Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/271

 FOURTH YEAR OF THE WAR -REVOLT OF MITYLENE. 249 the assembly an audience hardly less violent than himself, and would easily be able to satisfy them that anything like mercy to the Mitylenaeans was treason to Athens. He proposed to apply to the captive city the penalties tolerated by the custom of war in their harshest and fullest measure : to kill the whole Mitylenaean male population of military age, probably about six thousand per- sons, and to sell as slaves all the women and children.! The proposition, though strongly opposed by Diodotus and others, was sanctioned and passed by the assembly, and a trireme was forth- with despatched to Mitylene, enjoining Paches to put it in execu- tion. 2 Such a sentence was, in principle, nothing more than a very rigorous application of the received laws of war. Not merely the reconquered rebel, but even the prisoner of war, apart from any special convention, was at the mercy of his conqueror, to be slain, sold, or admitted to ransom : and we shall find the Lace- daemonians carrying out the maxim without the smallest abate- ment towards the Platsean prisoners, in the course of a very short time. And doubtless the Athenian people, so long as they remained in assembly, under that absorbing temporary intensification of the common and predominant sentiment which springs from the mere fact of multitude, and so long as they were discussing the principle of the case, What had Mitylene deserved ? thought only of this view. Less than the most rigorous measure of war, they would conceive, would be inade- quate to the wrong done by the Mitylanasans. But when the assembly broke up, when the citizen, no longer wound up by sympathizing companions and animated speakers in the Pnyx, subsided into the comparative quiescence of individual life, when the talk came to be, not about the propriety of passing such a resolution, but about the details of executing it, a sen- sible change and marked repentance became presently visible. We must also recollect, and it is a principle of no small mo- ment in human affairs, especially among a democratical people 1 I infer this total number from the fact that the number sent to Athens by Paches, as foremost instigators, was rather more than one thousand (Thucyd. iii, 50). The total of jjpuvrsc, or males of military age, must havfl been (I imagine) six times this number. * Thuovd. iii, 36