Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/272

 like the Athenians, who stand charged with so many resolutions passed and afterwards unexecuted, that the sentiment of wrath against the Mitylenaeans had been really in part discharged by the mere passing of the sentence, quite apart from its execution; just as a furious man relieves himself from overboiling anger by imprecations against others which he would himself shrink from afterwards realizing. The Athenians, on the whole the most humane people in Greece,—though humanity, according to our ideas, cannot be predicated of any Greeks,—became sensible that they had sanctioned a cruel and frightful decree, and the captain and seamen, to whom it was given to carry, set forth on their voyage with mournful repugnance. The Mitylenaean envoys present in Athens, who had probably been allowed to speak in the assembly and plead their own cause, together with those Athenians who had been proxeni and friends of Mitylene, and the minority gen- erally of the previous assembly, soon discerned, and did their best to foster, this repentance ; which became, during the course of the same evening, so powerful as well as so wide-spread, that the strategi acceded to the prayer of the envoys, and convoked a fresh assembly for the morrow to reconsider the proceeding. By so doing, they committed an illegality, and exposed themselves to the chance of impeachment : but the change of feeling among the people was so manifest as to overbear any such scruples.

Though Thucydides had given us only a short summary, without any speeches, of what passed in the first assembly,—yet as to the second assembly, he gives us at length the speeches both of Kleon and Diodotus, the two principal orators of the first also. We may be sure that this second assembly was in all points one of the most interesting and anxious of the whole war;