160 HISTORY OF GREECE. pedition itself, foi the failure of which Alkibiades 13 not to o held responsible. It might have succeeded in its special object, had it been properly conducted ; but even if it had succeeded, the remark of Nikias is not the less just, that Athens was aiming at an unmeasured breadth of empire, which it would be altogether impossible for her tc preserve. "When we recollect the true political wisdom with which Perikles had advised his country- men to maintain strenuously their existing empire, but by no means to grasp at any new acquisitions while they had powerful enemies in Peloponnesus, we shall appreciate by contrast the feverish system of never-ending aggression inculcated by Alkibi- ades, and the destructive principles which he lays down, that Athens must forever be engaged in new conquests, on pain of forfeiting her existing empire and tearing herself to pieces by internal discord. Even granting the necessity for Athens to em- ploy her military and naval force, as Nikias had truly observed, Amphipolis and the revolted subjects in Thrace were still unsub- dued ; and the first employment of Athenian force ought to be directed against them, instead of being wasted in distant hazards and treacherous novelties, creating for Athens a position in which she could never permanently maintain herself. The parallel which Alkibiades draws, between the enterprising spirit whereby the Athenian empire had been first acquired, and the undefined speculations which he was himself recommending, is altogether fallacious. The Athenian empire took its rise from Athenian enterprise, working in concert with a serious alarm and necessity on the part of all the Grecian cities in or round the ygean sea. Athens rendered an essential service by keeping off the Persians, and preserving that sea in a better condition than it had ever been in before : her empire had begun by being a voluntary con- federacy, and had only passed by degrees into constraint ; while the local situation of all her subjects was sufficiently near to be within the reach of her controlling navy. Her new career of aggression in Sicily, was in all these respects different. Nor is it less surprising to find Alkibiades asserting that the multiplica- tion of subjects in that distant island, employing a large portion of the Athenian naval force to watch them, would impart new stability to the preexisting Athenian empire ; to read the terms
in which he makes light of enemies both in Peloponnesus and in
