Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/228

 20 C HISTORY OF GREECE. see in the next chapter. Kallixenus and his accomplices found means to escape before the day of trial arrived, and remained in exile until after the dominion of the Thirty and the restoration of the democracy. Kallixenus then returned under the general amnesty. But the general amnesty protected him only against legal pursuit, not against the hostile memory of the people. " De- tested by all, he died of hunger," says Xenophon ; > a memorable proof how much the condemnation of these six generals shocked the standing democratical sentiment at Athens. From what cause did this temporary burst of wrong arise, so foreign to the habitual character of the people ? Even under the strongest political provocation, and towards the most hated traitors, as Euryptolemus himself remarked, by citing the case of Aristarchus, after the Four Hundred as well as after the Thirty, the Athenians never committed the like wrong, never deprived an accused party of the customary judicial securities, How then came they to do it here, where the generals condemned were not only not traitors, but had just signalized themselves by a victorious combat ? No Theramenes could have brought about this phenomenon ; no deep-laid oligarchical plot is, in my judgment, to be called in as an explanation.2 The true expla- nation is different, and of serious moment to state. Political hatred, intense as it might be, was never dissociated, in the mind of a citizen of Athens, from the democratical forms of procedure : but the men, who stood out here as actors, had broken loose from the obligations of citizenship and commonwealth, and surrendered themselves, heart and soul, to the family sympathies and an- tipathies ; feelings first kindled, and justly kindled, by the thought that their friends and relatives had been left to perish unheeded on the wrecks ; next, inflamed into preternatural and overwhelm- ing violence by the festival of the Apaturia, where all the relig- ious traditions connected with the ancient family tie, all those associations which imposed upon the relatives of a murdered man the duty of pursuing the murderer, were expanded into detail and worked up by their appropriate renovating solemnity. The 1 Xenophon. Ilellen. i, 7, 40. fiiGovfievoz VTTO irdvruv, learned men ; but, in my opinion, it is neither proved nor probable.
 * This is the supposition of Sievers, Forchhammer, and some other