In following this speech of the orator, we see the plain confession that the Mitylenæans had no reason whatever to complain of the conduct of Athens towards themselves: she had respected alike their dignity, their public force, and their private security. This important fact helps us to explain, first, the indifference which the Mitylenæan people will be found to manifest in the revolt; next, the barbarous resolution taken by the Athenians after its suppression. The reasons given for the revolt are mainly two. 1. The Mitylenæans had no security that Athens would not degrade them into the condition of subject-allies like the rest. 2. They did not choose to second the ambition of Athens, and to become parties to a war, for the sake of maintaining an empire essentially offensive to Grecian political instincts. In both these two reasons there is force; and both touch the sore point of the Athenian empire. That empire undoubtedly contradicted one of the fundamental instincts of the Greek mind,—the right of every separate town to administer its own political affairs apart from external control. The Peloponnesian alliance recognized this autonomy in theory, by the general synod and equal voting of all the members at Sparta, on important occasions; though it was quite true,[383] as Periklês urged at Athens, that in practice nothing more was enjoyed than an autonomy confined by Spartan leading-strings,—and though Sparta held in permanent custody hostages for the fidelity of her Arcadian allies, summoning their military contingents without acquainting them whither they were destined to march. But Athens proclaimed herself a despot, effacing the autonomy of her allies not less in theory than in practice: far from being disposed to cultivate in them any sense of a real common interest with herself, she did not even cheat them with those forms and fictions which so often appease discontent in the absence of realities. Doubtless, the nature of her empire, at once widely extended, maritime, and unconnected, or only partially connected, with kindred of race, rendered the forms of periodical deliberation difficult to keep up; at the same time that it gave to her as naval chief an ascendency much more despotic than could have been exercised by any chief on land. It is doubtful whether she could have overcome—it is certain that she did not try to overcome—these political difficulties; so that her empire stood confessed as a despotism, opposed to the political instinct of the Greek mind; and the revolts against it, like this of Mitylênê,—in so far as they represented a genuine feeling, and were not merely movements of an oligarchical party against their own democracy,—were revolts of this offended instinct, much more than consequences of actual oppression. The Mitylenæans might certainly affirm that they had no security against being one day reduced to the common condition of subject-allies like the rest; yet an Athenian speaker, had he