Volume 4 — CHAPTER XXXVI. FROM THE IONIC REVOLT TO THE BATTLE OF MARATHON. (continued 2)

According to Cornelius Nepos, Diodorus, and Plutarch, he was put in prison, after having been fined, and there died.[678] But Herodotus does not mention this imprisonment, and the fact appears to me improbable: he would hardly have omitted to notice it, had it come to his knowledge. Immediate imprisonment of a person fined by the dikastery, until his fine was paid, was not the natural and ordinary course of Athenian procedure, though there were particular cases in which such aggravation was added. Usually, a certain time was allowed for payment,[679] before absolute execution was resorted to, but the person under sentence became disfranchised and excluded from all political rights, from the very instant of his condemnation as a public debtor, until the fine was paid. Now in the instance of Miltiadês, the lamentable condition of his wounded thigh rendered escape impossible,—so that there would be no special motive for departing from the usual practice, and imprisoning him forthwith: moreover, if he was not imprisoned forthwith, he would not be imprisoned at all, since he cannot have lived many days after his trial.[680] To carry away the suffering general in his couch, incapable of raising himself even to plead for his own life, from the presence of the dikasts to a prison, would not only have been a needless severity, but could hardly have failed to imprint itself on the sympathies and the memory of all the beholders; so that Herodotus would have been likely to hear and mention it, if it had really occurred. I incline to believe therefore that Miltiadês died at home: all accounts concur in stating that he died of the mortal bodily hurt which already disabled him even at the moment of his trial, and that his son Kimon paid the fifty talents after his death. If he could pay them, probably his father could have paid them also. And this is an additional reason for believing that there was no imprisonment,—for nothing but non-payment could have sent him to prison; and to rescue the suffering Miltiadês from being sent thither, would have been the first and strongest desire of all sympathizing friends.

Thus closed the life of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of it produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking,—his descent from the pinnacle of glory to defeat, mean tampering with a temple-servant, mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death under a sentence of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared,—that readers, ancient and modern, have not been satisfied without finding some one to blame for it: we must except Herodotus, our original authority, who recounts the transaction without dropping a single hint of blame against any one. To speak ill of the people, as Machiavel has long ago observed,[681] is a strain in which every one at all times, even under a democratical government, indulges with impunity and without provoking any opponent to reply; and in this instance, the hard fate of Miltiadês has been imputed to the vices of the Athenians and their democracy,—it has been cited in proof, partly of their fickleness, partly of their ingratitude. But however such blame may serve to lighten the mental sadness arising from a series of painful facts, it will not be found justified if we apply to those facts a reasonable criticism.

What is called the fickleness of the Athenians on this occasion is nothing more than a rapid and decisive change in their estimation of Miltiadês; unbounded admiration passing at once into extreme wrath. To censure them for fickleness is here an abuse of terms; such a change in their opinion was the unavoidable result of his conduct. His behavior in the expedition of Paros was as reprehensible as at Marathon it had been meritorious, and the one succeeded immediately after the other: what else could ensue except an entire revolution in the Athenian feelings? He had employed his prodigious ascendency over their minds to induce them to follow him without knowing whither, in the confidence of an unknown booty: he had exposed their lives and wasted their substance in wreaking a private grudge: in addition to the shame of an unprincipled project, comes the constructive shame of not having succeeded in it. Without doubt, such behavior, coming from a man whom they admired to excess, must have produced a violent and painful revulsion in the feelings of his countrymen. The idea of having lavished praise and confidence upon a person who forthwith turns it to an unworthy purpose, is one of the greatest torments of the human bosom; and we may well understand that the intensity of the subsequent displeasure would be aggravated by this reactionary sentiment, without accusing the Athenians of fickleness. If an officer, whose conduct has been such as to merit the highest encomiums, comes on a sudden to betray his trust, and manifests cowardice or treachery in a new and important undertaking confided to him, are we to treat the general in command as fickle, because his opinion as well as his conduct undergoes an instantaneous revolution,—which will be all the more vehement in proportion to his previous esteem? The question to be determined is, whether there be sufficient ground for such a change; and in the case of Miltiadês, that question must be answered in the affirmative.

In regard to the charge of ingratitude against the Athenians, this last-mentioned point—sufficiency of reason—stands tacitly admitted. It is conceded that Miltiadês deserved punishment for his conduct in reference to the Parian expedition, but it is nevertheless maintained that gratitude for his previous services at Marathon ought to have exempted him from punishment. But the sentiment upon which, after all, this exculpation rests, will not bear to be drawn out and stated in the form of a cogent or justifying reason. For will any one really contend, that a man who has rendered great services to the public, is to receive in return a license of unpunished misconduct for the future? Is the general, who has earned applause by eminent skill and important victories, to be recompensed by being allowed the liberty of betraying his trust afterwards, and exposing his country to peril, without censure or penalty? This is what no one intends to vindicate deliberately; yet a man must be prepared to vindicate it, when he blames the Athenians for ingratitude towards Miltiadês. For if all that be meant is, that gratitude for previous services ought to pass, not as a receipt in full for subsequent crime, but as an extenuating circumstance in the measurement of the penalty, the answer is, that it was so reckoned in the Athenian treatment of Miltiadês.[682] His friends had nothing whatever to urge, against the extreme penalty proposed by his accuser, except these previous services,—which influenced the dikasts sufficiently to induce them to inflict the lighter punishment instead of the heavier. Now the whole amount of punishment inflicted consisted in a fine which certainly was not beyond his reasonable means of paying, or of prevailing upon friends to pay for him, since his son Kimon actually did pay it. And those who blame the Athenians for ingratitude,—unless they are prepared to maintain the doctrine that previous services are to pass as full acquittal for future crime,—have no other ground left except to say that the fine was too high; that instead of being fifty talents, it ought to have been no more than forty, thirty, twenty, or ten talents. Whether they are right in this, I will not take upon me to pronounce. If the amount was named on behalf of the accused party, the dikastery had no legal power of diminishing it; but it is within such narrow limits that the question actually lies, when transferred from the province of sentiment to that of reason. It will be recollected that the death of Miltiadês arose neither from his trial nor his fine, but from the hurt in his thigh.

The charge of ingratitude against the Athenian popular juries really amounts to this,—that, in trying a person accused of present crime or fault, they were apt to confine themselves too strictly and exclusively to the particular matter of charge, either forgetting, or making too little account of, past services which he might have rendered. Whoever imagines that such was the habit of Athenian dikasts, must have studied the orators to very little purpose. Their real defect was the very opposite: they were too much disposed to wander from the special issue before them, and to be affected by appeals to previous services and conduct.[683] That which an accused person at Athens usually strives to produce is, an impression in the minds of the dikasts favorable to his general character and behavior. Of course, he meets the particular allegation of his accuser as well as he can, but he never fails also to remind them emphatically, how well he has performed his general duties of a citizen,—how many times he has served in military expeditions,—how many trierarchies and liturgies he has performed, and performed with splendid efficiency. In fact, the claim of an accused person to acquittal is made to rest too much on his prior services, and too little upon innocence or justifying matter as to the particular indictment. When we come down to the time of the orators, I shall be prepared to show that such indisposition to confine themselves to a special issue was one of the most serious defects of the assembled dikasts at Athens. It is one which we should naturally expect from a body of private, non-professional citizens assembled for the occasion, and which belongs more or less to the system of jury-trial everywhere; but it is the direct reverse of that ingratitude, or habitual insensibility to prior services, for which they have been so often denounced.

The fate of Miltiadês, then, so far from illustrating either the fickleness or the ingratitude of his countrymen, attests their just appreciation of deserts. It also illustrates another moral, of no small importance to the right comprehension of Grecian affairs; it teaches us the painful lesson, how perfectly maddening were the effects of a copious draught of glory on the temperament of an enterprising and ambitious Greek. There can be no doubt, that the rapid transition, in the course of about one week, from Athenian terror before the battle to Athenian exultation after it, must have produced demonstrations towards Miltiadês such as were never paid towards any other man in the whole history of the commonwealth. Such unmeasured admiration unseated his rational judgment, so that his mind became abandoned to the reckless impulses of insolence, and antipathy, and rapacity;—that distempered state, for which (according to Grecian morality) the retributive Nemesis was ever on the watch, and which, in his case, she visited with a judgment startling in its rapidity, as well as terrible in its amount. Had Miltiadês been the same man before the battle of Marathon as he became after it, the battle might probably have turned out a defeat instead of a victory. Dêmosthenês, indeed,[684] in speaking of the wealth and luxury of political leaders in his own time, and the profuse rewards bestowed upon them by the people, pointed in contrast to the house of Miltiadês as being noway more splendid than that of a private man. But though Miltiadês might continue to live in a modest establishment, he received from his countrymen marks of admiration and deference such as were never paid to any citizen before or after him; and, after all, admiration and deference constitute the precious essence of popular reward. No man except Miltiadês ever dared to raise his voice in the Athenian assembly, and say: “Give me a fleet of ships: do not ask what I am going to do with them, but only follow me, and I will enrich you.” Herein we may read the unmeasured confidence which the Athenians placed in their victorious general, and the utter incapacity of a leading Greek to bear it without mental depravation; while we learn from it to draw the melancholy inference, that one result of success was to make the successful leader one of the most dangerous men in the community. We shall presently be called upon to observe the same tendency in the case of the Spartan Pausanias, and even in that of the Athenian Themistoklês. It is, indeed, fortunate that the reckless aspirations of Miltiadês did not take a turn more noxious to Athens than the comparatively unimportant enterprise against Paros. For had he sought to acquire dominion and gratify antipathies against enemies at home, instead of directing his blow against a Parian enemy, the peace and security of his country might have been seriously endangered.

Of the despots who gained power in Greece, a considerable proportion began by popular conduct, and by rendering good service to their fellow-citizens: having first earned public gratitude, they abused it for purposes of their own ambition. There was far greater danger, in a Grecian community, of dangerous excess of gratitude towards a victorious soldier, than of deficiency in that sentiment: hence the person thus exalted acquired a position such that the community found it difficult afterwards to shake him off. Now there is a disposition almost universal among writers and readers to side with an individual, especially an eminent individual, against the multitude; and accordingly those who under such circumstances suspect the probable abuse of an exalted position, are denounced as if they harbored an unworthy jealousy of superior abilities. But the truth is, that the largest analogies of the Grecian character justified that suspicion, and required the community to take precautions against the corrupting effects of their own enthusiasm. There is no feature which more largely pervades the impressible Grecian character, than a liability to be intoxicated and demoralized by success: there was no fault from which so few eminent Greeks were free: there was hardly any danger, against which it was at once so necessary and so difficult for the Grecian governments to take security,—especially the democracies, where the manifestations of enthusiasm were always the loudest. Such is the real explanation of those charges which have been urged against the Grecian democracies, that they came to hate and ill-treat previous benefactors; and the history of Miltiadês illustrates it in a manner no less pointed than painful.

I have already remarked that the fickleness, which has been so largely imputed to the Athenian democracy in their dealings with him, is nothing more than a reasonable change of opinion on the best grounds. Nor can it be said that fickleness was in any case an attribute of the Athenian democracy. It is a well-known fact, that feelings, or opinions, or modes of judging, which have once obtained footing among a large number of people, are more lasting and unchangeable than those which belong only to one or a few; insomuch that the judgments and actions of the many admit of being more clearly understood as to the past, and more certainly predicted as to the future. If we are to predicate any attribute of the multitude, it will rather be that of undue tenacity than undue fickleness; and there will occur nothing in the course of this history to prove that the Athenian people changed their opinions on insufficient grounds more frequently than an unresponsible one or few would have changed.

But there were two circumstances in the working of the Athenian democracy which imparted to it an appearance of greater fickleness, without the reality: First, that the manifestations and changes of opinion were all open, undisguised, and noisy: the people gave utterance to their present impression, whatever it was, with perfect frankness; if their opinions were really changed, they had no shame or scruple in avowing it. Secondly,—and this is a point of capital importance in the working of democracy generally,—the present impression, whatever it might be, was not merely undisguised in its manifestations, but also had a tendency to be exaggerated in its intensity. This arose from their habit of treating public affairs in multitudinous assemblages, the well-known effect of which is, to inflame sentiment in every man’s bosom by mere contact with a sympathizing circle of neighbors. Whatever the sentiment might be,—fear, ambition, cupidity, wrath, compassion, piety, patriotic devotion, etc,[685]—and whether well-founded or ill-founded, it was constantly influenced more or less by such intensifying cause. This is a defect which of course belongs in a certain degree to all exercise of power by numerous bodies, even though they be representative bodies,—especially when the character of the people, instead of being comparatively sedate and slow to move, like the English, is quick, impressible, and fiery, like Greeks or Italians; but it operated far more powerfully on the self-acting Dêmos assembled in the Pnyx. It was in fact the constitutional malady of the democracy, of which the people were themselves perfectly sensible,—as I shall show hereafter from the securities which they tried to provide against it,—but which no securities could ever wholly eradicate. Frequency of public assemblies, far from aggravating the evil, had a tendency to lighten it. The people thus became accustomed to hear and balance many different views as a preliminary to ultimate judgment; they contracted personal interest and esteem for a numerous class of dissentient speakers; and they even acquired a certain practical consciousness of their own liability to error. Moreover, the diffusion of habits of public speaking, by means of the sophists and the rhetors, whom it has been so much the custom to disparage, tended in the same direction,—to break the unity of sentiment among the listening crowd, to multiply separate judgments, and to neutralize the contagion of mere sympathizing impulse. These were important deductions, still farther assisted by the superior taste and intelligence of the Athenian people: but still, the inherent malady remained,—excessive and misleading intensity of present sentiment. It was this which gave such inestimable value to the ascendency of Periklês, as depicted by Thucydidês: his hold on the people was so firm, that he could always speak with effect against excess of the reigning tone of feeling. “When Periklês (says the historian) saw the people in a state of unseasonable and insolent confidence, he spoke so as to cow them into alarm; when again they were in groundless terror, he combated it, and brought them back to confidence.”[686] We shall find Dêmosthenês, with far inferior ascendency, employed in the same honorable task: the Athenian people often stood in need of such correction, but unfortunately did not always find statesmen, at once friendly and commanding, to administer it.

These two attributes, then, belonged to the Athenian democracy; first, their sentiments of every kind were manifested loudly and openly; next, their sentiments tended to a pitch of great present intensity. Of course, therefore, when they changed, the change of sentiment stood prominent, and forced itself upon every one’s notice,—being a transition from one strong sentiment past to another strong sentiment present.[687] And it was because such alterations, when they did take place, stood out so palpably to remark, that the Athenian people have drawn upon themselves the imputation of fickleness: for it is not at all true, I repeat, that changes of sentiment were more frequently produced in them by frivolous or insufficient causes, than changes of sentiment in other governments.