I will add another reason to evince how completely Andokidês
misconceives the history of Athens between 510-480 B. C. He
says that when the Peisistratids were put down, many of their
partisans were banished, many others allowed to stay at home with
the loss of their political privileges; but that afterwards, when
the overwhelming dangers of the Persian invasion supervened,
the people passed a vote to restore the exiles and to remove
the existing disfranchisements at home. He would thus have us
believe that the exiled partisans of the Peisistratids were all
restored, and the disfranchised partisans of the Peisistratids
all enfranchised, just at the moment of the Persian invasion,
and with the view of enabling Athens better to repel that grave
danger. This is nothing less than a glaring mistake; for the
first Persian invasion was undertaken with the express view of
restoring Hippias, and with the presence of Hippias himself at
Marathon; while the second Persian invasion was also brought
on in part by the instigation of his family. Persons who had
remained in exile or in a state of disfranchisement down to that
time, in consequence of their attachment to the Peisistratids,
could not in common prudence be called into action at the moment
of peril, to help in repelling Hippias himself. It is very
true that the exiles and the disfranchised were readmitted,
shortly before the invasion of Xerxês, and under the then
pressing calamities of the state. But these persons were not
philo-Peisistratids; they were a number gradually accumulated
from the sentences of exile and (atimy or) disfranchisement every
year passed at Athens,—for these were punishments applied by the
Athenian law to various crimes and public omissions,—the persons
so sentenced were not politically disaffected, and their aid
would then be of use in defending the state against a foreign
enemy.
In regard to “the exception of the family of Peisistratus from
the most comprehensive decrees of amnesty passed in later
times,” I will also remark that, in the decree of amnesty,
there is no mention of them by name, nor any special exception
made against them: among a list of various categories excepted,
those are named “who have been condemned to death or exile
either as murderers or as despots,” (ἢ σφαγεῦσιν ἢ τυράννοις,
Andokid. c. 13.) It is by no means certain that the _descendants_
of Peisistratus would be comprised in this exception, which
mentions only the person himself condemned; but even if this were
otherwise, the exception is a mere continuance of similar words
of exception in the old Solonian law, anterior to Peisistratus;
and, therefore, affords no indication of particular feeling
against the Peisistratids.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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