Remarks upon the event.

Thucydidês does not say; but Plutarch and others inform us that Alkibiadês' was strenuous in supporting it. Five hundred Athenian settlers were subsequently sent thither, to form a new community; apparently not as kleruchs, or out-citizens of Athens, but as new Melians2.

Taking the proceedings of the Athenians towards Mêlos from the beginning to the end, they form one of the grossest and most inexcusable pieces of cruelty combined with injustice which Grecian history presents to us. In appreciating the cruelty of such wholesale executions, we ought to recollect that the laws of war placed the prisoner altogether at the disposal of his conqueror, and that an Athenian garrison, if captured by the Corinthians in Naupaktus, Nisæa, or elsewhere, would assuredly have undergone the same fate, unless in so far as they might be kept for exchange. But the treatment of the Melians goes beyond all rigour of the laws of war; for they had never been at war with Athens, nor had they done anything to incur her enmity. Moreover the acquisition of the island was of no material value to Athens; not sufficient to pay the expenses of the armament employed in its capture. And while the gain was thus in every sense slender, the shock to Grecian feeling by the

1 Plutarch, Alkibiadês, c. 16. This is doubtless one of the statements which the composer of the Oration of Andokidês against Alkibiadês found current in respect to the conduct of the latter (sect. 123). Nor is there any reason for questioning the truth of it.

2 Thucyd. v. 106. τὸ δὲ χωρίον αὐτοὶ ᾤκησαν, ἀποίκους ὕστερον πεντακοσίους πέμψαντες. Lysander restored some Melians to the island after the battle of Ægospotami (Xenoph. Hellen. ii. 2, 9): some therefore must have escaped or must have been spared, or some of the youths and women, sold as slaves at the time of the capture, must have been redeemed or emancipated from captivity.

whole proceeding seems to have occasioned serious mischief to Athens. Far from tending to strengthen her entire empire, by sweeping in this small insular population who had hitherto been neutral and harmless, it raised nothing but odium against her, and was treasured up in after times as among the first of her misdeeds.

To gratify her pride of empire, by a new conquest -easy to effect, though of small value-was doubtless her chief motive; probably also strengthened by pique against Sparta, between whom and herself a thoroughly hostile feeling subsisted-and by a desire to humiliate Sparta through the Melians. This passion for new acquisition, superseding the more reasonable hopes of recovering the lost portions of her empire, will be seen in the coming chapters breaking out with still more fatal predominance.

Both these two points, it will be observed, are prominently marked in the dialogue set forth by Thucydidês. I have already stated that this dialogue can hardly represent what actually passed, except as to a few general points, which the historian has followed out into deductions and illustrations', thus dramatising the given situation in a powerful and characteristic manner. The language put into the mouth of the Athenian envoys is that of pirates and robbers; as Dionysius of Halikarnassus2 long ago remarked, intimating his suspicion that Thucydidês had so set out the case for the purpose of discrediting the country which had sent

1 Such is also the opinion of Dr. Thirlwall, Hist. Gr. vol. iii. ch. xxiv. p. 348.

2

Dionys. Hal. Judic. de Thucydid. c. 37-42. p. 906-920 Reisk : compare the remarks in his Epistol. ad Cn. Pompeium, de Præcipuis Historicis, p. 774 Reisk.

him into exile. suspicion, we may at least affirm that the arguments which he here ascribes to Athens are not in harmony even with the defects of the Athenian character. Athenian speakers are more open to the charge of equivocal wording, multiplication of false pretences, softening down the bad points of their case, putting an amiable name upon vicious acts, employing what is properly called sophistry where their purpose needs it'. Now the language of the envoy at Mêlos, which has been sometimes cited as illustrating the immorality of the class or profession (falsely called a school) named Sophists at Athens, is above all things remarkable for a sort of audacious frankness-a disdain not merely of sophistry in the modern sense of the word, but even of such plausible excuse as might have been offered. It has been strangely argued as if "the good old plan, That they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can"-had been first discovered and openly promulgated by Athenian sophists: whereas the true purpose and value of sophists, even in the modern and worst sense of the word (putting aside the perversion of applying that sense to the persons called Sophists at Athens), is, to furnish plausible matter of deceptive justification-so that the strong man may be enabled to act upon this "good old plan" as much as he pleases, but without avowing it, and while professing fair dealing or just retaliation for some imaginary wrong. The wolf in Æsop's fable (of the Wolf and the

Whatever may be thought of this

1 Plutarch, Alkibiad. 16. τοὺς ̓Αθηναίους ἀεὶ τὰ πραότατα τῶν ὀνομάτων τοῖς ἁμαρτήμασι τιθεμένους, παιδιὰς καὶ φιλανθρωπίας.—To the same purpose Plutarch, Solon, c. 15.

Lamb) speaks like a sophist; the Athenian envoy at Mêlos speaks in a manner totally unlike a sophist, either in the Athenian sense or in the modern sense of the word; we may add, unlike an Athenian at all, as Dionysius has observed.

As a matter of fact and practice, it is true that stronger states, in Greece and in the contemporary world, did habitually tend, as they have tended throughout the course of history down to the present day, to enlarge their power at the expense of the weaker. Every territory in Greece, except Attica and Arcadia, had been seized by conquerors who dispossessed or enslaved the prior inhabitants. We find Brasidas reminding his soldiers of the good sword of their forefathers, which had established dominion over men far more numerous than themselves, as matter of pride and glory' and when we come to the times of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, we shall see the lust of conquest reaching a pitch never witnessed among free Greeks. Of right thus founded on simple superiority of force, there were abundant examples to be quoted, as parallels to the Athenian conquest of Mêlos: but that which is unparalleled is the mode adopted by the Athenian envoy of justifying it, or rather of setting aside all justification, looking at the actual state of civilization in Greece. A barbarous invader casts his sword into the scale in lieu of argument: a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification-a good plea, if he can-a false plea, or

1 Compare also what Brasidas says in his speech to the Akanthians, ν. 86.--ἴσχυος δικαιώσει, ἣν ἡ τύχη ἔδωκεν, &c.

Place which it

the general

historical

of Thucy

sham plea, if he has no better. But the Athenian envoy neither copies the contemptuous silence of the barbarian nor the smooth lying of the civilized invader. Though coming from the most cultivated city in Greece, where the vices prevalent were those of refinement and not of barbarism, he disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy more than would have been done by an envoy even of Argos or Korkyra. He even disdains to mention-what might have been said with perfect truth as matter of fact, whatever may be thought of its sufficiency as a justification-that the Melians had enjoyed for the last fifty years the security of the Egean waters at the cost of Athens and her allies, without any payment of their own.

So at least he is made to do in the Thucydidean occupies in dramatic fragment - Μήλου "Αλωσις (The Capture of Mêlos)—if we may parody the title of the lost traconception gedy of Phrynichus-" The Capture of Miletus." didês. And I think a comprehensive view of the history of Thucydidês will suggest to us the explanation of this drama, with its powerful and tragical effect. The capture of Melos comes immediately before the great Athenian expedition against Syracuse, which was resolved upon three or four months afterwards, and despatched during the course of the following summer. That expedition was the gigantic effort of Athens, which ended in the most ruinous catastrophe known to ancient history. From such a blow it was impossible for Athens to recover. Though crippled, indeed, she struggled against its effects with surprising energy; but her fortune went on, in the main, declining-yet with occasional moments