Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/276

 254 HISTORY OF GREECE. He begins by vindicating 1 the necessity of reconsidering the resolution just passed, and insists on the mischief of deciding so important a question in haste or under strong passion ; he enters a protest against the unwarrantable insinuations of corruption or self-conceit by which Kleon had sought to silence or discredit his opponents ; 2 and then, taking up the question on the ground of public wisdom and prudence, he proceeds to show that the rigor ous sentence decreed on the preceding day was not to be de fended. Thet sentence would not prevent any other among the subject-allies from revolting, if they saw, or fancied that they jaw, a fair chance of success : but it might perhaps drive them, 5 if once embarked in revolt, to persist even to desperation, and bury themselves under the ruins of their city. While every means ought to be employed to prevent them from revolting, by precautions beforehand, it was a mistaken reckoning to try to deter them by enormity of punishment, inflicted afterwards upon such as were reconquered. In developing this argument, the speaker gives some remarkable views on the theory of punish- ment generally, and on the small addition obtained in the way of preventive effect even by the greatest aggravation of the suf- fering inflicted upon the condemned criminal, views which might have passed as rare and profound even down to the last century. 4 And he farther supports his argument by emphatically setting forth the impolicy of confounding the Mitylensean Demos in the same punishment with their oligarchy: the revolt had been the act exclusively of the latter, and the former had not 1 Thucyd. iii, 42. * Thucyd. iii, 43. 3 Thucyd. iii, 45. 46. 4 Compare this speech of Diodotus with the views of punishment implied by Xenophon in his Anabasis, where he is describing the government of Cyrus the younger : "Nor can any man contend, that Cyrus suffered criminals and wrong- doers to laugh at him : he punished them with the most unmeasured severity (u^eidearara TTUVTOV ^Tifiupelro). And you might often see along the frequented roads men deprived of their eyes, their hands, and their feet : so that in his government either Greek or barbarian, if he had no criminal purpose, might go fearlessly through and carry whatever he found conve- nient." (Anabasis, i, 9, 13.) The severity of the punishment is, in Xenophon's mind, the measure both of its effects in deterring criminals, and of the character of the ruler inflicting it.