Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/132

114 114 HISTORY OF GREECE. plots for betrayal commenced among the Melians themselves, so that they were constrained to surrender at discretion. The Athe- nians resolved to put to death all the men of military age and to sell the women and children as slaves. Who the proposer of this barbarous resolution was, Thucydides does not say ; but Plutarch and others inform us that Alkibiacles l was strenuous in support- ing it. Five hundred Athenian settlers were subsequently sent thither, to form a new community : apparently not as kleruchs, or out-citizens of Athens, but as new Melians. 3 Taking the proceedings of the Athenians towards Melos from the beginning to the end, they form one of the grossest and most inexcusable pieces of cruelty combined with injustice which Grecian history presents to us. In appreciating the cruelty of such wholesale executions, we ought to recollect that the laws of war placed the prisoner altogether at the disposal of his conqueror, and that an Athenian garrison, if captured by the Corinthians in Naupaktus, Nisaea, or elsewhere, would assuredly have undergone the same fate, unless in so far as they might be kept for exchange. But the treatment of the Melians goes beyond all rigor of the laws of war ; for they had never been at war with Athens, nor had they done anything to incur her enmity. Moreover, the acquisition of the island was of no material value to Athens ; not sufficient to pay the expenses of the armament employed in its capture. And while the gain was thus in every sense slender, the shock to Grecian feeling by the whole proceeding seems to have occasioned serious mischief to Athens. Far from tending to strengthen her entire empire, by sweeping in this small insular population, who had hitherto been neutral and harmless, it raised nothing but odium against her, and was treasured up in after times as among the first of her misdeeds. To gratify her pride of empire by a new conquest easy to 1 Plutarch, Alkibiades, c. 16. This is doubtless one of the statements which the composer of the Oration of Andokides against Alkibiades found jurrent in respect to the conduct of the latter (sect. 123). Nor is thero any reason for questioning the truth of it. KG riovf TTe/tipavTff. Lysander restored some Melians to the island after tho battle of -flSgospotami (Xenoph. Hcllcn. ii, 2, 9): some, therefore, must have escaped or must have been spaied.
 * Thucyd. v, 106. rb <5e x u P LOV civrol ficqaav, UTT oi Kovf vcrrepov Trevra