Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/325

 CONDUCT OF THE PEOPLE. 303 the orator Lysias were now at Athens, all individually well known to the sufferers. In like manner, the sons and brothers of Leon and the other victims of the Thirty, saw before them the very citizens by whose hands their innocent relatives h?.d been consigned without trial to prison and execution. 1 The amount of wrong suffered had been infinitely greater than in the time of the Four Hundred, and the provocation, on every ground, public and private, violent to a degree never exceeded in history. Yet with all this sting fresh in their bosoms, we find the victorious multi- tude, on the latter occasion as well as on the former, burying the past in an indiscriminate amnesty, and anxious only for the future harmonious march of the renovated and all-compre- hensive democracy. We see the sentiment of commonwealth in the Demos, twice contrasted with the sentiment of faction in an ascendent oligarchy ; 2 twice triumphant over the strongest counter-motives, over the most bitter recollections of wrongful murder and spoliation, over all that passionate rt.sn of reactionary appetite which characterizes the moment of political restoration. " Bloody will be the reign of that king who comes back to his kingdom from exile," says the Latin poet: bloody, indeed> had been the rule of Kritias and those oligarchs who had just come back from exile : " Harsh is a Demos (observes JEschylus) which has just got clear of misery." 3 But the Athenian Demos, on coming back from Peiroeus, exhibited the rare phenomenon of a restoration, after cruel wrong suffered, sacrificing all the strong impulse of retaliation to a generous and deliberate regard for the future march of the commonwealth. Thucydides remarks that Ihe moderation of political antipathy which prevailed at Athens after the victory of the people over the Four Hundred, was the main cause which revived Athens from her great public depres- ' Andokides dc Mysteriis, sect. 94. MrA^rof 6' av ovroal anijyayEv M ruv rpiiiKovra Acovra, (if {y/eZp uTrarrtf lore, KOI arrrtfavev iiceivof uxpirof . . . .Ultf.ijrov TOIVVV roif iraicl rolf TOV Acovrof oiiK lari (fiovov 6iuneiv t dn rolf vofioif del xp'iodaL T' Ei/cAet'Jov ap^ovrof tircl uf ye CVK amiyayev, nlf tvrbf uvnXeyei. ^Eschylus, Sept. ad Thebas, v, 1047. ye fievrot (J^/tof licfvyuv
 * Thucyd. vi, 39. 6i/poi', !;v/*nav uvofiixrdai, W.iyapx'tav rJe,