Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/44

 22 HISTORY OF GKEECE. of Alkibiades. Not merely did it cancel the boasted treaty, called the Peace of Kallias, concluded about forty years before between Athens and Persia, and limiting the Persian ships of war to the sea eastward of Phaselis, but it extinguished the maritime empire of Athens, and compromised the security of all the coasts and islands of the uEgean. To see Lesbos, Chios, and Samos, etc., in possession of Persia, was sufficiently painful ; but if there same to be powerful Persian fleets on these islands it would be the certain precursor and means of farther conquests to the Westward, and would revive the aggressive dispositions of the Great King, as they had stood at the beginning of the reign of Xerxes. Peisander and his comrades, abruptly breaking off' the debate, returned to Samos ; indignant at the discovery, which they now made for the first time, that Alkibiades had juggled them from the outset, and was imposing conditions which he knew to be inadmissible. 1 They still appear, however, to have thought that Alkibiades acted thus, not because he could not, but because he would not, bring about the alliance under discussion. 2 They suspected him of playing false with the oligarchical movement which he had himself instigated, and of projecting the accom- plishment of his own restoration, coupled with the alliance of Tissaphernes, into the bosom of the democracy which he had begun by denouncing. Such was the light in which they pre- sented his conduct, venting their disappointment in invectives against his duplicity, and in asseverations that he was after all unsuitable for a place in oligarchical society. Saon declarations, 1 Thucyd. viii, 56. vavf q!;iov eyv fiaat/.ea Troielatiai, Kal irapanfaiv TTJV kavrov yf)v, OTH? uv KO.I oaaif uv flov%7)-ai. In my judgment eavrov is decidedly the proper reading here, not eavTuv. I agree in this respect with Dr. Arnold, Bekker, and Gb'ller. In a former volume of this History, I have shown reasons for believing, in opposition to Mitford, Dahlmann, and others, that the treaty called by the name of Kallias, and sometimes miscalled by the name of Kimon, was a real fact and not a boastful fiction : see vol. v, ch. xlv, p. 340. The note of Dr. Arnold, though generally just, gives an inadequate representation of the strong reasons of Athens for rejecting and r senting this third demand. KoivotoyovfiEvoi i rxe^avTo, 'A>U//3, IK e id qirep ov /3 c t A e T a <, tyv {Kal yap OVK kinrriSeiov avrbv elvii ff bhiyapxiav tWclv), etc.
 * Thucyd. viii, 63. Kal iv aijtiffiv avrotf ufta ol kv TTJ Zufuj rS>v ''A.&r/vaMv