Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/427

 ATHENS AND HER SUBJECT-ALLIES. 405 A-thens oppressed them with hardship or humiliation, from whica their neighbors, the revolted Chalkidians in Olynthus and else- where, were exempt, they would have hailed the advent of Brasidas with that cordiality which he himself expected and was surprised not to find. The sense of present grievance, always acute and often excessive, would have stood out as their prom- inent impulse : nor would they have needed either intimidation or cajolery to induce them to throw open their gates to the liber- ator, who, in his speech within the town, finds no actual suffer- ing to appeal to, but is obliged to gain over an audience evidently unwilling by alternate threats and promises. As in Akanthus, so in most of the other Thracian subjects of Athens, the bulk of the citizens, though strongly solicited by the Chalkidians, manifest no spontaneous disposition to revolt from Athens. We shall find the party who introduce Brasidas to be a conspiring minority, who not only do not consult the ma- jority beforehand, but act in such a manner as to leave no free option to the majority afterwards, whether they will ratify or reject : bring in a foreign force to overawe them and compromise them without their own consent in hostility against Athens. Now that which makes the events of Akanthus so important as an evidence, is, that the majority is not thus entrapped and com- pressed, but pronounces its judgment freely after ample discus- sion : the grounds of that judgment are clearly set forth to us, so as to show that hatred of Athens, if even it exists at all, is in no way a strong or determining feeling. Had there existed any such strong feeling among the subject-allies of Athens in the Chalkidic peninsula, there was no Athenian force now present to hinder them all from opening their gates to the liberator Brasidas by spontaneous majorities, as he himself, encouraged by the san- guine promises of the Chalkidians, evidently expected that they would do. But nothing of this kind happened. That which I before remarked in recounting the revolt of Mitylene, a privileged ally of Athens, is now confirmed in the revolt of Akanthus, a tributary and subject-ally. The cir- cumstances of both prove that imperial Athens inspired no hatred, and occasioned no painful grievance, to the population of her subject-cities generally: the movements against her arose from party-minorities, of the same charactei as that Plataean