Such a sentence was, in principle, nothing more than a very rigorous application of the received laws of war. Not merely the reconquered rebel, but even the prisoner of war, apart from any special convention, was at the mercy of his conqueror, to be slain, sold, or admitted to ransom: and we shall find the Lacedæmonians carrying out the maxim without the smallest abatement towards the Platæan prisoners, in the course of a very short time. And doubtless the Athenian people, so long as they remained in assembly, under that absorbing temporary intensification of the common and predominant sentiment which springs from the mere fact of multitude, and so long as they were discussing the principle of the case, What had Mitylênê deserved? thought only of this view. Less than the most rigorous measure of war, they would conceive, would be inadequate to the wrong done by the Mitylenæans. But when the assembly broke up,—when the citizen, no longer wound up by sympathizing companions and animated speakers in the Pnyx, subsided into the comparative quiescence of individual life,—when the talk came to be, not about the propriety of passing such a resolution, but about the details of executing it, a sensible change and marked repentance became presently visible. We must also recollect, and it is a principle of no small moment in human affairs, especially among a democratical people like the Athenians, who stand charged with so many resolutions passed and afterwards unexecuted, that the sentiment of wrath against the Mitylenæans had been really in part discharged by the mere _passing_ of the sentence, quite apart from its execution; just as a furious man relieves himself from overboiling anger by imprecations against others which he would himself shrink from afterwards realizing. The Athenians, on the whole the most humane people in Greece,—though humanity, according to our ideas, cannot be predicated of any Greeks,—became sensible that they had sanctioned a cruel and frightful decree, and the captain and seamen,[412] to whom it was given to carry, set forth on their voyage with mournful repugnance. The Mitylenæan envoys present in Athens, who had probably been allowed to speak in the assembly and plead their own cause, together with those Athenians who had been proxeni and friends of Mitylênê, and the minority generally of the previous assembly, soon discerned, and did their best to foster, this repentance; which became, during the course of the same evening, so powerful as well as so wide-spread, that the stratêgi acceded to the prayer of the envoys, and convoked a fresh assembly for the morrow to reconsider the proceeding. By so doing, they committed an illegality, and exposed themselves to the chance of impeachment: but the change of feeling among the people was so manifest as to overbear any such scruples.[413]