Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/289

 GRECIAN AFFAIRS AFTER THE PERSIAN INVASION. 265 autonomous and regularly assembled allies in 476 B.C., and impe- rial Athens, with hor subject allies in 432 B.C. ; the Greek word equivalent to ally left either of these epithets to be understood, by an ambiguity exceedingly convenient to the powerful states, — and he indicates the general causes of the change : but he gives us few particulars as to the modifying cii'cumstances, and none at all as to the first start. He tells us only that the Athenians appointed a pecuHar board of officers, called the Hellenotamiae, to receive and administer the common fund, — that Delos was con- stituted the general treasury, w^here the money was to be kept, — and that the payment thus levied was called the phorus ; ^ a name which appears then to have been first put into circulation, though afterwards usual, — and to have conveyed at first no degrading import, though it afterwards became so odious as to be exchanged for a more innocent synonym. Endeavoring as well as we can to conceive the Athenian alli- ance in its infancy, we are first struck with the magnitude of the total sum contributed; which will appear the more remarkable when we reflect that many of the contributing cities furnished ships besides. We may be certain that all which was done at first was done by general consent, and by a freely determining major- ity : for Athens, at the time when the Ionic allies besought her protection against Spartan arrogance, could have had no power of constraining unwilling parties, especially when the loss of supremacy, though quietly borne, was yet fresh and rankling among the countrymen of Pausanias. So large a total implies, from the very fir^t, a great number of contributing states, and we learn from hence to appreciate the powerful, wide-spread, and voluntary movement which then brought together the maritime and insular Greeks distributed throughout the ^gean sea and the Hellespont. The Phenician fleet, and the Persian land-force, might at any moment reappear, nor was there any hope of resist- ing either except by confederacy : so that confederacy, under such circumstances, became, with these exposed Greeks, not merely a genuine feeling, but at that time the first of all their feelings. It was their common fear, rather than Athenian ambi- ' Thucyd. i, 95, 96. VOL. V. 12