Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/286

 264 HISTORY OF GREECE. own natural tendencies, oligarchical or democratical ; interfering only in special cases of actual and pronounced necessity. Now the influence of an ascendent state, employed for such purposes, and emphatically discarding all private ends for the accomplish- ment of a stable Pan-Hellenic sentiment and fraternity ; employed too thus, at a moment when so many of the Greek towns were in the throes of reorganization, having to take up a new political course in reference to the altered circumstances, is an element of which the force could hardly have failed to be prodigious as well as beneficial. What degree of positive good might have been wrought, by a noble-minded victor under such special circum- stances, we cannot presume to affirm in detail. But it would have been no mean advantage, to have preserved Greece from beholding and feeling such enormous powers in the hands of a man like Lysander ; through whose management the worst ten- dencies of an imperial city were studiously magnified by the exor- bitance of individual ambition. It was to him exclusively that the Thirty in Athens, and the dekadarchies elsewhere, owed both their existence and their means of oppression. It has been necessary thus to explain the general changes which had gone on in Greece and in Grecian feeling during the eight months succeeding the capture of Athens in March 404 B.C., in order that we may understand the position of the Thirty oli- garchs, or Tyrants, at Athens, and of the Athenian population both in Attica and in exile, about the beginning of December in the same year, the period which we have now reached. We see how it was that Thebes, Corinth, and Megara, who in March had been the bitterest enemies of the Athenians, had now become alienated both from Sparta and from the Lysandrian Thirty, whom they viewed as viceroys of Athens for separate Spartan benefit. We see how the basis was thus laid of sympathy for the suffering exiles who fled from Attica ; a feeling which the recital of tlie endless enormities perpetrated by Kritias and his colleagues inflamed every day more and more. We discern at the same time how the Thirty, while thus incurring enmity both in and out of Attica, were at the same time losing the hearty support of Sparta, from the decline of Lysander's influence, and the growing oppo- Bition of his rivals at home. Jn spite jf formal prohibition from Sparta, obtained doubtloa*