Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/116

 54 HISTORY OF GREECE. concluded, the question was put t) the deputies of every city, great and small, indiscriminately and the majority decided for war. 1 This important resolution was adopted about the end of 432 B.C., or the beginning of January 431 B.C. : the previous decision of the Spartans separately may have been taken about two months earlier, in the preceding October or November 432 B.C. Reviewing the conduct of the two great Grecian parties at this momentous juncture, with reference to existing treaties and positive grounds of complaint, it seems clear that Athens was in the right. She had done nothing which could fairly be called a vio- lation of the thirty years' truce : and for such of her acts as were alleged to be such, she offered to submit them to that amicable arbitration which the truce itself prescribed. The Peloponnesian confederates v;ere manifestly the aggressors in the contest ; and if Sparta, usually so backward, now came forward in a spirit so decidedly opposite, we are to ascribe it partly to her standing fear and jealousy of Athens, partly to the pressure of her allies, especially of the Corinthians. Thucydides, recognizing these two as the grand determining motives, and indicating the alleged infractions of truce as simple occasions or pretexts, seems to con- sider the fear and hatred of Athens as having contributed more to determine Sparta than the urgency of her allies. 2 That the extraordinary aggrandizement of Athens, during the period im- mediately succeeding the Persian invasion, was well calculated to excite alarm and jealousy in Peloponnesus, is indisputable : but if we take Athens as she stood in 432 B.C., it deserves notice that she had neither made, nor, so far as we know, tried to make, a single new acquisition during the whole fourteen years which had elapsed since the conclusion of the thirty years' truce ; 3 1 Thucyd. i, 125. nal rb jr/UJtfoc tyqfyiaavTO nofapelv. It seems that the decision was not absolutely unanimous. nal irofa/iTjTEa flvat, ov roaovrov TUV roff Xoyotf, ooov o f3ovfivoi Toff tvvri'&uai.v, opuvref avrolf T& iroUa T^f 'E/lAa(5of viroxEtpia ydr] ovra : compare also c. 23 and 118. 3 Plutarch's biography of Perikles is very misleading, from its inattention to chronology, asciibing to an earlier time feelings and tendencies which
 * Thucyd. i, 88. 'E^ij^iaavro 5e oi AaKedaipovioi ruf axovdiif fehva&at