Grecian Terra-cotta Statuette
(In the British Museum)
These obvious points of difference are sufficient to substantiate the result which we wish to arrive at. The “honesty and openness” of the Doric character, the noble simplicity of the ancient times of Greece, soon disappeared in this tumultuous age. Sparta therefore and the Peloponnesians emerge from the contest, altered, and as it were reversed; and even before its termination appear in a character of which they had before probably contained only the first seeds.
[460-405 B.C.]
But in the second half of the war, when the Spartans gave up their great armaments by land, and began to equip fleets with hired seamen; when they had learnt to consider money as the chief instrument of warfare, and begged it at the court of Persia; when they sought less to protect the states joined to them by affinity and alliance, than to dissolve the Athenian confederacy; when they began to secure conquered states by harmosts of their own, and by oligarchs forced upon the people, and found that the secret management of the political clubs was more to their interest than open negotiation with the government; we see developed on the one hand an energy and address, which was first manifested in the enterprises of the great Brasidas, and on the other a worldly policy, as was shown in Gylippus, and afterwards more strongly in Lysander; when the descendants of Hercules found it advisable to exchange the lion’s for the fox’s skin. And since the enterprises conducted in the spirit of earlier times either wholly failed or else remained fruitless, this new system, though the state had inwardly declined, brought with it, by the mockery of fate, external fame and victory.[b]
Whatever nobility of creed the Sparta-loving Müller has, as above, claimed for Sparta up to this time, it is certain that the sudden accession of vast and unforeseen power changed her to a mood in which, as Bury says, “she cynically set aside her high moral professions and yielded to a lust for oppression.” Grote was no lover of Sparta and yet he substantiates well his accusations against her.[a]
GROTE’S COMPARISON OF SPARTAN AND ATHENIAN RULE
[405-404 B.C.]
The Spartan empire began with the decisive victory of Ægospotami in the Hellespont (September or October 405 B.C.). The whole power of Athens was thus annihilated, and nothing remained for the Lacedæmonians to master except the city itself and Piræus; a consummation certain to happen, and actually brought to pass in April 404 B.C., when Lysander entered Athens in triumph, dismantled Piræus, and demolished a large portion of the Long Walls. With the exception of Athens herself—whose citizens deferred the moment of subjection by an heroic, though unavailing, struggle against the horrors of famine—and of Samos, no other Grecian city offered any resistance to Lysander after the battle of Ægospotami; which in fact not only took away from Athens her whole naval force, but transferred it all over to him, and rendered him admiral of a larger Grecian fleet than had ever been seen together since the battle of Salamis.
The allies, especially Thebes and Corinth, not only relented in their hatred and fear of Athens, now that she had lost her power—but even sympathised with her suffering exiles, and became disgusted with the self-willed encroachments of Sparta; while the Spartan king Pausanias, together with some of the ephors, were also jealous of the arbitrary and oppressive conduct of Lysander.