Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/143

 GREECE DURIXG PEISISTKATL3. l$& u felt themselves obnoxious would naturally retire along with him ; and If this be what is meant by "many persons condemned to exile," here is no reason to call it in question. But there is little probability that any one was put to death, and still less probability that any were punished by the loss of their political privileges. Within a year afterwards came the com- prehensive constitution of KleisthenOs, to be described in the following chapter, and I consider it eminently unlikely that there were a considerable class of residents in Attica left out of this constitution, under the category of partisans of Peisistratus : indeed, the fact cannot be so, if it be true that the very first person banished under the Klcisthenean ostracism wis a per- son named Hipparchus, a kinsman of Peisistratus (Androtion, Fr. b, c<. Didot ; Harpokration, v, "iTTTrap^of ) ; and this latter circumstance depends upon evidence better than that of Andokides. That there were a party in Attica attached to the Peisistratids, I do not doubt ; but that they were " a powerful party," (as Dr. Thirlwall imagines,) I see nothing to show; and the extraordinary vigor and unanimity of the Athenian people under the Kleisthenean constitution will go far to prove that such could not have been the case. I will add another reason to evince how completely Andokides miscon- ceives the history of Athens between 510-480 B.C. He says that when the Peisistratids were put down, many of their partisans were banished, many others allowed to stay at home with the loss of their political privileges ; but that afterwards, when the overwhelming dangers of the Persian invasion supervened, the people passed a vote to re tore the exiles and to remove the existing disfranchiscments at home. He would thus have us believe that the exiled partisans of the Peisistratids were all restored, and the dis- franchised partisans of the Peisistratids all enfranchised, just at the moment of the Persian invasion, and with the view of enabling Athens better to repel that grave danger. This is nothing less than a glaring mistake ; for the first Persian invasion was undertaken with the express view of restoring Hippias, and with the presence of Hippias himself at Marathon : while the second Persian invasion was also brought on in part by the instigation of his family. Persons who had remained in exile or in a state of disfran chisement down to that time, in consequence of their attachment to the Peisistratids, could not in common prudence be called into action at the moment of peril, to help in repelling Hippias himself. It is very true that the exiles and the disfranchised were readmitted, shortly before the invasion of Xerxes, and under the then pressing calamities of the state. But these persons were not philo-Pcisistratids ; they were a number gradually accu- mulated from the sentences of exile and (atimy or) disfran chisement every year passed at Athens, for these were punishments applied by the Athe- nian law to various crimes and public omissions, the persons so setence<l were not politically disaffected, and their aid would then be ; use in defending the state against a foreign enemy. In regard to " the exception of the family of Peisistratus from the most comprehensive decrees of amnesty passed in la.*er times," I will ak