Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/209

 OPPRESSIONS OF THE TEN. 137 ber, like Theranienes, until they contrived some stratagem for disarming the citizens, which would enable them to gratify both then* antipathies and their rapacity by victims still more numerous, many of such victims being wealthy men, selected for purposes of pure spoliation. 1 They would next despatch by force any obtru- sive monitor from their own number, like Theramenes ; probably with far less ceremony than accompanied the perpetration of this crime at Athens, where we may trace the effect of those judicial forms and habits to which the Athenian public had been habitu- ated, overruled indeed, yet still not forgotten. There would hardly remain any fresh enormity still to commit, over and above the multiplied executions, except to banish from the city all but their own immediate partisans, and to reward these latter with choice estates confiscated from the victims. 2 If called upon to excuse such tyranny, the leader of a dekarchy would have suffi- cient invention to employ the plea of Kritias, that all changes of government were unavoidably death-dealing, and that nothing less than such stringent measures would suffice to maintain his city hi suitable dependence upon Sparta. 3 Of course, it is not my purpose to affirm that in any other city, precisely the same phenomena took place as those which occurred in Athens. But we are nevertheless perfectly warranted in re- garding the history of the Athenian Thirty as a fair sample, from whence to derive our idea of those Lysandrian dekarchies which now overspread the Grecian world. Doubtless, each had its own peculiar march ; some were less tyrannical ; but, perhaps, some even more tyrannical, regard being had to the size of the city. And in point of fact, Isokrates, who speaks with indignant horror of these dekarchies, while he denounces those features which they had in common with the triakontarchy at Athens, extrajudicial murders, spoliations, and banishments, notices one enormity be- sides, which we do not find in the latter, violent outrages upon boys and women.4 Nothing of this kind is ascribed to Kritias and hia 1 Xen. Hellen, ii, 3, 21. s Xen. Hellen. ii, 4, 1. 3 Xen. He'.len. ii, 3, 24-32 Kal elal fiev 6rjnov navai fiETadoXal Tro/Ure- luv -davaTr/fc poi, etc. 4 Isokrates Orat. iv, (Panegyr.) s. 127-132 (c. 32). He has been speaking, at some length, and in terms of energetic denun- ciation, against the enormities of the dekarchies. He concludes by saying