Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/349

 RECEPTION OF THE ENVOYS AT ATHENS. 327 be added to those already subsisting, which rather concerned Sparta as the chief of the Peloponnesian confederacy. Nor was it only the good-will and gratitude of the Spartans which Athens would earn by accepting the proposition tendered to her; she would farther acquire the grace and glory of conferring peace on Greece, which all the Greeks would recognize as her act. And when once the two preeminent powers, Athens and Sparta, were established in cordial amity, the remaining Grecian states would be too weak to resist what they two might pre- scribe. 1 Such was the language held by the Lacedaemonians in the assembly at Athens. It was discreetly calculated for their pur pose, though when we turn back to the commencement of the war, and read the lofty declarations of the Spartan ephors and assembly respecting the wrongs of their allies and the necessity of extorting full indemnity for them from Athens, the contrast is indeed striking. On this occasion, the Lacedaemonians acted entirely for themselves and from consideration of their own necessities ; severing themselves from their allies, and soliciting a special peace for themselves, with as little scruple as the Spar- tan general, Menedaeus, during the preceding year, when he abandoned his Ambrakiot confederates after the battle of Olpae, to conclude a separate capitulation with Demosthenes. 1 ae course proper to be adopted by Athens in reference to the have been done to them by Athens : Sparta herself had no ground of com- plaint, nothing of which she desired redress. Dr. Arnold translates it : " "We shall hate you not only nationally, for the wound you have inflicted on Sparta ; but also individually, because so many of us will have lost our near relations from your inflexibility." " The Spartan aristocracy (he adds) would feel it a personal wound to lose at once so many of its members, connected by blood or marriage with its principal families: compare Thucyd. v, 15." We must recollect, however, that the Athenians could not possibly know at this time that the hoplites inclosed in Sphakteria belonged in great pro- portion to the first families in Sparta. And the Spartan envoys would surely have the diplomatic prudence to abstain from any facts or argu- ments which would reveal, or even suggest, to them so important a secret. 1 Thucyd. iv, 20. i][tuv yap not vfiuv ravra fayovruv TO ye uA/lo ' txbv Ivre on viroSesarepov bv T& fieyiara TLpfjaei. Aristophanes, Pac. 1048. 'Efov aneioafievois Koivy TT/C 'E/lPiudcf