stretched on a couch before them, pleaded successfully in
mitigation of punishment, and the sentence was commuted from
death to a fine of fifty talents. This was paid by his son, the
afterwards illustrious Cimon, Miltiades dying, soon after the
trial, of the injury which he had received at Paros.

[The common-place calumnies against the Athenians respecting
Miltiades have been well answered by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton in
his "Rise and Fall of Athens," and Bishop Thirlwall in the second
volume of his "History of Greece;" but they have received their
most complete refutation from Mr. Grote in the fourth volume of
his History, p.490 et seq., and notes. I quite concur with him
that, "looking to the practice of the Athenian dicastery in
criminal cases, fifty talents was the minor penalty actually
proposed by the defenders of Miltiades themselves as a substitute
for the punishment of death. In those penal cases at Athens,
where the punishment was not fixed beforehand by the terms of the
law, if the person accused was found guilty, it was customary to
submit to the jurors subsequently and separately, the question as
to the amount of punishment. First, the accuser named the
penalty which he thought suitable; next, the accused person was
called upon to name an amount of penalty for himself, and the
jurors were constrained to take their choice between these two;
no third gradation of penalty being admissible for consideration.
Of course, under such circumstances, it was the interest of the
accused party to name, even in his own case, some real and
serious penalty, something which the jurors might be likely to
deem not wholly inadequate to his crime just proved; for if he
proposed some penalty only trifling, he drove them to far the
heavier sentence recommended by his opponent." The stories of