EURIPIDES
therefore the Cyclops, who is Greek because he lives in Greek
Sicily (another anachronism), should spare Odysseus and his
men. What we have here is a covert but unmistakable allusion
to the Persian Wars, when Athens claimed to have saved
Hellas and the ancestral gods from the Persians. There is irony
in the claim that it was piety which saved the silver-mines of
Laurium on Cape Sunium (where there happened to be a
shrine to Poseidon), but the larger irony is somewhat more
complex.
What Odysseus is urging here is nothing more or less than
the argument which Athens had used to acquire her empire:
Athens had saved Hellas and should have the rewards of her
deed. This sanction for empire was employed down to the
time of the Peloponnesian War to coerce neutrals and unwill-
ing states into the Athenian orbit, and the sanction was as
loathsome to most Greeks as the Athenian Empire. Herodotus,
writing in the forties, is so much aware of the unpopularity of
Athens and her sanction that he is reluctant to state the real
truth which underlies the sanction—Athens did save Hellas.
In 432 B.C., just before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian
War, the unofficial Athenian envoys at Sparta could say of
their empire:
We have a fair claim to our possessions. . . . We need not refer
to remote antiquity . . . but to the Persian War and contemporary
history we must refer, although we are rather tired of continually
bringing this subject forward.6
By 416, the Athenian generals at Melos could argue naked
imperialism; the empire had outgrown its sanction:
We shall not trouble you with specious pretences . . . either of
how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Per-
sians, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done
us ... since you know as well as we do that right, as the world
goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong
do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.7
6. Thuc. i. 73. 2 ff.
7. Ibid.v. 89.
248