Page:History of Greece Vol XI.djvu/246

 220 HISTORY OF GREECE. The list included the islands Lesbos, Chios, Samos. (this last now partially occupied by a body of Athenian Kleruchs or settlers), Kos and Rhodes ; together with the important city of Byzantium. It was shortly after the recent success in Euboea, that Chios, Kos, Rhodes, and Byzantium revolted from Athens by concert, raising a serious war against her, known by the name of the Social War. Respecting the proximate causes of this outbreak, we find, un- fortunately, little information. There was now, and had always been since 378 B. c., a synod of deputies from all the confederate cities habitually assembling at Athens ; such as had not subsisted under the first Athenian empire in its full maturity. How far the Synod worked efficiently, we do not know. At least it must have afforded to the allies, if aggrieved, a full opportunity of making their complaints heard ; and of criticising the application of the common fund, to which each of them contributed. But I have re- marked in the preceding vloume, that the Athenian confederacy, which had begun (378 B. c.) in a generous and equal spirit of com- mon maritime defence, 1 had gradually become perverted, since the humiliation of the great enemy Sparta at Leuktra, towards purposes and interests more exclusively Athenian. Athens had been conquering the island of Samos Pydna, Potidoea, and Me- thone, on the coast of Macedonia and Thrace and the Thracian Chersonese; all of them acquisitions made for herself alone, without any advantage to the confederate synod and made, too, in great part, to become the private property of her own citizens as kleruchs, in direct breach of her public resolution, passed in 378 B. c., not to permit any appropriation of lands by Athenian citizens out of Attica. In proportion as Athens came to act more for her own separate aggrandizement, and less for interests common to the whole con- federacy, the adherence of the larger confederate states grew more and more reluctant. But what contributed yet farther to detach them from Athens, was, the behavior of her armaments on service, consisting in great proportion of mercenaries, scantily and irregu larly paid ; whose disorderly and rapacious exaction, especially ' Demosthenes, De Rhodior. Libcrtat. p. 194. s. 17. -rrapov avrolf (tho Rhodians) "E,A?rjai /cat fie^.rirati> aiiruv vulv ej lanv etc.