The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 04 : $b Greece to the Roman Conquest
History
The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 04 : $b Greece to the Roman Conquest
World history
If we follow the acts of the Thirty, we shall see that the horsemen and
the privileged three thousand hoplites in the city had made themselves
partisans in every species of flagitious crime which could possibly
be imagined to exasperate the feelings of the exiles. The latter on
returning saw before them men who had handed in their relatives to be put
to death without trial; who had seized upon and enjoyed their property;
who had expelled them all from the city, and a large portion of them
even from Attica; and who had held themselves in mastery not merely by
the overthrow of the constitution, but also by inviting and subsidising
foreign guards. Such atrocities, conceived and ordered by the Thirty,
had been executed by the aid, and for the joint benefit (as Critias
justly remarked) of those occupants of the city whom the exiles found
on returning. Now Thrasybulus, Anytus, and the rest of these exiles,
saw their property all pillaged and appropriated by others during the
few months of their absence: we may presume that their lands--which had
probably not been sold, but granted to individual members or partisans of
the Thirty--were restored to them; but the movable property could not be
reclaimed, and the losses to which they remained subject were prodigious.
[Sidenote: [403-402 B.C.]]
The men who had caused and profited by these losses--often with great
brutality towards the families of the exiles, as we know by the case
of Lysias--were now at Athens, all individually well known to the
sufferers. In like manner, the sons and brothers of Leon and the other
victims of the Thirty, saw before them the very citizens by whose hands
their innocent relatives had been consigned without trial to prison and
execution. The amount of wrong suffered had been infinitely greater than
in the time of the Four Hundred, and the provocation, on every ground,
public and private, violent to a degree never exceeded in history.
Yet with all this sting fresh in their bosoms, we find the victorious
multitude, on the latter occasion as well as on the former, burying
the past in an indiscriminate amnesty, and anxious only for the future
harmonious march of the renovated and all-comprehensive democracy. We see
the sentiment of commonwealth in the demos, twice contrasted with the
sentiment of faction in an ascendant oligarchy; twice triumphant over the
strongest counter-motives, over the most bitter recollections of wrongful
murder and spoliation, over all that passionate rush of reactionary
appetite which characterises the moment of political restoration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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