probably long before have taken the town without difficulty by assault. But the Spartans had a motive of policy for wishing to bring the siege to a different termination. They looked forward to a peace which they might have to conclude upon the ordinary terms of a mutual restitution of conquests made in the war. In this case, if Platea fell by storm, they would be obliged to restore it to Athens; but if it capitulated, they might allege that it was no conquest. With this view their commander protracted the blockade, until at length he discovered by a feint attack that the garrison was utterly unable to defend the walls. He then sent a herald to propose they should surrender, not to the Thebans, but to the Spartans, and on condition that Spartan judges alone should decide upon their fate. These terms were accepted, the town delivered up, and the garrison, which was nearly starved, received a supply of food. In a few days five commissioners came from Sparta to hold the promised trial. But instead of the usual forms of accusation and defence, the prisoners found themselves called upon to answer a single question: whether in the course of the war they had done any service to Sparta and her allies. The spirit which dictated such an interrogatory was clear enough. The prisoners however obtained leave to plead for themselves without restriction; their defence was conducted by two of their number, one of whom, Laco son of Aimnestus, was proxenus of Sparta.

"The arguments of the Platæan orators, as reported by Thucydides, are strong, and the address which he attributes to them is the only specimen he has left of pathetic eloquence. They could point out the absurdity of sending five commissioners from Sparta to inquire whether the garrison of a besieged town were friends of the besiegers; a question which if retorted upon the party which asked it, would equally convict them of a wanton aggression. They could appeal to their services and sufferings in the Persian war, when they alone among the Boeotians remained constant to the cause of Greece, while the Thebans had fought

on the side of the Barbarians in the very land which they now hoped to make their own with the consent of Sparta. They could plead an important obligation which they had more recently conferred on Sparta herself, whom they had. succored with a third part of their whole force, when her very existence was threatened by the revolt of the Messenians after the great earthquake. They could urge that their alliance with Athens had been originally formed with the approbation, and even by the advice of the Spartans themselves; that justice and honor forbad them to renounce a connexion which they had sought as a favor, and from which they had derived great advantages; and that, as far as lay in themselves, they had not broken the last peace, but had been treacherously surprised by the Thebans, while they thought themselves secure in the faith of treaties. Even if their former merits were not sufficient to outweigh any later offence which could be imputed to them, they might insist on the Greek usage of war which forbad proceeding to the last extremity with an enemy who had voluntarily surrendered himself; and as they had proved, by the patience with which they had endured the torments of hunger, that they preferred perishing by famine to falling into the hands of the Thebans, they had a right to demand that they should not be placed in a worse condition by their own act, but if they were to gain nothing by their capitulation, should be restored to the state in which they were when they made it.

"But unhappily for the Platæans, they had nothing to rely upon but the mercy or the honor of Sparta: two principles which never appear to have had the weight of a feather in any of her public transactions; and though the Spartan commissioners bore the title of judges, they came in fact only to pronounce a sentence which had been previously dictated by Thebes. Yet the appeal of the Platæans was so affecting, that the Thebans distrusted the firmness of their allies, and obtained leave to reply. They very judiciously and honestly treated the question as one

which lay entirely between the Plateans and themselves. They attributed the conduct of their ancestors in the Persian war to the compulsion of a small dominant faction, and pleaded the services which they had themselves since rendered to Sparta. They depreciated the patriotic deeds. of the Plateans, as the result of their attachment to Athens, whom they had not scrupled to abet in all her undertakings against the liberties of Greece. They defended the attempt which they had made upon Platea during the peace, on the ground that they had been invited by a number of its wealthiest and noblest citizens, and they charged the Platæans with a breach of faith in the execution of their Theban prisoners, whose blood called as loudly for vengeance as they for mercy.

"These were indeed reasons which fully explained, and perhaps justified, their own enmity to Platea, and did not need to be aided by so glaring a falsehood, as the assertion, that their enemies were enjoying the benefit of a fair trial. But the only part of their argument that bore upon the real question, was that in which they reminded the Spartans, that Thebes was their most powerful and useful ally. This the Spartans felt; and they had long determined that no scruples of justice or humanity should endanger so valuable a connexion. But it seems that they still could not devise any more ingenious mode of reconciling their secret motive with outward decency, than the original question which implied that if the prisoners were their enemies, they might rightfully put them to death; and in this sophistical abstraction all the claims which arose out of the capitulation, when construed according to the plainest rules of equity, were overlooked. The question was again proposed to each separately, and when the ceremony was finished by his answer or his silence, he was immediately consigned to the executioner. The Platæans who suffered amounted to two hundred; their fate was shared by twenty-five Athenians, who could not have expected or claimed milder treatment, as they might have been fairly excepted from

Conduct of the Athenians

on the surren. der of Melos.

the benefit of the surrender. The women were all made slaves. If there had been nothing but inhumanity in the proceeding of the Spartans, it would have been so much slighter than that which they had exhibited towards their most unoffending prisoners from the beginning of the war, as scarcely to deserve notice. All that is very signal in this transaction, is the baseness of their cunning, and perhaps the dullness of their invention."p

The conduct of the Athenians on the surrender of Melos is stated as follows, by the same able historian, who remarks that Thucydides, in his account of the negotiations which preceded the surrender, "has composed a dialogue, such as from his knowledge of the views and feelings of the parties, he conceived might have passed on this occasion; for there seems to be no ground for attributing to it any greater degree of historical truth." Still it is evident from the crowning act of cruelty with which the scene was closed, that the language put into the mouths of the interlocutors, contains a faithful expression of the maxims of international morality recognized by them.

"The Athenians, at the outset, lay down the grounds on which they propose to argue the question. They reject all appeals to justice as distinct from political expediency; not because they are conscious of a flagrant wrong, but because they have made up their minds on this head, and wish to prevent a waste of words. They do not charge the Melians with any offence, or pretend to deny, that though colonists of Lacedæmon, they had not so much as taken part in any of her expeditions; and the Melians were willing to engage to observe a strict neutrality for the future. But the power of Athens depended on the maintenance of a system, which was inconsistent with the independence of Melos. Her empire was in a great measure founded on opinion; and its stability would be endangered

P Thirlwall's Hist. of Greece, vol. iii. pp. 192. 196.

if it was observed that a single island might defy her with impunity. For the world would not give her credit for such singular moderation as willingly to abstain from a conquest which lay within her reach; but would certainly attribute her acquiescence to a sense of weakness. She was following what seemed to be the universal law of nature, in securing and strengthening her dominion, and had reason to hope that her conduct was no less conformable to the will of the gods, than it was sanctioned by the uniform practice of mankind. The Melians vainly endeavored to prove that the interest of Athens herself required that their neutrality should be respected, on the ground that other independent states would be alarmed and provoked by such an aggression as they were now threatened with; an argument which could only have been cogent if Athens had had a reputation for equity and moderation to maintain. The question therefore was reduced to a simple point, whether the Melians could gain any thing by resistance. And the Athenian speaker intimates to them, that their resistance, if unsuccessful, would involve them in the most dreadful calamities. They acknowledge that beside the chances of war, and the favor of the gods towards a righteous cause, they have no ground of hope but the assistance which they are entitled to expect from the parent state. They will not believe that Sparta will suffer a colony which had been true to her for seven hundred years to fall the victim of its fidelity that even if she cannot find means of sending an armament across the sea to their relief, she will not make an effectual diversion in their behalf, either by a fresh invasion of Attica, or by an expedition like that of Brasidas. The Athenian in vain endeavors to correct the error into which they seem to have fallen with regard both to Sparta and to Athens. He asserts as a notorious fact-and the Melians do not deny it-that of all states, Sparta is that which has most glaringly shown by her conduct, that in her political transactions she measures honor by inclination, and justice by expediency. She might therefore be ex