Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/287

 FOURTH YEAR OF THE WAR-FATE OF THE Fi,ATANS. 2G5 eeemed thus extinguished, and the sacrifices, in honor of the de- ceased victors who had fought under Pausanius, suspended, which the Plataean speakers had urged upon the Lacedaemonians as an impiety not to be tolerated, 1 and which perhaps the lattei would hardly have consented to under any other circumstances except from an anxious desire of conciliating the Thebans in their prominent antipathy. It is in this way that Thucydides explains the conduct of Sparta, which he pronounces to have been rigorous in the extreme. 2 And in truth it was more rigorous, considering only the principle of the case, and apart from the number of victims, than even the first unexecuted sen- tence of Athens against the Mitylenaeans : for neither Sparta, nor even Thebes, had any fair pretence for considering Platoea as a revolted town, whereas Mitylene was a city which had revolted under circumstances peculiarly offensive to Athens. Moreover, Sparta promised trial and justice to the Plataeans on their surrender : Paches promised nothing to the Mitylenaeans, except that their fate should be reserved for the decision of the Athenian people. This little city interesting from its Hellenic patriotism, its grateful and tenacious attachments, and its unmer- ited suffering now existed only in the persons of its citizens harbored at Athens : we shall find it hereafter restored, destroyed again, and finally again restored : so checkered was the fate of a little Grecian state swept away by the contending politics of the greater neighbors. The slaughter of the twenty-five Athe- I have before protested against corrections of the text of ancient authors grounded upon the reason which all these critics think so obvious and so convincing ; and I must again renew the protest here. It shows how little the principles of historical evidence have been reflected upon, when critics can thus concur in forcing dissentient witnesses into harmony, and in sub- stituting a true statement of their own in place of an erroneous statement which one of these witnesses gives them. And in the present instance, the principle adopted by these critics is the less defensible, because the Pseudo- Demosthenes introduces a great manyothe? errors and inaccuracies respect- ing Platsea, besides his mistake about the duration of the siege. The ten years' siege of Troy was constantly present to the imaginations of those literary Greeks. ' Thucyd. iii, 59. taiuovLOi ovTUf uTcoTTpaf2fievoi iyevovro Qqpaiuv tvaca, vofii&vref if rd vo7ii:nov avrotV ufiri TOTE KadiaTapevov ci^eAt/iorf thai. VOL. VI. 12
 * Thucyd. iii, 69. a%Sbv 6e n Kai rd vfnrav irefti. HXaTaitiv oi Aaice-