klês, the revenue, including tribute, was so managed as to leave large annual surplus; insomuch that a treasure of coined money was accumulated in the acropolis during the years preceding the Peloponnesian war, which treasure, when at its maximum, reached the great sum of nine thousand seven hundred talents (equal to two million two hundred and thirty thousand pounds), and was still at six thousand talents, after a serious drain for various purposes, at the moment when that war began.[1] This system of public economy, constantly laying by a considerable sum year after year, - in which Athens stood alone, since none of the Peloponnesian states had any public reserve whatever,[2] goes far of itself to vindicate Perikles from the charge of having wasted the public money in mischievous distributions for the purpose of obtaining popularity; and also to exonerate the Athenian Demos from that reproach of a greedy appetite for living
- ↑ Thucyd. ii, 13.
- ↑ Thucyd. i, 80. The foresight of the Athenian people, in abstaining from immediate use of public money and laying it up for future wants, would be still more conspicuously demonstrated, if the statement of Æschines, the orator, were true, that they got together seven thousand talents between the peace of Nikias and the Sicilian expedition. M. Boeckh believes this statement, and says: " It is not impossible that one thousand talents might have been laid by every year, as the amount of tribute received was so considerable." (Public Economy of Athens, ch. xx. p. 446, Eng. Trans.) I do not believe the statement: but M. Boeckh and others, who do admit it, ought in fairness to set it against the many remarks which they pass in condemnation of the democratical prodigality.
Sicily, enjoying the full esteem of his countrymen, until its complete failure and ruin before Syracuse, and perished himself afterwards as a Syracusan prisoner. Taking these circumstances together, it will at once be seen that there never can have been any time, ten months or more after the capture of Melos, when Nikias and Alkibiades could have been exposed to a vote of ostracism at Athens. The thing is absolutely impossible: and the oration in which such historical and chronological incompatibilities are embodied, must be spurious: furthermore, it must have been composed long after the pretended time of delivery, when the chronological series of events had been forgotten. I may add that the story of this duplication of the tribute by Alkibiadês is virtually contrary to the statement of Plutarch, probably borrowed from AEschines, who states that the demagogues gradually increased (Κατά μικρόν) the tribute to thirteen hundred talents (Plutarch, Aristeid. c. 24).
