Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/266

 244 HISTORY 01 GREECE. Salcethus, being recently detected in his place of concealment, was included among the prisoners transmitted. Upon the fate of these prisoners the Athenians had now to pronounce, and they entered upon the discussion in a temper of extreme wrath and vengeance. As to Salaethus, their resolution to put him to death was unanimous and immediate, nor would they listen to his promises, assuredly delusive, of terminating the blockade of Platasa, in case his life were spared. What to do with Mitylene and its inhabitants was a point more doubtful, and was submitted to formal debate in the public assembly. It is in this debate that Thucydides first takes notice of Kleon, who is, however, mentioned by Plutarch as rising into importance some few years earlier, during the lifetime of Perikles. Under the great increase of trade and population in Athens and Peiraaus during the last forty years, a new class of politicians seem to have gi'own up, men engaged in various descriptions of trade and manufacture, who began to rival more or less in impor- tance the ancient families of Attic proprietors. This change was substantially analogous to that which took place in the cities of mediaeval Europe, when the merchants and traders of the various guilds gradually came to compete with, and ulti- mately supplanted, the patrician families in whom the supremacy had originally resided. In Athens, persons of ancient family and station enjoyed at this time no political privilege, and since the reforms of Ephialtes and Perikles, the political constitution had become thoroughly democratical. But they still continued to form the two highest classes in the Solonian census founded on property, the pentakosiomedimni, and the hippeis, or knights : new men enriched by trade doubtless got into these classes, but probably only in minority, and imbibed the feeling of the class as they found it, instead of bringing into it any new spirit. Now an individual Athenian of this class, though without any lega 1. title to preference, yet when he stood forward as candidate fcr political influence, continued to be decidedly preferred and w 1- conied by the social sentiment at Athens, which preserved in its spontaneous sympathies distinctions effaced from the political code. 1 Besides this place ready prepared for him in the public 1 Thucyd. v, 43. 'A/Ut/Jtttdjyc avr/p faint? fiev uv In TOTS' vtof, <if h