The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

100 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

livered at Sparta; and he has reproduced the drift
of these important pieces of evidence. Both in
rwhat they say, and in what they do not say, they
bear out the justice of his construction and his
perspective.
It is a distinct question, What were the guiding
motives of the Athenian policy in regard to
Megara? Thucydides does not consider it, because it did not seem to him to have determined
the outbreak of the war, and was therefore, in a
narrow sense, irrelevant; a modern historian would
not venture to treat it in this way. The object of
Athens was undoubtedly to recover control of the
Megarid which she had in recent times won and
lost; and, to do this without violating the Thirty
Years' Peace, she resorted to economical pressure
which would starve her neighbour into voluntary
submission. Megara had a double value. Her
control would give Athens the power of blocking
the land route between the Peloponnesus and
Boeotia, and would also secure to her a direct
access to the Corinthian Gulf, for her commerce
or her troops.1 Wre cannot say which of these
consequences of the geographical position of
Megara counted more with Athenian statesmen,
in their unarmed aggression against a neighbour
with whom their relations had long been un1 F. M. Cornford has ably explained the geographical importance of
the Megarid as a commercial route between East and West, taking as his
text what he calls Berard's "law of isthmuses "; and those who do not
accept his inferences as a criticism of Thucydides must recognise the
value of his investigation.