Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/153

 TRIAL OF ANYTUS. 131 wards obliged to surrender, the garrison departing on terms of capitulation. 1 But Anytus, on his return, encountered great dis- pleasure from his countrymen, and was put on his trial for having betrayed, or for not having done his utmost to fulfil, the trust confided to him. It is said that he only saved himself from condemnation by bribing the dikastery, and that he was the first Athenian who ever obtained a verdict by corruption. 2 Whether he could really have reached Pylos, and whether the obstacles which baffled him were such as an energetic officer would have overcome, we have no means of determining ; still less, whether it be true that he actually escaped by bribery. The story seems to prove, however, that the general Athenian public thought him deserving of condemnation, and were so much sur prised by his acquittal, as to account for it by supposing, truly or falsely, the use of means never before attempted. It was about the same time, also, that the Megarians recovered by surprise their port of Nisaea, which had been held by an Athenian garrison since B.C. 424. The Athenians made an effort to recover it, but failed ; though they defeated the Megari- ans in an action. 3 Thrasyllus, during the summer of B.C. 409, and even the joint force of Thrasyllus and Alkibiades during the autumn of the same year, seem to have effected less than might have been expected from so large a force : indeed, it must have been at some period during this year that the Lacedaemonian Klearchus, with his fifteen Megarian ships, penetrated up the Hellespont to Byzan- tium, finding it guarded only by nine Athenian triremes. 4 But the operations of 408 B.C. were more important. The entire force under Alkibiades and the other commanders was mustered for the siege of Chalkedon and Byzantium. The Chalkedonians, 1 Diodor. xiii, 64. The slighting way in which Xenophon (Hcllcn.i, 2, 18) dismisses this capture of Pylos, as a mere retreat of some runaway Hclota from Malea, as well as his employment of the name Koryphasion, and nat of Pylos, prove how much he wrote after Lacedaemonian informants. Aristotle, 'At9i?va<wv TroAtm'a, ap Harpokrntjpn, v. Ae/cufuv, and in taa Collection of Fragment. Aristotel. no. 72, ed. Didot (Fragment. Historic Grace, vol. ii, p. 127). 1 Dixlor. xiii, 65. Xcnoph. Ilellcn. i, 1, 3*.
 * Diodor. xiii, 64 ; Plutarch, Coriolan. c. 14.