CHAP. nevertheless been cautiously inoffensive to Athens, XVII. till forced to become enemies. The punishment for this involuntary crime, even to the lower people, supposed all along in some degree friendly, when all were surrendered together to the mercy of the Athenians, was no less than what the unfortunate Scionæans had undergone, for that termed rebellion. All the adult males were put to death, and the women and children, of all ranks, were sold for slaves. The iland was divided among five hundred Athenian families. With the most unquestionable testimony to facts, which strike with horror, when perpetrated by a tribe of savages, we are at a loss to conceive how they could take place in the peculiar country and age of philosophy and the fine arts; where Pericles had spoken and ruled, where Thucydides was then writing, where Socrates was then teaching, where Xenophon and Plato and Isocrates were receiving their education, and where the paintings of Parrhasius and Zeuxis, the sculpture of Pheidias and Praxiteles, the architecture of Callicrates and Ictinus, and the sublime and chaste dramas of Sophocles and Euripides formed the delight of the people. Tho the late battle near Mantineia had restored the tarnished glory of the Lacedæmonian arms and the sullied character of the people, yet the conduct of their administration continued to earn for them those imputations of ill faith, illiberal policy, and inertness, which, in reporting the conference at Melos, Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian commissioner, and which, for their conduct toward Argos, they had deserved. Their total abandonment of the faithful and unfortunate Melians was deeply disgraceful. Their Argian friends, wandering up and down Peloponnesus, SECT. VI. were, wherever they showed themselves or were heard of, striking testimonies to their discredit. In the existing tumult of Grecian politics, some exertion was unavoidable; but it was generally feeble, irregular, and confined to little objects. No less than thrice, since the beginning of hostilities with Argos, the Lacedæmonian army, after advancing to the frontier, was stopped by unfavorable appearances in the border-passing sacrifice, and returned home; a circumstance little known when able and active men directed public affairs. Once indeed we have this religious trick politically accounted for. Incouragement from the friends of oligarchy in Argos induced the Lacedæmonian army to march, and intelligence that the plot was discovered occasioned the stop, which was imputed to forbidding tokens in the sacrifice. At times, however, party ran high in Lacedæmon itself; which might contribute to the visible feebleness and irregularity in the conduct of the administration at this period. Before the end of the winter in which Melos fell, an effort was made to relieve Thucyd. the Argian fugitives, and distress the Argians in 1. 6. c. 7. possession; but, tho the preparations promised something great, what followed was little and inefficacious. The forces of all the Peloponnesian allies, except Corinth, were assembled, and the strength of Laconia joined them. But, from the first, the objects seem to have been no more than to carry off the plunder of the villages of Argolis, for which waggons attended the march of the army, and to establish the Argian fugitives in Orneæ, an Argolic town on the borders of Phliasia. Both were very incompletely executed. A small part of Argolis only was plundered; and the Lacedæmonian army was no sooner withdrawn, and, CHAP. according to the practice of the Greeks, dispersed XVII. for the winter, than the Argians, with a small auxiliary force from Athens, marched against Ornæa, which was so ill provided for defence, that those who held it consulted their safety by immediate flight. During these military transactions, the Lacedæmonian administration so far exerted themselves in negotiation, as to endevor to excite the Chalcidians of Thrace, whose present independency was a benefit derived from the arms of Lacedæmon, to join the king of Macedonia in hostilities against Athens. But the Chalcidians no longer won and animated by the abilities, the activity, the popular manners, and the generous faith of a Brasidas, and probably both apprehensive of the power and distrustful of the character of Perdiccas, refused. While indeed they injoyed independency in peace, the small tribute assessed by Aristeides was apparently not an object for which to provoke the naval power of Athens; and it was rather their interest to see Perdiccas, after all his wiles, unquiet within his own government, as well as harassed by a forein war. The troubles within Macedonia disabled him for any considerable exertion without; while Methonë, an Athenian garrison on the borders, became an asylum for Macedonian refugees and malcontents; who, together with a body of Athenian horse stationed there, employed themselves in inroads wherever they could find most plunder and least resistance. Such were the transactions of the sixteenth winter of the war. CHAPTER XVIII. Of the Affairs of SICILY, and of the ATHENIAN EXpedition into SICILY. SECTION I. Affairs of Sicily: Hieron King of Syracuse. Expulsion of the Family of SECT. THE Athenian people, whose numbers were far below the name of a nation, being indeed a very small portion of the Greek nation, but whose men were all soldiers and seamen; possessing a fleet that no one state then on earth could resist, high discipline, military as well as naval, officers of extensive experience, a civil and political system upon the whole admirably arranged, with large revenue from mines and from tributary states; there is no foreseeing how far their tyrannous dominion might not have been extended over Greeks and among forein nations, but that the folly of democracy unrestrained would of course work its own ruin. The evident weakness in the political conduct of the only rival power, Lacedæmon, operated to the incouragement of chiefs and people; and in the same winter in which the inhabitants of the little iland of Melos 1.6. c. 1. Thucyd. CHAP. Nic. were cut off from the face of the earth, the wild ambition of the people of Athens became eager in proPlut. vit. ject for the conquest of another iland, many times larger, not only than Melos, but than Attica; ignorant at the same time, almost all of them, of its magnitude, its population, its value if conquered, and its means to resist conquest. Ch. 10. of Arist. de Rep. 1. 5. c. 12. c. 38. In the succinct history of Sicily formerly given, this Hist. we have seen Gelon, from a private citizen of Gela, become king of that city and of Syracuse, and head of the Grecian interest in the iland. His dominion comprehended all the Grecian settlements on the eastern coast, the greatest part of those on the southern, with some on the northern, and extensive command over the inland barbarians. After an illustrious reign of only seven years, dying at no very advanced age, in the next year, if we can unDiod.1. 11. derstand and may trust Diodorus, after the glorious B.C. 479. battle of Himera, he was succeeded by his brother Hieron. The only considerable power besides in Sicily, was that of Theron prince of Agrigentum; who, like Gelon, had raised himself from a private station, and had also merited his advancement. He outlived Gelon, according to Diodorus, seven years, B.C. 472. dying in the first of the seventy-seventh Olympiad, after a reign of only ten. who succeeded him, was of a different character: arrogant abroad, as tyrannical at home, he ingaged in war with Hieron. Being defeated, he lost the respect of his own people; and flying, for refuge from their animosity, to the Misæan Megarians, was by them put to death. His opponents made peace with the Syracusan prince, and a republican form of government was restored. His son Thrasydæus, Gelon's reign was too short for completing a work of such complex difficulty as that of molding |