Athens, like all the other Greek republics, colonized other countries with the surplus of their free--mostly poor--population. Herodotus died in such an expedition. The Dorians very likely colonized Sicily, the Ionians Italy or Magna Grecia. Such colonizations relieved the over-populated mother-country, extended the Hellenic culture, but likewise, in more than one way, fostered and nursed slavery. The Greek colonists in Sicily and in Italy, conquering or pushing into the interior the aborigines of these lands, enslaved, kidnapped and sold them. Then the Greek cities warred with and enslaved each other. Such was the case between Sybaris and Crotona, or in Sicily between Syracuse, Girgentum, etc. The rich men of Athens bought more and more slaves, purchased the lands of the poor, substituted in various handicrafts their gangs of slave laborers for freemen, and exported the impoverished freemen.[13] The increase of large estates and chattels went hand in hand with the decrease of freemen and public spirit in Athens; and the same was the case in other large commercial cities of Greece. After the Persian war Athens became the wealthiest of commercial cities, and the Athenians a conquering nation. Both circumstances increased the number of slaves. But still the landed property was not yet absorbed. Alcibiades owned only about three hundred _plethra_, or about seventy-five acres of land in Attica. The wealthy slave-owners and oligarchs were not in power, but they owned mines in Attica and landed estates in various Greek dependencies and colonies. Slavery prevailed in the city, and it became more and more common on the farms. However, on the eve of the Peloponnesian war, democracy still prevailed. The oligarchs, proud of their slaves, mines, plantations and estates, scorned the democracy of Athens, composed of artists, yeomen, operatives, artisans--who really formed the soul of the great Periclean epoch. Oligarchies are alike all over the world; in most of them, slave-holders, however called, live upon the labor of others; all of them scorn the laboring classes. The Southern militant planters and their Northern servile retainers scorn the enlightened masses of working-men, the farmers and operatives of the free states. But it is those masses which exclusively give original signification to America in the history of human development. Athens and the various monuments of the Periclean epoch coruscate over doomed Hellas: so the villages of the free states, with their schools and laborious, intelligent, self-reliant populations, shed their rays now over the Christian world. And the sight of such a village is a far different subject of contemplation from that of the slave-crowded plantation.