Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/312

 290 fflSTORY OF GREECE. most progressive and most intellectual of all its separate com- munities, we shall look with double regret on the ruin of the Athenian empire, as accelerating, without remedy, the universal ruin of Grecian independence, political action, and mental grandeur CHAPTER LXVI. FROM THE RESTORATION OF THE DEMOCRACY TO THE DEATH OF ALKIBIADES. THE period intervening between the defeat of .^Egospotami (October, 405 B.C.) and the reestablishment of the democracy aa sanctioned by the convention concluded with Pausanias, some time in the summer of 403 B.C., presents two years of cruel and multifarious suffering to Athens. For seven years before, indeed ever since the catastrophe at Syracuse, she had been struggling with hardships ; contending against augmented hostile force, while her own means were cut down in every way ; crip- pled at home by the garrison of Dekeleia ; stripped to a great degree both of her tribute and her foreign trade, and beset by the snares of her own oligarchs. In spite of circumstances so adverse, she had maintained the fight with a resolution not less surprising than admirable ; yet not without sinking more and more towards impoverishment and exhaustion. The defeat of -ZEgospotami closed the war at once, and transferred her from her period of struggle to one of concluding agony. Nor is the last word by any means too strong for the reality. Of these two years, the first portion was marked by severe physical privation, passing by degrees into absolute famine, and accompanied by the intolerable sentiment of despair and helplessness against her enemies, after two generations of imperial grandeur, not without a strong chance of being finally consigned to ruin and individual slavery ; while the last porlion comprised all the tyranny, mur- ders, robberies, and expulsions perpetrated by the Thirty, over- thrown only by heroic efforts of patriotism on the part of the