Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/316

 S92 • mSTOHY OF GREECE. Athenian hegemony to the Athenian empire was doubtless grad- ual, so that no one could determine precisely where the formei* ends and the latter begins : but it had been consummated before the thirty years' truce, which was concluded fourteen years before the Peloponnesian war, — and it was in fact the substantial cause of that war. Empire then came to be held by Athens, — partly as a fact established, resting on acquiescence rather than attachment or consent on the minds of the subjects, — partly as a corollary from necessity of union combined with her superior force : while this latter point, superiority of force as a legitimate title, stood more and more forward, both in the language of her speakers and in the conceptions of her citizens. Nay, the Athenian orators of the middle of the Peloponnesian war venture to affirm that their empire had been of this same character ever since the repulse of the Persians : an inaccuracy so manifest, that if we could suppose the speech made by the Athenian Euphemus at Kamarina in 415 B.C. to have been heard by Themistokles or Aristeides fifty years before, it would have been alike offensive to the prudence of the one and to the justice of the other. The imperial state of Athens, that which she held at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, when her allies, except Chios and Les- bos, were tributary subjects, and when the -^gean sea was an Athenian lake, — was of course the period of her greatest splen- dor and greatest action upon the Grecian world. It was also the period most impressive to historians, orators, and philosophers, — suggesting the idea of some one state exercising dominion ad Thucyd. i, 94), and by the Corinthians to express their claims as metrop- olis of Korkyra, which were really little more than honorary, — em r^ 7/y£fj.6vE( re elvai Kal tu eiKora ■&avfiu^£(r&at (Thucyd. i, 38) : compare vii, 55. Indeed, it sometimes means simply a guide (iii, 98; vii, 50). But the words apxr), upxeiv, upxea-&ai, voc. pass., are much less extensive in meaning, and imply both superior dignity and coercive authority to a greater or less extent : compare Thucyd. v, 69 ; ii, 8, etc. The noTn^ upxhv Exovaa is analogous to uv^p rvpavvo^ (vi, 85). Herodotus is less careful in distinguishing the meanings of these words than Thucydides : see the discussion of the Lacedaemonian and Athenian envoys with Gelo (vii. 155-162). But it is to be obsers'ed that he makes Gelo ask for the riye/xovca and not for the iipxri, — putting the claim in the least offensive form : compare also the claim of the Argeianf for r^yeixovia (vii, 148).