nomy for each city; which manifested itself in each, through the oligarchical party, whose power was kept down by Athens, and was stimulated by the sentiment communicated from the Grecian communities without the Athenian empire. According to that sentiment, the condition of a subject-ally of Athens was treated as one of degradation and servitude: and in proportion as fear and hatred of Athens became more and more predominant among the allies of Sparta, they gave utterance to the sentiment more and more emphatically, so as to encourage discontent artificially among the subject-allies of the Athenian empire. Possessing complete mastery of the sea, and every sort of superiority requisite for holding empire over islands, Athens had yet no sentiment to appeal to in her subjects, calculated to render her empire popular, except that of common democracy, which seems at first to have acted without any care on her part to encourage it, until the progress of the Peloponnesian war made such encouragement a part of her policy. And had she even tried sincerely to keep up in the allies the feeling of a common interest, and the attachment to a permanent confederacy, the instinct of political separation would probably have baffled all her efforts. But she took no such pains, — with the usual morality that grows up in the minds of the actual possessors of power, she conceived herself entitled to exact obedience as her right; and some of the Athenian speakers in Thucydides go so far as to disdain all pretence of legitimate power, even such as might fairly be set up, resting the supremacy of Athens on the naked plea of superior force.[1] As the allied cities were mostly under democracies, — through the indirect influence rather than the systematic dictation of Athens, — yet each having its own internal aristocracy in a state of opposition; so the movements for revolt against Athens originated with the aristocracy or with some few citizens apart: while the people, though sharing more or less in the desire for autonomy, had yet either a fear of their own aristocracy or a sympathy with
- ↑ Thucyd. iii, 37; ii, 63. See the conference, at the island of Melos in the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian war (Thucyd. v, 89, seq.), between the Athenian commissioners and the Melians. I think, however, that this conference is less to be trusted as based in reality, than the speeches in Thucydides generally, — of which more hereafter.
