Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/322

 298 HISTORY OF GREECE. iron into the sea never again to be seen.i As this confederacy was thus both perpetual and peremptory, binding each member to the rest, and not allowing either retirement or evasion, so it was essential that it should be sustained by some determining authority and enforcing sanction. The determining authority was provided by the synod at Delos : the enforcing sanction was exercised by Athens as president. And there is every reason to presume that Athens, for a long time, performed this duty in a legitimate and honorable manner, acting in execution of the re- solves of the synod, or at least in full harmony with its general purposes. She exacted from every member the regulated quota of men or money, employing coercion against recusants, and visiting neglect of military duty with penalties. In all these requirements she only discharged her appropriate functions as chosen leader of the confederacy, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the general synod went cordially along with her^ in strictness of dealing towards those defaulters who obtained pro- tection without bearing their share of the burden. But after a few years, several of the confederates becoming weary of personal military service, prevailed upon the Athenians to provide ships and men in their place, and imposed upon them- selves in exchange a money-payment of suitable amount. This commutation, at first probably introduced to meet some special case of inconvenience, was found so suitable to the taste of all parties that it gradually spread through the larger portion of the confederacy. To unwarlike allies, hating labor and privation, it was a welcome relief, — while to the Athenians, full of ardor and patient of labor, as well as discipline, for the aggrandizement of their country, it afforded constant pay for a fleet more numerous than they could otherwise have kept afloat. It is plain from the statement of Thucydides that this altered practice was introduced from the petition of the confederates themselves, not from any ' Plutarch. Aristeides, c. 24. ^ Such concurrence of the general sj-nod is in fact implied In the speech put by Thucydides into the mouth of the Mitylenaean envoys at Olympia, in ■he third year of the Peloponnesian war : a speech pronounced by parties altogether hostile to Athens (Thucyd. iii, 11) — ajia fi'ev yap naprvpii^ kxpuvTo (the Athenians) nfj uv tov( ye iaoip7](povc aKovrac, el fi^ Ti ^d'tKovv oI( ETT^eaav. ^varpareveiv.