Taking the proceedings of the Athenians towards Mêlos from the beginning to the end, they form one of the grossest and most inexcusable pieces of cruelty combined with injustice which Grecian history presents to us. In appreciating the cruelty of such wholesale executions, we ought to recollect that the laws of war placed the prisoner altogether at the disposal of his conqueror, and that an Athenian garrison, if captured by the Corinthians in Naupaktus, Nisæa, or elsewhere, would assuredly have undergone the same fate, unless in so far as they might be kept for exchange. But the treatment of the Melians goes beyond all rigor of the laws of war; for they had never been at war with Athens, nor had they done anything to incur her enmity. Moreover, the acquisition of the island was of no material value to Athens; not sufficient to pay the expenses of the armament employed in its capture. And while the gain was thus in every sense slender, the shock to Grecian feeling by the whole proceeding seems to have occasioned serious mischief to Athens. Far from tending to strengthen her entire empire, by sweeping in this small insular population, who had hitherto been neutral and harmless, it raised nothing but odium against her, and was treasured up in after times as among the first of her misdeeds. To gratify her pride of empire by a new conquest—easy to effect, though of small value—was doubtless her chief motive; probably also strengthened by pique against Sparta, between whom and herself a thoroughly hostile feeling subsisted, and by a desire to humiliate Sparta through the Melians. This passion for new acquisition, superseding the more reasonable hopes of recovering the lost portions of her empire, will be seen in the coming chapters breaking out with still more fatal predominance.