The Historians' History of the World 04

Isocrates, who speaks with indignant horror of these decarchies, while he denounces those features which they had in common with the triacontarchy at Athens—extrajudicial murders, spoliations, and banishments—notices one enormity besides, which we do not find in the latter: violent outrages upon boys and women. Nothing of this kind is ascribed to Critias and his companions; and it is a considerable proof of the restraining force of Athenian manners, that men who inflicted so much evil in gratification of other violent impulses, should have stopped short here. The decemvirs named by Lysander, like the decemvir Appius Claudius at Rome, would find themselves armed with power to satiate their lusts as well as their antipathies, and would not be more likely to set bounds to the former than to the latter. Lysander, in all the overweening insolence of victory, while rewarding his most devoted partisans with an exaltation comprising every sort of licence and tyranny, stained the dependent cities with countless murders, perpetrated on private as well as on public grounds. No individual Greek had ever before wielded so prodigious a power of enriching friends or destroying enemies, as in this universal reorganisation of Greece; nor was there ever any power more deplorably abused.

Taking all these causes of evil together—the decarchies, the harmosts, and the overwhelming dictatorship of Lysander—and construing other parts of the Grecian world by the analogy of Athens under the Thirty, we shall be warranted in affirming that the first years of the Spartan empire, which followed upon the victory of Ægospotami, were years of all-pervading tyranny, and multifarious intestine calamity, such as Greece had never before endured. The hardships of war, severe in many ways, were now at an end, but they were replaced by a state of suffering not the less difficult to bear because it was called peace. And what made the suffering yet more intolerable was, that it was a bitter disappointment and a flagrant violation of promises proclaimed, repeatedly and explicitly, by the Lacedæmonians themselves.

For more than thirty years preceding—from times earlier than the commencement of the Peloponnesian War—the Spartans had professed to interfere only for the purpose of liberating Greece, and of putting down the usurped ascendency of Athens. Like the allied sovereigns of Europe in 1813, who, requiring the most strenuous efforts on the part of the people to contend against the Emperor Napoleon, promised free constitutions, and granted nothing after the victory had been assured—the Lacedæmonians held out the most emphatic and repeated assurances of general autonomy in order to enlist allies against Athens; disavowing, even ostentatiously, any aim at empire for themselves.

The victory of Ægospotami, with its consequences, cruelly undeceived every one. The language of Brasidas, sanctioned by the solemn oaths of the Lacedæmonian ephors, in 424 B.C., and the proceedings of the Lacedæmonian Lysander in 405-404 B.C., the commencing hour of Spartan omnipotence, stand in such literal and flagrant contradiction, that we might almost imagine the former to have foreseen the possibility of such a successor, and to have tried to disgrace and disarm him beforehand. There was no present necessity for conciliating allies—still less for acting up to former engagements; so that nothing remained to oppose the naturally ambitious inspirations of the Spartan ephors, who allowed the admiral to carry out the details in his own way. But former assurances, though Sparta was in a condition to disregard them, were not forgotten by others; and the recollection of them imparted additional bitterness to the oppressions of the decemvirs and harmosts. In perfect consistency with her misrule throughout eastern Greece, too, Sparta identified herself with the energetic tyranny of Dionysius at Syracuse, assisting both to erect and to uphold it; a contradiction to her former maxims of action which would have astounded the historian Herodotus.

[405-371 B.C.]