Note 631 — Chapter LXXV · FROM THE REBUILDING OF THE LONG WALLS OF ATHENS TO THE PEACE OF ANTALKIDAS.

In recounting this alternation of violence projected, violence perpetrated, recourse on the one side to a foreign ally, treason on the other by admitting an avowed enemy,—which formed the modus operandi of opposing parties in the oligarchical Corinth,—I invite the reader to contrast it with the democratical Athens.

At Athens, in the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, there were precisely the same causes at work, and precisely the same marked antithesis of parties, as those which here disturbed Corinth. There was first, a considerable Athenian minority who opposed the war with Sparta from the first; next, when the war began, the proprietors of Attica saw their lands ruined, and were compelled either to carry away, or to lose, their servants and cattle, so that they obtained no returns. The intense discontent, the angry complaints, the bitter conflict of parties, which these circumstances raised among the Athenian citizens,—not to mention the aggravation of all these symptoms by the terrible epidemic,—are marked out in Thucydides, and have been recorded in the fifth volume of this history. Not only the positive loss and suffering, but all other causes of exasperation, stood at a higher pitch at Athens in the early part of the Peloponnesian war, than at Corinth in 392 B.C.

Yet what were the effects which they produced? Did the minority resort to a conspiracy,—or the majority to a coup d’état—or either of them to invitation of foreign aid against the other? Nothing of the kind. The minority had always open to them the road of pacific opposition, and the chance of obtaining a majority in the Senate or in the public assembly, which was practically identical with the totality of the citizens. Their opposition, though pacific as to acts, was sufficiently animated and violent in words and propositions, to serve as a real discharge for imprisoned angry passion. If they could not carry the adoption of their general policy, they had the opportunity of gaining partial victories which took off the edge of a fierce discontent; witness the fine imposed upon Perikles (Thucyd. ii, 65) in the year before his death, which both gratified and mollified the antipathy against him, and brought about shortly afterwards a strong reaction in his favor. The majority, on the other hand, knew that the predominance of its policy depended upon its maintaining its hold on a fluctuating public assembly, against the utmost freedom of debate and attack, within certain forms and rules prescribed by the constitution; attachment to the latter being the cardinal principle of political morality in both parties. It was this system which excluded on both sides the thought of armed violence. It produced among the democratical citizens of Athens that characteristic insisted upon by Kleon in Thucydides,—“constant and fearless security and absence of treacherous hostility among one another” (διὰ γὰρ τὸ καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀδεὲς καὶ ἀνεπιβούλευτον πρὸς ἀλλήλους, καὶ ἐς τοὺς ξυμμάχους τὸ αὐτὸ ἔχετε—Thuc. iii, 37), the entire absence of which stands so prominently forward in these deplorable proceedings of the oligarchical Corinth. Pasimêlus and his Corinthian minority had no assemblies, dikasteries, annual Senate, or constant habit of free debate and accusation, to appeal to; their only available weapon was armed violence, or treacherous correspondence with a foreign enemy. On the part of the Corinthian government, superior or more skilfully used force, or superior alliance abroad, was the only weapon of defence, in like manner.

I shall return to this subject in a future chapter, where I enter more at large into the character of the Athenians.