculine, and that they have reference, like πάντες and ἴσοι, in the preceding line, to the privileged minority of equal confederates who are supposed to have just got possession of the government. At Sparta, the word οἱ ὅμοιοι acquired a sort of technical sense, to designate the small ascendent minority of wealthy Spartan citizens, who monopolized in their own hands political power, to the practical exclusion of the remainder (see Xenoph. Hellen. iii. 3, 5; Xenoph. Resp. Lac. x, 7; xiii, 1; Demosth. cont. Lept. s. 88). Now these ὅμοιοι, or peers, here indicated by Thucydidês as the peers of a recently-formed oligarchy, are not merely equal among themselves, but rivals one with another, and personally known to each other. It is important to bear in mind all these attributes as tacitly implied, though not literally designated or connoted by the word ὅμοιοι, or peers; because the comparison instituted by Thucydidês is founded on all the attributes taken together; just as Aristotle (Rhetoric, ii, 8; ii, 13, 4), in speaking of the envy and jealousy apt to arise towards τοὺς ὁμοίους, considers them as ἀντεράστας and ἀνταγωνίστας.
The Four Hundred at Athens were all peers,—equals, rivals, and personally known among one another,—who had just raised themselves by joint conspiracy to supreme power. Theramenês, one of the number, conceives himself entitled to preëminence, but finds that he is shut out from it, the men who shut him out being this small body of known equals and rivals. He is inclined to impute the exclusion to personal motives on the part of this small knot; to selfish ambition on the part of each; to ill-will, to jealousy, to wrongful partiality; so that he thinks himself injured, and the sentiment of injury is embittered by the circumstance that those from whom it proceeds are a narrow, known, and definite body of colleagues. Whereas, if his exclusion had taken place under the democracy, by the suffrage of a large, miscellaneous, and personally unknown collection of citizens, he would have been far less likely to carry off with him a sense of injury. Doubtless he would have been mortified; but he would not have looked upon the electors in the light of jealous or selfish rivals, nor would they form a definite body before him for his indignation to concentrate itself upon. Thus Nikomachidês—whom Sokratês (see Xenophon, Memor. iii, 4) meets returning mortified because the people had chosen another person and not him as general—would have been not only mortified, but angry and vindictive besides, if he had been excluded by a few peers and rivals.
Such, in my judgment, is the comparison which Thucydidês wishes to draw between the effect of disappointment inflicted by the suffrage of a numerous and miscellaneous body of citizens, compared with disappointment inflicted by a small knot of oligarchical peers upon a competitor among their own number, especially at a moment when the expectations of all these peers are exaggerated, in consequence of the recent acquisition of their power. I believe the remark of the historian to be quite just; and that the disappointment in the first case is less intense, less connected with the sentiment of injury, and less likely to lead to active manifestation of enmity. This is one among the advantages of a numerous suffrage.
I cannot better illustrate the jealousies pretty sure to break out among a small number of ὅμοιοι, or rival peers, than by the description which Justin gives of the leading officers of Alexander the Great, immediately after that monarch’s death (Justin, xii, 2):—
“Cæterum, occiso Alexandro, non, ut læti, ita et securi fuere, omnibus unum locum competentibus: nec minus milites invicem se timebant, quorum et libertas solutior et favor incertus erat. Inter ipsos vero æqualitas discordiam augebat, nemine tantum cæteros excedente, ut ei aliquis se submitteret.”