Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/505

 KLEON AND ARISTOPHANES. 483 In the prose of Thucydides, we find Kleon described as a dishonest politician, a wrongful accuser of others, the most violent of all the citizens : : throughout the verse of Aristophanes, these same charges are set forth with his characteristic emphasis, but others are also superadded ; Kleon practises the basest artifices and deceptions to gain favor with the people, steals the public money, receives bribes, and extorts compositions from private persons by wholesale, and thus enriches himself under pretence of zeal for the public treasury. In the comedy of the Achar- nians, represented one year earlier than the Knights, the poet alludes with great delight to a sum of five talents, which Kleon had been compelled " to disgorge " : a present tendered to him by the insular subjects of Athens, if we may believe Theopom- pus, for the purpose of procuring a remission of their tribute, and which the Knights, whose evasions of military service he had exposed, compelled him to relinquish. 2 But when we put together the different heads of indictment accumulated by Aristophanes, it will be found that they are not easily reconcilable one with the other ; for an Athenian, whose temper led him to violent crimination of others, at the inevitable price of multiplying and exasperating personal enemies, would find it peculiarly dangerous, if not impossible, to carry on pecula- tion for his own account. If, on the other hand, he took the latter turn, he would be inclined to purchase connivance from others even by winking at real guilt on their part, far from making himself conspicuous as a calumniator of innocence. We must therefore discuss the side of the indictment which is indi- cated in Thucydides ; not Kleon, as truckling to the people and cheating for his own pecuniary profit (which is certainly not the character implied in his speech about the Mitylenaeans, as given is reproached with pretending to be engaged at Argos in measures for winning the alliance of that city, but in reality, under cover of this proceed- ing, carrying on clandestine negotiations with the Lacedaemonians (464). In two other passages, he is denounced as being the person who obstructs the conclusion of peace with the Lacedsemonians (790, 1390). 1 Thucyd. v, 17; iii, 45. /cara^ave'crepof fiev dvai nanovpyuv, KOI uirtct' rorepof i5ia(3a^uv jSiaioraTOf TUV TTO^ITUV. pns. Tfceopomprs, Fragment. 99, 100, 101, ed. Didot
 * Aristophan. Acharn. 8, with the Scholiast, who quotes from Theoponw