Happy would it have been for Miltiades if he had shared the honourable
death of the polemarch Callimachus, in seeking to fire the ships of the
defeated Persians at Marathon. The short sequel of his history will be
found in melancholy contrast with the Marathonian heroism.
His reputation had been great before the battle, and after it the
admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds: it appears,
indeed, to have reached such a pitch that his head was turned, and he
lost both his patriotism and his prudence. He proposed to his countrymen
to incur the cost of equipping an armament of seventy ships, with an
adequate armed force, and to place it altogether at his discretion;
giving them no intimation whither he intended to go, but merely assuring
them that, if they would follow him, he would conduct them to a land
where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise from the
lips of the recent victor of Marathon was sufficient, and the armament
was granted, no man except Miltiades knowing what was its destination. He
sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town, and
sent in a herald to require from the inhabitants a contribution of one
hundred talents [£20,000 or $100,000], on pain of entire destruction. His
pretence for this attack was, that the Parians had furnished a trireme
to Datis for the Persian fleet at Marathon; but his real motive, so
Herodotus assures us, was vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen
named Lysagoras, who had exasperated the Persian general Hydarnes against
him. The Parians amused him at first with evasions, until they had
procured a little delay to repair the defective portions of their wall,
after which they set him at defiance; and Miltiades in vain prosecuted
hostilities against them for the space of twenty-six days: he ravaged
the island, but his attacks made no impression upon the town. Beginning
to despair of success in his military operations, he entered into some
negotiation--such at least was the tale of the Parians themselves--with a
Parian woman named Timo, priestess or attendant in the temple of Demeter,
near the town gates. This woman, promising to reveal to him a secret
which would place Paros in his power, induced him to visit by night a
temple to which no male person was admissible. He leaped the exterior
fence, and approached the sanctuary; but on coming near, was seized
with a panic terror and ran away, almost out of his senses: on leaping
the same fence to get back, he strained or bruised his thigh badly,
and became utterly disabled. In this melancholy state he was placed on
shipboard, the siege being raised, and the whole armament returning to
Athens.
[Sidenote: [489 B.C.]]
Vehement was the indignation both of the armament and of the remaining
Athenians against Miltiades on his return; and Xanthippus, father of
the great Pericles, became the spokesman of this feeling. He impeached
Miltiades before the popular judicature as having been guilty of
deceiving the people, and as having deserved the penalty of death.
The accused himself, disabled by his injured thigh, which even began
to show symptoms of gangrene, was unable to stand, or to say a word
in his own defence: he lay on his couch before the assembled judges,
while his friends made the best case they could in his behalf. Defence,
it appears, there was none; all they could do, was to appeal to his
previous services: they reminded the people largely and emphatically of
the inestimable exploit at Marathon, coming in addition to his previous
conquest of Lemnos. The assembled dicasts, or jurors, showed their sense
of these powerful appeals by rejecting the proposition of his accuser
to condemn him to death: but they imposed on him the penalty of fifty
talents [£10,000 or $50,000] “for his iniquity.”
Cornelius Nepos affirms that these fifty talents represented the expenses
incurred by the state in fitting out the armament; but we may more
probably believe, looking to the practice of the Athenian dicastery
in criminal cases, that fifty talents was the minor penalty actually
proposed by the defenders of Miltiades themselves, as a substitute
for the punishment of death. In those penal cases at Athens, where
the punishment was not fixed beforehand by the terms of the law, if
the person accused was found guilty, it was customary to submit to
the jurors, subsequently and separately, the question as to amount
of punishment: first, the accuser named the penalty which he thought
suitable; next, the accused person was called upon to name an amount of
penalty for himself, and the jurors were constrained to take their choice
between these two--no third gradation of penalty being admissible for
consideration. Of course, under such circumstances, it was the interest
of the accused party to name, even in his own case, some real and serious
penalty--something which the jurors might be likely to deem not wholly
inadequate to his crime just proved; for if he proposed some penalty only
trifling, he drove them to prefer the heavier sentence recommended by his
opponent. Accordingly, in the case of Miltiades, his friends, desirous of
inducing the jurors to refuse their assent to the punishment of death,
proposed a fine of fifty talents as the self-assessed penalty of the
defendant; and perhaps they may have stated, as an argument in the case,
that such a sum would suffice to defray the costs of the expedition. The
fine was imposed, but Miltiades did not live to pay it: his injured limb
mortified, and he died, leaving the fine to be paid by his son Cimon.
According to Cornelius Nepos, Diodorus, and Plutarch, he was put in
prison, after having been fined, and there died. But Herodotus does not
mention this imprisonment, and the fact appears improbable: he would
hardly have omitted to notice it, had it come to his knowledge.
Thus closed the life of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of it
produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking--his descent from
the pinnacle of glory to defeat, mean tampering with a temple-servant,
mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death under a sentence
of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared--that readers, ancient and
modern, have not been satisfied without finding some one to blame for
it: we must except Herodotus, our original authority, who recounts the
transaction without dropping a single hint of blame against any one.
To speak ill of the people, as Machiavelli has long ago observed, is
a strain in which every one at all times, even under a democratical
government, indulges with impunity and without provoking any opponent to
reply; and in this instance, the hard fate of Miltiades has been imputed
to the vices of the Athenians and their democracy--it has been cited
in proof, partly of their fickleness, partly of their ingratitude. But
however such blame may serve to lighten the mental sadness arising from
a series of painful facts, it will not be found justified if we apply to
those facts a reasonable criticism.
What is called the fickleness of the Athenians on this occasion is
nothing more than a rapid and decisive change in their estimation of
Miltiades; unbounded admiration passing at once into extreme wrath. To
censure them for fickleness is here an abuse of terms; such a change in
their opinion was the unavoidable result of his conduct. His behaviour
in the expedition of Paros was as reprehensible as at Marathon it had
been meritorious, and the one succeeded immediately after the other: what
else could ensue except an entire revolution in the Athenian feelings? He
had employed his prodigious ascendency over their minds to induce them
to follow him without knowing whither, in the confidence of an unknown
booty; he had exposed their lives and wasted their substance in wreaking
a private grudge; in addition to the shame of an unprincipled project,
comes the constructive shame of not having succeeded in it. Without
doubt, such behaviour, coming from a man whom they admired to excess,
must have produced a violent and painful revulsion in the feelings of
his countrymen. The idea of having lavished praise and confidence upon
a person who forthwith turns it to an unworthy purpose, is one of the
greatest torments of the human bosom; and we may well understand that
the intensity of the subsequent displeasure would be aggravated by this
reactionary sentiment, without accusing the Athenians of fickleness.
In regard to the charge of ingratitude against the Athenians, this
last-mentioned point--sufficiency of reason--stands tacitly admitted.
It is conceded that Miltiades deserved punishment for his conduct in
reference to the Parian expedition, but it is nevertheless maintained
that gratitude for his previous services at Marathon ought to have
exempted him from punishment. But the sentiment upon which, after all,
this exculpation rests, will not bear to be drawn out and stated in
the form of a cogent or justifying reason. For will any one really
contend, that a man who has rendered great services to the public, is
to receive in return a license of unpunished misconduct for the future?
Is the general, who has earned applause by eminent skill and important
victories, to be recompensed by being allowed the liberty of betraying
his trust afterwards, and exposing his country to peril, without censure
or penalty? This is what no one intends to vindicate deliberately; yet a
man must be prepared to vindicate it, when he blames the Athenians for
ingratitude towards Miltiades. It will be recollected that the death of
Miltiades arose neither from his trial nor his fine, but from the hurt in
his thigh.
The charge of ingratitude against the Athenian popular juries really
amounts to this--that, in trying a person accused of present crime or
fault, they were apt to confine themselves too strictly and exclusively
to the particular matter of charge, either forgetting or making too
little account of past services which he might have rendered. Whoever
imagines that such was the habit of Athenian dicasts, must have studied
the orators to very little purpose. Their real defect was the very
opposite: they were too much disposed to wander from the special issue
before them, and to be affected by appeals to previous services and
conduct.
This defect is one which we should naturally expect from a body of
private, non-professional citizens assembled for the occasion, and which
belongs more or less to the system of jury-trial everywhere; but it is
the direct reverse of that ingratitude, or habitual insensibility to
prior services, for which they have been so often denounced.
The fate of Miltiades, then, so far from illustrating either the
fickleness or the ingratitude of his countrymen, attests their just
appreciation of deserts. It also illustrates another moral, of no small
importance to the right comprehension of Grecian affairs; it teaches us
the painful lesson, how perfectly maddening were the effects of a copious
draught of glory on the temperament of an enterprising and ambitious
Greek. There can be no doubt, that the rapid transition, in the course
of about one week, from Athenian terror before the battle to Athenian
exultation after it, must have produced demonstrations towards Miltiades
such as were never paid towards any other man in the whole history of
the commonwealth. Such unmeasured admiration unseated his rational
judgment, so that his mind became abandoned to the reckless impulses of
insolence, and antipathy, and rapacity--that distempered state, for which
(according to Grecian morality) the retributive Nemesis was ever on the
watch, and which, in his case, she visited with a judgment startling in
its rapidity, as well as terrible in its amount. Had Miltiades been the
same man before the battle of Marathon as he became after it, the battle
might probably have turned out a defeat instead of a victory. We shall
presently be called upon to observe the same tendency in the case of the
Spartan Pausanias, and even in that of the Athenian Themistocles.
It is, indeed, fortunate that the reckless aspirations of Miltiades did
not take a turn more noxious to Athens than the comparatively unimportant
enterprise against Paros. For had he sought to acquire dominion and
gratify antipathies against enemies at home, instead of directing his
blow against a Parian enemy, the peace and security of his country might
have been seriously endangered.
Of the despots who gained power in Greece, a considerable proportion
began by popular conduct, and by rendering good service to their
fellow-citizens: having first earned public gratitude, they abused it
for purposes of their own ambition. There was far greater danger, in a
Grecian community, of dangerous excess of gratitude towards a victorious
soldier, than of deficiency in that sentiment: hence the person thus
exalted acquired a position such that the community found it difficult
afterwards to shake him off. Now there is a disposition almost universal
among writers and readers to side with an individual, especially an
eminent individual, against the multitude; and accordingly those who
under such circumstances suspect the probable abuse of an exalted
position, are denounced as if they harboured an unworthy jealousy of
superior abilities. But the truth is, that the largest analogies of the
Grecian character justified that suspicion, and required the community to
take precautions against the corrupting effects of their own enthusiasm.
There is no feature which more largely pervades the impressible Grecian
character, than a liability to be intoxicated and demoralised by success:
there was no fault from which so few eminent Greeks were free: there
was hardly any danger, against which it was at once so necessary and
so difficult for the Grecian governments to take security--especially
the democracies, where the manifestations of enthusiasm were always
the loudest. Such is the real explanation of those charges which have
been urged against the Grecian democracies, that they came to hate and
ill-treat previous benefactors; and the history of Miltiades illustrates
it in a manner no less pointed than painful.
If we are to predicate any attribute of the multitude, it will rather
be that of undue tenacity than undue fickleness; and there will occur
nothing in the course of this history to prove that the Athenian people
changed their opinions on insufficient grounds more frequently than an
unresponsible one or few would have changed.
But there were two circumstances in the working of the Athenian democracy
which imparted to it an appearance of greater fickleness, without the
reality: First, that the manifestations and changes of opinion were
all open, undisguised, and noisy: the people gave utterance to their
present impression, whatever it was, with perfect frankness; if their
opinions were really changed, they had no shame or scruple in avowing
it. Secondly,--and this is a point of capital importance in the working
of democracy generally,--the present impression, whatever it might
be, was not merely undisguised in its manifestations, but also had a
tendency to be exaggerated in its intensity. This arose from their
habit of treating public affairs in multitudinous assemblages, the
well-known effect of which is, to inflame sentiment in every man’s bosom
by mere contact with a sympathising circle of neighbours. Whatever the
sentiment might be,--fear, ambition, cupidity, wrath, compassion, piety,
patriotic devotion, etc.,--and whether well-founded or ill-founded,
it was constantly influenced more or less by such intensifying cause.
This is a defect which of course belongs in a certain degree to all
exercise of power by numerous bodies, even though they be representative
bodies, especially when the character of the people, instead of being
comparatively sedate and slow to move, like the English, is quick,
impressible, and fiery, like Greeks or Italians; but it operated far
more powerfully on the self-acting Demos assembled in the Pnyx. It was
in fact the constitutional malady of the democracy, of which the people
were themselves perfectly sensible,--as we shall show hereafter from
the securities which they tried to provide against it,--but which no
securities could ever wholly eradicate. Frequency of public assemblies,
far from aggravating the evil, had a tendency to lighten it. The people
thus became accustomed to hear and balance many different views as a
preliminary to ultimate judgment; they contracted personal interest
and esteem for a numerous class of dissentient speakers; and they even
acquired a certain practical consciousness of their own liability to
error.
These two attributes, then, belonged to the Athenian democracy; first,
their sentiments of every kind were manifested loudly and openly; next,
their sentiments tended to a pitch of great present intensity. Of course,
therefore, when they changed, the change of sentiment stood prominent,
and forced itself upon every one’s notice--being a transition from
one strong sentiment past to another strong sentiment present. And it
was because such alterations, when they did take place, stood out so
palpably to remark, that the Athenian people have drawn upon themselves
the imputation of fickleness: for it is not at all true that changes
of sentiment were more frequently produced in them by frivolous or
insufficient causes, than changes of sentiment in other governments.[b]
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