Areopagiticus

Or that at the time when the people were in control of affairs, we placed our garrisons in the citadels of other states, whereas when the Thirty took over the government, the enemy occupied the Acropolis of Athens?[*](Lysander kept a Spartan garrison on the Acropolis during the rule of the Thirty. See Isoc. 8.92; Isoc. 15.319.) Or, again, that during the rule of the Thirty the Lacedaemonians were our masters, but that when the exiles returned and dared to fight for freedom, and Conon won his naval victory,[*](The Battle of Cnidus, 394 B.C., re-established the power of Athens.) ambassadors came from the Lacedaemonians and offered Athens the command of the sea?[*](See Isoc. 9.68.)

Yes, and who of my own generation does not remember that the democracy so adorned the city with temples and public buildings that even today visitors from other lands consider that she is worthy to rule not only over Hellas but over all the world;[*](In almost the same terms he praises Pericles for his adornment of Athens, Isoc. 15.234.) while the Thirty neglected the public buildings, plundered the temples, and sold for destruction for the sum of three talents the dockyards[*](The bitterest denunciation of the misrule of the Thirty is in the oration Against Eratosthenes, by Lysias (Lys. 12). At its close, he speaks of the sacrilege of the Thirty, particularly in selling off the treasures stored in the temples, and of their tearing down the dockyards of the Piraeus.) upon which the city had spent not less than a thousand talents?

And surely no one could find grounds to praise the mildness[*](An example of irony (litotes), a figure sparingly used by Isocrates. Cf. “outworn” in Isoc. 4.92.) of the Thirty as against that of the people's rule! For when the Thirty took over the city, by vote of the Assembly,[*](Under duress. See Xen. Hell. 2.3.2.) they put to death fifteen hundred Athenians[*](The same number is given in Isoc. 20.11.) without a trial and compelled more than five thousand to leave Athens and take refuge in the Piraeus,[*](Only those enjoyed the franchise under the Thirty who were in the catalogue of the approved “three thousand.” See Isoc. 18.17.) whereas when the exiles overcame them and returned to Athens under arms, these put to death only the chief perpetrators of their wrongs and dealt so generously and so justly by the rest[*](Cf. Plat. Menex. 243e.) that those who had driven the citizens from their homes fared no worse than those who had returned from exile.

But the best and strongest proof of the fairness of the people is that, although those who had remained in the city had borrowed a hundred talents from the Lacedaemonians[*](See Lys. 12.59.) with which to prosecute the siege of those who occupied the Piraeus, yet later when an assembly of the people was held to consider the payment of the debt, and when many insisted that it was only fair that the claims of the Lacedaemonians should be settled, not by those who had suffered the siege, but by those who had borrowed the money, nevertheless the people voted to pay the debt out of the public treasury.[*](This is attested to by Aristotle (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 40) in a passage which pays a high compliment to the admirable spirit in which the feud between the two parties was wiped out.)