the energetic and the just statesman, procuring the first place in the league for Athens, as the fittest to possess it, and composing the rules by which its authority should be exercised and obeyed, with such consummate equity, that none complained they were inferior, and even Athens scarcely boasted of being superior.195 He lived, however, to behold the growth of covetousness amongst his people, which made them oppressive where he had taught them to be moderate; and the poverty in which he died, though it gave them an opportunity to be generous towards his children, did not inspire them to be frugal or just themselves. 196 The war with the Persians was not fairly over before the freedom thus gallantly defended was endangered by a recurrence of the intestine strifes to which the Greeks appear to have been born and doomed. They who had won the glory of the conflict were hasty to turn their arms against the neighbours from whom the disgrace of faithlessness or cowardice might be thought to spread itself over the entire nation.197 Yet the impulse to union survived its original cause 195 Diod. Sic., XI. 46, 47. Corn. Nep., Arist., 3. Plut., Arist., 24. See, generally, for the account here given of Aristides, Plutarch's Life, Sect. 2, 5-8, 13, 22, 27. 196❝There have been, in this city and elsewhere, and there undoubtedly will be hereafter, men distinguished in that kind of virtue which consists in managing their trusts with justice." These are words that Plato wrote for Socrates, and to these he added, -"Of this number was Aristides." Gorgias, Dial., ap. fin. "Nonne ob eam causam expulsus est patria quod præter modum justus esset?" Cic., Tusc. Quæst., V. 36. 197 See the account of the expedition against Andros and the other islands, Plut., Them., 21, and of the proposal of Sparta touching the Amphictyonic states, Ibid., 20. a little longer; the more naturally, that the hostilities with the Persians did not immediately cease, but were even directed against them in the islands and provinces of their own dominion. The greater part, therefore, of the Grecian states were still united in the league that had been made in resistance and was now continued in aggression. But from this confederacy, common though it were, there arose an untried danger, more threatening, indeed, to the liberties of Greece than the previous separation between her children. Almost immediately after the triumph at Platæa and the naval victory of the same day at Mycale, the quarrel for precedence amongst the conquerors began. Sparta was accustomed to rule; but Athens, scarcely wont to obey at any time, was now learning to govern through the ambition which Miltiades, Themistocles, and Aristides had, each in his different way, aroused. The claims of the two great cities to ascendency over adjoining states or islands were soon succeeded by pretensions to superiority over one another; of which the example was set by Sparta, in endeavouring to prevent the fortification of Athens by its famous walls.199 Spartans could not but foresee that the preeminence of their country would be disputed by the nation whose sacrifices and victories had lately eclipsed their own; while Athenians were urgent to catch the breeze that drove them on to rivalry and empire. Both and all bore ample testi 198 Thucyd., I. 89 et seq. Diod. Sic., XI. 41 et seq. Plut., Them., 19. All these narratives are full of instruction concerning the evil spirit which followed upon the day of glory. mony to the hold which their peculiar institutions had upon them, in clinging to these as to the surest means of their own maintenance or advancement; and as a firm and orderly aristocracy was everywhere commended and sometimes forcibly introduced by Sparta amongst her allies, so Athens sent, in the train of her fleets or her embassies, the precepts and the samples of her own democracy, that she would have spread in all directions. Instead of one confederacy, there were now two, with room and motive prepared for more. Nor was the jealousy at once, and the quarrel soon afterward, arising between the two, to be deplored simply because of the wars that were thus engendered. Both the one and the other led, as if of course, to increased demands upon the subordinate states, inducing the Spartans to exercise a haughtier control over their neighbours in the Peloponnesus, and encouraging the Athenians to transform, by craftiness or violence, their allies of the Egean islands into dependent tributaries. 199 The submission which was hard, at first, to yield, became, at last, a habit only too easy to be observed; while, on the other hand, the love of power, corrupting itself in the love of gold and of oppression, resulted finally in the degradation and servitude of the very people whom it had originally exalted. A few individual names may be mentioned in illustration of the hostilities and dangers that hovered, 199 Thucydides describes the empire of Athens in a passage (I. 19. 89 et seq.) not so much worthy of 25 VOL. I. consultation for its statistics as for its principles. vulture-like, above the field which seemed to those who fought upon it to be for ever won. Themistocles cannot be distinguished, in himself, from many who preceded him. He professed the same fondness for liberal, and showed the same passion for selfish, principles that are peculiar to many men; but the circumstances of the war, and of the city after the war, were of a kind to conceal, and even for a time to dissipate, the leaven of his nature. When the urgency of action, magnanimous and devoted in itself, whoever might be its agent, was passed, Themistocles appeared the vain and towering citizen, as he might, perhaps, have been, without appearing so, from the beginning. His countrymen remembered his lowness of birth, and sent him into banishment for the pride that had altered him too suddenly from the upstart to the patriot, and again from the patriot to the would-be sovereign. He was suspected even in his exile, and obliged to fly, at length, to the Persian court, whose bounties he was nothing loath to take and to vaunt before his children.200 Pausanias, the Spartan leader at Platæa, was guiltier in his aims. He would have made himself master of Greece, with the aid of Persia, and, failing herein, aspired to overthrow or so to alter the government of his native country, 201 that he might seize upon the supreme authority in Sparta. He was convicted and starved to death. 200 Plut., Them., 29. 201 Thucyd., I. 128–134. Another Athenian, Cimon, the son of Miltiades, though neither treasonable like Pausanias nor overbearing like Themistocles, but faithful to his fellow citizens of Athens and liberal to his fellow-countrymen of Greece, is nevertheless the representative, in an eminent degree, of the ambition which could gratify itself only in ostentation or warfare. For a long time under the influence of Aristides, he became notable for his leaning to Sparta,202 and to the cause of aristocracy that the name of Sparta signified; too notable, indeed, for this, to be of service to the conservative principles which his early friend would undoubtedly have taught him more prudently to uphold. He withstood Ephialtes and Pericles, as will presently be told; but his largesses were not sufficient to win the support of the people, and he was banished. Recalled before five years of exile, he was the peacemaker with Sparta, and then the war-maker in Egypt, where he died, thirty years after the battle at Thermopylæ.203 These thirty years were the limit to the age defined as that of laws, in the history of Grecian liberty. Even before their close, it seems, whether we turn to Athens or to Sparta, as if we stood where the earthquake was soon to come with crash and ruin. The Spartans were ten years contending with the Helots in Messenia; and though the masters whom Lycur 202 The Spartans, indeed, took him for their champion at Athens. He named one of his sons Lacedæmonius. See Plut., Cim., 16. 203 About A. C. 449. Plut., Cim., 19. Cimon is called by Plu- |
