parties, and who had gained from all, except his bitter personal foes, the praise of surpassing wisdom and moderation.* But, as Thucydides expressly tells us, "Those who succeeded after his death, being more equal one with another, and each of them desiring pre-eminence over the rest, adopted the different course of courting the favour of the people, and sacrificing to that object even important state interests.". His controlling mind was withdrawn at the very time when mutual exasperation provoked rash counsels. Even before his death, in the second year of the war, the Lacedæmonians had imported a systematic cruelty into their naval warfare. Unable to cope with the Athenian navy, they fitted out privateers to prey upon the mercantile and fishing vessels that sailed round their coasts, and massacred the crews not only of Athenian but of neutral ships. The Athenians retaliated by the murder of some envoys, whom the Lacedæmonians, in pursuance of the policy adopted from the very beginning of the war, had sent to solicit aid from Persia, and who were delivered up to them by their ally the Thracian king. Among them were the Corinthian Aristeus, who had instigated the revolt of Potidæa, and two Spartan heralds, whose fathers had gone to Susa to offer their lives in atonement for the murder of the heralds of Darius, but had been dismissed unhurt by Xerxes. But the event that roused the bitterest passions of the Athenians was the revolt of one of the most important of their own allies, Lesbos, one of the three large islands on the coast of Asia (reduced to two since the revolt and subjugation of Samos), which alone of all the Delian confederates remained on an equal footing with Athens. It was early in the fourth year of the war (B.c. 428) that the news reached Athens that Mytilene had revolted, at the instigation of the oligarchical party, drawing after it the three towns of Antissa, Eresus, and Pyrrha, whose governments it absorbed into its own. Methymna, the second city of the island, and the jealous rival of Mytilene, remained faithful to the Athenians. The revolt was purely political, and the Mytilenæans sent a solemn embassy to the Peloponnesians assembled at the Olympic festival, proposing to join their alliance, and begging for their aid. But before the promised succours could be sent, the fate of the revolt was decided by the energy of the Athenians. Though their strength had been drained by the plague, and their accumulated treasure exhausted, they raised a direct contribution of two hundred talents at home, *The eulogy of Thucydides (ii. 65) is decisive of the esteem in which Pericles was held by moderate and impartial men. B.C. 428.] REVOLT OF MYTILENE. 502 and sent ships to collect money from the islands; they demanded the personal service of all citizens, except the two highest Solonian classes, and of the resident foreigners; and, disregarding the Peloponnesian army, which had again invaded Attica, they sent out a fleet of 100 triremes to blockade Mytilene. After a long resistance, the spirits of the Mytilenæans were raised by the presence of a Lacedæmonian, Salæthus, who had contrived to enter the city, bringing the news that a Lacedæmonian fleet was on its way to their relief (B.c. 427). But the time passed on without the appearance of the promised succours; the provisions were exhausted; and Salæthus resolved to try one united sally. But no sooner had he put arms into the hands of all the people, than the democratic party refused to act under the former leaders, who were obliged to capitulate, as the only means of preventing an unconditional surrender. Paches, the Athenian general, agreed to refer the fate of the rebels to the Athenian people, before whom Mytilenæan envoys were to plead their cause; and he sent to Athens a thousand of the chief citizens as prisoners, together with Salæthus. The debate which ensued at Athens forms one of the most memorable episodes of the war. Cleon now appears for the first time, as the representative of those demagogues for whom the removal of Pericles had made way. The reader of Thucydides cannot fail to be struck with the great void among the party leaders of the higher class from the death of Pericles to the rise of Alcibiades. Almost the only names of any eminence in the ecclesia, besides the demagogues, are those of Nicias and Demosthenes. The latter, who does not appear prominently till B.C. 426, was little more than the honest straightforward soldier. The former had already been associated in command with Pericles; and his wealth, birth, and character must have secured him considerable respect. But his quiet and irresolute disposition by no means fitted him to seize the reins as they fell from the hand of Pericles. It is not till after the rise of Cleon that we find him impelled by his sense of patriotism and by the claims of his party, to wage an unequal contest with the demagogue; * and his political ascendancy only dates from Cleon's death in B.C. 422. Free as the arena of the government had been to all the citizens since the reforms of Pericles and Ephialtes, the great leaders had till now been, for the most part, men of the old families. It is * The orator who opposes Cleon in the affair of the Mytilenæans, is not Nicias, but Diodotus, a politician otherwise unknown. but slowly that the power passes out of the hands of that class in a free state; and their influence was upheld at Athens by their social and political associations. No such help,-but the jealous opposition of a body anxious to preserve by their union privileges no longer allowed to them by the law,―met the men of the people who, enriched by the growth of commerce, or possessed of power of speech and of the assurance needed to face the ecclesia and the dicasteries, aspired to a leading part in politics. "A person of such low or middling station obtained no favourable presumptions or indulgence on the part of the public to meet him half-way, nor had he established connections to encourage first successes, or help him out of early scrapes. He found others already in possession of ascendancy, and well disposed to keep down new competitors; so that he had to win his own way unaided, from the first step to the last, by qualities personal to himself; by assiduity of attendance-by acquaintance with business-by powers of striking speech-and withal by unflinching audacity, indispensable to enable him to bear up against that opposition and enmity which he would incur from the high-born politicians and organized party clubs, as soon as he appeared to be rising up into ascendancy." Such men were Eucrates, the rope-seller; Lysicles, the sheepseller; Hyperbolus, the lamp-maker; and, above all, Cleon, the leather-seller. The character of this remarkable man is delineated by Thucydides in a few of his masterly touches, and roughly drawn by Aristophanes with the broadest strokes of caricature. The great comedian began his public career in this very year, B.C. 427, with a play called "The Banqueters," which is now lost. His second comedy, "The Babylonians," which is also lost (B.c. 426), first opened the attack on Cleon, which was followed up two years afterwards in his celebrated "Knights" (B.c. 424). This play furnishes a leading type of the spirit of the Old Attic Comedy, as perfected by its greatest master. DEMOS (the people), an old man who has reached his dotage, without being the less cunning and suspicious, irascible and tyrannical, has fallen into the hands of his steward, Cleon, a leather-seller, smelling of the tan-yard, brawling and bullying, cozening and fawning, pilfering and lying, bringing accusations against his fellow servants, and withdrawing them for bribes. The old man's faithful servants, Nicias and Demosthenes, set up a rival to Cleon in the person of a sausage-seller, who surpasses him in all his foul arts, cheating ways, and over* Grote, History of Greece, vol. vi., pp. 330–1. B.C. 427.] ARISTOPHANES. БОЕ bearing tyranny, till he has entirely supplanted Cleon. He then throws off his assumed character; appears as the model of old aristocratic virtue; restores Demos to youth by the magic virtue of a cauldron like Medea's, and exhibits him in all the freshness of the age of Marathon. The exact influence of Aristophanes on the mind of his age, and his value to us as an authority, are often misunderstood through forgetfulness of the essential spirit of caricature. Once let it be exactly truthful, moderate, sober, cautious, and it ceases to be caricature at all. Truthful, indeed, it must be, in one sense, if it be not dishonest and contemptible; if its object be simply to amuse, the pleasure must not be purchased by falsehood; if serious, it is still more bound to refrain from any positive deception. The comic masks of the Attic stage, like the pictures of our great modern caricaturists, would lose all merit unless they preserved the likeness of their originals, however laughably distorted or exaggerated in the several features; and their "counterfeit presentment" of character was governed by the same laws. But, as we should scarcely place pictures of the former class in a portrait gallery, so we should beware of following the latter delineations of character too literally. Still more mistaken, however, is the view which sets them aside as mere buffoonery. The prevalence of that element on the comic stage of Athens-an element which he himself claims to have reduced within a far more moderate compass than before does not make Aristophanes a mere buffoon. A serious purpose is manifested throughout his works. He is the strenuous advocate of the old views in politics and social life, in poetical criticism, in philosophy and religion, if indeed we ought not rather to say that he condemned all the philos ophy of his age as irreligious and demoralizing. The vividness of his fancy, the exquisite beauty of his more poetical passages, and the purity of his language, even in his scenes of broadest humour, have won the admiration of every age, whose universal verdict has re-echoed the praise of Plato : "The Muses seeking for a shrine Whose glories ne'er should cease, Of Aristophanes.* In politics, the poet came forward to resist the demagogues at a time when they scarcely had any effective opposition in the ecclesia. The seriousness of his purpose, in this field at all events, was * Epigram in the Greek Anthology, translated by Merivale. proved by the courage with which he attacked Cleon in the year after his popularity had reached its height by the capture of the Spartans in Sphacteria (B.c. 424). Of this the play of "The Knights" is itself a sufficient proof, even if there be no sufficient foundation for the story that, when no artist had the courage to make the mask of Cleon, Aristophanes acted the part himself, with his face daubed with lees of wine, after the fashion of the early comedians. Whatever there may have been exaggerated in the character thus pourtrayed, and whether or no the personal turpitude of Cleon was as deep as Aristophanes depicts it, we have the testimony of Thucydides to his political profligacy, his dishonest calumnies, and his reckless invectives. He first appears as an instigator of the popular discontent against Pericles during the invasion of Attica in the first year of the war; and now again as the vehement advocate of a most cruel act of popular vengeance, which has brought indelible disgrace on the Athenian democracy, though its consummation was hindered by their repentance. The revolt of Lesbos had startled the Athenians by its discovery of the insecurity of their maritime empire. They had seen a Lacedæmonian fleet invited into the Asiatic waters by their faithless ally, at the moment when they were weakened by the plague at home. The very defence of the Mytilenæan advocates was calculated to increase their indignation; for they alleged no injury done to them by Athens, and the only plea they urged was most offensive by its distrust, and by its implied censure on the whole course of the Athenian empire,-the fear that she might oppress and subdue them hereafter, as had been the fate of the other allies. To an assembly thus excited, Cleon suddenly proposed that all the male population of military age should be put to death, and the women and children sold for slaves; and the decree was passed after a vehement opposition. But the assembly had no sooner broken up than a revulsion of feeling followed, the more readily, as Mr. Grote has suggested, from a well-known law of human nature, "that the sentiment of wrath against the Mytilenæans had been really in part discharged by the mere passing of the sentence, quite apart from its execution." The Mytilenean envoys induced the strategi to call another assembly for the next day, in which the decree was reversed, in spite of the furious opposition of Cleon, but only by a small majority.* A swift trireme was despatched to overtake the ship which had been sent off immediately * Thucydides, who only mentions the first assembly very briefly, gives a full report of the speech of Cleon and the reply of Diodotus, iii. 37–48. |