Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/69

 ATHENS BEFORE THE PELOPCNNESIAN WAR 4^ tenting rigor as we shall find hereafter manifested towards Mity- lene, Skione, and Melos. The policy of Perikles, now in the plenitude of his power at Athens, was cautious and conservative, averse to forced extension of empire as well as to those increased burdens ou the dependent allies which such schemes would have entailed, and tending to maintain that assured commerce in the ^Egean by which all of them must have been gainers, not without a conviction that the contest must arise sooner or later between Athens and Sparta, and that the resources as well as the temper of the allies must be husbanded against that contin- gency. If we read in Thucydides the speech of the envoy from Mitylene 1 at Olympia, delivered to the Lacedaemonians and their allies in the fourth year of the Peloponnesian war, on occasion of the revolt of the city from Athens, a speech imploring aid and setting forth the strongest case against Athens which the facts could be made to furnish, we shall be surprised how weak the case is, and how much the speaker is conscious of its weak- ness. He has nothing like practical grievances and oppressions to urge against the imperial city, he does not dwell upon enor- mity of tribute, unpunished misconduct of Athenian officers, hardship of bringing causes for trial to Athens, or other suffer- ings of the subjects generally, he has nothing to say except that they were defenceless and degraded subjects, and that Athens held authority over them without and against their own consent : and in the case of Mitylene, not so much as this could be said, since she was on the footing of an equal, armed, and autonomous ally. Of course, this state of forced dependence was one which the allies, or such of them as could stand alone, would naturally and reasonably shake off whenever they had an opportunity :- but the negative evidence, derived from the speech of the Mity- lenaean orator, goes far to make out the point contended for by the Athenian speaker at Sparta immediately before the war, that, beyond the fact of such forced dependence, the allies had little practically to complain of. A city like Mitylene, moreover, Thucyd.iii, 11-14. 1 So the Athenian orator Diodotns puts it in his speech deprecating the extreme punishment about to be inflicted on Mitylenfi r/v nva nal fiip up%6(jvov eiKoruf irpbf avrovouiav airoara VTU etc. (Thucyd. iii, 46.)