Notwithstanding the good laws of Solon, then, as now, there were found men to take advantage of their provisions to gratify their own private hates. Thus, Solon's laws allowed popular action for most offences—regarding all offences as against the "peace and dignity of the state"—as we do now; but in many cases advantage was taken of this by bad men to make the most calumnious accusations against men whose character until then had stood even above suspicion. So advantage was frequently taken of the law of ostracism (which was only meant for good), whereby some of their very best men were banished from the state. Thus, when an ignorant citizen was about to cast his vote for the ostracism of Aristides, he was asked by Aristides himself, who chanced to be passing by at the moment, and who was unknown t<\ him:
"Why, what harm, my friend, has Aristides done to you?"
"None in the world," replied he; "but I hate to hear everybody call him the 'Just.'"
Thucydides also, from whom Athens had received the most eminent services, was in like manner banished by ostracism; as likewise were Miltiades, Cimon, Themistocles, Phocion, and many other of their most eminent men. What was meant, too, for religious freedom was made to subserve (by those who temporarily had the power) the purposes of religious bigotry, tyranny, and persecution, until even the renowned philosopher, Socrates, was made to drink the fatal hemlock.
While the great majority of Athenians were entirely satisfied with their form of government; while the masses were equally jealous of their liberty, because liberty was equally necessary to each for the enjoyment of his favorite scheme of life; yet there were those inside of the republic, as well as outside, who did not like a republican form of government, and who were all the while watching for an opportunity to overthrow it Among these was Pisistratus, a man of large wealth, splendid talents, and of great popularity. He aspired to sovereign power, and by his artifices came so near in obtaining it, that Solon, disgusted at the want of patriotism among his countrymen, and unable to witness its degradation, bade adieu to Athens, and died in voluntary exile. He—even he, the great and good Solon—was made to feel what it was to be "a man without a country," and chose to die in exile rather than to remain in his native land, or even to look upon it again in a state of degradation.. If the time should ever come (and God only knows how soon it may come!) when not only one but scores, yea, hundreds, of American Solons should be wandering throughout the world, without a home and without a country, because of the destruction of our representative form of government by European jealousy and Catholic bigotry, then, if never before, they and all others will fully understand something of the natural outgrowth of the Democratic party of this country, of which the late rebellion was the first act in the drama, and of which its secret workings only represented the machinations of a hundred Pisistratuses!
But though Pisistratus thus usurped power, and for a while played the sovereign, he was unable to retain it long. Megacles and Lycurgus, the chiefs of the Alemæonidæ, gained at length so much strength as to attack and expel the usurper from Athens. By a stratagem he again secured power, and, on dying, bequeathed the crown to his sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, but erelong Hipparchus was killed, and Hippias dethroned, and once again the republic prevailed, and statues were erected to the honor of Harmodius and Aristogiton as the authors of their country's deliverance from tyranny.
From thenceforth there was almost a constant warfare between the political parties or factions of the republic, while jealous eyes outside were consequently watching an opportunity for its destruction. Ambitious demagogues were constantly using the people as their tools, but scarcely would one obtain the chief magistracy until another would pull him down—if not by a vote of the people, then by faction or by assassination. Meanwhile Hippias, who had been dethroned, sought aid from the king of Persia to reinstate him, and thus brought a long and bloody war upon his own country. In this war were fought the renowned battles of Marathon, Salamis, Plateæ, and Mycale, and the Greeks came off victorious, but at a most fearful sacrifice of treasure and life. After this followed the disunion among the several Grecian states—the secession of some—the coldness and indifference of others; and though the brilliant administrations of Cimon and Pericles seemed to revive the republic for awhile, it was evident to all that the seeds of death were fast germinating and would bring forth fruit erelong. The Persian king, and the sovereigns of other surrounding countries, had long felt deep jealousy of the Athenian Republic, and, when an excuse came for attacking it, they were not backward in availing themselves of the opportunity. Fortunately for the Athenian Republic the attack made upon them by Persia had the effect to bring the whole power of the Spartan Republic to their aid, which, with such other aid as they received from minor states of Greece, enabled them to defeat the Persians in the end and maintain their own independence.
But a worse fate awaited them—namely, a fight among themselves. The mutual jealousies that had long existed between Athens and Sparta broke out afresh, and soon terminated in an open war between the two republics, and most of the minor states of Greece took a part in the quarrel. The first declaration of hostilities, however, was compromised before they came to actual conflict; but it proved to be only a smouldering, and not an extinguishment, of the fire that had long burned in the breast of each—a fire that afterwards broke forth in what was known as the "Peloponnesian war," and lasted twenty-eight years. Our plan and space will not permit any details of this. A history of the first twenty-two years of the war was admirably written by Thucydides, and of the last six years by Xenophon, to whom we must refer the reader who would know its particulars. Suffice it to say here that during this long internecine war each achieved victories and each suffered defeats. At one time the Spartans so reduced Athens as to make an entire change in its constitution. The republic was abolished and thirty governors, or, as the Greek historians style them, "thirty tyrants" were substituted, whose power seems to have been absolute, unless in so far as each was restrained by the equally arbitrary will of his colleagues. So fearful and terrible was their rule, that Xenophon thinks "a greater number of Athenian citizens lost their lives by the sentence of these tyrants, in the short space of eight months, than had fallen in the whole twenty-eight years of the Peloponnesian war." Hundreds of the most eminent of the Athenian families left their country in despair, and what remained were for a time awed into silence, and dumb with consternation.
And just here we may pause to say that precisely the same kind of rule, and the same kind of results, would have been witnessed in this country, had the rebellion, by the aid of the Democratic party, succeeded in capturing Washington and in establishing their rule over this country. It is one of the "Secrets of the Late Rebellion, now Revealed for the First Time" (and our information comes from one who was behind the scenes and knew all about it, and the first sixteen chapters of this volume entirely confirm this opinion), that behind President Davis and behind General Lee stood a body of desperate men, who, at one single sweep, would have wiped them off the chess-board and put others in their stead, had they shown the least considerate humanity in dealing with Northern men, in case the rebellion had succeeded. Not Abraham Lincoln alone would have fallen at the hands of the assassin or hangman, but thousands of others throughout the North would have suffered a like fate, until the rule of the "thirty tyrants" in Athens would have been considered but child's play in comparison with the rule of the more than three hundred tyrants of this republic. Then would have been witnessed here, as there, thousands of the most eminent of American families leaving their country in despair—wandering they knew not whither—without a home, and without a country! Abraham Lincoln's assassination was indeed done by a half crazed Southern rebel; but who can doubt, after reading the secrets revealed in the foregoing pages, that the frenzy that fired Booth's brain, and the nerve that enabled him to fire the deadly shot, came as directly from the Democratic party, as a party, as that the pistol itself was purchased by a Democratic partisan. All these facts go hand-in-hand, and there is no separating one from the others.
But we have already occupied much more of time and space on the Athenian Republic than we had intended. We can only say, in conclusion, that, after the reign of the "thirty tyrants," its fortunes were up and down—oftener down than up—until the battle of Chæronea, which occurred in the year 338 before Christ, when the liberties of Greece were made to yield finally and forever to the stronger arm of the Macedonian. The Athenian Republic had existed after a fashion—and, indeed, much of the time it was orderly "after a fashion"—for seven hundred and thirty years; and when it fell, there was not so much as an empty shell left. Its internal dissensions, more than anything else, had eaten out its vitals; the jealousy of surrounding monarchies had been to it a constant source of danger, and several times a source of great disaster; while for fully one-half of the seven hun-dren and thirty years it was rather a government of tyranny than of liberty to those who lived under it.