To the sufferings of the Æginetans, which we shall hereafter find still more deplorably aggravated, we have to add those of the Megarians. Both had been most zealous in kindling the war, but upon none did the distress of war fall so heavily. Both probably shared the premature confidence felt among the Peloponnesian confederacy, that Athens could never hold out more than a year or two, and were thus induced to overlook their own undefended position against her. Towards the close of September, the full force of Athens, citizens and metics, marched into the Megarid, under Pericles, and laid waste the greater part of the territory; while they were in it, the hundred ships which had been circumnavigating Peloponnesus, having arrived at Ægina on their return, joined their fellow citizens in the Megarid, instead of going straight home. The junction of the two formed the largest Athenian force that had ever yet been seen together; there were ten thousand citizen hoplites (independent of three thousand others who were engaged in the siege of Potidæa), and three thousand metic hoplites, besides a large number of light troops. Against so large a force the Megarians could make no head, so that their territory was all laid waste, even to the city walls. For several years of the war, the Athenians inflicted this destruction once, and often twice in the same year. A decree was proposed in the Athenian ecclesia by Charinus, though perhaps not carried, to the effect that the strategi every year should swear, as a portion of their oath of office, that they would twice invade and ravage the Megarid. As the Athenians at the same time kept the port of Nisæa blocked up, by means of their superior naval force and of the neighbouring coast of Salamis, the privations imposed on the Megarians became extreme and intolerable. Not only their corn and fruits, but even their garden vegetables were rooted up, and their situation was that of a besieged city pressed by famine. Even in the time of Pausanias, many centuries afterward, the miseries of the town during these years were remembered and communicated to him, being assigned as the reason why one of their most memorable statues had never been completed.
To the various military operations of Athens during the course of this summer, some other measures of moment are to be added. Moreover, Thucydides notices an eclipse of the sun, which modern astronomical calculations refer to the third of August; had this eclipse happened three months earlier, immediately before the entrance of the Peloponnesians into Attica, it might probably have been construed as an unfavourable omen, and caused the postponement of the scheme. Expecting a prolonged struggle, the Athenians now made arrangements for placing Attica in a permanent state of defence, both by sea and land; what these arrangements were, we are not told in detail, but one of them was sufficiently remarkable to be named particularly. They set apart one thousand talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000] out of the treasure in the Acropolis as an inviolable reserve, not to be touched except on the single contingency of a hostile naval force about to assail the city, with no other means at hand to defend it. They further enacted that if any citizen should propose, or any magistrate put the question, in the public assembly, to make any different application of this reserve, he should be punishable with death. Moreover, they resolved every year to keep back one hundred of their best triremes, and trierarchs to command and equip them, for the same special necessity. It may be doubted whether this latter provision was placed under the same stringent sanction, or observed with the same rigour, as that concerning the money; which latter was not departed from until the twentieth year of the war, after all the disasters of the Sicilian expedition, and on the terrible news of the revolt of Chios. It was on that occasion that the Athenians first repealed the sentence of capital punishment against the proposer of this forbidden change, and next appropriated the money to meet the then imminent peril of the commonwealth.
The resolution here taken about this sacred reserve, and the rigorous sentence interdicting contrary propositions, is pronounced by Mitford[48] to be an evidence of the indelible barbarism of democratical government. But we must recollect, first, that the sentence of capital punishment was one which could hardly by possibility come into execution; for no citizen would be so mad as to make the forbidden proposition while this law was in force. Whoever desired to make it would first begin by proposing to repeal the prohibitory law, whereby he would incur no danger, whether the assembly decided in the affirmative or negative; and if he obtained an affirmative decision he would then, and then only, proceed to move the re-appropriation of the fund. To speak the language of English parliamentary procedure, he would first move the suspension or abrogation of the standing order whereby the proposition was forbidden; next, he would move the proposition itself; in fact, such was the mode actually pursued, when the thing at last came to be done. But though the capital sentence could hardly come into effect, the proclamation of it in terrorem had a very distinct meaning. It expressed the deep and solemn conviction which the people entertained of the importance of their own resolution about the reserve; it forewarned all assemblies and all citizens to come of the danger of diverting it to any other purpose; it surrounded the reserve with an artificial sanctity, which forced every man who aimed at the re-appropriation to begin with a preliminary proposition formidable on the very face of it, as removing a guarantee which previous assemblies had deemed of immense value, and opening the door to a contingency which they had looked upon as treasonable. The proclamation of a lighter punishment, or a simple prohibition without any definite sanction whatever, would neither have announced the same emphatic conviction, nor produced the same deterring effect. The assembly of 431 B.C. could not in any way enact laws which subsequent assemblies could not reverse; but it could so frame its enactments, in cases of peculiar solemnity, as to make its authority strongly felt upon the judgment of its successors, and to prevent them from entertaining motions for repeal except under necessity at once urgent and obvious.
Far from thinking that the law now passed at Athens displayed barbarism, either in the end or in the means, we consider it principally remarkable for its cautious and long-sighted view of the future—qualities the exact reverse of barbarism—and worthy of the general character of Pericles, who probably suggested it. Athens was just entering into a war which threatened to be of indefinite length, and was certain to be very costly. To prevent the people from exhausting all their accumulated fund, and to place them under a necessity of reserving something against extreme casualties, was an object of immense importance. Now the particular casualty, which Pericles (assuming him to be the proposer) named as the sole condition of touching this one thousand talents, might be considered as of all others the most improbable, in the year 431 B.C. So immense was then the superiority of the Athenian naval force, that to suppose it defeated, and a Peloponnesian fleet in full sail for Piræus, was a possibility which it required a statesman of extraordinary caution to look forward to, and which it is truly wonderful that the people generally could have been induced to contemplate. Once tied up to this purpose, however, the fund lay ready for any other terrible emergency: and we shall find the actual employment of it incalculably beneficial to Athens, at a moment of the gravest peril, when she could hardly have protected herself without some such special resource. The people would scarcely have sanctioned so rigorous an economy, had it not been proposed to them at a period so early in the war that their available reserve was still much larger. But it will be forever to the credit of their foresight as well as constancy, that they should first have adopted such a precautionary measure, and afterwards adhered to it for nineteen years, under severe pressure for money, until at length a case arose which rendered further abstinence really, and not constructively, impossible.
To display their force and take revenge by disembarking and ravaging parts of the Peloponnesus, was doubtless of much importance to Athens during this first summer of the war: though it might seem that the force so employed was quite as much needed in the conquest of Potidæa, which still remained under blockade, and of the neighbouring Chalcidians in Thrace, still in revolt. It was during the course of this summer that a prospect opened to Athens of subduing these towns, through the assistance of Sitalces, king of the Odrysian Thracians. That prince had married the sister of Nymphodorus, a citizen of Abdera; who engaged to render him, and his son Sadocus, allies of Athens. Sent for to Athens and appointed proxenus of Athens at Abdera, which was one of the Athenian subject allies, Nymphodorus made this alliance, and promised in the name of Sitalces that a sufficient Thracian force should be sent to aid Athens in the reconquest of her revolted towns: the honour of Athenian citizenship was at the same time conferred upon Sadocus. Nymphodorus further established a good understanding between Perdiccas II of Macedonia and the Athenians, who were persuaded to restore to him Therma, which they had before taken from him. The Athenians had thus the promise of powerful aid against the Chalcidians and Potidæans: yet the latter still held out, with little prospect of immediate surrender. Moreover, the town of Astacus in Acarnania, which the Athenians had captured during the summer, in the course of their expedition round Peloponnesus, was recovered during the autumn by the deposed despot Euarchus, assisted by forty Corinthian triremes and one thousand hoplites. This Corinthian armament, after restoring Euarchus, made some unsuccessful descents both upon other parts of Acarnania and upon the island of Cephallenia: in the latter they were entrapped into an ambuscade and obliged to return home with considerable loss.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[47] “Cleon,” says Thucydides, “attacked him with great acrimony, making use of the general resentment against Pericles, as a means to increase his own popularity, as Hermippus testifies in these verses:
“‘Sleeps then, thou king of Satyrs, sleeps the spear,
While thundering words make war? Why boast thy prowess,
Yet shudder at the sound of sharpened swords,