Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/210

 188 HISTORY OF GREECE. had made light of this alleged storm, in casting the blame upon him, so he again made light of it, and treated it as an insufficient excuse, in his denunciations against them ; taking care to wake good use of their official despatch, which virtually exonerated him, by its silence, from any concern in the matter. Such is the way in which I conceive the relations to have stood between the generals on one side and Theramenes on the other, having regard to all that is said both in Xenophon and in Diodorus. But the comparative account of blame and recrimi- nation between these two parties is not the most important feature of the case. The really serious inquiry is, as to the intensity or instant occurrence of the storm. Was it really so instant and so dangerous, that the duty of visiting the wrecks could not be per- formed, either before the ships went back to Arginusce, or after- wards ? If we take the circumstances of the case, and apply them to the habits and feelings of the English navy, if we sup- pose more than one thousand seamen, late comrades in the vic- tory, distributed among twenty damaged and helpless hulls, await- ing the moment when these hulls would fill and consign them all o o to a watery grave, it must have been a frightful storm indeed, which would force an English admiral even to go back to his moorings leaving these men so exposed, or which would deter him, if he were at his moorings, from sending out the very first and nearest ships at hand to save them. And granting the danger to be such that he hesitated to give the order, there ment of the Thirty, just before he was going to put Theramenes to death : OvTOf de TOI eortv, 6f rax&elf uveTieaftai vnb r&v crparrjyiJv rovf KaraSiiv raf 'A.-dTjvaiuv ev ry nepl Asafiov vavfiaxia, aiirbs ov K av c.16 (iev of 5[tuf TUV GTpartjyuv Kcrrjyopuv UTTEKTEIVEV aiirovf, iv a avrdf ire p tau- & EIT]. (Xen. ut sup.) Here it stands admitted that the first impression at Athens was, as Dio- dorus states expressly, that Theramenes was ordered to pick up the men on the wrecks, might have done it if he had taken proper pains, and was to blame for not doing it. Now how did this impression arise 1 Of course, through communications received from the armament itself. And when Theramenes, in his reply, says that the generals themselves made communi- cations in the same tenor, there is no reason why we should not helieve him, in spite of their joint official despatch, wherein they made no mention of him, and in spite of their speech in the public assembly afterwards, where the previous official letter fettered them, and prevented them from acrosir.g