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XXXIII. Before his return a decree had been passed authorising him to do so, at the instance of Kritias, the son of Kallaeschrus, who himself alludes to it in his poems, mentioning the service which he performed for Alkibiades in the following verse: "I moved your restoration by decree, And that you're home again you owe to me."
The serious admiration of Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism, not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of Kleon or of Kritias. History never again beheld such a band of pamphleteers! In the history of Rome, during the second war against Carthage, a similar moment occurs.
This is the man whom Aristophanes ridiculed in his play as sitting by the altars as a suppliant, with a pale face and a scarlet cloak, begging for an army. We are told by Kritias that Ephialtes vigorously opposed his mission, and besought the Athenians not to assist in restoring a state which was the rival of Athens, but to let the pride of Sparta be crushed and trampled in the dust.
Moreover, Gorgias of Leontini says that Kimon acquired wealth in order to use it, and used it so as to gain honour: while Kritias, who was one of the Thirty, in his poems wishes to be "Rich as the Skopads, and as Kimon great, And like Agesilaus fortunate."
That hour was but the essential agony of a soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the Athens of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion.
The common traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero of the Aeneid and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right of the ancient State.
At last, Kritias informed Lysander, that while Athens was governed by a democracy, the Lacedaemonian empire in Greece could never be safe; and if the Athenians were ever so much inclined to an oligarchical form of government, Alkibiades, if he lived, would not long suffer them to submit to it.
But it was not Aristion only at Athens, nor yet Kritias before him, and all who were philosophers with Kritias and tyrants at the same time; but in Italy also, those who were Pythagoreans, and in Greece the Seven Sages as they are called, as many of them as engaged in public affairs, all were chiefs and tyrants more cruel than tyrants who were not philosophers.
For this reason such things as are useful and necessary, like couches and tables and chairs, were made there better than anywhere else, and the Laconian cup, we are told by Kritias, was especially valued for its use in the field.
The Spartan commander Lysander blockaded Athens; starvation forced her to surrender. Lysander established the government known as that of the Thirty Tyrants, who were headed by Kritias.
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