The Athenians, who were acting weakly in Chalcidice, had recently lost two towns there and had seen the king of Macedon withdraw from their alliance; they resolved to avenge themselves for all their embarrassments on the Dorian island of Melos, which was insulting their maritime empire by its independence. At Naxos and Samos they had shown themselves merciful, because they were amongst the Ionians where they could reckon on a democratic party; at Melos, an outpost of the Dorians in the Cretan Sea, they were implacable because the blow struck at these islanders, faithful to their metropolis, was to find a mournful echo in Lacedæmon. A squadron of thirty-eight galleys summoned the town to submit, and on its refusal an army besieged it, took it, and exterminated all the adult male population. The women and children were sold (416). Before the attack a conference had taken place with the Melians.
“In order to obtain the best possible result for our negotiations,” said the Athenians, “let us start from a principle with which both sides shall be really satisfied, a principle which we know well and would employ with people who are as well acquainted with it as we are: it is that business between men is regulated by the laws of justice when an equal necessity obliges them to submit to it; but that those who have the advantage in strength do all that is in their power and that it is the part of the weak to yield,” and further: “nor do we fear that the divine protection will forsake us. In our principles and in our actions we neither depart from the idea which men have conceived of the Divinity nor from the line of conduct which they preserve amongst themselves. We believe, according to the received opinion, that the gods, and we know very well that men, by a necessity of nature, dominate wherever they have force. This is not a law that we have made; it is not we who have first applied it; we profit by it and shall transmit it to times to come; you yourselves, with the power which we enjoy, would follow the same course.”
The theory of force has rarely been so distinctly expressed. The reputation of the Athenians has suffered by it, without their having derived the slightest profit from this evil deed. But let us observe, even while we think with horror of the sanguinary act performed at Melos, that the practice, if not the theory of this right of the strongest is a very old one; it is the principle on which the whole of antiquity is based; it is nothing but the famous law, salus populi suprema lex, so many times evoked to justify odious enterprises or iniquitous cruelties; and it must be acknowledged with sadness that in all times and in almost all places men have thought with Euripides, “that wisdom and glory are: to hold a victorious hand over the head of one’s enemies.” Force is as old as the world, it is right which emerges slowly: can we believe that its reign will not come?
The Dorian colonists of Melos had counted on the support of Sparta. “She will abandon you,” the Athenians had answered; and the prudent city which, for its part regarded all things from the point of view of utility, had sent neither ship nor soldier. This inertia inflated the hopes of Athens: she believed that the moment had come for annexing to her empire the great island of the West where internal divisions had roused in several cities the desire for foreign protection.[b]
From a Greek Vase
