Metoikoi or alien residents and even of the slaves might be inconvenient or dangerous, but to the Temenos of Poseidon at Kolonos about a mile beyond the city gates. Without preface or comment the commissioners at the suggestion of Peisandros proposed that every citizen should be left perfectly free to bring forward any measures whatsoever, and that any attempt to punish him by means of the Graphê Paronomón or writ for illegal procedure should be visited by heavy pains and penalties. One great bulwark of Athenian polity was thus thrown down without a protest, for the citizens now knew well that the assassins were ready with their daggers; and the next proposition swept away all existing offices and all pay except for military service, while it gave the commissioners power to choose five men who should in their turn choose one hundred, these hundred again nominating each three. It was further agreed that these Four Hundred, invested with absolute powers, should take their place in the council chamber and carry on the government after their will and pleasure, taking counsel, whenever they might wish to do so, with the Five Thousand citizens not of Athens but of Nephelokokkygia. Such were the blessings which Athens received from conspirators who prided themselves on being gentlemen, brave, refined, and honourable, and who regarded plain-spoken demagogues (if the word must be used) as the very scum and offscouring of the earth. For the noisy arguments of these vulgar debaters they had substituted the point of the dagger; and a large measure of success had rewarded a graceful change singularly befitting men of careful culture and ancient lineage.

the Council

of the Five Hundred.

All that remained now to be done was the installation of the tyrants into the chamber of the senate which represented the Expulsion of Kleisthenean tribes. The work was soon done. All Athens was now one vast garrison. It was easy for the conspirators to instruct their bravoes to remain near at hand after the dispersal of the citizens (few probably in number and utterly cowed in spirit) from the place of meeting at Kolonos. Attended by a goodly band of four hundred and twenty assassins carrying each his hidden dagger, the Four Hundred marched from Kolonos to the senate house, and commanded the senators to depart, tendering them at the same time their pay for the fraction of their official year which was still to run out. The money was taken; the democracy of Kleisthenes died with selfinflicted ignominy; and in its place was set up the religious association of the old Eupatrid polity.

1 The new association consisted of 300: but the conspirators had already organised a band of 120 young men gathered seemingly

from various Greek cities, for carying out the sentences of their Vehmic tribunal. Thuc. viii. 69, 4. 2 See p. 9 et seq.

Overtures of the Four Hundred to

The selfish and heartless traitors, who had thus undone the work of a century, were to receive some hard and wholesome lessons. The trusty oligarchs, who found assassination a vastly more convenient instrument than long and troublesome trials in courts of law, were now supreme. Agis. There could therefore be no difficulty in adjusting the quarrel with Sparta, and no hindrance to the enjoyment of a peace sadly needed to recruit the exhausted powers of Athens. The message was accordingly sent in full confidence to Agis at Dekeleia, and by him treated with contempt.1 Sending for a large reinforcement to Sparta, the Spartan king allowed sufficient time for their march to the Athenian border and then advanced from Dekeleia in the hope that the present confusion within the city might even enable him to carry the walls by storm. He found himself completely mistaken. There was no slackening in the watch, and some of the enemy who approached too close paid a heavy penalty for their rashness, while a body of Athenian hoplites, bowmen, and lightarmed troops, sallying out, caused great loss. Agis therefore after a while sent his Peloponnesian reinforcement home, and returned to his border fortress, whither a fresh embassy from the Four Hundred soon followed him. These were more graciously treated, and received permission to send envoys to make their wishes known at Sparta.

oligarchic revolution

at Samos.

But the tyrants felt that their work was but half done, rather was not done at all, so long as they failed to secure the co-operation of the army of Samos. Envoys were accordingly sent Attempted to assure them that the oligarchical conspirators had acted from a disinterested generosity which looked only to the interests of the city and the empire; that they had done away with a cumbrous and impracticable franchise, securing at the same time a great saving in the public expenditure; but that the governing body, being still five thousand, fully represented the whole mass of the people. Before they could reach Samos, the traitors in that island had set in motion the machinery which Antiphon had worked so successfully at home. Some few of the Samians, who scarcely a year ago had taken part in the democratic revolution, were induced to join the plot. The brave work was begun by the murder of Hyperbolos, who had been ostracised by the combined partisans of Alkibiades and Nikias certainly six, and perhaps even ten, years earlier. Sundry other like things they did, the historian tells us; and they were fast maturing their scheme for putting down the opposition of the adverse majority. In all likelihood, their plans might have been carried out, had it 2 Thuc. viii. 73, 2.

1 Thục. viii. 71.

not been for the precautions taken by Leon and Diomedon, the commanders sent out on the suggestion of Peisandros to supersede the oligarchic Phrynichos.1 Honestly attached to the law and constitution of Athens, these men never quitted Samos without leaving behind them some ships to keep guard against oligarchical intriguers; and they were ably and zealously seconded by the trierarch Thrasylos and by Thrasy boulos then serving as a hoplite in the army. Roused by the earnest requests made to them, these men canvassed the army personally, praying them not only to guard the laws of Athens, but not to let go their hold on Samos which had now become the mainstay of her empire. The sincerity of the men whom they addressed was attested by the heartiness of their answers; and thus when the oligarchs ventured to trust the issue to the dagger or the sword, they were met by a resistance which cost them the lives of thirty of their number. The victors were more generous than the vanquished deserved, more generous than sound policy required that they should be. Three only of those who were most guilty were banished; the rest were allowed to remain unmolested under the rule of the demos which they had sought to subvert. In the enthusiasm of the moment they dispatched the Paralian trireme with Chaireas, the son of Archestratos, to Athens with a report of what had taken place. They sailed ignorantly into the lion's den. As soon as they landed, some few of the men were imprisoned by the Four Hundred; the rest were placed in another ship and ordered to cruise about Euboia. Chaireas contrived to make his escape, and hastening to Samos, informed the army that Athens was in the hands of tyrants who were scourging the citizens and insulting their wives and children, and whose intention was to imprison and to put to death those of the army who were not prepared to submit to their dictation."

The escape of Chaireas was followed by results which showed that the tyrants had committed a blunder in not putting him to

Determina

tion of the Athenians in Samos to maintain

death. An oath inforced by the most solemn sanctions was taken by every soldier in the army that he would maintain harmony under the ancient constitution of Athens, that he would vigorously carry on the war, and that he would have no dealings with the Four Hundred, who were denounced as public enemies.

the constitution.

But the citizens assembled at Samos did even more. In a formal assembly it was ruled that as the demos at Athens had been forcibly put down, the lawful administration of government devolved upon themselves, and that they in fact constituted the true Athens. Exercising thus their undoubted rights of citizenship,

1 Thục, viii. 54.

2 Ib. viii. 74, 3.

of the citizens at Sa

mos to treat Athens as a

revolted

city.

they deposed such of their generals and trierarchs as were suspected of being concerned with the oligarchical conspiracy, Thrasyboulos and Thrasylos being among the officers chosen in their Resolution place. The assembly was one worthy of that great name of Athens which Nikias knew better how to invoke than to defend.1 Unlike the contemptible or starving senators who consented to abandon their trust for a pittance held out to themby traitors, the speakers in the Samian council declared with memorable terseness that Athens had revolted from them, and that this fact could not humiliate and should not discourage those who had had nothing to do with her apostasy. There was no need to change their position in order to carry on the war. Nay because her army and fleet had found a sure refuge in Samos and friends to be trusted to the uttermost in the Samians, therefore and only therefore was the mouth of the Peiraieus kept open for the conveyance of supplies to a town which must otherwise soon be starved out. The traitors of Athens were thus really in their power, for they might at any moment sail from Samos and block up the harbour themselves. If again their thought was for money, the city since the Sicilian disasters had been able to do but little for them. In few words, the conspirators at Athens had sinned by setting at naught the laws of their fathers; it was the business of the citizens at Samos to keep those laws and to compel these traitors to keep them.

Election of

as general by the citizens at Samos.

Such was the attitude of the Athenians in Samos when the ten envoys of the Four Hundred reached Delos and heard the report that the citizens serving in Samos would have nothing to do with the oligarchic usurpers. They naturally Alkibiades hesitated to go further, fearing probably most of all that the influence of Alkibiades might be set in the scale against them. At first it seemed unlikely that their fears would be realised. The main body of the citizens at Samos was greatly opposed to his restoration; and it needed all the eloquence and energy of Thrasyboulos to induce them to consent to his recall. But Thrasy boulos was as firmly convinced, as the oligarchic envoys had been, that Alkibiades could do what he pleased with Tissaphernes, and that the salvation of Athens depended on her obtaining foreign aid, or at the least in detaching Persia from the alliance with Sparta. Under this conviction he went to Magnesia and brought back Alkibiades to Samos. The narrative of his introduction to the assembly is painful not so much for the glibness of the lies strung together by this consummate traitor as for the pitiable credulity of his hearers. To ? Thục. viii. 81.

1 Thục. vii. 64, 2. See p. 401.

the oligarchs he had said that on no consideration would he again set foot on Attic soil until the demos which had driven him into exile should be put down:1 speaking to the people, he laid the blame of his calamities not upon them but upon his own unhappy destiny. He had told the oligarchs that the suppression of the democratic constitution was the one indispensable condition for winning the thorough confidence of the Persian king: to the people he not only uttered no hint that any such condition was required, but he described in moving terms the absorbing anxiety of Tissaphernes to secure the close friendship of democratic Athens. All who heard him were too much carried away by the heated fancies of the moment to question his facts or to see that he had a triple motive in thus parading his supposed influence with the Persian satrap. If his statements could only be credited, they would strike terror into the oligarchs at Athens and paralyse the action of the Clubs in the city; they would encourage the army in Samos and impress them with a due sense of his importance; lastly they would have the effect of sowing mistrust between Tissaphernes and his Peloponnesian allies, and of disappointing the bright hopes of the Spartans. So greedily were his words received by his hearers that before the assembly dispersed he was appointed general, and a strong wish was expressed to sail at once to the Peiraieus and punish the men who had subverted the constitution. From this course Alkibiades strongly dissuaded them. He had a part to play with Tissaphernes, and in order to get away he promised to return so soon as he should have concerted with him the necessary measures for carrying on the war.2

But before the return of Alkibiades to Magnesia, the oligarchic envoys, who had felt their bravery oozing away at Delos, ventured Reception of on presenting themselves to the assembly of the citizens the oligarat Samos. They were received with a storm of indigchic envoys at Samos. nation which threatened their lives; but when at length they were allowed to speak, they delivered themselves of the comforting message with which they had been charged, adding some comments which recent incidents seemed to call for. The manifest hatred of the army for government by a club of tyrants drew forth the assurance that all the Five Thousand would take their place in turn in the Council of the Four Hundred: but with special earnestness they inveighed against the monstrous lies with which, as they insisted, Chaireas had cheated the citizens in Samos. There was no intention whatever of doing the least harm to their wives, their children, or their kinsfolk; nor could the charges of past ill-treatment be sustained. The assassination of men who 3 See p. 435.

1 See p. 427.

2 Thục. viii. 81, 82.