Yet what were the effects which they produced? Did the minority resort to a conspiracy,—or the majority to a coup d’état—or either of them to invitation of foreign aid against the other? Nothing of the kind. The minority had always open to them the road of pacific opposition, and the chance of obtaining a majority in the Senate or in the public assembly, which was practically identical with the totality of the citizens. Their opposition, though pacific as to acts, was sufficiently animated and violent in words and propositions, to serve as a real discharge for imprisoned angry passion. If they could not carry the adoption of their general policy, they had the opportunity of gaining partial victories which took off the edge of a fierce discontent; witness the fine imposed upon Perikles (Thucyd. ii, 65) in the year before his death, which both gratified and mollified the antipathy against him, and brought about shortly afterwards a strong reaction in his favor. The majority, on the other hand, knew that the predominance of its policy depended upon its maintaining its hold on a fluctuating public assembly, against the utmost freedom of debate and attack, within certain forms and rules prescribed by the constitution; attachment to the latter being the cardinal principle of political morality in both parties. It was this system which excluded on both sides the thought of armed violence. It produced among the democratical citizens of Athens that characteristic insisted upon by Kleon in Thucydides,—“constant and fearless security and absence of treacherous hostility among one another” (διὰ γὰρ τὸ καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀδεὲς καὶ ἀνεπιβούλευτον πρὸς ἀλλήλους, καὶ ἐς τοὺς ξυμμάχους τὸ αὐτὸ ἔχετε—Thuc. iii, 37), the entire absence of which stands so prominently forward in these deplorable proceedings of the oligarchical Corinth. Pasimêlus and his Corinthian minority had no assemblies, dikasteries, annual Senate, or constant habit of free debate and accusation, to appeal to; their only available weapon was armed violence, or treacherous correspondence with a foreign enemy. On the part of the Corinthian government, superior or more skilfully used force, or superior alliance abroad, was the only weapon of defence, in like manner.
I shall return to this subject in a future chapter, where I enter more at large into the character of the Athenians.
[632] Diodor. xiv, 86; Xen. Hellen. iv, 4, 5.
[633] Xen. Hellen. iv, 4, 8. καὶ κατὰ τύχην καὶ κατ᾽ ἐπιμέλειαν, etc.
[634] Xen. Hellen. iv, 4, 8. Nothing can show more forcibly the Laconian bias of Xenophon, than the credit which he gives to Pasimêlus for his good faith towards the Lacedæmonians whom he was letting in; overlooking or approving his treacherous betrayal towards his own countrymen, in thus opening a gate which he had been trusted to watch. τὼ δ᾽ εἰσηγαγέτην, καὶ οὕτως ἁπλῶς ἀπεδειξάτην, ὥστε ὁ εἰσελθὼν ἐξήγγειλε, πάντα εἶναι ἀδόλως, οἷάπερ ἐλεγέτην.
[635] Xen. Hellen. iv, 4. 10. Καὶ τοὺς μὲν Σικυωνίους ἐκράτησαν καὶ διασπάσαντες τὸ σταύρωμα ἐδίωκον ἐπὶ θάλασσαν, καὶ ἐκεῖ πολλοὺς αὐτῶν ἀπέκτειναν.
It would appear from hence that there must have been an open portion of Lechæum, or a space apart from (but adjoining to) the wall which encircled Lechæum, yet still within the Long Walls. Otherwise the fugitive Sikyonians could hardly have got down to the sea.
[636] Xen. Hellen. iv, 4, 12. Οὕτως ἐν ὀλίγῳ πολλοὶ ἔπεσον, ὥστε εἰθισμένοι ὁρᾷν οἱ ἄνθρωποι σωροὺς σίτου, ξύλων, λίθου, τότε ἐθεάσαντο σωροὺς νεκρῶν.
A singular form of speech.
[637] Diodorus (xiv, 87) represents that the Lacedæmonians on this occasion surprised and held Lechæum, defeating the general body of the confederates who came out from Corinth to retake it. But his narrative of all these circumstances differs materially from that of Xenophon; whom I here follow in preference, making allowance for great partiality, and for much confusion and obscurity.