The rule of the Thirty Tyrants
The Spartan leaders resisted the
demand of their allies the Corinthians1, the bitterest enemy of the Athenians, for the utter destruction of Athens.
They feared
Corinth2, with its large fleet and strategic location on the isthmus
potentially blocking access to and from the Peloponnese, might grow too strong if
Athens were no longer in existence to serve as a counterweight. Instead of ruining
Athens, Sparta installed as the conquered city's rulers a collaborationist regime of
anti-democratic Athenian aristocrats, who became known as the
Thirty
Tyrants.3 These men came from
the class of aristocrats that had traditionally despised democracy and admired
oligarchy. Brutally suppressing their opposition and stealing shamelessly from people
whose only crime was to possess desirable property, these oligarchs embarked on an
eight-month-long period of terror in 404-403 B.C. The metic and famous
speechwriter-to-be, Lysias, for example, whose father had earlier moved his family
from their native Syracuse at the invitation of Pericles, reported that the henchmen
of the Thirty
seized his brother4 for execution as a way of stealing the family's valuables. The plunderers even
ripped the
gold earrings5 from the ears of his brother's wife in their pursuit of loot. As a result of
political divisions among their leadership, the Spartans did not interfere when
a
prodemocracy resistance movement came to power in Athens after a series of
street battles in 403 B.C.6 To put an end to the
internal strife that threatened to tear Athens apart, the newly restored democracy
proclaimed an
amnesty7, the first known in Western history, under which all further charges and
official recriminations concering the period of terror in 404-403 B.C. were forbidden.
Athens' government was once again a functioning democracy; its financial and military
strength, however, was shattered, and its society harbored the memory of a bitter
divisiveness that no amnesty could completely dispel.
