the popular dikasteries at Athens had not been thus open, the allied cities would have suffered much more severely from the captains and officials of Athens in their individual capacity. And the maintenance of political harmony, between the imperial city and the subject ally, was insured by Athens through the jurisdiction of her dikasteries with much less cost of injustice and violence than by Sparta; for though oligarchical partisans might sometimes be unjustly condemned at Athens, yet such accidental wrong was immensely overpassed by the enormities of the Spartan harmosts and dekadarckies, who put numbers to death without any trial at all.
So again, it is to be recollected that Athenian private citizens, not officially employed, were spread over the whole range of the empire as kleruchs, proprietors, or traders; of course, therefore, disputes would arise between them and the natives of the subject cities, as well as among these latter themselves, in cases where both parties did not belong to the same city. Now in such cases the Spartan imperial authority was so exercised as to afford little or no remedy, since the action of the harmost or the dekadarchy was confined to one separate city; while the Athenian dikasteries, with universal competence and public trial, afforded the only redress which the contingency admitted. If a Thasian citizen believed himself aggrieved by the historian Thucydides, either as commander of the Athenian fleet off the station, or as proprietor of gold mines in Thrace, he had his remedy against the latter
fines, sentences Of banishment, capital punishments; and that the Athenian people, though they had a strong public interest in the prosperity of the allies, in order that their tribute might be larger, nevertheless thought it better that any individual citizen of Athens should pocket what he could out of the plunder of the allies, and leave to the latter nothing more than was absolutely necessary for them to live and work, without any superfluity, such as might tempt them to revolt. That the Athenian officers on service may have succeeded too often in unjust peculation at the cost of the allies, is probable enough: but that the Athenian people were pleased to see their own individual citizens so enriching themselves is certainly not true. The large jurisdiction of the dikasteries was intended, among other effects, to open to the allies a legal redress against such misconduct on the part of the Athenian officers: and the passage above cited from Thucydides proves that it really produced such an effect.
