Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/247

Rh trial ; those who had been condemned either to exile or to death by the Areopagus, or any of the other constituted tribunals for homicide, or for subversion of the public liberty. Not merely the public registers of all the condemnations thus released were ordered to be destroyed, but it was forbidden, under severe penal- ties, to any private citizen to keep a copy of them, or to make any allusion to such misfortunes.

Pursuant to the comprehensive amnesty and forgiveness adopt- ed by the people in this decree of Patrokleidês, the general body of citizens swore to each other a solemn pledge of mutual har- mony in the acropolis. The reconciliation thus introduced enabled them the better to bear up under their distress; especially as the persons relieved by the amnesty were, for the most part, not men politically disaffected, like the exiles. To restore the latter, was a measure which no one thought of: indeed, a large proportion of them had been and were still at Dekeleia, assisting the Lace- daemonians in their warfare against Athens. But even the most prudent internal measures could do little for Athens in reference to her capital difficulty, that of procuring subsistence for the nu- merous population within her walls, augmented every day by outlying garrisons and citizens. She had long been shut out from the produce of Attica by the garrison at Dekeleia ; she obtained nothing from Euboea, and since the late defeat of Ægospotami, nothing from the Euxine, from Thrace, or from the islands. Per- haps some corn may still have reached her from Cyprus, and her small remaining navy did what was possible to keep Peiræus, supplied, in spite of the menacing prohibitions of Lysander, pre- VOL. VIII.