Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/395

 ATHENS NOT CORRUPTED. 373 after the battle of Arginusa?, if we suppose the same conduct on their part to have occurred in 490 B.C., would have been decreed more rapidly and more unceremoniously than it was actually decreed in 406 B.C. For at that earlier date there existed no psephism of Kannonus, surrounded by prescriptive respect ; no graphe paranomon ; no such habits of established deference to a dikastery solemnly sworn, with full notice to defendants and full time of defence measured by the clock ; none of those securities which a long course of democracy had gradually worked into the public morality of every Athenian, and which, as we saw in a former chapter, interposed a serious barrier to the impulse of the moment, though ultimately overthrown by its fierceness. A far less violent impulse would have sufficed for the same mischief in 490 B.C., when no such barriers existed. Lastly, if we want a measure of the appreciating sentiment of the Athenian public, towards a strict and decorous morality in the narrow sense, in the middle of the Peloponnesian war, we have only to consider the manner in which they dealt with Kikias. I have shown, in de- scribing the Sicilian expedition, that the gravest error which the Athenians ever committed, that which shipwrecked both their armament at Syracuse and their power at home, arose from their unmeasured esteem for the respectable and pious Nikias, which blinded them to the grossest defects of generalship and public conduct. Disastrous as such misjudgment was, it counts at least as a proof that the moral corruption alleged to have been operated in their characters, is a mere fiction. Nor let it be supposed that the nerve and resolution which once animated the combatants of Marathon and Salamis, had disappeared in the latter years of the Peloponnesian war. On the contrary, the energetic and pro- tracted struggle of Athens, after the irreparable calamity at Syra- cuse, forms a worthy parallel to her resistance in the time of Xerxes, and maintained unabated that distinctive attribute which 1'erikles had set forth as the main foundation of her glory, that of never giving way before misfortune. 1 Without any disparage- ment to the armament at Salamis, we may remark that the patriotism of the fleet at Samos, which rescued Athens from the 1 Thucyi. ii, 64. yvu.-e <P ovopa neyiarov avrfjv (TIJV TroXtv) fyovaav if wuaiv uvd( j jiroi{, 6tii rd raif fyftfooaif fir) clicciv.