Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/327

 REPAYMENT OF SPARTA 302 The Ten who had succeeded to the oligarchical presidency jf Athens after the death of Kritias and the expulsion of the Thirty, had borrowed from Sparta the sum of one hundred talents, for the express purpose of making war on the exiles in Peiroetis. After the peace, it was necessary that such sum should be repaid, and some persons proposed that recourse should be had to the property of those individuals and that party who had borrowed the money. The apparent equity of the proposition was doubtless felt with peculiar force at a time when the public treasury was in the extreme of poverty. But nevertheless both the democratical leaders and the people decidedly opposed it, resolving to recognize the debt as a public charge ; in which capacity it was afterwards liquidated, after some delay arising from an unsupplied treasury. 1 All that was required from the horsemen, or knights, who had been active in the service of the Thirty, was that they should repay the sums which had been advanced to them by the latter as outfit. Such advance to the horsemen, subject to subsequent repayment, and seemingly distinct from the regular military pay, appears to have been a customary practice under the previous democracy ; a but we may easily believe that the Thirty had car- ried it to an abusive excess, in their anxiety to enlist or stimulate partisans, when we recollect that they resorted to means more nefarious for the same end. There were of course great indi- vidual differences among these knights, as to the degree in which each had lent himself to the misdeeds of the oligarchy. Even the most guilty of them were not molested, and they were sent, four 1 Isokrates, Arcopagit. Or. vii, sect. 77 ; Demosth. cont. Lcptin. c. 5, p. 460. explanation which Ilarpokration anil Photius give of the word /iaruaracrtf, in spite of the objections taken to it by M. Bocckh, which appear to me not founded upon any adequate ground. I cannot but think that Ilci.ske is right in distinguishing Karaaruaif from the pay, utatfof. Sec Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, b. ii, sect. 19, p. 250. In the Appendix t; this work, which is not translated into English along with the rork itself he farther gives the Fragment of an inscription, which he con- siders to txtir upon this resumption of Karacrru<nc from the horsemen, ot knigh'.s, after the Thirty. But the Fragment is so very imperfect, that nothing run be affirmed with any certainty concerning it: see the Stoats- lumsh. dcr Athcncr, Appendix, vol. ii, pp. 207, 208 VOL. VIII 200C.
 * Lysias pro Mantitheo, Or. xvi, sects. 6-8. I accept substantially the