Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/162

 140 HISTORY OF GREECE. obvious. Far from thinking that the law now passed at Athera displayed barbarism, either in the end or in the means, I .'onsidcr it principally remarkable for its cautious and long-sighi';d view of the future, qualities the exact reverse of barbarism, and worthy of the general character of Perikles, who probably sug- gested it. Athens was just entering into a war which threatened to be of indefinite length, and was certain to be very costly. To prevent the people from exhausting all their accumulated fund, and to place them under a necessity of reserving something against extreme casualties, was an object of immense importance. Now the particular casualty, which Perikles, assuming him to be the proposer, named as the sole condition of touching this one thousand talents, might be considered as of all others the most improbable, in the year 431 B.C. So immense was then the superiority of the Athenian naval force, that to suppose it de- feated, and a Peloponnesian fleet in full sail for Peiraeus, was a possibility which it required a statesman of extraordinary caution to look forward to, and which it is truly wonderful that the peo- ple generally could have been induced to contemplate. Once tied up to this purpose, however, the fund lay ready for any other terrible emergency : and we shall find tbe actual employment of it incalculably beneficial to Athens, at a moment of the gravest peril, when she could hardly have protected herself without some such special resource. The people would scarcely have sanc- tioned so rigorous an economy, had it not been proposed to them at a period so early in the war that their available reserve was still much larger : but it will be forever to the credit of their foresight as well as constancy, that they should first have adopted such a precautionary measure, and afterwards adhered to it for nineteen years, under severe pressure for money, until at length a case arose which rendered farther abstinence really, and not constructively, impossible. To display their force and take revenge by disembarking and ravaging parts of Peloponnesus, was doubtless of much impor- tance to Athens during this first summer of the war: though it might seem that the force so employed was quite as much needed in the conquest of Potidsea, which still remained under blockade, and of the neighboring Chalkidians in Thrace, still in revolt. It was during the course of this summer that a prospect