History of Greece, Volume 09 (of 12)

by George Grote

The victory of Ægospotami, complete and decisive beyond all expectations either of friend or foe, enabled him to discharge these obligations with interest. All Greece at once made submission to the Lacedæmonians,[302] except Athens and Samos,—and these two only held out a few months. It was now the first business of the victorious commander to remunerate his adherents, and to take permanent security for Spartan dominion as well as for his own. In the greater number of cities, he established an oligarchy of ten citizens, or a dekarchy,[303] composed of his own partisans; while he at the same time planted in each a Lacedæmonian harmost or governor, with a garrison to uphold the new oligarchy. The dekarchy of ten Lysandrian partisans, with the Lacedæmonian harmost to sustain them, became the general scheme of Hellenic government throughout the Ægean, from Eubœa to the Thracian coast-towns, and from Myletus to Byzantium. Lysander sailed round in person, with his victorious fleet, to Byzantium and Chalkêdon, to the cities of Lesbos, to Thasos, and other places,—while he sent Eteonikus to Thrace, for the purpose of thus recasting the governments everywhere. Not merely those cities which had hitherto been on the Athenian side, but also those which had acted as allies of Sparta, were subjected to the same intestine revolution and the same foreign constraint.[304] Everywhere the new Lysandrian dekarchy superseded the previous governments, whether oligarchical or democratical.

At Thasus, as well as in other places, this revolution was not accomplished without much bloodshed as well as treacherous stratagem, nor did Lysander himself scruple to enforce, personally and by his own presence, the execution and expulsion of suspected citizens.[305] In many places, however, simple terrorism probably sufficed. The new Lysandrian Ten overawed resistance and procured recognition of their usurpation by the menace of inviting the victorious admiral with his fleet of two hundred sail, and by the simple arrival of the Lacedæmonian harmost. Not only was each town obliged to provide a fortified citadel and maintenance for this governor with his garrison, but a scheme of tribute, amounting to one thousand talents annually, was imposed for the future, and assessed ratably upon each city by Lysander.[306]

In what spirit these new dekarchies would govern, consisting as they did of picked oligarchical partisans distinguished for audacity and ambition,[307]—who, to all the unscrupulous lust of power which characterized Lysander himself, added a thirst for personal gain, from which he was exempt, and were now about to reimburse themselves for services already rendered to him,—the general analogy of Grecian history would sufficiently teach us, though we are without special details. But in reference to this point, we have not merely general analogy to guide us; we have farther the parallel case of the Thirty at Athens, the particulars of whose rule are well known and have already been alluded to. These Thirty, with the exception of the difference of number, were to all intents and purposes a Lysandrian dekarchy; created by the same originating force, placed under the like circumstances, and animated by the like spirit and interests. Every subject town would produce its Kritias and Theramenes, and its body of wealthy citizens like the knights or horsemen at Athens to abet their oppressions, under Lacedæmonian patronage and the covering guard of the Lacedæmonian harmost. Moreover, Kritias, with all his vices, was likely to be better rather than worse, as compared with his oligarchical parallel in any other less cultivated city. He was a man of letters and philosophy, accustomed to the conversation of Sokrates, and to the discussion of ethical and social questions. We may say the same of the knights or horsemen at Athens. Undoubtedly they had been better educated, and had been exposed to more liberalizing and improving influences, than the corresponding class elsewhere. If, then, these knights at Athens had no shame in serving as accomplices to the Thirty throughout all their enormities, we need not fear to presume that other cities would furnish a body of wealthy men yet more unscrupulous, and a leader at least as sanguinary, rapacious, and full of antipathies, as Kritias. As at Athens, so elsewhere; the dekarchs would begin by putting to death notorious political opponents, under the name of “the wicked men;”[308] they would next proceed to deal in the same manner with men of known probity and courage, likely to take a lead in resisting oppression.[309] Their career of blood would continue,—in spite of remonstrances from more moderate persons among their own number, like Theramenes,—until they contrived some stratagem for disarming the citizens, which would enable them to gratify both their antipathies and their rapacity by victims still more numerous,—many of such victims being wealthy men, selected for purposes of pure spoliation.[310] They would next despatch by force any obtrusive monitor from their own number, like Theramenes; probably with far less ceremony than accompanied the perpetration of this crime at Athens, where we may trace the effect of those judicial forms and habits to which the Athenian public had been habituated,—overruled indeed, yet still not forgotten. There would hardly remain any fresh enormity still to commit, over and above the multiplied executions, except to banish from the city all but their own immediate partisans, and to reward these latter with choice estates confiscated from the victims.[311] If called upon to excuse such tyranny, the leader of a dekarchy would have sufficient invention to employ the plea of Kritias,—that all changes of government were unavoidably death-dealing, and that nothing less than such stringent measures would suffice to maintain his city in suitable dependence upon Sparta.[312]

Of course, it is not my purpose to affirm that in any other city, precisely the same phenomena took place as those which occurred in Athens. But we are nevertheless perfectly warranted in regarding the history of the Athenian Thirty as a fair sample, from whence to derive our idea of those Lysandrian dekarchies which now overspread the Grecian world. Doubtless, each had its own peculiar march; some were less tyrannical; but, perhaps, some even more tyrannical, regard being had to the size of the city. And in point of fact, Isokrates, who speaks with indignant horror of these dekarchies, while he denounces those features which they had in common with the triakontarchy at Athens,—extrajudicial murders, spoliations, and banishments,—notices one enormity besides, which we do not find in the latter, violent outrages upon boys and women.[313] Nothing of this kind is ascribed to Kritias and his companions;[314] and it is a considerable proof of the restraining force of Athenian manners, that men who inflicted so much evil in gratification of other violent impulses, should have stopped short here. The decemvirs named by Lysander, like the decemvir Appius Claudius at Rome, would find themselves armed with power to satiate their lusts as well as their antipathies, and would not be more likely to set bounds to the former than to the latter. Lysander, in all the overweening insolence of victory, while rewarding his most devoted partisans with an exaltation comprising every sort of license and tyranny, stained the dependent cities with countless murders, perpetrated on private as well as on public grounds.[315] No individual Greek had ever before wielded so prodigious a power of enriching friends or destroying enemies, in this universal reorganization of Greece;[316] nor was there ever any power more deplorably abused.

It was thus that the Lacedæmonian empire imposed upon each of the subject cities a double oppression;[317] the native decemvirs, and the foreign harmost; each abetting the other, and forming together an aggravated pressure upon the citizens, from which scarce any escape was left. The Thirty at Athens paid the greatest possible court to the harmost Kallibius,[318] and put to death individual Athenians offensive to him, in order to purchase his coöperation in their own violences. The few details which we possess respecting these harmosts (who continued throughout the insular and maritime cities for about ten years, until the battle of Knidus, or as long as the maritime empire of Sparta lasted,—but in various continental dependencies considerably longer, that is, until the defeat of Leuktra in 371 B.C.), are all for the most part discreditable. We have seen in the last chapter the description given by the philo-Laconian Xenophon, of the harsh and treacherous manner in which they acted towards the returning Cyreian soldiers, combined with their corrupt subservience to Pharnabazus. We learn from him that it depended upon the fiat of a Lacedæmonian harmost whether these soldiers should be proclaimed enemies and excluded forever from their native cities; and Kleander, the harmost of Byzantium, who at first threatened them with this treatment, was only induced by the most unlimited submission, combined with very delicate management, to withdraw his menace. The cruel proceeding of Anaxibius and Aristarchus, who went so far as to sell four hundred of these soldiers into slavery, has been recounted a few pages above. Nothing can be more arbitrary or reckless than their proceedings. If they could behave thus towards a body of Greek soldiers full of acquired glory, effective either as friends or as enemies, and having generals capable of prosecuting their collective interests and making their complaints heard,—what protection would a private citizen of any subject city, Byzantium or Perinthus, be likely to enjoy against their oppression?

The story of Aristodemus, the harmost of Oreus in Eubœa, evinces that no justice could be obtained against any of their enormities from the ephors of Sparta. That harmost, among many other acts of brutal violence, seized a beautiful youth, son of a free citizen at Oreus, out of the palæstra,—carried him off,—and after vainly endeavoring to overcome his resistance, put him to death. The father of the youth went to Sparta, made known the atrocities, and appealed to the ephors and Senate for redress. But a deaf ear was turned to his complaints, and in anguish of mind he slew himself. Indeed, we know that these Spartan authorities would grant no redress, not merely against harmosts, but even against private Spartan citizens, who had been guilty of gross crime out of their own country. A Bœotian near Leuktra, named Skedasus, preferred complaint that two Spartans, on their way from Delphi, after having been hospitably entertained in his house, had first violated, and afterwards killed, his two daughters; but even for so flagitious an outrage as this, no redress could be obtained.[319] Doubtless, when a powerful foreign ally, like the Persian satrap Pharnabazus,[320] complained to the ephors of the conduct of a Lacedæmonian harmost or admiral, his representations would receive attention; and we learn that the ephors were thus induced not merely to recall Lysander from the Hellespont, but to put to death another officer, Thorax, for corrupt appropriation of money. But for a private citizen in any subject city, the superintending authority of Sparta would be not merely remote but deaf and immovable, so as to afford him no protection whatever, and to leave him altogether at the mercy of the harmost. It seems, too, that the rigor of Spartan training, and peculiarity of habits, rendered individual Lacedæmonians on foreign service more self-willed, more incapable of entering into the customs or feelings of others, and more liable to degenerate when set free from the strict watch of home,—than other Greeks generally.[321]

Taking all these causes of evil together,—the dekarchies, the harmosts, and the overwhelming dictatorship of Lysander,—and construing other parts of the Grecian world by the analogy of Athens under the Thirty,—we shall be warranted in affirming that the first years of the Spartan Empire, which followed upon the victory of Ægospotami, were years of all-pervading tyranny and multifarious intestine calamity, such as Greece had never before endured. The hardships of war, severe in many ways, were now at an end, but they were replaced by a state of suffering not the less difficult to bear because it was called peace. And what made the suffering yet more intolerable was, that it was a bitter disappointment, and a flagrant violation of promises proclaimed, repeatedly and explicitly, by the Lacedæmonians themselves.

For more than thirty years preceding,—from times earlier than the commencement of the Peloponnesian war,—the Spartans had professed to interfere only for the purpose of liberating Greece, and of putting down the usurped ascendency of Athens. All the allies of Sparta had been invited into strenuous action,—all those of Athens had been urged to revolt,—under the soul-stirring cry of “Freedom to Greece.” The earliest incitements addressed by the Corinthians to Sparta in 432 B.C., immediately after the Korkyræan dispute, called upon her to stand forward in fulfilment of her recognized function as “Liberator of Greece,” and denounced her as guilty of connivance with Athens if she held back.[322] Athens was branded as the “despot city;” which had already absorbed the independence of many Greeks, and menaced that of all the rest. The last formal requisition borne by the Lacedæmonian envoys to Athens in the winter immediately preceding the war, ran thus,—“If you desire the continuance of peace with Sparta, restore to the Greeks their autonomy.”[323] When Archidamus, king of Sparta, approached at the head of his army to besiege Platæa, the Platæans laid claim to autonomy as having been solemnly guaranteed to them by King Pausanias after the great victory near their town. Upon which Archidamus replied,—“Your demand is just; we are prepared to confirm your autonomy,—but we call upon you to aid us in securing the like for those other Greeks who have been enslaved by Athens. This is the sole purpose of our great present effort.”[324] And the banner of general enfranchisement, which the Lacedæmonians thus held up at the outset of the war, enlisted in their cause encouraging sympathy and good wishes throughout Greece.[325]

But the most striking illustration by far, of the seductive promises held out by the Lacedæmonians, was afforded by the conduct of Brasidas in Thrace, when he first came into the neighborhood of the Athenian allies during the eighth year of the war (424 B.C.). In his memorable discourse addressed to the public assembly at Akanthus, he takes the greatest pains to satisfy them that he came only for the purpose of realizing the promise of enfranchisement proclaimed by the Lacedæmonians at the beginning of the war.[326] Having expected, when acting in such a cause, nothing less than a hearty welcome, he is astonished to find their gates closed against him. “I am come (said he) not to injure, but to liberate the Greeks; after binding the Lacedæmonian authorities by the most solemn oaths, that all whom I may bring over shall be dealt with as autonomous allies. We do not wish to obtain you as allies either by force or fraud, but to act as your allies at a time when you are enslaved by the Athenians. You ought not to suspect my purposes, in the face of these solemn assurances; least of all ought any man to hold back through apprehension of private enmities, and through fear lest I should put the city into the hands of a few chosen partisans. I am not come to identify myself with local faction: I am not the man to offer you an unreal liberty by breaking down your established constitution, for the purpose of enslaving either the Many to the Few, or the Few to the Many. That would be more intolerable even than foreign dominion; and we Lacedæmonians should incur nothing but reproach, instead of reaping thanks and honor for our trouble. We should draw upon ourselves those very censures, upon the strength of which we are trying to put down Athens; and that, too, in aggravated measure, worse than those who have never made honorable professions; since to men in high position, specious trick is more disgraceful than open violence.[327]—If (continued Brasidas) in spite of my assurances, you still withhold from me your coöperation, I shall think myself authorized to constrain you by force. We should not be warranted in forcing freedom on any unwilling parties, except with a view to some common good. But as we seek not empire for ourselves,—as we struggle only to put down the empire of others,—as we offer autonomy to each and all,—so we should do wrong to the majority if we allowed you to persist in your opposition.”[328]