Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/360

 336 fflSTORY OF GREECE. of the Thracian Bosphorus vnih the Euxine. On their side, the Athenians agreed t© leave him in undisturbed possession of Cy- prus and Egypt. Kallias, an Athenian of distinguished family, with some others of his countrymen, went up to Susa to negoti- ate this convention : and certain envoys from Argos, then in alli- ance with Athens, took the opportunity of going thither at the same time, to renew the friendly understanding which their city had established with Xerxes at the period of his invasion of Greece.^ As is generally the case with treaties after hostility, — this convention did little more than recognize the existing state of things, without introducing any new advantage or disadvantage on either side, or calling for any measures to be taken in conse- quence of it. We may hence assign a reasonable ground for the silence of Thucydides, who does not even notice the convention as having been made : we are to recollect always that in the in- terval between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, he does not profess to do more than glance briefly at the main events. But the boastful and inaccurate authors of the ensuing century, ora- tors, rhetors, and historians, indulged in so much exaggeration and untruth respecting this convention, both as to date and a3 to details, — and extolled as something so glorious the fact of ' Herodot. vii, 151 ; Diodor. xii. 3, 4. Demosthenes (De Falsa Legat. c. 77, p. 428, R: compare De Ehodior. Libert, c. 13, p. 199) speaks of this peace as t^v v-nb ttuvtcov df)v7'Aovfievrjv elprjvjjv. Compare Lykurgus, cont. Leokrat. c. 17, p. 187 ; Isokrates, Panegjr. c. 33, 34, p. 244; Areopagitic. c. 37, pp. 150, 229 ; Panathenaic, c. 20, p. 360. The loose language of these orators makes it impossible to determine what was the precise limit in respect of vicinity to the coast. Isokrates is careless enough to talk of the river Halys as the boundary; Demosthenes states it as ." a day's course for a horse," — which is probably larger than the truth. The two boundaries marked by sea, on the other hand, are both clear and natural, in reference to the Athenian empire, — the Kyanean rocks at one end, Phaselis, or the Chelidonian islands — there is no material distance between these two last-mentioned places — on the other. Dahlmann, at the end of his Dissertation on the reahty of this Kimo- nian peace, collects the various passages of authors wherein it is men- tioned : among them arc several out of the rhetor Aristeides (Forschtmgen pp. 140-118.