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117 HISTORICAL CONCEPTION OF THUCYDIDES. U7 plea, or sham plea, if he has no better. But the Athenian envoy neither copies the contemptuous silence of the barbarian nor the smooth lying of the civilized invader. Though coming from the most cultivated city in Greece, where the vices prevalent were those of refinement and not of barbarism, he disdains the conven- tional arts of civilized diplomacy more than would have been done by an envoy even of Argos or Korkyra. He even disdains to mention, what might have been said with perfect truth as a matter of fact, whatever may be thought of its sufficiency as a justification, that the Melians had enjoyed for the last fifty years the security of the .ZEgean waters at the cost of Athens and her allies, without any payment of their own. So at least he is made to do in the Thucydidean dramatic fragment, Mfaov "stt.coatg (The Capture of Melos), if we may parody the title of the lost tragedy of Phrynichus " The Cap- ture of Miletus." And I think a comprehensive view of the history of Thucydides will suggest to us the explanation of this drama, with its powerful and tragical effect. The capture of Melos comes immediately before the great Athenian expedition against Syracuse, which was resolved upon three or four months afterwards, and despatched during the course of the following summer. That expedition was the gigantic effort of Athens, which ended in the most ruinous catastrophe known to ancient history. From such a blow it was impossible for Athens to recover. Though thus crippled, indeed, she struggled against its effects with surprising energy; but her fortune went on, in the main, declining, yet with occasional moments of apparent restoration, until her complete prostration and subjugation by Lysander. Now Thucydides, just before he gets upon the plane of this descending progress, makes a halt, to illustrate the senti- ment of Athenian power in its most exaggerated, insolent, and cruel manifestation, by this dramatic fragment of the envoys at Melos. It will be recollected that Herodotus, when about to describe the forward march of Xerxes into Greece, destined to terminate in such fatal humiliation, impresses his readers with an elaborate idea of the monarch's insolence and superhuman pride, by various conversations between him and the courtiers about him, as well as by other anecdotes, combined with the over- whelming specifications of the muster at Uoriskus. Such moral