policy of Perikles. New conquests alone could satisfy Alkibiades, and the paramount duty of the Athenians to re-establish their empire in Chalkidike was put aside for the establishment of a new supremacy in the Peloponnesos. Of the schemes which he set on foot for this purpose, it cannot be said that any one brought any gain to Athens, while they all tended to keep up and to multiply occasions of strife between the chief Peloponnesian cities. One of these schemes was for the occupation of Epidauros, to the invasion of which he stirred up the Argives. (419 B.C.) Irritated with this warfare which really broke, while it nominally respected, the peace, the Spartans during the winter contrived to smuggle 300 men into Epidauros; and the Argives complained at Athens that the clause of the treaty between them which asserted that neither side should allow hostile forces to pass through their territory, had been violated. The Spartans had conveyed these men by sea, and the sea was specially the dominion of Athens. Pleased with this flattery, the Athenians readily adopted the suggestion of the Argives that by way of punishing the Spartans the Messenians and the Helots should be brought back to Pylos, a note being added to the inscription on the pillar of peace at Athens ascribing this step to the violation of the covenant by the Spartans.

But the Spartans were now fully awake to the dangers of their position. A simultaneous invasion of Corinthian and Spartan forces from two different quarters caught the Argives in front and rear. (418 B.C.) The latter, far from fearing the destruction which, if they fought, was really inevitable, saw in their desperate position only an opportunity for taking ample revenge upon the Spartans, and were fiercely indignant when almost at the moment of onset two of their generals, who saw how they were placed, obtained from the Spartan king Agis a truce of four months.

At Sparta this arrangement excited so deep an indignation against Agis that he narrowly escaped a sentence fining him 100,000 drachmas. Agis simply asked that he might be allowed an opportunity of redeeming his past error before the infliction of the punishment; and the message which now came from the people of Tegea to say that only instant help could prevent the loss of the city to the Spartan confederacy brought the occasion which he desired. With a rapidity never yet matched, Agis set out at the head of the whole Spartan force.

Finding the Argives posted on a precipitous eminence, he was about to attack them without further thought, when a Spartan veteran cited in his hearing the old proverb on the healing of evil by evil. The retreat of the Spartan king again awakened the resentment of the Argives, who thought that their generals were again letting the prey slip from their grasp, and the latter at once brought their men down from the hill and drew them out in order of battle on the open plain. On this ground on the following day was fought a battle which Thucydides describes with such singular minuteness and exactness as to justify the conclusion that he must have been an eye-witness. The partial victory of the Mantineians, with the Argive regiment of one thousand on the right wing, was followed or accompanied by a crushing defeat of the other allies, with the Athenians and their horsemen, on the left. The result did away with the impression which the surrender of the hoplites at Sphakteria and the subsequent sluggishness of the Spartans had almost everywhere created; and it was at once acknowledged that although they may have been unfortunate, Spartan courage was as great and Spartan discipline as effective as ever.

The battle had further consequences at Argos. The oligarchic conspirators in this city were a formidable body; and the Thousand Regiment were ready to throw off all disguise. In the fight at Mantineia the demos had been shamefully beaten, while they had been really victorious. In casting their lot in with the Spartans, they were thus consulting at once their interest and their dignity: and with their sanction Lichas arrived from Sparta with an ultimatum, offering the Argives either war or the treaty which he brought with him ready written. This treaty, which nominally allowed the imperial character of the Argive state, re-established in fact the supremacy of Sparta, and the Mantineians once more joined her confederacy.

The fabric of oligarchy thus raised at Argos stood on an uncertain foundation. The insolence of the Thousand became insufferable. The demos was restored (417 B.C.); the alliance with Athens was renewed, and the people set to work to connect the city by long walls with the sea. If this design could have been completed, Argos might have defied the attacks of any land force, as the Athenians could pour in from the sea any supplies needed for the people. But the oligarchical party was not rooted

out; and receiving promises of aid which were not fulfilled, Agis, unable to enter Argos, levelled the long walls to the ground.

The feebleness of Athenian policy is shown by the course which in the winter of this year the Athenians found themselves constrained to adopt towards the Makedonian Perdikkas. Nikias and his adherents, who now saw that Amphipolis, if it was ever to be recovered at all, must be recovered by force, urged an expedition for this purpose which was nevertheless to be made dependent on the co-operation of a chief whose only gift to Athens had been confined to shiploads of lies. Perdikkas of course failed to keep his engagements; the enterprise was abandoned; and the strength which might have recovered Amphipolis was put forth in the following year for the destruction of a petty township in the island of Melos. On the refusal of the Melians to become the allies of Athens, Nikias blockaded the city. (416 B.C.) Time went on. No help came from Sparta, and plots were discovered for betraying the place to the Athenians. The Melians determined to anticipate them by unconditional surrender, and their recompense for so doing was the murder of all the grown men and the selling of the women and children into slavery.

The case of the Melians is obviously quite different from that of the Mytilenaians or the Skionaians. The Melians had done to the Athenians no specific wrong; and the worst charge that could have been urged against them was that they shared in the benefits arising from the Athenian confederacy, without sharing, if such was the fact, the burdens necessary for its maintenance. But, according to the elaborate report given by Thucydides of the conference which preceded the siege, the arguments urged by the Athenians in justification of their attack were of a totally different kind. The Athenians had pre-eminently the reputation of a people who were always disposed to call ugly things by pretty names, and even average Greeks sought to throw over deeds of wanton iniquity a veil of decency if they could not hope to pass them off as righteous and equitable. Least of all in the history of Athens generally do we find the temper which glories in the exertion of naked brute force and delights to insult and defy the moral instincts of mankind. But in the conference which precedes the Melian massacre we have precisely this temper, and the Athenians are represented as

trampling on all seemliness of word or action, asserting an independence which raises them above all law, and as boasting that iniquity to the weak can do the strong. no harm.

In its whole spirit and form this conference stands out in glaring inconsistency notonly with the previous history of Athens but with that which follows it. When we remember that the massacre at Melos was a political crime greater certainly and more. atrocious than any of which the Athenians had yet been guilty, that it brought them no gain while it insured to Athens a bitter harvest of hatred, and that this horrible and infatuated crime preceded only by a few months the ill-fated expedition to Sicily, we can have little doubt that in his account of this conference the historian has left us not a record of fact but an ethical picture like that which Herodotos has drawn of the Persian despot in his overweening arrogance and pride (p. 100). From this time forward the strength of Athens was to be turned aside to impracticable tasks in which even unqualified success could scarcely bring a gain proportionate to the outlay, and the affairs of the city were to be conducted in the gambling spirit which stakes a continually increasing sum in the hope of recovering past losses. The supposed conference vividly inforces this contract; and although Thucydides nowhere mentions his name in connexion with this crime, the arguments put into the mouths of the Athenians are just those which might have come from Alkibiades, who is said by Plutarch to have vehemently urged on the massacre. The conduct thus ascribed to him would be a fitting prelude to the treasons of his after-life.

CHAPTER VII.

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR.-THE SICILIAN EXPEDITION.

In the year which witnessed the disgraceful revolution at Korkyra, the rhetor Gorgias (427 B.C.) headed an embassy from the Sicilian Leontinoi to ask the aid of Athens against the Syracusans. Whatever power the eloquence of Gorgias may have exercised over the Athenian assembly, no more constraining argument probably was adduced than the warning that if the Sicilian Dorians should be suffered to subdue their Ionian kinsfolk, the Spartans would assuredly receive from Sicily the

succours on which the Corinthians especially had eagerly counted. The Leontine envoys had thus little difficulty in obtaining the promise of help; but although three Athenian fleets appeared successively during the next two years in Sicilian waters, no decisive results were obtained on either side.

The great success of Demosthenes at Sphakteria produced in the public opinion of Sicily a change not less marked than that which it brought about at Athens. The Sicilian Greeks began to feel that their incessant quarrels and wars might leave the whole island at the mercy of a people who had shown a power of resistance and a fertility of resource far beyond any with which at the beginning of the war their enemies would have credited them. The necessity of making common cause against Athens was felt first by the citizens of Kamarina and Gela, and was first expressed probably by the men of the weaker city. The truce between these two cities was followed by a congress at Gela (424 B.C.) in which before the general body of Sikeliot envoys the Syracusan Hermokrates stood forward for the first time as the uncompromising antagonist of Athens.

The decision sought for by Hermokrates was attained; and it was agreed that a general peace should be made between the several cities which should retain each its present possessions. The pacification thus brought about was short-lived. It was not, indeed, likely to last longer than the general fear of Athenian ambition; and the disasters of the Boiotian campaign, crowned by the catastrophe of Delion, speedily dispelled this fear. But a quarrel between Selinous and Egesta, one of the two cities of the Elymoi, (416 B.c.) was destined to produce greater results than the appeals of Leontinoi for help to Athens. Far from appealing to any sentiment of compassion, the Egestaians inforced their claim on the grounds of expediency and good policy. They were quite willing to admit that they could not stand by themselves; but they pledged themselves not merely to bring their own men into the field but to take on themselves the whole costs of the war.

Charmed at the prospect thus opened to them, the Athenians, instead of pausing to think whether under any circumstances further interference in Sicily would be either wise or profitable, resolved to send ambassadors to test the resources of the Egestaians and their prospect of success in their war with Selinous. The Egestaians turned out to be mere impostors: