CHAPTER LXII.

TWENTY-FIRST YEAR OF THE WAR.—OLIGARCHY OF FOUR HUNDRED AT ATHENS.

About a year elapsed between the catastrophe of the Athenians near Syracuse and the victory which they gained over the Milêsians, on landing near Milêtus (from September 413 B.C., to September 412 B.C.). After the first of those two events, the complete ruin of Athens had appeared both to her enemies and to herself, impending and irreparable. But so astonishing, so rapid, and so energetic had been her rally, that, at the time of the second, she was found again carrying on a tolerable struggle, though with impaired resources and on a purely defensive system, against enemies both bolder and more numerous than ever. Nor is there any reason to doubt that her foreign affairs might have gone on thus improving, had they not been endangered at this critical moment by the treason of a fraction of her own citizens, bringing her again to the brink of ruin, from which she was only rescued by the incompetence of her enemies.

That treason took its first rise from the exile Alkibiadês. I have already recounted how this man, alike unprincipled and energetic, had thrown himself with his characteristic ardor into the service of Sparta, and had indicated to her the best means of aiding Syracuse, of inflicting positive injury upon Athens, and lastly, of provoking revolt among the Ionic allies of the latter. It was by his boldness and personal connections in Ionia that the revolt of Chios and Milêtus had been determined.

In the course of a few months, however, he had greatly lost the confidence of the Spartans. The revolt of the Asiatic dependencies of Athens had not been accomplished so easily and rapidly as he had predicted; Chalkideus, the Spartan commander with whom he had acted was defeated and slain near Milêtus; the ephor Endius, by whom he was chiefly protected, retained his office only for one year, and was succeeded by other ephors,[1] just about the end of September, or beginning of October, when the Athenians gained their second victory near Milêtus, and were on the point of blocking up the town; while his personal enemy king Agis still remained to persecute him. Moreover, there was in the character of this remarkable man something so essentially selfish, vain, and treacherous, that no one could ever rely upon his faithful coöperation. And as soon as any reverse occurred, that very energy and ability, which seldom failed him, made those with whom he acted the more ready to explain the mischance, by supposing that he had betrayed them.

[1] See Thucyd. v, 36.

It was thus that, after the defeat of Milêtus, king Agis was enabled to discredit Alkibiadês as a traitor to Sparta; upon which the new ephors sent out at once an order to the general Astyochus, to put him to death.[2] Alkibiadês had now an opportunity of tasting the difference between Spartan and Athenian procedure. Though his enemies at Athens were numerous and virulent, with all the advantage, so unspeakable in political warfare, of being able to raise the cry of irreligion against him, yet the utmost which they could obtain was that he should be summoned home to take his trial before the dikastery. At Sparta, without any positive ground of crimination, and without any idea of judicial trial, his enemies procure an order that he shall be put to death.

[2] Thucyd. viii, 45. Καὶ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν ἀφικομένης ἐπιστολῆς πρὸς Ἀστύοχον ἐκ Λακεδαίμονος ὥστ᾽ ἀποκτεῖναι (ἦν γὰρ καὶ τῷ Ἄγιδι ἐχθρὸς ~καὶ ἄλλως ἄπιστος~ ἐφαίνετο), etc.

Alkibiadês, however, got intimation of the order in time to retire to Tissaphernês. Probably he was forewarned by Astyochus himself, not ignorant that so monstrous a deed would greatly alienate the Chians and Milêsians, nor foreseeing the full mischief which his desertion would bring upon Sparta. With that flexibility of character which enabled him at once to master and take up a new position, Alkibiadês soon found means to insinuate himself into the confidence of the satrap. He began now to play a game neither Spartan nor Athenian, but Persian and anti-Hellenic: a game of duplicity to which Tissaphernês himself was spontaneously disposed, but to which the intervention of a dexterous Grecian negotiator was indispensable. It was by no means the interest of the Great King, Alkibiadês urged, to lend such effective aid to either of the contending parties as would enable it to crush the other: he ought neither to bring up the Phenician fleet to the aid of the Lacedæmonians, nor to furnish that abundant pay which would procure for them indefinite levies of new Grecian force. He ought so to feed and prolong the war, as to make each party an instrument of exhaustion and impoverishment against the other, and thus himself to rise on the ruins of both: first to break down the Athenian empire by means of the Peloponnesians, and afterwards to expel the Peloponnesians themselves; which might be effected with little trouble if they were weakened by a protracted previous struggle.[3]

[3] Thucyd. viii, 45, 46.

Thus far Alkibiadês gave advice, as a Persian counsellor, not unsuitable to the policy of the court of Susa. But he seldom gave advice without some view to his own profit, ambition, or antipathies. Cast off unceremoniously by the Lacedæmonians, he was now driven to seek restoration in his own country. To accomplish this object, it was necessary not only that he should preserve her from being altogether ruined, but that he should present himself to the Athenians as one who could, if restored, divert the aid of Tissaphernês from Lacedæmon to Athens. Accordingly, he farther suggested to the satrap, that while it was essential to his interest not to permit land power and maritime power to be united in the same hands, whether Lacedæmonian or Athenian, it would nevertheless be found easier to arrange matters with the empire and pretensions of Athens than with those of Lacedæmon. The former, he argued, neither sought nor professed any other object than the subjection of her own maritime dependencies, in return for which she would willingly leave all the Asiatic Greeks in the hands of the Great King; while the latter, forswearing all idea of empire, and professing ostentatiously to aim at the universal enfranchisement of every Grecian city, could not with the smallest consistency conspire to deprive the Asiatic Greeks of the same privilege. This view appeared to be countenanced by the objection which Theramenês and many of the Peloponnesian officers had taken to the first convention concluded by Chalkideus and Alkibiadês with Tissaphernês: objections afterwards renewed by Lichas even against the second modified convention of Theramenês, and accompanied with an indignant protest against the idea of surrendering to the Great King all the territory which had been ever possessed by his predecessors.[4]

[4] Thucyd. viii, 46-52.

All these latter arguments, whereby Alkibiadês professed to create in the mind of the satrap a preference for Athens, were either futile or founded on false assumptions. For on the one hand, even Lichas never refused to concur in surrendering the Asiatic Greeks to Persia; while on the other hand, the empire of Athens, so long as she retained any empire, was pretty sure to be more formidable to Persia than any efforts undertaken by Sparta under the disinterested pretence of liberating generally the Grecian cities. Nor did Tissaphernês at all lend himself to any such positive impression; though he felt strongly the force of the negative recommendations of Alkibiadês, that he should do no more for the Peloponnesians than was sufficient to feed the war, without insuring to them either a speedy or a decisive success: or rather, this duplicity was so congenial to his Oriental mind, that there was no need of Alkibiadês to recommend it. The real use of the Athenian exile, was to assist the satrap in carrying it into execution; and to provide for him those plausible pretences and justifications, which he was to issue as a substitute for effective supplies of men and money. Established along with Tissaphernês at Magnesia,—the same place which had been occupied about fifty years before by another Athenian exile, equally unprincipled, and yet abler, Themistoklês,—Alkibiadês served as interpreter of his views in all his conversations with the Greeks, and appeared to be thoroughly in his confidence: an appearance of which he took advantage to pass himself off falsely upon the Athenians at Samos, as having the power of turning Persian wealth to the aid of Athens.

The first payment made by Tissaphernês, immediately after the capture of Iasus and of the revolted Amorgês, to the Peloponnesians at Milêtus, was at the rate of one drachma per head. But notice was given that for the future it would be reduced one half, and for this reduction Alkibiadês undertook to furnish a reason. The Athenians, he urged, gave no more than half a drachma; not because they could not afford more, but because, from their long experience of nautical affairs, they had found that higher pay spoiled the discipline of the seamen by leading them into excesses and over-indulgence, as well as by inducing too ready leave of absence to be granted, in confidence that the high pay would induce them to return when called for.[5] As he probably never expected that such subterfuges, employed at a moment when Athens was so poor that she could not even pay the half drachma per head, would carry conviction to any one, so he induced Tissaphernês to strengthen their effect by individual bribes to the generals and trierarchs: a mode of argument which was found effectual in silencing the complaints of all, with the single exception of the Syracusan Hermokratês. In regard to other Grecian cities who sent to ask pecuniary aid, and especially Chios, Alkibiadês spoke out with less reserve. They had been hitherto compelled to contribute to Athens, he said, and now that they had shaken off this payment, they must not shrink from imposing upon themselves equal or even greater burdens in their own defence. Nor was it anything less, he added, than sheer impudence in the Chians, the richest people in Greece, if they required a foreign military force for their protection, to require at the same time that others should furnish the means of paying it.[6] At the same time, however, he intimated,—by way of keeping up hopes for the future,—that Tissaphernês was at present carrying on the war at his own cost; but if hereafter remittances should arrive from Susa, the full rate of pay would be resumed, with the addition of aid to the Grecian cities in any other way which could be reasonably asked. To this promise was added an assurance that the Phenician fleet was now under equipment, and would shortly be brought up to their aid, so as to give them a superiority which would render resistance hopeless: an assurance not merely deceitful but mischievous, since it was employed to dissuade them from all immediate action, and to paralyze their navy during its moments of fullest vigor and efficiency. Even the reduced rate of pay was furnished so irregularly, and the Peloponnesian force kept so starved, that the duplicity of the satrap became obvious to every one, and was only carried through by his bribery to the officers.[7]

[5] Thucyd. viii, 45. Οἱ δὲ τὰς ναῦς ἀπολείπωσιν, οὐχ ὑπολιπόντες ἐς ὁμήρειαν τὸν προσοφειλόμενον μισθόν.

This passage is both doubtful in the text and difficult in the translation. Among the many different explanations given by the commentators, I adopt that of Dr. Arnold as the least unsatisfactory, though without any confidence that it is right.

[6] Thucyd. viii, 45. Τὰς τε πόλεις δεομένας χρημάτων ἀπήλασεν, αὐτὸς ἀντιλέγων ὑπὲρ τοῦ Τισσαφέρνους, ὡς οἱ μὲν Χῖοι ἀναίσχυντοι εἶεν, πλουσιώτατοι ὄντες τῶν Ἑλλήνων, ἐπικουρίᾳ δὲ ὅμως σωζόμενοι ἀξιοῦσι καὶ τοῖς σώμασι καὶ τοῖς χρήμασιν ἄλλους ὑπὲρ τῆς ἐκείνων ἐλευθερίας κινδυνεύειν.

[7] Thucyd. viii, 46. Τήν τε τροφὴν κακῶς ἐπόριζε τοῖς Πελοποννησίοις καὶ ναυμαχεῖν οὐκ εἴα· ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰς Φοινίσσας ναῦς φάσκων ἥξειν καὶ ἐκ περιόντος ἀγωνιεῖσθαι ἔφθειρε τὰ πράγματα καὶ τὴν ἀκμὴν τοῦ ναυτικοῦ αὐτῶν ἀφείλετο, γενομένην καὶ πάνυ ἰσχυρὰν, τά τε ἄλλα, καταφανέστερον ἢ ὥστε λανθάνειν, οὐ προθύμως ξυνεπολέμει.

While Alkibiadês, as the confidential agent and interpreter of Tissaphernês, was carrying on this anti-Peloponnesian policy through the autumn and winter of 412-411 B.C.,—partly during the stay of the Peloponnesian fleet at Milêtus, partly after it had moved to Knidus and Rhodes,—he was at the same time opening correspondence with the Athenian officers at Samos. His breach with the Peloponnesians, as well as his ostensible position in the service of Tissaphernês, were facts well known among the Athenian armament; and his scheme was, to procure both restoration and renewed power in his native city, by representing himself as competent to bring over to her the aid and alliance of Persia, through his ascendency over the mind of the satrap. His hostility to the democracy, however, was so generally known, that he despaired of accomplishing his return, unless he could connect it with an oligarchical revolution; which, moreover, was not less gratifying to his sentiment of vengeance for the past, than to his ambition for the future. Accordingly, he sent over a private message to the officers and trierarchs at Samos, several of them doubtless his personal friends, desiring to be remembered to the “best men” in the armament,[8] such was one of the standing phrases by which oligarchical men knew and described each other; and intimating his anxious wish to come again as a citizen among them, bringing with him Tissaphernês as their ally. But he would do this only on condition of the formation of an oligarchical government; nor would he ever again set foot amidst the odious democracy to whom he owed his banishment.[9]

[8] Thucyd. viii, 47. Τὰ μὲν καὶ Ἀλκιβιάδου προσπέμψαντος λόγους ἐς τοὺς δυνατωτάτους αὐτῶν (Ἀθηναίων) ἄνδρας, ὥστε μνησθῆναι περὶ αὐτοῦ ἐς ~τοὺς βελτίστους~ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, ὅτι ἐπ᾽ ὀλιγαρχίᾳ βούλεται, καὶ οὐ πονηρίᾳ οὐδὲ δημοκρατίᾳ τῇ ἑαυτὸν ἐκβαλούσῃ, κατελθὼν, etc.

[9] Thucyd. viii, 47.

Such was the first originating germ of that temporary calamity, which so nearly brought Athens to absolute ruin, called the Oligarchy of Four Hundred: a suggestion from the same exile who had already so deeply wounded his country by sending Gylippus to Syracuse, and the Lacedæmonian garrison to Dekeleia. As yet, no man in Samos had thought of a revolution; but the moment that the idea was thus started, the trierarchs and wealthy men in the armament caught at it with avidity. To subvert the democracy for their own profit, and to be rewarded for doing so with the treasures of Persia as a means of carrying on the war against the Peloponnesians, was an extent of good fortune greater than they could possibly have hoped. Amidst the exhaustion of the public treasure at Athens, and the loss of tribute from her dependencies, it was now the private proprietors, and most of all, the wealthy proprietors, upon whom the cost of military operations fell: from which burden they here saw the prospect of relief, coupled with increased chance of victory. Elate with so tempting a promise, a deputation of them crossed over from Samos to the mainland to converse personally with Alkibiadês, who again renewed his assurances in person, that he would bring not only Tissaphernês, but the Great King himself, into active alliance and coöperation with Athens, provided they would put down the Athenian democracy, which he affirmed that the king could not possibly trust.[10] He doubtless did not omit to set forth the other side of the alternative; that, if the proposition were refused, Persian aid would be thrown heartily into the scale of the Peloponnesians, in which case, there was no longer any hope of safety for Athens.

[10] Thucyd. viii, 48.

On the return of the deputation with these fresh assurances, the oligarchical men in Samos came together, both in greater number and with redoubled ardor, to take their measures for subverting the democracy. They even ventured to speak of the project openly among the mass of the armament, who listened to it with nothing but aversion, but who were silenced at least, though not satisfied, by being told that the Persian treasury would be thrown open to them on condition, and only on condition, that they would relinquish their democracy. Such was at this time the indispensable need of foreign money for the purposes of the war, such was the certainty of ruin, if the Persian treasure went to the aid of the enemy, that the most democratical Athenian might well hesitate when the alternative was thus laid before him. The oligarchical conspirators, however, knew well that they had the feeling of the armament altogether against them, that the best which they could expect from it was a reluctant acquiescence, and that they must accomplish the revolution by their own hands and management. They formed themselves into a political confederacy, or hetæria, for the purpose of discussing the best measures towards their end. It was resolved to send a deputation to Athens, with Peisander[11] at the head, to make known the new prospects, and to put the standing oligarchical clubs, or hetæries, into active coöperation for the purpose of violently breaking up the democracy, and farther to establish oligarchical governments in all the remaining dependencies of Athens. They imagined that these dependencies would be thus induced to remain faithful to her, perhaps even that some of those which had already revolted might come back to their allegiance, when once she should be relieved from her democracy, and placed under the rule of her “best and most virtuous citizens.”

[11] It is asserted in an Oration of Lysias (Orat. xxv, Δήμου Καταλύσεως Ἀπολογία, c. 3, p. 766, Reisk.) that Phrynichus and Peisander embarked in this oligarchical conspiracy for the purpose of getting clear of previous crimes committed under the democracy. But there is nothing to countenance this assertion, and the narrative of Thucydidês gives quite a different color to their behavior.

Peisander was now serving with the armament at Samos; moreover, his forwardness and energy—presently to be described—in taking the formidable initiative of putting down the Athenian democracy, is to me quite sufficient evidence that the taunts of the comic writers against his cowardice are unfounded. Xenophon in the Symposion repeats this taunt (ii, 14) which also appears in Aristophanês, Eupolis, Plato Comicus, and others: see the passages collected in Meineke, Histor. Critic. Comicor. Græcorum, vol. i, p. 178, etc.

Modern writers on Grecian history often repeat such bitter jests as if they were so much genuine and trustworthy evidence against the person libelled.

Hitherto, the bargain tendered for acceptance had been, subversion of the Athenian democracy and restoration of Alkibiadês, on one hand, against hearty coöperation, and a free supply of gold from Persia, on the other. But what security was there that such bargain would be realized, or that when the first part should have been brought to pass, the second would follow? There was absolutely no security except the word of Alkibiadês,—very little to be trusted, even when promising what was in his own power to perform, as we may recollect from his memorable dealing with the Lacedæmonian envoys at Athens,—and on the present occasion, vouching for something in itself extravagant and preposterous. For what reasonable motive could be imagined to make the Great King shape his foreign policy according to the interests of Alkibiadês, or to inspire him with such lively interest in the substitution of oligarchy for democracy at Athens? This was a question which the oligarchical conspirators at Samos not only never troubled themselves to raise, but which they had every motive to suppress. The suggestion of Alkibiadês coincided fully with their political interest and ambition. Their object was to put down the democracy, and get possession of the government for themselves; and the promise of Persian gold, if they could get it accredited, was inestimable as a stepping-stone towards this goal, whether it afterwards turned out to be a delusion or not. The probability is, that having a strong interest in believing it themselves, and a still stronger interest in making others believe it, they talked each other into a sincere persuasion. Without adverting to this fact, we should be at a loss to understand how the word of such a man as Alkibiadês, on such a matter, could be so implicitly accepted as to set in motion a whole train of novel and momentous events.

There was one man, and one man alone, so far as we know, who ventured openly to call it in question. This was Phrynichus, one of the generals of the fleet, who had recently given valuable counsel after the victory of Milêtus; a clear-sighted and sagacious man, but personally hostile to Alkibiadês, and thoroughly seeing through his character and projects. Though Phrynichus was afterwards one of the chief organizers of the oligarchical movement, when it became detached from, and hostile to Alkibiadês, yet under the actual circumstances he discountenanced it altogether.[12] Alkibiadês, he said, had no attachment to oligarchical government rather than to democratical; nor could he be relied on for standing by it after it should have been set up. His only purpose was, to make use of the oligarchical conspiracy now forming, for his own restoration; which, if brought to pass, could not fail to introduce political discord into the camp, the greatest misfortune that could at present happen. As to the Persian king, it was unreasonable to expect that he would put himself out of his way to aid the Athenians, his old enemies, in whom he had no confidence, while he had the Peloponnesians present as allies, with a good naval force and powerful cities in his own territory, from whom he had never experienced either insult or annoyance. Moreover, the dependencies of Athens—upon whom it was now proposed to confer simultaneously with Athens herself, the blessing of oligarchical government—would receive that boon with indifference. Those who had already revolted would not come back, those who yet remained faithful, would not be the more inclined to remain so longer. Their object would be to obtain autonomy, either under oligarchy or democracy, as the case might be. Assuredly, they would not expect better treatment from an oligarchical government at Athens, than from a democratical; for they knew that those self-styled “good and virtuous” men, who would form the oligarchy, were, as ministers of democracy, the chief advisers and instigators of the people to iniquitous deeds, most commonly for nothing but their own individual profit. From an Athenian oligarchy, the citizens of these dependencies had nothing to expect but violent executions without any judicial trial; but under the democracy, they could obtain shelter and the means of appeal, while their persecutors were liable to restraint and chastisement, from the people and the popular dikasteries. Such, Phrynichus affirmed on his own personal knowledge, was the genuine feeling among the dependencies of Athens.[13] Having thus shown the calculations of the conspirators—as to Alkibiadês, as to Persia, and as to the allied dependencies—to be all illusory, Phrynichus concluded by entering his decided protest against adopting the propositions of Alkibiadês.

[12] Phrynichus is affirmed, in an Oration of Lysias, to have been originally poor, keeping sheep in the country part of Attica; then, to have resided in the city, and practised what was called _sycophancy_, or false and vexatious accusation before the dikastery and the public assembly, (Lysias, Orat. xx. pro Polystrato, c. 3, p. 674, Reisk.)

[13] Thucyd. viii, 48. Τάς τε ξυμμαχίδας πόλεις, αἷς ὑπεσχῆσθαι δὴ σφᾶς ὀλιγαρχίαν, ὅτι δὴ καὶ αὐτοὶ οὐ δημοκρατήσονται, εὖ εἰδέναι ἔφη ὅτι οὐδὲν μᾶλλον σφίσιν οὔθ᾽ αἱ ἀφεστηκυῖαι προσχωρήσονται, οὔθ᾽ αἱ ὑπάρχουσαι βεβαιότεραι ἔσονται· οὐ γὰρ βουλήσεσθαι αὐτοὺς μετ᾽ ὀλιγαρχίας ἢ δημοκρατίας δουλεύειν μᾶλλον, ἢ μεθ᾽ ὁποτέρου ἂν τύχωσι τούτων ἐλευθέρους εἶναι. Τούς ~τε καλοὺς κἀγαθοὺς ὀνομαζομένους~ οὐκ ἐλάσσω αὐτοὺς νομίζειν σφίσι πράγματα παρέξειν τοῦ ~δήμου, ποριστὰς ὄντας καὶ ἐσηγητὰς τῶν κακῶν τῷ δήμῳ, ἐξ ὧν τὰ πλείω αὐτοὺς ὠφελεῖσθαι~· καὶ τὸ μὲν ἐπ᾽ ἐκείνοις εἶναι, καὶ ἄκριτοι ἂν καὶ βιαιότερον ἀποθνήσκειν, τὸν τε ~δῆμον σφῶν τε καταφυγὴν εἶναι καὶ ἐκείνων σωφρονιστήν~. Καὶ ταῦτα ~παρ᾽ αὐτῶν τῶν ἔργων ἐπισταμένας~ τὰς πόλεις σαφῶς αὐτὸς εἰδέναι, ὅτι οὕτω νομίζουσι.

In taking the comparison between oligarchy and democracy in Greece, there is hardly any evidence more important than this passage: a testimony to the comparative merit of democracy, pronounced by an oligarchical conspirator, and sanctioned by an historian himself unfriendly to the democracy.

But in this protest, borne out afterwards by the result, he stood nearly alone. The tide of opinion, among the oligarchical conspirators, ran so furiously the other way, that it was resolved to despatch Peisander and others immediately to Athens to consummate the oligarchical revolution as well as the recall of Alkibiadês; and at the same time to propose to the people their new intended ally, Tissaphernês.

Phrynichus knew well what would be the consequence to himself—if this consummation were brought about, as he foresaw that it probably would be—from the vengeance of his enemy Alkibiadês against his recent opposition. Satisfied that the latter would destroy him, he took measures for destroying Alkibiadês beforehand, even by a treasonable communication to the Lacedæmonian admiral Astyochus at Milêtus, to whom he sent a secret account of the intrigues which the Athenian exile was carrying on at Samos to the prejudice of the Peloponnesians, prefaced with an awkward apology for this sacrifice of the interests of his country to the necessity of protecting himself against a personal enemy. But Phrynichus was imperfectly informed of the real character of the Spartan commander, or of his relations with Tissaphernês and Alkibiadês. Not merely was the latter now at Magnesia, under the protection of the satrap, and out of the power of the Lacedæmonians, but Astyochus, a traitor to his duty through the gold of Tissaphernês, went up thither to show the letter of Phrynichus to the very person whom it was intended to expose. Alkibiadês forthwith sent intelligence to the generals and officers at Samos, of the step taken by Phrynichus, and pressed them to put him to death.

The life of Phrynichus now hung by a thread, and was probably preserved only by that respect for judicial formalities so deeply rooted in the Athenian character. In the extremity of danger, he resorted to a still more subtle artifice to save himself. He despatched a second letter to Astyochus, complaining of the violation of confidence in regard to the former, but at the same time intimating that he was now willing to betray to the Lacedæmonians the camp and armament at Samos. He invited Astyochus to come and attack the place, which was as yet unfortified, explaining minutely in what manner the attack could be best conducted. And he concluded by saying that this, as well as every other means of defence, must be pardoned to one whose life was in danger from a personal enemy. Foreseeing that Astyochus would betray this letter as he had betrayed the former, Phrynichus waited a proper time, and then revealed to the camp the intention of the enemy to make an attack, as if it had reached him by private information. He insisted on the necessity of immediate precautions, and himself, as general, superintended the work of fortification, which was soon completed. Presently arrived a letter from Alkibiadês, communicating to the army that Phrynichus had betrayed them, and that the Peloponnesians were on the point of making an attack. But this letter, arriving after the precautions taken by order of Phrynichus himself had been already completed, was construed as a mere trick on the part of Alkibiadês himself, through his acquaintance with the intentions of the Peloponnesians, to raise a charge of treasonable correspondence against his personal enemy. The impression thus made by his second letter effaced the taint which had been left upon Phrynichus by the first, insomuch that the latter stood exculpated on both charges.[14]

[14] Thucyd. viii, 50, 51.

But Phrynichus, though successful in extricating himself, failed thoroughly in his manœuvre against the influence and life of Alkibiadês; in whose favor the oligarchical movement not only went on, but was transferred from Samos to Athens. On arriving at the latter place, Peisander and his companions laid before the public assembly the projects which had been conceived by the oligarchs at Samos. The people were invited to restore Alkibiadês and renounce their democratical constitution; in return for which, they were assured of obtaining the Persian king as an ally, and of overcoming the Peloponnesians.[15] Violent was the storm which these propositions raised in the public assembly. Many speakers rose in animated defence of the democracy; few, if any, distinctly against it. The opponents of Alkibiadês indignantly denounced the mischief of restoring him, in violation of the laws, and in reversal of a judicial sentence, while the Eumolpidæ and Kerykes, the sacred families connected with the Eleusinian mysteries which Alkibiadês had violated, entered their solemn protest on religious grounds to the same effect. Against all these vehement opponents, whose impassioned invectives obtained the full sympathy of the assembly, Peisander had but one simple reply. He called them forward successively by name, and put to each the question: “What hope have you of salvation for the city, when the Peloponnesians have a naval force against us fully equal to ours, together with a greater number of allied cities, and when the king as well as Tissaphernês are supplying them with money, while we have no money left? What hope have you of salvation, unless we can persuade the king to come over to our side?” The answer was a melancholy negative, or perhaps not less melancholy silence. “Well, then, rejoined Peisander, that object cannot possibly be attained, unless we conduct our political affairs for the future in a more moderate way, and put the powers of government more in the hands of a few, and unless we recall Alkibiadês, the only man now living who is competent to do the business. Under present circumstances, we surely shall not lay greater stress upon our political constitution than upon the salvation of the city; the rather as what we now enact may be hereafter modified, if it be found not to answer.”

[15] In the speech made by Theramenês (the Athenian) during the oligarchy of Thirty, seven years afterwards, it is affirmed that the Athenian people voted the adoption of the oligarchy of Four Hundred, from being told that the _Lacedæmonians_ would never trust a democracy (Xenoph. Hellen. ii, 3, 45).

This is thoroughly incorrect, a specimen of the loose assertion of speakers in regard to facts even not very long past. At the moment when Theramenês said this, the question, what political constitution at Athens the Lacedæmonians would please to tolerate, was all-important to the Athenians. Theramenês transfers the feelings of the present to the incidents of the past.

Against the proposed oligarchical change, the repugnance of the assembly was alike angry and unanimous. But they were silenced by the imperious necessity of the case, as the armament at Samos had been before; and admitting the alternative laid down by Peisander, as I have observed already, the most democratical citizen might be embarrassed as to his vote. Whether any speaker, like Phrynichus at Samos, arraigned the fallacy of the alternative, and called upon Peisander for some guarantee, better than mere asseveration, of the benefits to come, we are not informed. But the general vote of the assembly, reluctant and only passed in the hope of future change, sanctioned his recommendation.[16] He and ten other envoys, invested with full powers of negotiating with Alkibiadês and Tissaphernês, were despatched to Ionia immediately. Peisander at the same time obtained from the assembly a vote deposing Phrynichus from his command; under the accusation of having traitorously caused the loss of Iasus and the capture of Amorgês, after the battle of Milêtus, but from the real certainty that he would prove an insuperable bar to all negotiations with Alkibiadês. Phrynichus, with his colleague Skironidês, being thus displaced, Leon and Diomedon were sent to Samos as commanders in their stead; an appointment of which, as will be presently seen, Peisander was far from anticipating the consequences.

[16] Thucyd. viii, 54. Ὁ δὲ δῆμος τὸ μὲν πρῶτον ἀκούων χαλεπῶς ἔφερε τὸ περὶ τῆς ὀλιγαρχίας· σαφῶς δὲ διδασκόμενος ὑπὸ τοῦ Πεισάνδρου μὴ εἶναι ἄλλην σωτηρίαν, ~δείσας, καὶ ἅμα ἐλπίζων ὡς καὶ μεταβαλεῖται, ἐνέδωκε~.

“Atheniensibus, imminente periculo belli, major salutis quam dignitatis cura fuit. Itaque, permittente populo, imperium ad Senatum transfertur,” (Justin, v, 3).

Justin is correct, so far as this vote goes: but he takes no notice of the change of matters afterwards, when the establishment of the Four Hundred was consummated _without_ the promised benefit of Persian alliance, and by simple terrorism.

Before his departure for Asia, he took a step yet more important. He was well aware that the recent vote—a result of fear inspired by the war, representing a sentiment utterly at variance with that of the assembly, and only procured as the price of Persian aid against a foreign enemy—would never pass into a reality by the spontaneous act of the people themselves. It was, indeed, indispensable as a first step; partly as an authority to himself, partly also as a confession of the temporary weakness of the democracy, and as a sanction and encouragement for the oligarchical forces to show themselves. But the second step yet remained to be performed; that of calling these forces into energetic action, organizing an amount of violence sufficient to extort from the people actual submission in addition to verbal acquiescence, and thus, as it were, tying down the patient while the process of emasculation was being consummated. Peisander visited all the various political clubs, conspiracies, or hetæries, which were habitual and notorious at Athens; associations, bound together by oath, among the wealthy citizens, partly for purposes of amusement, but chiefly pledging the members to stand by each other in objects of political ambition, in judicial trials, in accusation or defence of official men after the period of office had expired, in carrying points through the public assembly, etc. Among these clubs were distributed most of “the best citizens, the good and honorable men, the elegant men, the well known, the temperate, the honest and moderate men,”[17] etc., to employ that complimentary phraseology by which wealthy and anti-popular politicians have chosen to designate each other, in ancient as well as in modern times. And though there were doubtless individuals among them who deserved these appellations in their best sense, yet the general character of the clubs was not the less exclusive and oligarchical. In the details of political life, they had different partialities as well as different antipathies, and were oftener in opposition than in coöperation with each other. But they furnished, when taken together, a formidable anti-popular force; generally either in abeyance or disseminated in the accomplishment of smaller political measures and separate personal successes; but capable, at a special crisis, of being evoked, organized, and put in conjoint attack, for the subversion of the democracy. Such was the important movement now initiated by Peisander. He visited separately each of these clubs, put them into communication with each other, and exhorted them all to joint aggressive action against their common enemy the democracy, at a moment when it was already intimidated and might be finally overthrown.[18]

[17] Οἱ βέλτιστοι, οἱ καλοκἀγαθοὶ, οἱ χαριέντες, οἱ γνώριμοι, οἱ σώφρονες, etc.: le parti honnête et modéré, etc.

[18] About these ξυνωμοσίαι ἐπὶ δίκαις καὶ ἀρχαῖς, political and judicial associations, see above, in this History, vol. iv, ch. xxxvii, pp. 399, 400; vol. vi, ch. li. pp. 290, 291: see also Hermann Büttner, Geschichte der politischen Hetærieen zu Athen. pp. 75, 79, Leipsic, 1840.

There seem to have been similar political clubs or associations at Carthage, exercising much influence, and holding perpetual banquets as a means of largess to the poor, Aristotel. Polit. ii, 8, 2; Livy, xxxiii, 46; xxxiv, 61; compare Kluge, ad Aristotel. De Polit. Carthag. pp. 46-127, Wratisl. 1824.

The like political associations were both of long duration among the nobility of Rome, and of much influence for political objects as well as judicial success: “coitiones (compare Cicero pro Cluentio, c. 54, s. 148) honorum adipiscendorum causâ factæ, factiones, sodalitates.” The incident described in Livy (ix. 26) is remarkable. The senate, suspecting the character and proceedings of these clubs, appointed the dictator Mænius (in 312 B.C.) as commissioner with full power to investigate and deal with them. But such was the power of the clubs, in a case where they had a common interest and acted in coöperation (as was equally the fact under Peisander at Athens), that they completely frustrated the inquiry, and went on as before. “Nec diutius, _ut fit, quam dum recens erat, quæstio per clara nomina reorum viguit_: inde labi cœpit ad viliora capita, _donec coitionibus factionibusque, adversus quas comparata erat, oppressa est_.” (Livy. ix, 26.) Compare Dio. Cass. xxxvii, 57, about the ἑταιρικὰ of the Triumvirs at Rome. Quintus Cicero (de Petition. Consulat. c. 5) says to his brother, the orator: “Quod si satis grati homines essent, hæc omnia (_i.e._ all the _subsidia_ necessary for success in his coming election) tibi parata esse debebant, sicut parata esse confido. Nam hoc biennio quatuor _sodalitates_ civium ad ambitionem gratiosissimorum tibi obligasti.... Horum in causis ad te deferundis _quidnam eorum sodales tibi receperint et confirmarint_, scio; nam interfui.”

See Th. Mommsen, De Collegiis et Sodaliciis Romanorum, Kiel, 1843, ch. iii, sects. 5, 6, 7; also the Dissertation of Wunder, inserted in the Onomasticon Tullianum of Orelli and Baiter, in the last volume of their edition of Cicero, pp. 200-210, ad Ind. Legum; _Lex Licinia de Sodalitiis_.

As an example of these clubs or conspiracies for mutual support in ξυνωμοσίαι ἐπὶ δίκαις (not including ἀρχαῖς, so far as we can make out), we may cite the association called οἱ Εἰκαδεῖς, made known to us by an Inscription recently discovered in Attica, and published first in Dr. Wordsworth’s Athens and Attica, p. 223; next in Ross, Die Demen von Attica, Preface, p. v. These Εἰκαδεῖς are an association, the members of which are bound to each other by a common oath, as well as by a curse which the mythical hero of the association, Eikadeus, is supposed to have imprecated (ἐνάντιον τῇ ἄρᾳ ἣν Εἰκαδεὺς ἐπηράσατο); they possess common property, and it was held contrary to the oath for any of the members to enter into a pecuniary process against the κοινόν: compare analogous obligations among the Roman Sodales, Mommsen, p. 4. Some members had violated their obligation upon this point: Polyxenus had attacked them at law for false witness: and the general body of the Eikadeis pass a vote of thanks to him for so doing, and choose three of their members to assist him in the cause before the dikastery (οἳτινες συναγωνιοῦνται τῷ ἐπεσκημμένῳ τοῖς μάρτυσι): compare the ἑταιρίαι alluded to in Demosthenês (cont. Theokrin. c. 11, p. 1335) as assisting Theokrinês before the dikastery, and intimidating the witnesses.

The Guilds in the European cities during the Middle Ages, usually sworn to by every member, and called _conjurationes Amicitiæ_, bear in many respects a resemblance to these ξυνωμοσίαι; though the judicial proceedings in the mediæval cities, being so much less popular than at Athens, narrowed their range of interference in this direction: their political importance, however, was quite equal. (See Wilda, Das Gilden Wesen des Mittelalters, Abschn. ii, p. 167, etc.)

“Omnes autem ad Amicitiam pertinentes villæ per _fidem et sacramentum_ firmaverunt, quod unus subveniat alteri tanquam fratri suo in utili et honesto,” (ib. p. 148.)

Having taken other necessary measures towards the same purpose, Peisander left Athens with his colleagues to enter upon his negotiation with Tissaphernês. But the coöperation and aggressive movement of the clubs which he had originated was prosecuted with increased ardor during his absence, and even fell into hands more organizing and effective than his own. The rhetorical teacher Antiphon, of the deme Rhamnus, took it in hand especially, acquired the confidence of the clubs, and drew the plan of campaign against the democracy. He was a man estimable in private life, and not open to pecuniary corruption: in other respects, of preëminent ability,—in contrivance, judgment, speech, and action. The profession to which he belonged, generally unpopular among the democracy, excluding him from taking rank as a speaker either in the public assembly or the dikastery: for a rhetorical teacher, contending in either of them against a private speaker, to repeat a remark already once made, was considered to stand at the same unfair advantage, as a fencing-master fighting a duel with a gentleman would be held to stand in modern times. Thus debarred himself from the showy celebrity of Athenian political life, Antiphon became only the more consummate, as a master of advice, calculation, scheming, and rhetorical composition,[19] to assist the celebrity of others; insomuch that his silent assistance in political and judicial debates, as a sort of chamber-counsel, was highly appreciated and largely paid. Now such were precisely the talents required for the present occasion; while Antiphon, who hated the democracy for having hitherto kept him in the shade, gladly bent his full talents towards its subversion.

[19] The person described by Krito, in the Euthydêmus of Plato (c. 31, p. 305, C.), as having censured Sokratês for conversing with Euthydêmus and Dionysodorus, is presented exactly like Antiphon in Thucydidês: ἥκιστα νὴ τὸν Δία ῥήτωρ· οὐδὲ οἶμαι πώποτε αὐτὸν ἐπὶ δικαστήριον ἀναβεβηκέναι· ἀλλ᾽ ἐπαΐειν αὐτόν φασι περὶ τοῦ πράγματος, νὴ τὸν Δία, καὶ δεινὸν εἶναι καὶ δεινοὺς λόγους ξυντιθέναι.

Heindorf thinks that Isokratês is here meant: Groen van Prinsterer talks of Lysias; Winkelmann, of Thrasymachus. The description would fit Antiphon as well as either of these three: though Stallbaum may perhaps be right in supposing no particular individual to have been in the mind of Plato.

Οἱ συνδικεῖν ἐπιστάμενοι, whom Xenophon specifies as being so eminently useful to a person engaged in a lawsuit, are probably the persons who knew how to address the dikastery effectively in support of his case (Xenoph. Memorab. i, 2, 51).

Such was the man to whom Peisander, in departing, chiefly confided the task of organizing the anti-popular clubs, for the consummation of the revolution already in immediate prospect. His chief auxiliary was Theramenês, another Athenian, now first named, of eminent ability and cunning. His father (either natural or by adoption), Agnon, was one of the probûli, and had formerly been founder of Amphipolis. Even Phrynichus—whose sagacity we have already had occasion to appreciate, and who, from hatred towards Alkibiadês, had pronounced himself decidedly against the oligarchical movement at Samos—became zealous in forwarding the movement at Athens, after his dismissal from the command. He brought to the side of Antiphon and Theramenês a contriving head not inferior to theirs, coupled with daring and audacity even superior. Under such skilful leaders, the anti-popular force of Athens was organized with a deep skill, and directed with a dexterous wickedness, never before witnessed in Greece.

At the time when Peisander and the other envoys reached Ionia, seemingly about the end of January or beginning of February 411 B.C., the Peloponnesian fleet had already quitted Milêtus and gone to Knidus and Rhodes, on which latter island Leon and Diomedon made some hasty descents, from the neighboring island of Chalkê. At the same time the Athenian armament at Chios was making progress in the siege of that place and the construction of the neighboring fort at Delphinium. Pedaritus, the Lacedæmonian governor of the island, had sent pressing messages to solicit aid from the Peloponnesians at Rhodes, but no aid arrived; and he therefore resolved to attempt a general sally and attack upon the Athenians with his whole force, foreign as well as Chian. Though at first he obtained some success, the battle ended in his complete defeat and death, with great slaughter of the Chian troops, and with the loss of many whose shields were captured in the pursuit.[20] The Chians, now reduced to greater straits than before, and beginning to suffer severely from famine, were only enabled to hold out by a partial reinforcement soon afterwards obtained from the Peloponnesian guardships at Milêtus. A Spartan named Leon, who had come out in the vessel of Antisthenês as one of the epibatæ, or marines, conducted this reinforcing squadron of twelve triremes, chiefly Thurian and Syracusan, succeeding Pedaritus in the general command of the island.[21]

[20] Thucyd. viii, 55, 56.

[21] Thucyd. viii, 61. ἔτυχον δὲ ἔτι ἐν Ῥόδῳ ὄντος Ἀστυόχου ἐκ τῆς Μιλήτου Λέοντά τε ἄνδρα Σπαρτιάτην, ~ὃς Ἀντισθένει ἐπιβάτης~ ξυνέπλει, τοῦτον κεκομισμένοι μετὰ τὸν Πεδαρίτου θάνατον ἄρχοντα, etc.

I do not see why the word ἐπιβάτης should not be construed here, as elsewhere, in its ordinary sense of _miles classiarius_. The commentators, see the notes of Dr. Arnold, Poppo, and Göller start difficulties which seem to me of little importance; and they imagine divers new meanings, for none of which any authority is produced. We ought not to wonder that a common _miles classiarius_, or marine, being a Spartan citizen, should be appointed commander at Chios, when, a few chapters afterwards, we find Thrasybulus at Samos promoted, from being a common hoplite in the ranks, to be one of the Athenian generals (viii. 73).

The like remark may be made on the passage cited from Xenophon (Hellenic. i. 3, 17), about Hegesandridas—ἐπιβάτης ὢν Μινδάρου, where also the commentators reject the common meaning (see Schneider’s note in the Addenda to his edition of 1791, p. 97). The participle ὢν in that passage must be considered as an inaccurate substitute for γεγενημένος, since Mindarus was dead at the time. Hegesandridas _had been_ among the epibatæ of Mindarus, and was _now_ in command of a squadron on the coast of Thrace.

It was while Chios seemed thus likely to be recovered by Athens—and while the superior Peloponnesian fleet was paralyzed at Rhodes by Persian intrigues and bribes—that Peisander arrived in Ionia to open his negotiations with Alkibiadês and Tissaphernês. He was enabled to announce that the subversion of the democracy at Athens was already begun, and would soon be consummated: and he now required the price which had been promised in exchange, Persian alliance and aid to Athens against the Peloponnesians. But Alkibiadês knew well that he had promised what he had not the least chance of being able to perform. The satrap had appeared to follow his advice,—or had rather followed his own inclination, employing Alkibiadês as an instrument and auxiliary,—in the endeavor to wear out both parties, and to keep them nearly on an equality until each should ruin the other. But he was no way disposed to identify himself with the cause of Athens, and to break decidedly with the Peloponnesians, especially at a moment when their fleet was both the greater of the two, and in occupation of an island close to his own satrapy. Accordingly Alkibiadês, when summoned by the Athenian envoys to perform his engagement, found himself in a dilemma from which he could only escape by one of his characteristic manœuvres.

Receiving the envoys himself in conjunction with Tissaphernês, and speaking on behalf of the latter, he pushed his demands to an extent which he knew that the Athenians would never concede, in order that the rupture might seem to be on their side, and not on his. First, he required the whole of Ionia to be conceded to the Great King; next, all the neighboring islands, with some other items besides.[22] Large as these requisitions were, comprehending the cession of Lesbos and Samos as well as Chios, and replacing the Persian monarchy in the condition in which it had stood in 496 B.C., before the Ionic revolt, Peisander and his colleagues granted them all: so that Alkibiadês was on the point of seeing his deception exposed and frustrated. At last, he bethought himself of a fresh demand, which touched Athenian pride, as well as Athenian safety, in the tenderest place. He required that the Persian king should be held free to build ships of war in unlimited number, and to keep them sailing along the coast as he might think fit, through all these new portions of territory. After the immense concessions already made, the envoys not only rejected this fresh demand at once, but resented it as an insult, which exposed the real drift and purpose of Alkibiadês. Not merely did it cancel the boasted treaty, called the Peace of Kallias, concluded about forty years before between Athens and Persia, and limiting the Persian ships of war to the sea eastward of Phasêlis, but it extinguished the maritime empire of Athens, and compromised the security of all the coasts and islands of the Ægean. To see Lesbos, Chios, and Samos, etc., in possession of Persia, was sufficiently painful; but if there came to be powerful Persian fleets on these islands it would be the certain precursor and means of farther conquests to the westward, and would revive the aggressive dispositions of the Great King, as they had stood at the beginning of the reign of Xerxes. Peisander and his comrades, abruptly breaking off the debate, returned to Samos; indignant at the discovery, which they now made for the first time, that Alkibiadês had juggled them from the outset, and was imposing conditions which he knew to be inadmissible.[23] They still appear, however, to have thought that Alkibiadês acted thus, not because he _could_ not, but because he _would_ not, bring about the alliance under discussion.[24] They suspected him of playing false with the oligarchical movement which he had himself instigated, and of projecting the accomplishment of his own restoration, coupled with the alliance of Tissaphernês, into the bosom of the democracy which he had begun by denouncing. Such was the light in which they presented his conduct, venting their disappointment in invectives against his duplicity, and in asseverations that he was after all unsuitable for a place in oligarchical society. Such declarations, circulated at Samos, to account for their unexpected failure in realizing the hopes which they had raised, created among the armament an impression that Alkibiadês was really favorable to the democracy, at the same time leaving unabated the prestige of his unbounded ascendency over Tissaphernês and the Great King. We shall presently see the effects resulting from this belief.

[22] Thucyd. viii, 56. Ἰωνίαν τε γὰρ πᾶσαν ἠξίουν δίδοσθαι, καὶ αὖθις νήσους τε ἐπικειμένας ~καὶ ἄλλα~, οἷς οὐκ ἐναντιουμένων τῶν Ἀθηναίων, etc.

What this _et cetera_ comprehended, we cannot divine. The demand was certainly ample enough without it.

[23] Thucyd. viii, 56. ναῦς ἠξίου ἐᾷν βασιλέα ποιεῖσθαι, καὶ παραπλεῖν τὴν ~ἑαυτοῦ~ γῆν, ὅπη ἂν καὶ ὅσαις ἂν βούληται.

In my judgment ἑαυτοῦ is decidedly the proper reading here, not ἑαυτῶν. I agree in this respect with Dr. Arnold, Bekker, and Göller.

In a former volume of this History, I have shown reasons for believing, in opposition to Mitford, Dahlmann, and others, that the treaty called by the name of Kallias, and sometimes miscalled by the name of Kimon, was a real fact and not a boastful fiction: see vol. v, ch. xlv, p. 340.

The note of Dr. Arnold, though generally just, gives an inadequate representation of the strong reasons of Athens for rejecting and resenting this third demand.

[24] Thucyd. viii, 63. Καὶ ἐν σφίσιν αὐτοῖς ἅμα οἱ ἐν τῇ Σάμῳ τῶν Ἀθηναίων κοινολογούμενοι ἐσκέψαντο, Ἀλκιβιάδην μέν, ~ἐπειδήπερ οὐ βούλεται~, ἐᾷν (καὶ γὰρ οὐκ ἐπιτήδειον αὐτὸν εἶναι ~ἐς ὀλιγαρχίαν~ ἐλθεῖν), etc.

Immediately after the rupture of the negotiations, however, the satrap took a step well calculated to destroy the hopes of the Athenians altogether, so far as Persian aid was concerned. Though persisting in his policy of lending no decisive assistance to either party and of merely prolonging the war so as to enfeeble both, he yet began to fear that he was pushing matters too far against the Peloponnesians, who had now been two months inactive at Rhodes, with their large fleet hauled ashore. He had no treaty with them actually in force, since Lichas had disallowed the two previous conventions; nor had he furnished them with pay or maintenance. His bribes to the officers had hitherto kept the armament quiet; yet we do not distinctly see how so large a body of men found subsistence.[25] He was now, however, apprized that they could find subsistence no longer, and that they would probably desert, or commit depredations on the coast of his satrapy, or perhaps be driven to hasten on a general action with the Athenians, under desperate circumstances. Under such apprehensions he felt compelled to put himself again in communication with them, to furnish them with pay, and to conclude with them a third convention, the proposition of which he had refused to entertain at Knidus. He therefore went to Kaunus, invited the Peloponnesian leaders to Milêtus, and concluded with them near that town a treaty to the following effect:—

[25] Thucyd. viii, 44-57. In two parallel cases, one in Chios, the other in Korkyra, the seamen of an unpaid armament found subsistence by hiring themselves out for agricultural labor. But this was only during the summer (see Xenoph. Hellen. ii, 1, 1; vi, 2, 37), while the stay of the Peloponnesians at Rhodes was from January to March.

“In this thirteenth year of the reign of Darius, and in the ephorship of Alexippidas at Lacedæmon, a convention is hereby concluded by the Lacedæmonians and their allies, with Tissaphernês and Hieramenês and the sons of Pharnakês, respecting the affairs of the king and of the Lacedæmonians and their allies. The territory of the king, as much of it as is in Asia, shall belong to the king. Let the king determine as he chooses respecting his own territory. The Lacedæmonians and their allies shall not approach the king’s territory with any mischievous purpose, nor shall the king approach that of the Lacedæmonians and their allies with any like purpose. If any one among the Lacedæmonians or their allies shall approach the king’s territory with mischievous purpose, the Lacedæmonians and their allies shall hinder him: if any one from the king’s territory shall approach the Lacedæmonians or their allies with mischievous purpose, the king shall hinder him. Tissaphernês shall provide pay and maintenance, for the fleet now present, at the rate already stipulated, until the king’s fleet shall arrive; after that, it shall be at the option of the Lacedæmonians to maintain their own fleet, if they think fit; or, if they prefer, Tissaphernês shall furnish maintenance, and at the close of the war the Lacedæmonians shall repay to him what they have received. After the king’s fleet shall have arrived, the two fleets shall carry on war conjointly, in such manner as shall seem good to Tissaphernês and the Lacedæmonians and their allies. If they choose to close the war with the Athenians, they shall close it only by joint consent.”[26]

[26] Thucyd. viii, 58.

In comparing this third convention with the two preceding, we find that nothing is now stipulated as to any territory except the continent of Asia; which is insured unreservedly to the king, of course with all the Greek residents planted upon it. But by a diplomatic finesse, the terms of the treaty imply that this is not _all_ the territory which the king is entitled to claim, though nothing is covenanted as to any remainder.[27] Next, this third treaty includes Pharnabazus, the son of Pharnakês, with his satrapy of Daskylium, and Hieramenês, with his district, the extent and position of which we do not know; while in the former treaties no other satrap except Tissaphernês had been concerned. We must recollect that the Peloponnesian fleet included those twenty-seven triremes, which had been brought across by Kalligeitus expressly for the aid of Pharnabazus; and therefore that the latter now naturally became a party to the general operations. Thirdly, we here find, for the first time, formal announcement of a Persian fleet about to be brought up as auxiliary to the Peloponnesians. This was a promise which the satrap now set forth more plainly than before, to amuse them, and to abate the mistrust which they had begun to conceive of his sincerity. It served the temporary purpose of restraining them from any immediate act of despair hostile to his interests, which was all that he looked for. While he renewed his payments, therefore, for the moment, he affected to busy himself in orders and preparations for the fleet from Phenicia.[28]

[27] Thucyd. viii, 58. χώραν τὴν βασιλέως, ~ὅση τῆς Ἀσίας ἐστὶ~, βασιλέως εἶναι· καὶ περὶ τῆς χώρας τῆς ἑαυτοῦ βουλευέτω βασιλεὺς ὅπως βούλεται.

[28] Thucyd. viii, 59.

The Peloponnesian fleet was now ordered to move from Rhodes. Before it quitted that island, however, envoys came thither from Eretria and from Orôpus; which latter place, a dependency on the northeastern frontier of Attica, though protected by an Athenian garrison, had recently been surprised and captured by the Bœotians. The loss of Orôpus much increased the facilities for the revolt of Eubœa; and these envoys came to entreat aid from the Peloponnesian fleet, to second that island in that design. The Peloponnesian commanders, however, felt themselves under prior obligation to relieve the sufferers at Chios, towards which island they first bent their course. But they had scarcely passed the Triopian cape, when they saw the Athenian squadron from Chalkê dogging their motions. Though there was no wish on either side for a general battle, yet they saw evidently that the Athenians would not permit them to pass by Samos, and get to the relief of Chios, without one. Renouncing, therefore, the project of relieving Chios, they again concentrated their force at Milêtus, while the Athenian fleet was also again united at Samos.[29] It was about the end of March, 411 B.C., that the two fleets were thus replaced in the stations which they had occupied four months previously.

[29] Thucyd. viii, 60.

After the breach with Alkibiadês, and still more after this manifest reconciliation of Tissaphernês with the Peloponnesians, Peisander and the oligarchical conspirators at Samos had to reconsider their plan of action. They would not have begun the movement at first, had they not been instigated by Alkibiadês, and furnished by him with the treacherous delusion of Persian alliance to cheat and paralyze the people. They had, indeed, motives enough, from their own personal ambition, to originate it of themselves, apart from Alkibiadês; but without the hopes—equally useful for their purpose, whether false or true—connected with his name, they would have had no chance of achieving the first step. Now, however, that first step had been achieved, before the delusive expectation of Persian gold was dissipated. The Athenian people had been familiarized with the idea of a subversion of their constitution, in consideration of a certain price: it remained to extort from them at the point of the sword, without paying the price, what they had thus consented to sell.[30] Moreover, the leaders of the scheme felt themselves already compromised, so that they could not recede with safety. They had set in motion their partisans at Athens, where the system of murderous intimidation, though the news had not as yet reached Samos, was already in full swing: so that they felt constrained to persevere, as the only chance of preservation to themselves. At the same time, all that faint pretence of public benefit, in the shape of Persian alliance, which had been originally attached to it, and which might have been conceived to enlist in the scheme some timid patriots, was now entirely withdrawn; and nothing remained except a naked, selfish, and unscrupulous scheme of ambition, not only ruining the freedom of Athens at home, but crippling and imperiling her before the foreign enemy, at a moment when her entire strength was scarcely adequate to the contest. The conspirators resolved to persevere, at all hazards, both in breaking down the constitution and in carrying on the foreign war. Most of them being rich men, they were content, Thucydidês observes, to defray the cost out of their own purses, now that they were contending, not for their country, but for their own power and profit.[31]

[30] See Aristotel. Politic. v, 3, 8. He cites this revolution as an instance of one begun by deceit and afterwards consummated by force: οἷον ἐπὶ τῶν τετρακοσίων τὸν δῆμον ἐξηπάτησαν, φάσκοντες τὸν βασιλέα χρήματα παρέξειν πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον τὸν πρὸς Λακεδαιμονίους· ψευσάμενοι δὲ, κατέχειν ἐπειρῶντο τὴν πολιτείαν.

[31] Thucyd. viii, 63. Αὐτοὺς δὲ ἐπὶ σφῶν αὐτῶν, ~ὡς ἤδη καὶ κινδυνεύοντας~, ὁρᾷν ὅτῳ τρόπῳ μὴ ἀνεθήσεται τὰ πράγματα, καὶ τὰ τοῦ πολέμου ἅμα ἀντέχειν, καὶ ἐσφέρειν αὐτοὺς προθύμως χρήματα καὶ ἤν τι ἄλλο δέῃ, ὡς οὐκέτι ~ἄλλοις ἢ σφίσιν αὐτοῖς~ ταλαιπωροῦντας.

They lost no time in proceeding to execution, immediately after returning to Samos from the abortive conference with Alkibiadês. While they despatched Peisander with five of the envoys back to Athens, to consummate what was already in progress there, and the remaining five to oligarchize the dependent allies, they organized all their partisan force in the armament, and began to take measures for putting down the democracy in Samos itself. That democracy had been the product of a forcible revolution, effected about ten months before, by the aid of three Athenian triremes. It had since preserved Samos from revolting like Chios: it was now the means of preserving the democracy at Athens itself. The partisans of Peisander, finding it an invincible obstacle to their views, contrived to gain over a party of the leading Samians now in authority under it. Three hundred of these latter, a portion of those who ten months before had risen in arms to put down the preëxisting oligarchy, now enlisted as conspirators along with the Athenian oligarchs, to put down the Samian democracy, and get possession of the government for themselves. The new alliance was attested and cemented, according to genuine oligarchical practice, by a murder without judicial trial, or an assassination, for which a suitable victim was at hand. The Athenian Hyperbolus, who had been ostracized some years before by the coalition of Nikias and Alkibiadês, together with their respective partisans,—ostracized as Thucydidês tells us, not from any fear of his power and over-ascendent influence, but from his low character, and from his being a disgrace to the city, and thus ostracized by an abuse of the institution,—was now resident at Samos. As he was not a Samian, and had, moreover, been in banishment during the last five or six years, he could have had no power either in the island or the armament, and therefore his death served no prospective purpose. But he represented the demagogic and accusatory eloquence of the democracy, the check upon official delinquency; so that he served as a common object of antipathy to Athenian and Samian oligarchs. Some of the Athenian partisans, headed by Charmînus, one of the generals, in concert with the Samian conspirators, seized Hyperbolus and put him to death, seemingly with some other victims at the same time.[32]

[32] Thucyd. viii, 73. Καὶ Ὑπέρβολόν τέ τινα τῶν Ἀθηναίων, μοχθηρὸν ἄνθρωπον, ὠστρακισμένον οὐ διὰ δυνάμεως καὶ ἀξιώματος φόβον, ἀλλὰ διὰ πονηρίαν καὶ αἰσχύνην τῆς πόλεως, ἀποκτείνουσι μετὰ Χαρμίνου τε ἑνὸς τῶν στρατηγῶν καί τινων τῶν παρὰ σφίσιν Ἀθηναίων, πίστιν διδόντες αὐτοῖς, ~καὶ ἄλλα μετ᾽ αὐτῶν τοιαῦτα ξυνέπραξαν~, τοῖς τε πλείοσιν ὥρμηντο ἐπιτίθεσθαι.

I presume that the words, ἄλλα τοιαῦτα ξυνέπραξαν, must mean that other persons were assassinated along with Hyperbolus.

The incorrect manner in which Mr. Mitford recounts these proceedings at Samos has been properly commented on by Dr. Thirlwall (Hist. Gr. ch. xxviii, vol. iv, p. 30). It is the more surprising, since the phrase μετὰ Χαρμίνου, which Mr. Mitford has misunderstood, is explained in a special note of Duker.

But though these joint assassinations served as a pledge to each section of the conspirators for the fidelity of the other, in respect to farther operations, they at the same time gave warning to opponents. Those leading men at Samos who remained attached to the democracy, looking abroad for defence against the coming attack, made earnest appeal to Leon and Diomedon, the two generals most recently arrived from Athens in substitution for Phrynichus and Skironidês,—men sincerely devoted to the democracy, and adverse to all oligarchical change, as well as to the trierarch Thrasyllus, to Thrasybulus, son of Lykus, then serving as an hoplite, and to many others of the pronounced democrats and patriots in the Athenian armament. They made appeal not simply in behalf of their own personal safety and of their own democracy, now threatened by conspirators of whom a portion were Athenians, but also on grounds of public interest to Athens; since, if Samos became oligarchized, its sympathy with the Athenian democracy and its fidelity to the alliance would be at an end. At this moment the most recent events which had occurred at Athens, presently to be told, were not known, and the democracy was considered as still subsisting there.[33]

[33] Thucyd. viii, 73, 74. οὐκ ἠξίουν περιϊδεῖν αὐτοὺς σφᾶς τε διαφθαρέντας, καὶ Σάμον Ἀθηναίοις ἀλλοτριωθεῖσαν, etc.

... οὐ γὰρ ᾔδεσάν πω τοὺς τετρακοσίους ἄρχοντας, etc.

To stand by the assailed democracy of Samos, and to preserve the island itself, now the mainstay of the shattered Athenian empire, were motives more than sufficient to awaken the Athenian leaders thus solicited. Commencing a personal canvass among the soldiers and seamen, and invoking their interference to avert the overthrow of the Samian democracy, they found the general sentiment decidedly in their favor, but most of all, among the parali, or crew of the consecrated public trireme, called the paralus. These men were the picked seamen of the state,—each of them not merely a freeman, but a full Athenian citizen, receiving higher pay than the ordinary seamen, and known as devoted to the democratical constitution, with an active repugnance to oligarchy itself as well as to everything which scented of it.[34] The vigilance of Leon and Diomedon on the defensive side, counteracted the machinations of their colleague Charmînus, along with the conspirators, and provided for the Samian democracy faithful auxiliaries constantly ready for action. Presently, the conspirators made a violent attack to overthrow the government; but though they chose their own moment and opportunity, they still found themselves thoroughly worsted in the struggle, especially through the energetic aid of the parali. Thirty of their number were slain in the contest, and three of the most guilty afterwards condemned to banishment. The victorious party took no farther revenge, even upon the remainder of the three hundred conspirators, granted a general amnesty, and did their best to reëstablish constitutional and harmonious working of the democracy.[35]

[34] Thucyd. viii, 73. καὶ οὐχ ἥκιστα τοὺς Παράλους, ἄνδρας Ἀθηναίους τε καὶ ἐλευθέρους πάντας ἐν τῇ νηῒ πλέοντας, καὶ ~ἀεὶ δήποτε ὀλιγαρχίᾳ καὶ μὴ παρούσῃ ἐπικειμένους~.

Peitholaus called the paralus ῥόπαλον τοῦ δήμου, “the club, staff, or mace of the people.” (Aristotel. Rhetoric, iii, 3.)

[35] Thucyd. viii, 73. Καὶ τριάκοντα μέν τινας ἀπέκτειναν τῶν τριακοσίων, τρεῖς δὲ τοὺς αἰτιωτάτους φυγῇ ἐζημίωσαν· τοῖς δ᾽ ἄλλοις οὐ μνησικακοῦντες δημοκρατούμενοι τὸ λοιπὸν ξυνεπολίτευον.

Chæreas, an Athenian trierarch, who had been forward in the contest, was sent in the paralus itself to Athens, to make communication of what had occurred. But this democratical crew, on reaching their native city, instead of being received with that welcome which they doubtless expected, found a state of things not less odious than surprising. The democracy of Athens had been subverted: instead of the senate of Five Hundred, and the assembled people, an oligarchy of Four Hundred self-installed persons were enthroned with sovereign authority in the senate-house. The first order of the Four Hundred, on hearing that the paralus had entered Peiræus, was to imprison two or three of the crew, and to remove all the rest from their own privileged trireme aboard a common trireme, with orders to depart forthwith and to cruise near Eubœa. The commander, Chæreas, found means to escape, and returned back to Samos to tell the unwelcome news.[36]

[36] Thucyd. viii. 74.

The steps, whereby this oligarchy of Four Hundred had been gradually raised up to their new power, must be taken up from the time when Peisander quitted Athens,—after having obtained the vote of the public assembly authorizing him to treat with Alkibiadês and Tissaphernês,—and after having set on foot a joint organization and conspiracy of all the anti-popular clubs, which fell under the management especially of Antiphon and Theramenês, afterwards aided by Phrynichus. All the members of that Board of Elders called Probûli, who had been named after the defeat in Sicily, with Agnon, father of Theramenês, at their head,[37]—together with many other leading citizens, some of whom had been counted among the firmest friends of the democracy, joined the conspiracy; while the oligarchical and the neutral rich came into it with ardor; so that a body of partisans was formed both numerous and well provided with money. Antiphon did not attempt to bring them together, or to make any public demonstration, armed or unarmed, for the purpose of overawing the actual authorities. He permitted the senate and the public assembly to go on meeting and debating as usual; but his partisans, neither the names nor the numbers of whom were publicly known, received from him instructions both when to speak and what language to hold. The great topic upon which they descanted, was the costliness of democratical institutions in the present distressed state of the finances, the heavy tax imposed upon the state by paying the senators, the dikasts, the ekklesiasts, or citizens who attended the public assembly, etc. The state could now afford to pay only those soldiers who fought in its defence, nor ought any one else to touch the public money. It was essential, they insisted, to exclude from the political franchise all except a select body of Five Thousand, composed of those who were best able to do service to the city by person and by purse.

[37] Thucyd. viii, 1. About the countenance which _all_ these probûli lent to the conspiracy, see Aristotle, Rhetoric, iii, 18, 2.

Respecting the activity of Agnon, as one of the probûli, in the same cause, see Lysias, Orat. xii, cont. Eratosthen. c. 11, p. 426, Reisk. sect. 66.

The extensive disfranchisement involved in this last proposition was quite sufficiently shocking to the ears of an Athenian assembly. But in reality the proposition was itself a juggle, never intended to become reality, and representing something far short of what Antiphon and his partisans intended. Their design was to appropriate the powers of government to themselves simply, without control or partnership, leaving this body of Five Thousand not merely unconvened, but non-existent, as a mere empty name to impose upon the citizens generally. Of this real intention, however, not a word was as yet spoken. The projected body of Five Thousand was the theme preached upon by all the party orators; yet without submitting any substantive motion for the change, which could not be yet done without illegality.

Even thus indirectly advocated, the project of cutting down the franchise to Five Thousand, and of suppressing all the paid civil functions, was a change sufficiently violent to call forth abundant opponents. For such opponents Antiphon was fully prepared. Of the men who thus stood forward in opposition, either all, or at least all the most prominent, were successively taken off by private assassination. The first of them who thus perished was Androklês, distinguished as a demagogue, or popular speaker, and marked out to vengeance not only by that circumstance, but by the farther fact that he had been among the most vehement accusers of Alkibiadês before his exile. For at this time, the breach of Peisander with Tissaphernês and Alkibiadês had not yet become known at Athens, so that the latter was still supposed to be on the point of returning home as a member of the contemplated oligarchical government. After Androklês, many other speakers of similar sentiments perished in the same way, by unknown hands. A band of Grecian youths, strangers, and got together from different cities,[38] was organized for the business: the victims were all chosen on the same special ground, and the deed was so skilfully perpetrated that neither director nor instrument ever became known. After these assassinations—sure, special, secret, and systematic, emanating from an unknown directory, like a Vehmic tribunal—had continued for some time, the terror which they inspired became intense and universal. No justice could be had, no inquiry could be instituted, even for the death of the nearest and dearest relative. At last, no man dared to demand or even to mention inquiry, looking upon himself as fortunate that he had escaped the same fate in his own person. So finished an organization, and such well-aimed blows, raised a general belief that the conspirators were much more numerous than they were in reality. And as it turned out that there were persons among them who had before been accounted hearty democrats,[39] so at last dismay and mistrust became universally prevalent. Nor did any one dare even to express indignation at the murders going on, much less to talk about redress or revenge, for fear that he might be communicating with one of the unknown conspirators. In the midst of this terrorism, all opposition ceased in the senate and public assembly, so that the speakers of the conspiring oligarchy appeared to carry an unanimous assent.[40]

[38] Thucyd. viii, 69. Οἱ εἴκοσι καὶ ἑκατὸν μετ᾽ αὐτῶν (that is, along with the Four Hundred) Ἕλληνες νεανίσκοι, οἷς ἐχρῶντο εἴ τί που δέοι χειρουργεῖν.

Dr. Arnold explains the words Ἕλληνες νεανίσκοι to mean some of the members of the aristocratical clubs, or unions, formerly spoken of. But I cannot think that Thucydidês would use such an expression to designate Athenian citizens: neither is it probable that Athenian citizens would be employed in repeated acts of such a character.

[39] Even Peisander himself had professed the strongest attachment to the democracy, coupled with exaggerated violence against parties suspected of oligarchical plots, four years before, in the investigations which followed on the mutilation of the Hermæ at Athens (Andokidês de Myster. c. 9, 10, sects. 36-43).

It is a fact that Peisander was one of the prominent movers on both these two occasions, four years apart. And if we could believe Isokratês (de Bigis, sects. 4-7, p. 347), the second of the two occasions was merely the continuance and consummation of a plot which had been projected and begun on the first, and in which the conspirators had endeavored to enlist Alkibiadês. The latter refused, so his son, the speaker in the above-mentioned oration, contends, in consequence of his attachment to the democracy; upon which the oligarchical conspirators, incensed at his refusal, got up the charge of irreligion against him and procured his banishment.

Though Droysen and Wattenbach (De Quadringentorum Athenis Factione, pp. 7, 8, Berlin, 1842) place confidence, to a considerable extent, in this manner of putting the facts, I consider it to be nothing better than complete perversion; irreconcilable with Thucydidês, confounding together facts unconnected in themselves as well as separated by a long interval of time, and introducing unreal causes, for the purpose of making out, what was certainly not true, that Alkibiadês was a faithful friend of the democracy, and even a sufferer in its behalf.

[40] Thucyd. viii, 66.

Such was the condition to which things had been brought in Athens, by Antiphon and the oligarchical conspirators acting under his direction, at the time when Peisander and the five envoys arrived thither returning from Samos. It is probable that they had previously transmitted home from Samos news of the rupture with Alkibiadês, and of the necessity of prosecuting the conspiracy without farther view either to him or to the Persian alliance. Such news would probably be acceptable both to Antiphon and Phrynichus, both of them personal enemies of Alkibiadês; especially Phrynichus, who had pronounced him to be incapable of fraternizing with an oligarchical revolution.[41] At any rate, the plans of Antiphon had been independent of all view to Persian aid, and had been directed to carry the revolution by means of naked, exorbitant, and well-directed fear, without any intermixture of hope or any prospect of public benefit. Peisander found the reign of terror fully matured. He had not come direct from Samos to Athens, but had halted in his voyage at various allied dependencies, while the other five envoys, as well as a partisan named Diotrephês, had been sent to Thasos and elsewhere;[42] all for the same purpose, of putting down democracies in those allied cities where they existed, and establishing oligarchies in their room. Peisander made this change at Tênos, Andros, Karystus, Ægina, and elsewhere; collecting from these several places a regiment of three hundred hoplites, which he brought with him to Athens as a sort of body-guard to his new oligarchy.[43] He could not know until he reached Peiræus the full success of the terrorism organized by Antiphon and the rest; so that he probably came prepared to surmount a greater resistance than he actually found. As the facts stood, so completely had the public opinion and spirit been subdued, that he was enabled to put the finishing stroke at once, and his arrival was the signal for consummating the revolution, first, by an extorted suspension of the tutelary constitutional sanction, next, by the more direct employment of armed force.

[41] Thucyd. viii. 68. νομίζων οὐκ ἄν ποτε αὐτὸν (Alkibiadês) κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ὑπ᾽ ὀλιγαρχίας κατελθεῖν, etc.

[42] Thucyd. viii, 64.

[43] Thucyd. viii, 65. Οἱ δὲ ἀμφὶ τὸν Πείσανδρον ~παραπλέοντές~ τε, ὥσπερ ἐδέδοκτο, ~τοὺς δήμους ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι κατέλυον~, καὶ ἅμα ~ἔστιν ἀφ᾽ ὧν χωρίων~ καὶ ὁπλίτας ἔχοντες σφίσιν αὐτοῖς ξυμμάχους ἦλθον ἐς τὰς Ἀθήνας. Καὶ καταλαμβάνουσι τὰ πλεῖστα τοῖς ἑταίροις προειργασμένα.

We may gather from c. 69 that the places which I have named in the text were among those visited by Peisander: all of them lay very much in his way from Samos to Athens.

First, he convoked a public assembly, in which he proposed a decree, naming ten commissioners with full powers, to prepare propositions for such political reform as they should think advisable, and to be ready by a given day.[44] According to the usual practice, this decree must previously have been approved in the senate of Five Hundred, before it was submitted to the people. Such was doubtless the case in the present instance, and the decree passed without any opposition. On the day fixed, a fresh assembly met, which Peisander and his partisans caused to be held, not in the usual place, called the Pnyx, within the city walls, but at a place called Kolônus, ten stadia, rather more than a mile, without the walls,[45] north of the city. Kolônus was a temple of Poseidon, within the precinct of which the assembly was inclosed for the occasion. Such an assembly was not likely to be numerous, wherever held,[46] since there could be little motive to attend, when freedom of debate was extinguished; but the oligarchical conspirators now transferred it without the walls; selecting a narrow area for the meeting, in order that they might lessen still farther the chance of numerous attendance, an assembly which they fully designed should be the last in the history of Athens. They were thus also more out of the reach of an armed movement in the city, as well as enabled to post their own armed partisans around, under color of protecting the meeting against disturbance by the Lacedæmonians from Dekeleia.

[44] Thucyd. viii, 67. Καὶ πρῶτον μὲν τὸν δῆμον ξυλλέξαντες εἶπον γνώμην, δέκα ἄνδρας ἑλέσθαι ~ξυγγραφέας αὐτοκράτορας~, τούτους δὲ ξυγγράψαντας γνώμην ἐσενεγκεῖν ἐς τὸν δῆμον ἐς ἡμέραν ῥητὴν, καθ᾽ ὅτι ἄριστα ἡ πόλις οἰκήσεται.

In spite of certain passages found in Suidas and Harpokration (see K. F. Hermann, Lehrbuch der Griechischen Staats Alterthümer, sect. 167, note 12: compare also Wattenbach, De Quadringentor. Factione, p. 38), I cannot think that there was any connection between these ten ξυγγραφεῖς, and the Board of πρόβουλοι mentioned as having been before named (Thucyd. viii, 1). Nor has the passage in Lysias, to which Hermann makes allusion, anything to do with these ξυγγραφεῖς. The mention of Thirty persons by Androtion and Philochorus, seems to imply that they, or Harpokration, confounded the proceedings ushering in this oligarchy of Four Hundred, with those before the subsequent oligarchy of Thirty. The σύνεδροι, or ξυγγραφεῖς, mentioned by Isokratês (Areopagit. Or. vii, sect. 67) might refer either to the case of the Four Hundred or to that of the Thirty.

[45] Thucyd. viii, 67. Ἔπειτα, ἐπειδὴ ἡ ἡμέρα ἐφῆκε, ~ξυνέκλῃσαν~ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἐς τὸν Κόλωνον (ἔστι δ᾽ ἱερὸν Ποσειδῶνος ἔξω πόλεως, ἀπέχον σταδίους μάλιστα δέκα), etc.

The very remarkable word ξυνέκλῃσαν, here used respecting the assembly, appears to me to refer (not, as Dr. Arnold supposes in his note, to any existing practice observed even in the usual assemblies which met in the Pnyx, but rather) to a departure from the usual practice, and the employment of a stratagem in reference to this particular meeting.

Kolônus was one of the Attic demes: indeed, there seems reason to imagine that two distinct demes bore this same name (see Boeckh, in the Commentary appended to his translation of the Antigonê of Sophoklês, pp. 190, 191: and Ross, Die Demen von Attika, pp. 10, 11). It is in the grove of the Eumenides, hard by this temple of Poseidon, that Sophoklês has laid the scene of his immortal drama, the Œdipus Koloneus.

[46] Compare the statement in Lysias (Orat. xii, cont. Eratosth. s. 76, p. 127) respecting the small numbers who attended and voted at the assembly by which the subsequent oligarchy of Thirty was named.

The proposition of the newly-appointed commissioners—probably Peisander, Antiphon, and other partisans themselves—was exceedingly short and simple. They merely moved the abolition of the celebrated Graphê Paranomôn; that is, they proposed that every Athenian citizen should have full liberty of making any anti-constitutional proposition that he chose, and that every other citizen should be interdicted, under heavy penalties, from prosecuting him by graphê paranomôn indictment on the score of informality, illegality, or unconstitutionality, or from doing him any other mischief. This proposition was adopted without a single dissentient. It was thought more formal by the directing chiefs to sever this proposition pointedly from the rest, and to put it, singly and apart, into the mouth of the special commissioners; since it was the legalizing condition of every other positive change which they were about to move afterwards. Full liberty being thus granted to make any motion, however anti-constitutional, and to dispense with all the established formalities, such as preliminary authorization by the senate, Peisander now came forward with his substantive propositions to the following effect:—

1. All the existing democratical magistracies were suppressed at once, and made to cease for the future. 2. No civil functions whatever were hereafter to be salaried. 3. To constitute a new government, a committee of five persons were named forthwith, who were to choose a larger body of one hundred; that is, one hundred including the five choosers themselves. Each individual out of this body of one hundred, was to choose three persons. 4. A body of Four Hundred was thus constituted, who were to take their seat in the senate-house, and to carry on the government with unlimited powers, according to their own discretion. 5. They were to convene the Five Thousand, whenever they might think fit.[47] All was passed without a dissentient voice.

[47] Thucyd. viii, 68. Ἐλθόντας δὲ αὐτοὺς τετρακοσίους ὄντας ἐς τὸ βουλευτήριον, ἄρχειν ὅπῃ ἂν ἄριστα γιγνώσκωσιν, ~αὐτοκράτορας~, καὶ ~τοὺς πεντακισχιλίους~ δὲ ξυλλέγειν, ὁπόταν αὐτοῖς δοκῇ.

The invention and employment of this imaginary aggregate of Five Thousand was not the least dexterous among the combinations of Antiphon. No one knew who these Five Thousand were: yet the resolution just adopted purported,—not that such a number of citizens should be singled out and constituted, either by choice, or by lot, or in some determinate manner which should exhibit them to the view and knowledge of others,—but that the Four Hundred should convene _The Five Thousand_, whenever they thought proper: thus assuming the latter to be a list already made up and notorious, at least to the Four Hundred themselves. The real fact was, that the Five Thousand existed nowhere except in the talk and proclamations of the conspirators, as a supplement of fictitious auxiliaries. They did not even exist as individual names on paper, but simply as an imposturous nominal aggregate. The Four Hundred, now installed, formed the entire and exclusive rulers of the state.[48] But the mere name of the Five Thousand, though it was nothing more than a name, served two important purposes for Antiphon and his conspiracy. First, it admitted of being falsely produced, especially to the armament at Samos, as proof of a tolerably numerous and popular body of equal, qualified, concurrent citizens, all intended to take their turn by rotation in exercising the powers of government; thus lightening the odium of extreme usurpation to the Four Hundred, and passing them off merely as the earliest section of the Five Thousand, put into office for a few months, and destined at the end of that period to give place to another equal section.[49] Next, it immensely augmented the means of intimidation possessed by the Four Hundred at home, by exaggerating the impression of their supposed strength. For the citizens generally were made to believe that there were five thousand real and living partners in the conspiracy; while the fact that these partners were not known and could not be individually identified, rather aggravated the reigning terror and mistrust; since every man, suspecting that his neighbor might possibly be among them, was afraid to communicate his discontent or propose means for joint resistance.[50] In both these two ways, the name and assumed existence of the Five Thousand lent strength to the real Four Hundred conspirators. It masked their usurpation, while it increased their hold on the respect and fears of the citizens.

[48] Thucyd. viii, 66. ἦν δὲ τοῦτο εὐπρεπὲς πρὸς τοὺς πλείους, ἐπεὶ ἕξειν γε τὴν πόλιν οἵπερ καὶ μεθιστάναι ἔμελλον.

Plutarch, Alkibiad. c. 26.

[49] Thucyd. viii, 72. Πέμπουσι δὲ ἐς τὴν Σάμον δέκα ἄνδρας ... διδάξοντας—~πεντακισχίλιοι δὲ ὅτι εἶεν~, καὶ οὐ τετρακόσιοι μόνον, οἱ πράσσοντες.

viii, 86. Οἱ δ᾽ ἀπήγγελλον ὡς οὔτε ἐπὶ διαφθορᾷ ~τῆς πόλεως~ ἡ μετάστασις γένοιτο, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ σωτηρίᾳ ... ~τῶν δὲ πεντακισχιλίων ὅτε πάντες ἐν τῷ μέρει μεθέξουσιν~, etc.

viii, 89. ἀλλὰ ~τοὺς πεντακισχιλίους~ ἔργῳ καὶ μὴ ὀνόματι χρῆναι ἀποδεικνύναι, καὶ τὴν πολιτείαν ἰσαιτέραν καθιστάναι.

viii, 92. (After the Four Hundred had already been much opposed and humbled, and were on the point of being put down)—ἦν δὲ πρὸς τὸν ὄχλον ἡ παράκλησις ὡς χρὴ, ὅστις ~τοὺς πεντακισχιλίους~ βούλεται ἄρχειν ἀντὶ τῶν τετρακοσίων, ἰέναι ἐπὶ τὸ ἔργον. Ἐπεκρύπτοντο γὰρ ὅμως ἔτι ~τῶν πεντακισχιλίων~ τῷ ὀνόματι, μὴ ἄντικρυς δῆμον ὅστις βούλεται ἄρχειν ὀνομάζειν—~φοβούμενοι μὴ τῷ ὄντι ὦσι, καὶ πρός τινα εἰπών τίς τι δι᾽ ἀγνοίαν σφαλῇ~. Καὶ οἱ τετρακόσιοι διὰ τοῦτο οὐκ ἤθελον ~τοὺς πεντακισχιλίους οὔτε εἶναι, οὔτε μὴ ὄντας δήλους εἶναι~· τὸ μὲν καταστῆσαι μετόχους τοσούτους, ἄντικρυς ἂν δῆμον ἡγούμενοι, ~τὸ δ᾽ αὖ ἀφανὲς φόβον ἐς ἀλλήλους παρέξειν~.

viii, 93. λέγοντες ~τούς τε πεντακισχιλίους~ ἀποφανεῖν, καὶ ἐκ ~τούτων ἐν μέρει~, ᾗ ἂν τοῖς πεντακισχιλίοις δοκῇ, τοὺς τετρακοσίους ἔσεσθαι, τέως δὲ τὴν πόλιν μηδενὶ τρόπῳ διαφθείρειν, etc.

Compare also c. 97.

[50] Compare the striking passage (Thucyd. viii, 92) cited in my previous note.

As soon as the public assembly at Kolônus had, with such seeming unanimity, accepted all the propositions of Peisander, they were dismissed; and the new regiment of Four Hundred were chosen and constituted in the form prescribed. It now only remained to install them in the senate-house. But this could not be done without force, since the senators were already within it; having doubtless gone thither immediately from the assembly, where their presence, at least the presence of the prytanes, or senators of the presiding tribe, was essential as legal presidents. They had to deliberate what they would do under the decree just passed, which divested them of all authority. Nor was it impossible that they might organize armed resistance; for which there seemed more than usual facility at the present moment, since the occupation of Dekeleia by the Lacedæmonians kept Athens in a condition like that of a permanent camp, with a large proportion of the citizens day and night under arms.[51] Against this chance the Four Hundred made provision. They selected that hour of the day when the greater number of citizens habitually went home, probably to their morning meal, leaving the military station, with the arms piled and ready, under comparatively thin watch. While the general body of hoplites left the station at this hour, according to the usual practice, the hoplites—Andrian, Tenian, and others—in the immediate confidence of the Four Hundred, were directed, by private order, to hold themselves prepared and in arms, at a little distance off; so that if any symptoms should appear of resistance being contemplated, they might at once interfere and forestall it. Having taken this precaution, the Four Hundred marched in a body to the senate-house, each man with a dagger concealed under his garment, and followed by their special body-guard of one hundred and twenty young men from various Grecian cities, the instruments of the assassinations ordered by Antiphon and his colleagues. In this array they marched into the senate-house, where the senators were assembled, and commanded them to depart; at the same time tendering to them their pay for all the remainder of the year,—seemingly about three months or more down to the beginning of Hecatombæon, the month of new nominations,—during which their functions ought to have continued. The senators were no way prepared to resist the decree just passed under the forms of legality with an armed body now arrived to enforce its execution. They obeyed and departed, each man as he passed the door receiving the salary tendered to him. That they should yield obedience to superior force, under the circumstances, can excite neither censure nor surprise; but that they should accept, from the hands of the conspirators, this anticipation of an unearned salary, was a meanness which almost branded them as accomplices, and dishonored the expiring hour of the last democratical authority. The Four Hundred now found themselves triumphantly installed in the senate-house; without the least resistance, either within its walls, or even without, by any portion of the citizens.[52]

[51] See the jests of Aristophanês, about the citizens all in armor, buying their provisions in the market-place and carrying them home, in the Lysistrata, 560: a comedy represented about December 412 or January 411 B.C., three months earlier than the events here narrated.

[52] Thucyd. viii, 69, 70.

Thus perished, or seemed to perish, the democracy of Athens, after an uninterrupted existence of nearly one hundred years since the revolution of Kleisthenês. So incredible did it appear that the numerous, intelligent, and constitutional citizens of Athens should suffer their liberties to be overthrown by a band of four hundred conspirators, while the great mass of them not only loved their democracy, but had arms in their hands to defend it, that even their enemy and neighbor Agis, at Dekeleia, could hardly imagine the revolution to be a fact accomplished. We shall see presently that it did not stand,—nor would it probably have stood, had circumstances even been more favorable,—but the accomplishment of it at all, is an incident too extraordinary to be passed over without some words in explanation.

We must remark that the tremendous catastrophe and loss of blood in Sicily had abated the energy of the Athenian character generally, but especially had made them despair of their foreign relations; of the possibility that they could make head against enemies, increased in number by revolts among their own allies, and farther sustained by Persian gold. Upon this sentiment of despair is brought to bear the treacherous delusion of Alkibiadês, offering them the Persian aid; that is, means of defence and success against foreign enemies, at the price of their democracy. Reluctantly the people are brought, but they _are_ brought, to entertain the proposition: and thus the conspirators gain their first capital point, of familiarizing the people with the idea of such a change of constitution. The ulterior success of the conspiracy—when all prospect of Persian gold, or improved foreign position, was at an end—is due to the combinations, alike nefarious and skilful, of Antiphon, wielding and organizing the united strength of the aristocratical classes at Athens; strength always exceedingly great, but under ordinary circumstances working in fractions disunited and even reciprocally hostile to each other,—restrained by the ascendant democratical institutions,—and reduced to corrupt what it could not overthrow. Antiphon, about to employ this anti-popular force in one systematic scheme, and for the accomplishment of a predetermined purpose, keeps still within the same ostensible constitutional limits. He raises no open mutiny: he maintains inviolate the cardinal point of Athenian political morality, respect to the decision of the senate and political assembly, as well as to constitutional maxims. But he knows well that the value of these meetings, as political securities, depends upon entire freedom of speech; and that, if that freedom be suppressed, the assembly itself becomes a nullity, or rather an instrument of positive imposture and mischief. Accordingly, he causes all the popular orators to be successively assassinated, so that no man dares to open his mouth on that side; while on the other hand, the anti-popular speakers are all loud and confident, cheering one another on, and seeming to represent all the feeling of the persons present. By thus silencing each individual leader, and intimidating every opponent from standing forward as spokesman, he extorts the formal sanction of the assembly and the senate to measures which the large majority of the citizens detest. That majority, however, are bound by their own constitutional forms; and when the decision of these, by whatever means obtained, is against them, they have neither the inclination nor the courage to resist. In no part of the world has this sentiment of constitutional duty, and submission to the vote of a legal majority, been more keenly and universally felt, than it was among the citizens of democratical Athens.[53] Antiphon thus finds means to employ the constitutional sentiment of Athens as a means of killing the constitution: the mere empty form, after its vital and protective efficacy has been abstracted, remains simply as a cheat to paralyze individual patriotism.

[53] This striking and deep-seated regard of the Athenians for all the forms of an established constitution, makes itself felt even by Mr. Mitford (Hist. Gr. ch. xix. sect. v, vol. iv, p. 235).

It was this cheat which rendered the Athenians indisposed to stand forward with arms in defence of that democracy to which they were attached. Accustomed as they were to unlimited pacific contention within the bounds of their constitution, they were in the highest degree averse to anything like armed intestine contention. This is the natural effect of an established free and equal polity, to substitute the contests of the tongue for those of the sword, and sometimes, even to create so extreme a disinclination to the latter, that if liberty be energetically assailed, the counter-energy necessary for its defence may probably be found wanting. So difficult is it for the same people to have both the qualities requisite for making a free constitution work well in ordinary times, together with those very different qualities requisite for upholding it against exceptional dangers and under trying emergencies. None but an Athenian of extraordinary ability, like Antiphon, would have understood the art of thus making the constitutional feeling of his countrymen subservient to the success of his conspiracy, and of maintaining the forms of legal dealing towards assembled and constitutional bodies, while he violated them in secret and successive stabs directed against individuals. Political assassination had been unknown at Athens, as far as our information reaches, since it was employed, about fifty years before, by the oligarchical party against Ephialtês, the coadjutor of Periklês.[54] But this had been an individual case, and it was reserved for Antiphon and Phrynichus to organize a band of assassins working systematically, and taking off a series of leading victims one after the other. As the Macedonian kings in after-times required the surrender of the popular orators in a body, so the authors of this conspiracy found the same enemies to deal with, and adopted another way of getting rid of them; thus reducing the assembly into a tame and lifeless mass, capable of being intimidated into giving its collective sanction to measures which its large majority detested.

[54] See Plutarch, Periklês, c. 10; Diodor. xi, 77; and vol. v, of this History chap. xlvi, p. 370.

As Grecian history has been usually written, we are instructed to believe that the misfortunes, and the corruption, and the degradation of the democratical states are brought upon them by the class of demagogues, of whom Kleon, Hyperbolus, Androklês, etc., stand forth as specimens. These men are represented as mischief-makers and revilers, accusing without just cause, and converting innocence into treason. Now the history of this conspiracy of the Four Hundred presents to us the other side of the picture. It shows that the political enemies—against whom the Athenian people were protected by their democratical institutions, and by the demagogues as living organs of those institutions—were not fictitious but dangerously real. It reveals the continued existence of powerful anti-popular combinations, ready to come together for treasonable purposes when the moment appeared safe and tempting. It manifests the character and morality of the leaders, to whom the direction of the anti-popular force naturally fell. It proves that these leaders, men of uncommon ability, required nothing more than the extinction or silence of the demagogues, to be enabled to subvert the popular securities and get possession of the government. We need no better proof to teach us what was the real function and intrinsic necessity of these demagogues in the Athenian system, taking them as a class, and apart from the manner in which individuals among them may have performed their duty. They formed the vital movement of all that was tutelary and public-spirited in democracy. Aggressive in respect to official delinquents, they were defensive in respect to the public and the constitution. If that anti-popular force, which Antiphon found ready-made, had not been efficient, at a much earlier moment, in stifling the democracy, it was because there were demagogues to cry aloud, as well as assemblies to hear and sustain them. If Antiphon’s conspiracy was successful, it was because he knew where to aim his blows, so as to strike down the real enemies of the oligarchy and the real defenders of the people. I here employ the term demagogues because it is that commonly used by those who denounce the class of men here under review: the proper neutral phrase, laying aside odious associations, would be to call them popular speakers, or opposition speakers. But, by whatever name they may be called, it is impossible rightly to conceive their position in Athens, without looking at them in contrast and antithesis with those anti-popular forces against which they formed the indispensable barrier, and which come forth into such manifest and melancholy working under the organizing hands of Antiphon and Phrynichus.

As soon as the Four Hundred found themselves formally installed in the senate-house, they divided themselves by lot into separate prytanies,—probably ten in number, consisting of forty members each, like the former senate of Five Hundred, in order that the distribution of the year to which the people were accustomed might not be disturbed,—and then solemnized their installation by prayer and sacrifice. They put to death some political enemies, though not many: they farther imprisoned and banished others, and made large changes in the administration of affairs, carrying everything with a strictness and rigor unknown under the old constitution.[55] It seems to have been proposed among them to pass a vote of restoration to all persons under sentence of exile. But this was rejected by the majority in order that Alkibiadês might not be among the number; nor did they think it expedient, notwithstanding, to pass the law, reserving him as a special exception.

[55] Thucyd. viii, 70. I imagine that this must be the meaning of the words τὰ τε ἄλλα ἔνεμον κατὰ κράτος τὴν πόλιν.

They farther despatched a messenger to Agis at Dekeleia, intimating their wish to treat for peace; which, they affirmed, he ought to be ready to grant to them, now that “the faithless Demos” was put down. Agis, however, not believing that the Athenian people would thus submit to be deprived of their liberty, anticipated that intestine dissension would certainly break out, or at least that some portion of the Long Walls would be found unguarded, should a foreign army appear. While therefore he declined the overtures for peace, he at the same time sent for reinforcements out of Peloponnesus, and marched with a considerable army, in addition to his own garrison, up to the very walls of Athens. But he found the ramparts carefully manned: no commotion took place within: even a sally was made, in which some advantage was gained over him. He therefore speedily retired, sending back his newly-arrived reinforcements to Peloponnesus; while the Four Hundred, on renewing their advances to him for peace, now found themselves much better received, and were even encouraged to despatch envoys to Sparta itself.[56]

[56] Thucyd. viii, 71.

As soon as they had thus got over the first difficulties, and placed matters on a footing which seemed to promise stability, they despatched ten envoys to Samos. Aware beforehand of the danger impending over them in that quarter from the known aversion of the soldiers and seamen to anything in the nature of oligarchy, they had, moreover, just heard, by the arrival of Chæreas and the paralus, of the joint attack made by the Athenian and Samian oligarchs, and of its complete failure. Had this event occurred a little earlier, it might perhaps have deterred even some of their own number from proceeding with the revolution at Athens, which was rendered thereby almost sure of failure, from the first. Their ten envoys were instructed to represent at Samos that the recent oligarchy had been established with no views injurious to the city, but on the contrary for the general benefit; that though the Council now installed consisted of Four Hundred only, yet the total number of partisans who had made the revolution, and were qualified citizens under it, was Five Thousand; a number greater, they added, than had ever been actually assembled in the Pnyx under the democracy, even for the most important debates,[57] in consequence of the unavoidable absences of numerous individuals on military service and foreign travel.

[57] Thucyd. viii, 72. This allegation, respecting the number of citizens who attended in the Athenian democratical assemblies, has been sometimes cited as if it carried with it the authority of Thucydidês; which is a great mistake, duly pointed out by all the best recent critics. It is simply the allegation of the Four Hundred, whose testimony, as a guarantee for truth, is worth little enough.

That _no_ assembly had ever been attended by so many as five thousand (οὐδεπώποτε) I certainly am far from believing. It is not improbable, however, that five thousand was an unusually large number of citizens to attend.

Dr. Arnold, in his note, opposes the allegation in part, by remarking that “the law required not only the presence but the sanction of at least six thousand citizens to some particular decrees of the assembly.” It seems to me, however, quite possible that, in cases where this large number of votes was required, as in the ostracism, and where there was no discussion carried on immediately before the voting, the process of voting may have lasted some hours, like our keeping open of a poll. So that though more than six thousand citizens must have _voted_, altogether, it was not necessary that all should have been present in the same assembly.

What satisfaction might have been given, by this allusion to the fictitious Five Thousand, or by the fallacious reference to the numbers, real or pretended, of the past democratical assemblies, had these envoys carried to Samos the first tidings of the Athenian revolution, we cannot say. They were forestalled by Chæreas, the officer of the paralus; who, though the Four Hundred tried to detain him, made his escape and hastened to Samos to communicate the fearful and unexpected change which had occurred at Athens. Instead of hearing that change described under the treacherous extenuations prescribed by Antiphon and Phrynichus, the armament first learned it from the lips of Chæreas, who told them at once the extreme truth, and even more than the truth. He recounted, with indignation, that every Athenian who ventured to say a word against the Four Hundred rulers of the city, was punished with the scourge; that even the wives and children of persons hostile to them were outraged; that there was a design of seizing and imprisoning the relatives of the democrats at Samos, and putting them to death, if the latter refused to obey orders from Athens. The simple narrative of what had really occurred would have been quite sufficient to provoke in the armament a sentiment of detestation against the Four Hundred. But these additional details of Chæreas, partly untrue, filled them with uncontrollable wrath, which they manifested by open menace against the known partisans of the Four Hundred at Samos, as well as against those who had taken part in the recent oligarchical conspiracy in the island. It was not without difficulty that their hands were arrested by the more reflecting citizens present, who remonstrated against the madness of such disorderly proceedings when the enemy was close upon them.

But though violence and aggressive insult were thus seasonably checked, the sentiment of the armament was too ardent and unanimous to be satisfied without some solemn, emphatic, and decisive declaration against the oligarchs at Athens. A great democratical manifestation, of the most earnest and imposing character, was proclaimed, chiefly at the instance of Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus. The Athenian armament, brought together in one grand assembly, took an oath by the most stringent sanctions: to maintain their democracy; to keep up friendship and harmony with each other; to carry on the war against the Peloponnesians with energy; to be at enmity with the Four Hundred at Athens, and to enter into no amicable communication with them whatever. The whole armament swore to this compact with enthusiasm, and even those who had before taken part in the oligarchical movements were forced to be forward in the ceremony.[58] What lent double force to this touching scene was, that the entire Samian population, every male of the military age, took the oath along with the friendly armament. Both pledged themselves to mutual fidelity and common suffering or triumph, whatever might be the issue of the contest. Both felt that the Peloponnesians at Milêtus, and the Four Hundred at Athens, were alike their enemies, and that the success of either would be their common ruin.

[58] Thucyd. viii, 75. Μετὰ δὲ τοῦτο, λαμπρῶς ἤδη ἐς δημοκρατίαν βουλόμενοι μεταστῆσαι τὰ ἐν τῇ Σάμῳ ὅ τε Θρασύβουλος καὶ Θράσυλλος, ὥρκωσαν πάντας τοὺς στρατιώτας τοὺς μεγίστους ὅρκους, καὶ αὐτοὺς τοὺς ἐκ τῆς ὀλιγαρχίας μάλιστα, ἦ μὴν δημοκρατήσεσθαι τε καὶ ὁμονοήσειν, καὶ τὸν πρὸς Πελοποννησίους πόλεμον προθύμως διοίσειν, καὶ τοῖς τετρακοσίοις πολέμιοί τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ οὐδὲν ἐπικηρυκεύεσθαι. Ξυνώμνυσαν δὲ καὶ Σαμίων πάντες τὸν αὐτὸν ὅρκον οἱ ἐν τῇ ἡλικίᾳ, καὶ τὰ πράγματα πάντα καὶ τὰ ἀποβησόμενα ἐκ τῶν κινδύνων ξυνεκοινώσαντο οἱ στρατιῶται τοῖς Σαμίοις, νομίζοντες οὔτε ἐκείνοις ἀποστροφὴν σωτηρίας οὔτε σφίσιν εἶναι, ἀλλ᾽ ἐάν τε οἱ τετρακόσιοι κρατήσωσιν ἐάν τε οἱ ἐκ Μιλήτου πολέμιοι, διαφθαρήσεσθαι.

Pursuant to this resolution,—of upholding their democracy and at the same time sustaining the war against the Peloponnesians, at all cost or peril to themselves,—the soldiers of the armament now took a step unparalleled in Athenian history. Feeling that they could no longer receive orders from Athens under her present oligarchical rulers, with whom Charmînus and others among their own leaders were implicated, they constituted themselves into a sort of community apart, and held an assembly as citizens to choose anew their generals and trierarchs. Of those already in command, several were deposed as unworthy of trust; others being elected in their places, especially Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus. Nor was the assembly held for election alone; it was a scene of effusive sympathy, animating eloquence, and patriotism generous as well as resolute. The united armament felt that _they_ were the real Athens; the guardians of her constitution, the upholders of her remaining empire and glory, the protectors of her citizens at home against those conspirators who had intruded themselves wrongfully into the senate-house; the sole barrier, even for those conspirators themselves, against the hostile Peloponnesian fleet. “_The city has revolted from us_,” exclaimed Thrasybulus and others in pregnant words, which embodied a whole train of feeling.[59] “But let not this abate our courage: for they are only the lesser force, we are the greater and the self-sufficing. We have here the whole navy of the state, whereby we can insure to ourselves the contributions from our dependencies just as well as if we started from Athens. We have the hearty attachment of Samos, second in power only to Athens herself, and serving us as a military station against the enemy, now as in the past. We are better able to obtain supplies for ourselves, than those in the city for themselves; for it is only through our presence at Samos that they have hitherto kept the mouth of Peiræus open. If they refuse to restore to us our democratical constitution, we shall be better able to exclude them from the sea than they to exclude us. What, indeed, does the city do now for us to second our efforts against the enemy? Little or nothing. We have lost nothing by their separation. They send us no pay, they leave us to provide maintenance for ourselves; they are now out of condition for sending us even good counsel, which is the great superiority of a city over a camp.[60] As counsellors, we here are better than they; for they have just committed the wrong of subverting the constitution of our common country, while we are striving to maintain it, and will do our best to force them into the same track. Alkibiadês, if we insure to him a safe restoration, will cheerfully bring the alliance of Persia to sustain us; and, even if the worst comes to the worst, if all other hopes fail us, our powerful naval force will always enable us to find places of refuge in abundance, with city and territory adequate to our wants.”

[59] Thucyd. viii, 76. Καὶ παραινέσεις ἄλλας τε ἐποιοῦντο ἐν σφίσιν αὐτοῖς ἀνιστάμενοι, καὶ ὡς οὐ δεῖ ἀθυμεῖν ὅτι ~ἡ πόλις αὐτῶν ἀφέστηκε~· τοὺς γὰρ ἐλάσσους ~ἀπὸ σφῶν τῶν~ πλεόνων καὶ ἐς πάντα ποριμωτέρων ~μεθεστάναι~.

[60] Thucyd. viii, 76. Βραχὺ δέ τι εἶναι καὶ οὐδενὸς ἄξιον, ᾧ πρὸς τὸ περιγίγνεσθαι τῶν πολεμίων ἡ πόλις χρήσιμος ἦν, καὶ οὐδὲν ἀπολωλεκέναι, οἵ γε μήτε ἀργύριον ἔτι εἶχον πέμπειν, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτοὶ ἐπορίζοντο οἱ στρατιῶται, μήτε βούλευμα χρηστὸν, οὗπερ ἕνεκα πόλις στρατοπέδων κρατεῖ· ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν τούτοις τοὺς μὲν ἡμαρτηκέναι, τοὺς πατρίους νόμους καταλύσαντας, αὐτοὶ δὲ σώζειν καὶ ἐκείνους πειράσεσθαι προσαναγκάζειν. Ὥστε οὐδὲ τούτους, οἵπερ ἂν βουλεύοιέν τι χρηστὸν, παρὰ σφίσι χείρους εἶναι.

Such was the encouraging language of Thrasyllus and Thrasybulus, which found full sympathy in the armament, and raised among them a spirit of energetic patriotism and resolution, not unworthy of their forefathers when refugees at Salamis under the invasion of Xerxês. To regain their democracy and to sustain the war against the Peloponnesians, were impulses alike ardent and blended in the same tide of generous enthusiasm; a tide so vehement as to sweep before it the reluctance of that minority who had before been inclined to the oligarchical movement. But besides these two impulses, there was also a third, tending towards the recall of Alkibiadês; a coadjutor, if in many ways useful, yet bringing with him a spirit of selfishness and duplicity uncongenial to the exalted sentiment now all-powerful at Samos.[61]

[61] The application of the Athenians at Samos to Alkibiadês, reminds us of the emphatic language in which Tacitus characterizes an incident in some respects similar. The Roman army, fighting in the cause of Vitellius against Vespasian, had been betrayed by their general Cæcina, who endeavored to carry them over to the latter: his army, however, refused to follow him, adhered to their own cause, and put him under arrest. Being afterwards defeated by the troops of Vespasian, and obliged to capitulate in Cremona, they released Cæcina, and solicited his intercession to obtain favorable terms. “Primores castrorum nomen atque imagines Vitellii amoliuntur; catenas Cæcinæ (nam etiam tum vinctus erat) exsolvunt, orantque, ut causæ suæ deprecator adsistat: aspernantem tumentemque lacrymis fatigant. _Extremum malorum, tot fortissimi viri, proditoris opem invocantes._” (Tacitus, Histor. iii, 31.)

This exile had been the first to originate the oligarchical conspiracy, whereby Athens, already scarcely adequate to the exigencies of her foreign war, was now paralyzed in courage and torn by civil discord, preserved from absolute ruin only by that counter-enthusiasm which a fortunate turn of circumstances had raised up at Samos. Having at first duped the conspirators themselves, and enabled them to dupe the sincere democrats, by promising Persian aid, and thus floating the plot over its first and greatest difficulties,—Alkibiadês had found himself constrained to break with them as soon as the time came for realizing his promises. But he had broken off with so much address as still to keep up the illusion that he _could_ realize them if he chose. His return by means of the oligarchy being now impossible, he naturally became its enemy, and this new antipathy superseded his feeling of revenge against the democracy for having banished him. In fact he was disposed, as Phrynichus had truly said about him,[62] to avail himself indifferently of either, according as the one or the other presented itself as a serviceable agency for his ambitious views. Accordingly, as soon as the turn of affairs at Samos had made itself manifest, he opened communication with Thrasybulus and the democratical leaders,[63] renewing to them the same promises of Persian alliance, on condition of his own restoration, as he had before made to Peisander and the oligarchical party. Thrasybulus and his colleagues either sincerely believed him, or at least thought that his restoration afforded a possibility, not to be neglected, of obtaining Persian aid, without which they despaired of the war. Such possibility would at least infuse spirit into the soldiers; while the restoration was now proposed without the terrible condition which had before accompanied it, of renouncing the democratical constitution.

[62] Thucyd. viii, 48.

[63] Thucydidês does not expressly mention this communication, but it is implied in the words Ἀλκιβιάδην—~ἄσμενον παρέξειν~, etc. (viii, 76.)

It was not without difficulty, however, nor until after more than one assembly and discussion,[64] that Thrasybulus prevailed on the armament to pass a vote of security and restoration to Alkibiadês. As Athenian citizens, the soldiers probably were unwilling to take upon them the reversal of a sentence solemnly passed by the democratical tribunal, on the ground of irreligion with suspicion of treason. They were, however, induced to pass the vote, after which Thrasybulus sailed over to the Asiatic coast, brought across Alkibiadês to the island, and introduced him to the assembled armament. The supple exile, who had denounced the democracy so bitterly, both at Sparta, and in his correspondence with the oligarchical conspirators, knew well how to adapt himself to the sympathies of the democratical assembly now before him. He began by deploring the sentence of banishment passed against him, and throwing the blame of it, not upon the injustice of his countrymen, but upon his own unhappy destiny.[65] He then entered upon the public prospects of the moment, pledging himself with entire confidence to realize the hopes of Persian alliance, and boasting, in terms not merely ostentatious but even extravagant, of the ascendant influence which he possessed over Tissaphernês. The satrap had promised him, so the speech went on, never to let the Athenians want for pay, as soon as he once came to trust them, not even if it were necessary to issue out his last daric or to coin his own silver couch into money. Nor would he require any farther condition to induce him to trust them, except that Alkibiadês should be restored and should become their guarantee. Not only would he furnish the Athenians with pay, but he would, besides, bring up to their aid the Phenician fleet, which was already at Aspendus, instead of placing it at the disposal of the Peloponnesians.

[64] Thucyd. viii, 81. Θρασύβουλος, ~ἀεί τε τῆς αὐτῆς γνώμης ἐχόμενος~, ἐπειδὴ μετέστησε τὰ πράγματα, ὥστε κατάγειν Ἀλκιβιάδην, καὶ ~τέλος~ ἐπ᾽ ἐκκλησίας ἔπεισε τὸ πλῆθος τῶν στρατιωτῶν, etc.

[65] Thucyd. viii, 81. γενομένης δὲ ἐκκλησίας τήν ~τε ἰδίαν ξυμφορὰν τῆς φυγῆς ἐπῃτιάσατο καὶ ἀνωλοφύρατο~ ὁ Ἀλκιβιάδης, etc.

Contrast the different language of Alkibiadês, vi, 92: viii, 47.

For the word ξυμφορὰν, compare i, 127.

Nothing can be more false and perverted than the manner in which the proceedings of Alkibiadês, during this period, are presented in the Oration of Isokratês de Bigis, sects. 18-23.

In the communications of Alkibiadês with Peisander and his coadjutors, Alkibiadês had pretended that the Great King could have no confidence in the Athenians unless they not only restored him, but abnegated their democracy. On this occasion, the latter condition was withdrawn, and the confidence of the Great King was said to be more easily accorded. But though Alkibiadês thus presented himself with a new falsehood, as well as with a new vein of political sentiment, his discourse was eminently successful. It answered all the various purposes which he contemplated; partly of intimidating and disuniting the oligarchical conspirators at home, partly of exalting his own grandeur in the eyes of the armament, partly of sowing mistrust between the Spartans and Tissaphernês. It was in such full harmony with both the reigning feelings of the armament,—eagerness to put down the Four Hundred, as well as to get the better of their Peloponnesian enemies in Ionia,—that the hearers were not disposed to scrutinize narrowly the grounds upon which his assurances rested. In the fulness of confidence and enthusiasm, they elected him general along with Thrasybulus and the rest, conceiving redoubled hopes of victory over their enemies both at Athens and at Milêtus. So completely, indeed, were their imaginations filled with the prospect of Persian aid, against their enemies in Ionia, that alarm for the danger of Athens under the government of the Four Hundred became the predominant feeling; and many voices were even raised in favor of sailing to Peiræus for the rescue of the city. But Alkibiadês, knowing well—what the armament did not know—that his own promises of Persian pay and fleet were a mere delusion, strenuously dissuaded such a movement, which would have left the dependencies in Ionia defenceless against the Peloponnesians. As soon as the assembly broke up, he crossed over again to the mainland, under pretence of concerting measures with Tissaphernês to realize his recent engagements.

Relieved substantially, though not in strict form, from the penalties of exile, Alkibiadês was thus launched in a new career. After having first played the game of Athens against Sparta, next, that of Sparta against Athens, thirdly, that of Tissaphernês against both, he now professed to take up again the promotion of Athenian interests. In reality, however, he was and had always been playing his own game, or obeying his own self-interest, ambition, or antipathy. He was at this time eager to make a show of intimate and confidential communication with Tissaphernês, in order that he might thereby impose upon the Athenians at Samos, to communicate to the satrap his recent election as general of the Athenian force, that his importance with the Persians might be enhanced, and lastly, by passing backwards and forwards from Tissaphernês to the Athenian camp, to exhibit an appearance of friendly concert between the two, which might sow mistrust and alarm in the minds of the Peloponnesians. In this tripartite manœuvring, so suitable to his habitual character, he was more or less successful, especially in regard to the latter purpose. For though he never had any serious chance of inducing Tissaphernês to assist the Athenians, he did, nevertheless, contribute to alienate him from the enemy, as well as the enemy from him.[66]

[66] Thucyd. viii, 82, 83, 87.

Without any longer delay in the camp of Tissaphernês than was necessary to keep up the faith of the Athenians in his promise of Persian aid, Alkibiadês returned to Samos, where he was found by the ten envoys sent by the Four Hundred from Athens, on their first arrival. These envoys had been long in their voyage; having made a considerable stay at Delos, under alarm from intelligence of the previous visit of Chæreas, and the furious indignation which his narrative had provoked.[67] At length they reached Samos, and were invited by the generals to make their communication to the assembled armament. They had the utmost difficulty in procuring a hearing, so strong was the antipathy against them, so loud were the cries that the subverters of the democracy ought to be put to death. Silence being at length obtained, they proceeded to state that the late revolution had been brought to pass for the salvation of the city, and especially for the economy of the public treasure, by suppressing the salaried civil functions of the democracy, and thus leaving more pay for the soldiers;[68] that there was no purpose of mischief in the change, still less of betrayal to the enemy, which might already have been effected, had such been the intention of the Four Hundred, when Agis advanced from Dekeleia up to the walls; that the citizens now possessing the political franchise, were not Four Hundred only, but Five Thousand in number, all of whom would take their turn in rotation for the places now occupied by the Four Hundred;[69] that the recitals of Chæreas, affirming ill-usage to have been offered to the relatives of the soldiers at Athens, were utterly false and calumnious.

[67] Thucyd. viii, 77-86.

[68] Thucyd. viii, 86. Εἰ δὲ ἐς εὐτέλειάν τι ξυντέτμηται, ὥστε τοὺς στρατιώτας ἔχειν τροφὴν, πάνυ ἐπαινεῖν.

This is a part of the answer of Alkibiadês to the envoys, and therefore indicates what they had urged.

[69] Thucyd. viii, 86. τῶν τε πεντακισχιλίων ὅτι πάντες ἐν τῷ μέρει μεθέξουσιν, etc. I dissent from Dr. Arnold’s construction of this passage, which is followed both by Poppo and by Göller. He says, in his note: “The sense must clearly be, ‘that all the citizens should be of the five thousand in their turn,’ however strange the expression may seem, μεθέξουσι τῶν πεντακισχιλίων. But without referring to the absurdity of the meaning, that all the Five Thousand should partake of the government _in their turn_,—for they _all_ partook of it as being the sovereign assembly,—yet μετέχειν, in this sense, would require τῶν πραγμάτων after it, and would be at least as harsh, standing alone, as in the construction of μεθέξουσι τῶν πεντακισχιλίων.”

Upon this remark, 1. Μετέχειν may be construed with a genitive case not actually expressed, but understood out of the words preceding; as we may see by Thucyd. ii, 16, where I agree with the interpretation suggested by Matthiæ (Gr. Gr. § 325), rather than with Dr. Arnold’s note.

2. In the present instance, we are not reduced to the necessity of gathering a genitive case for μετέχειν by implication out of previous phraseology: for the express genitive case stands there a line or two before—~τῆς πόλεως~, the idea of which is carried down without being ever dropped: οἱ δ᾽ ἀπήγγελλον, ὡς οὔτε ἐπὶ διαφθορᾷ ~τῆς πόλεως~ ἡ μετάστασις γένοιτο, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ σωτηρίᾳ, οὔθ᾽ ἵνα τοῖς πολεμίοις παραδοθῇ (i. e., ἡ πόλις) ... τῶν τε πεντακισχιλίων ὅτι πάντες ~ἐν τῷ μέρει μεθέξουσιν~ (i. e., τῆς πόλεως).

There is therefore no harshness of expression; nor is there any absurdity of meaning, as we may see by the repetition of the very same in viii, 93, λέγοντες τούς τε πεντακισχιλίους ἀποφανεῖν, καὶ ~ἐκ τούτων ἐν μέρει~, ᾗ ἂν τοῖς πεντακισχιλίοις δοκῇ, ~τοὺς τετρακοσίους ἔσεσθαι~, etc.

Dr. Arnold’s designation of these Five Thousand as “the sovereign assembly,” is not very accurate. They were not an assembly at all: they had never been called together, nor had anything been said about an intention of calling them together: in reality, they were but a fiction and a name; but even the Four Hundred themselves pretended only to talk of them as partners in the conspiracy and revolution, not as _an assembly_ to be convoked—πεντακισχίλιοι—~οἱ πράσσοντες~ (viii, 72).

As to the idea of bringing all the remaining citizens to equal privileges, in rotation, with the Five Thousand, we shall see that it was never broached until considerably after the Four Hundred had been put down.

Such were the topics on which the envoys insisted, in an apologetic strain, at considerable length, but without any effect in conciliating the soldiers who heard them. The general resentment against the Four Hundred was expressed by several persons present in public speech, by others in private manifestation of feeling against the envoys: and so passionately was this sentiment aggravated,—consisting not only of wrath for what the oligarchy had done, but of fear for what they might do,—that the proposition of sailing immediately to the Peiræus was revived with greater ardor than before. Alkibiadês, who had already once discountenanced this design, now stood forward to repel it again. Nevertheless, all the plenitude of his influence, then greater than that of any other officer in the armament, and seconded by the esteemed character as well as the loud voice of Thrasybulus,[70] was required to avert it. But for him, it would have been executed. While he reproved and silenced those who were most clamorous against the envoys, he took upon himself to give to the latter a public answer in the name of the collective armament. “We make no objection (he said) to the power of the Five Thousand: but the Four Hundred must go about their business, and reinstate the senate of Five Hundred as it was before. We are much obliged for what you have done in the way of economy, so as to increase the pay available for the soldiers. Above all, maintain the war strenuously, without any flinching before the enemy. For if the city be now safely held, there is good hope that we may make up the mutual differences between us by amicable settlement; but if once either of us perish, either we here or you at home, there will be nothing left for the other to make up with.”[71]

[70] Plutarch, Alkibiadês, c. 26.

[71] Thucyd. viii. 86. Καὶ τἄλλα ἐκέλευεν ἀντέχειν, καὶ μηδὲν ἐνδιδόναι τοῖς πολεμίοις· πρὸς μὲν γὰρ σφᾶς αὐτοὺς σωζομένης τῆς πόλεως πολλὴν ἐλπίδα εἶναι καὶ ξυμβῆναι, εἰ δὲ ἅπαξ τὸ ἕτερον σφαλήσεται ἢ τὸ ἐν Σάμῳ ἢ ἐκεῖνοι, οὐδὲ ὅτῳ διαλλαγήσεταί τις ἔτι ἔσεσθαι.

With this reply he dismissed the envoys; the armament reluctantly abandoning their wish of sailing to Athens. Thucydidês insists much on the capital service which Alkibiadês then rendered to his country, by arresting a project which would have had the effect of leaving all Ionia and the Hellespont defenceless against the Peloponnesians. His advice doubtless turned out well in the result; yet if we contemplate the state of affairs at the moment when he gave it, we shall be inclined to doubt whether prudential calculation was not rather against him, and in favor of the impulse of the armament. For what was to hinder the Four Hundred from patching up a peace with Sparta, and getting a Lacedæmonian garrison into Athens to help them in maintaining their dominion? Even apart from ambition, this was their best chance, if not their only chance, of safety for themselves; and we shall presently see that they tried to do it; being prevented from succeeding, partly, indeed, by the mutiny which arose against them at Athens, but still more by the stupidity of the Lacedæmonians themselves. Alkibiadês could not really imagine that the Four Hundred would obey his mandate delivered to the envoys, and resign their power voluntarily. But if they remained masters of Athens, who could calculate what they would do,—after having received this declaration of hostility from Samos,—not merely in regard to the foreign enemy, but even in regard to the relatives of the absent soldiers? Whether we look to the legitimate apprehensions of the soldiers, inevitable while their relatives were thus exposed, and almost unnerving them as to the hearty prosecution of the war abroad, in their utter uncertainty with regard to matters at home,—or to the chance of irreparable public calamity, greater even than the loss of Ionia, by the betrayal of Athens to the enemy,—we shall be disposed to conclude that the impulse of the armament was not merely natural, but even founded on a more prudent estimate of the actual chances, and that Alkibiadês was nothing more than fortunate in a sanguine venture. And if, instead of the actual chances, we look to the chances as Alkibiadês represented, and as the armament conceived them upon his authority,—namely, that the Phenician fleet was close at hand to act against the Lacedæmonians in Ionia,—we shall sympathize yet more with the defensive movement homeward. Alkibiadês had an advantage over every one else, simply by knowing his own falsehoods.

At the same assembly were introduced envoys from Argos, bearing a mission of recognition and an offer of aid to the Athenian Demos in Samos. They came in an Athenian trireme, navigated by the parali who had brought home Chæreas in the paralus from Samos to Athens, and had been then transferred into a common ship of war and sent to cruise about Eubœa. Since that time, however, they had been directed to convey Læspodias, Aristophon, and Melêsias,[72] as ambassadors from the Four Hundred to Sparta. But when crossing the Argolic gulf, probably under orders to land at Prasiæ, they declared against the oligarchy, sailed to Argos, and there deposited as prisoners the three ambassadors, who had all been active in the conspiracy of the Four Hundred. Being then about to depart for Samos, they were requested by the Argeians to carry thither their envoys, who were dismissed by Alkibiadês with an expression of gratitude, and with a hope that their aid would be ready when called for.

[72] Thucyd. viii. 86. It is very probable that the Melêsias here mentioned was the son of that Thucydidês who was the leading political opponent of Periklês. Melêsias appears as one of the _dramatis personæ_ in Plato’s dialogue called Lachês.

Meanwhile the envoys returned from Samos to Athens, carrying back to the Four Hundred the unwelcome news of their total failure with the armament. A little before, it appears, some of the trierarchs on service at the Hellespont had returned to Athens also,—Eratosthenês, Iatroklês, and others, who had tried to turn their squadron to the purposes of the oligarchical conspirators, but had been baffled and driven off by the inflexible democracy of their own seamen.[73] If at Athens, the calculations of these conspirators had succeeded more triumphantly than could have been expected beforehand, everywhere else they had completely miscarried; not merely at Samos and in the fleet, but also with the allied dependencies. At the time when Peisander quitted Samos for Athens, to consummate the oligarchical conspiracy even without Alkibiadês, he and others had gone round many of the dependencies and had effected a similar revolution in their internal government, in hopes that they would thus become attached to the new oligarchy at Athens. But this anticipation, as Phrynichus had predicted, was nowhere realized. The newly-created oligarchies only became more anxious for complete autonomy than the democracies had been before. At Thasos, especially, a body of exiles who had for some time dwelt in Peloponnesus were recalled, and active preparations were made for revolt, by new fortifications as well as by new triremes.[74] Instead of strengthening their hold on the maritime empire, the Four Hundred thus found that they had actually weakened it; while the pronounced hostility of the armament at Samos, not only put an end to all their hopes abroad, but rendered their situation at home altogether precarious.

[73] Lysias cont. Eratosthen. sect. 43, c. 9, p. 411, Reisk. οὐ γὰρ νῦν πρῶτον (Eratosthenês) τῷ ὑμετέρῳ πλήθει τὰ ἐναντία ἔπραξεν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν Τετρακοσίων ἐν τῷ στρατοπέδῳ ὀλιγαρχίαν καθιστὰς ἔφευγεν ἐξ Ἑλλησπόντου τριηράρχος καταλιπὼν τὴν ναῦν, μετὰ Ἰατροκλέους καὶ ἑτέρων ... ἀφικόμενος δὲ δεῦρο τἀναντία τοῖς βουλομένοις δημοκρατίαν εἶναι ἔπραττε.

[74] Thucyd. viii, 64.

From the moment when the coadjutors of Antiphon first learned, through the arrival of Chæreas at Athens, the proclamation of the democracy at Samos, discord, mistrust, and alarm began to spread even among their own members; together with a conviction that the oligarchy could never stand except through the presence of a Peloponnesian garrison in Athens. While Antiphon and Phrynichus, the leading minds who directed the majority of the Four Hundred, despatched envoys to Sparta for concluding peace,—these envoys never reached Sparta, being seized by the parali and sent prisoners to Argos, as above stated—, and commenced the erection of a special fort at Ectioneia, the projecting mole which contracted and commanded, on the northern side, the narrow entrance of Peiræus, there began to arise even in the bosom of the Four Hundred an opposition minority affecting popular sentiment, among whom the most conspicuous persons were Theramenês and Aristokratês.[75]

[75] Thucyd. viii, 89, 90. The representation of the character and motives of Theramenês, as given by Lysias in the Oration contra Eratosthenem (Orat. xii, sects. 66, 67, 79; Orat. xiii, cont. Agorat. sects. 12-17), is quite in harmony with that of Thucydidês (viii, 89): compare Aristophan. Ran. 541-966; Xenoph. Hellen. ii, 3, 27-30.

Though these men had stood forward prominently as contrivers and actors throughout the whole progress of the conspiracy, they now found themselves bitterly disappointed by the result. Individually, their ascendency with their colleagues was inferior to that of Peisander, Kallæschrus, Phrynichus, and others; while, collectively, the ill-gotten power of the Four Hundred was diminished in value, as much as it was aggravated in peril, by the loss of the foreign empire and the alienation of their Samian armament. Now began the workings of jealousy and strife among the successful conspirators, each of whom had entered into the scheme with unbounded expectations of personal ambition for himself, each had counted on stepping at once into the first place among the new oligarchical body. In a democracy, observes Thucydidês, contentions for power and preëminence provoke in the unsuccessful competitors less of fierce antipathy and sense of injustice, than in an oligarchy; for the losing candidates acquiesce with comparatively little repugnance in the unfavorable vote of a large miscellaneous body of unknown citizens; but they are angry at being put aside by a few known comrades, their rivals as well as their equals: moreover, at the moment when an oligarchy of ambitious men has just raised itself on the ruins of a democracy, every man of the conspirators is in exaggerated expectation; every one thinks himself entitled to become at once the first man of the body, and is dissatisfied if he be merely put upon a level with the rest.[76]

[76] Thucyd. viii, 89. ἦν δὲ τοῦτο μὲν σχῆμα πολιτικὸν τοῦ λόγου αὐτοῖς, κατ᾽ ἰδίας δὲ φιλοτιμίας οἱ πολλοὶ αὐτῶν τῷ τοιούτῳ προσέκειντο, ἐν ᾧπερ καὶ μάλιστα ὀλιγαρχία ἐκ δημοκρατίας γενομένη ἀπόλλυται. Πάντες γὰρ αὐθημερὸν ἀξιοῦσιν οὐχ ὅπως ἴσοι, ἀλλὰ καὶ πολὺ πρῶτος αὐτὸς ἕκαστος εἶναι· ἐκ δὲ δημοκρατίας αἱρέσεως γιγνομένης, ῥᾷον τὰ ἀποβαίνοντα, ὡς οὐκ ἀπὸ τῶν ὁμοίων, ἐλασσούμενός τις φέρει.

I give in the text what appears to me the proper sense of this passage, the last words of which are obscure: see the long notes of the commentators, especially Dr. Arnold and Poppo. Dr. Arnold considers τῶν ὁμοίων as a neuter, and gives the paraphrase of the last clause as follows: “Whereas under an old-established government, they (ambitious men of talent) are prepared to fail: they know that the weight of the government is against them, and are thus spared the peculiar pain of being beaten in a fair race, when they and their competitors start with equal advantages, and there is nothing to lessen the mortification of defeat. Ἀπὸ τῶν ὁμοίων ἐλασσούμενος, is, _being beaten when the game is equal, when the terms of the match are fair_.”

I cannot concur in Dr. Arnold’s explanation of these words, or of the general sense of the passage. He thinks that Thucydidês means to affirm what applies generally “to an opposition minority when it succeeds in revolutionizing the established government, whether the government be a democracy or a monarchy; whether the minority be an aristocratical party or a popular one.” It seems to me, on the contrary, that the affirmation bears only on the special case of an oligarchical conspiracy subverting a democracy, and that the comparison taken is applicable only to the state of things as it stood under the preceding democracy.

Next, the explanation given of the words by Dr. Arnold, assumes that “to be beaten in a fair race, or when the terms of the match are fair,” causes to the loser _the maximum_ of pain and offence. This is surely not the fact: or rather, the reverse is the fact. The man who loses his cause or his election through unjust favor, jealousy, or antipathy, is _more_ hurt than if he had lost it under circumstances where he could find no injustice to complain of. In both cases, he is doubtless mortified; but if there be injustice, he is offended and angry as well as mortified: he is disposed to take vengeance on men whom he looks upon as his personal enemies. It is important to distinguish the mortification of simple failure, from the discontent and anger arising out of belief that the failure has been unjustly brought about: it is this discontent, tending to break out in active opposition, which Thucydidês has present to his mind in the comparison which he takes between the state of feeling which precedes and follows the subversion of the democracy.

It appears to me that the words τῶν ὁμοίων are masculine, and that they have reference, like πάντες and ἴσοι, in the preceding line, to the privileged minority of equal confederates who are supposed to have just got possession of the government. At Sparta, the word οἱ ὅμοιοι acquired a sort of technical sense, to designate the small ascendent minority of wealthy Spartan citizens, who monopolized in their own hands political power, to the practical exclusion of the remainder (see Xenoph. Hellen. iii. 3, 5; Xenoph. Resp. Lac. x, 7; xiii, 1; Demosth. cont. Lept. s. 88). Now these ὅμοιοι, or peers, here indicated by Thucydidês as the peers of a recently-formed oligarchy, are not merely equal among themselves, but rivals one with another, and personally known to each other. It is important to bear in mind all these attributes as tacitly implied, though not literally designated or _connoted_ by the word ὅμοιοι, or peers; because the comparison instituted by Thucydidês is founded on all the attributes taken together; just as Aristotle (Rhetoric, ii, 8; ii, 13, 4), in speaking of the envy and jealousy apt to arise towards τοὺς ὁμοίους, considers them as ἀντεράστας and ἀνταγωνίστας.

The Four Hundred at Athens were all peers,—equals, rivals, and personally known among one another,—who had just raised themselves by joint conspiracy to supreme power. Theramenês, one of the number, conceives himself entitled to preëminence, but finds that he is shut out from it, the men who shut him out being this small body of known equals and rivals. He is inclined to impute the exclusion to personal motives on the part of this small knot; to selfish ambition on the part of each; to ill-will, to jealousy, to wrongful partiality; so that he thinks himself injured, and the sentiment of injury is embittered by the circumstance that those from whom it proceeds are a narrow, known, and definite body of colleagues. Whereas, if his exclusion had taken place under the democracy, by the suffrage of a large, miscellaneous, and personally unknown collection of citizens, he would have been far less likely to carry off with him a sense of injury. Doubtless he would have been mortified; but he would not have looked upon the electors in the light of jealous or selfish rivals, nor would they form a definite body before him for his indignation to concentrate itself upon. Thus Nikomachidês—whom Sokratês (see Xenophon, Memor. iii, 4) meets returning mortified because the people had chosen another person and not him as general—would have been not only mortified, but angry and vindictive besides, if he had been excluded by a few peers and rivals.

Such, in my judgment, is the comparison which Thucydidês wishes to draw between the effect of disappointment inflicted by the suffrage of a numerous and miscellaneous body of citizens, compared with disappointment inflicted by a small knot of oligarchical peers upon a competitor among their own number, especially at a moment when the expectations of all these peers are exaggerated, in consequence of the recent acquisition of their power. I believe the remark of the historian to be quite just; and that the disappointment in the first case is less intense, less connected with the sentiment of injury, and less likely to lead to active manifestation of enmity. This is one among the advantages of a numerous suffrage.

I cannot better illustrate the jealousies pretty sure to break out among a small number of ὅμοιοι, or rival peers, than by the description which Justin gives of the leading officers of Alexander the Great, immediately after that monarch’s death (Justin, xii, 2):—

“Cæterum, occiso Alexandro, non, ut læti, ita et securi fuere, omnibus unum locum competentibus: nec minus milites invicem se timebant, quorum et libertas solutior et favor incertus erat. _Inter ipsos vero æqualitas discordiam augebat_, nemine tantum cæteros excedente, ut ei aliquis se submitteret.”

Compare Plutarch, Lysander, c. 23.

Haack and Poppo think that ὁμοίων cannot be masculine, because ~ἀπὸ~ τῶν ὁμοίων ἐλασσούμενος would not then be correct, but ought to be ~ὑπὸ~ τῶν ὁμοίων ἐλασσούμενος. I should dispute, under all circumstances, the correctness of this criticism: for there are quite enough parallel cases to defend the use of ἀπὸ here, (see Thucyd. i, 17; iii, 82; iv, 115; vi, 28, etc.) But we need not enter into the debate; for the genitive τῶν ὁμοίων depends rather upon τὰ ἀποβαίνοντα which precedes, than upon ἐλασσούμενος which follows; and the preposition ἀπὸ is what we should naturally expect. To mark this, I have put a comma after ἀποβαίνοντα as well as after ὁμοίων.

To show that an opinion is not correct, indeed, does not afford _certain_ evidence that Thucydidês may not have advanced it: for he might be mistaken. But it ought to count as good presumptive evidence, unless the words peremptorily bind us to the contrary, which in this case they do not.

Such were the feelings of disappointed ambition, mingled with despondency, which sprung up among a minority of the Four Hundred, immediately after the news of the proclamation of the democracy at Samos among the armament. Theramenês, the leader of this minority,—a man of keen ambition, clever but unsteady and treacherous, not less ready to desert his party than to betray his country, though less prepared for extreme atrocities than many of his oligarchical comrades, began to look out for a good pretence to disconnect himself from a precarious enterprise. Taking advantage of the delusion which the Four Hundred had themselves held out about the fictitious Five Thousand, he insisted that, since the dangers that beset the newly-formed authority were so much more formidable than had been anticipated, it was necessary to popularize the party by enrolling and producing these Five Thousand as a real instead of a fictitious body.[77] Such an opposition, formidable from the very outset, became still bolder and more developed when the envoys returned from Samos, with an account of their reception by the armament, as well as of the answer, delivered in the name of the armament, whereby Alkibiadês directed the Four Hundred to dissolve themselves forthwith, but at the same time approved of the constitution of the Five Thousand, coupled with the restoration of the old senate. To enroll the Five Thousand at once, would be meeting the army half way; and there were hopes that, at that price, a compromise and reconciliation might be effected, of which Alkibiadês had himself spoken as practicable.[78] In addition to the formal answer, the envoys doubtless brought back intimation of the enraged feelings manifested by the armament, and of their eagerness, uncontrollable by every one except Alkibiadês, to sail home forthwith and rescue Athens from the Four Hundred. Hence arose an increased conviction that the dominion of the latter could not last: and an ambition, on the part of others as well as Theramenês, to stand forward as leaders of a popular opposition against it, in the name of the Five Thousand.[79]

[77] Thucyd. viii, 86, 2. Of this sentence, from φοβούμενοι down to καθιστάναι, I only profess to understand the last clause. It is useless to discuss the many conjectural amendments of a corrupt text, none of them satisfactory.

[78] Thucyd. viii, 86-89. It is alleged by Andokidês (in an oration delivered many years afterwards before the people of Athens, De Reditu suo, sects. 10-15), that during this spring he furnished the armament at Samos with wood proper for the construction of oars, only obtained by the special favor of Archelaus king of Macedonia, and of which the armament then stood in great need. He farther alleges, that he afterwards visited Athens, while the Four Hundred were in full dominion; and that Peisander, at the head of this oligarchical body, threatened his life for having furnished such valuable aid to the armament, then at enmity with Athens. Though he saved his life by clinging to the altar, yet he had to endure bonds and manifold hard treatment.

Of these claims, which Andokidês prefers to the favor of the subsequent democracy, I do not know how much is true.

[79] Thucyd. viii, 89. σαφέστατα δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐπῆρε τὰ ἐν τῇ Σάμῳ τοῦ Ἀλκιβιάδου ἰσχυρὰ ὄντα, καὶ ὅτι αὐτοῖς οὐκ ἐδόκει μόνιμον τὸ τῆς ὀλιγαρχίας ἔσεσθαι. ἠγωνίζετο οὖν εἷς ἕκαστος ~προστάτης τοῦ δήμου ἔσεσθαι~.

This is a remarkable passage, as indicating what is really meant by προστάτης τοῦ δήμου: “the leader of a popular opposition.” Theramenês, and the other persons here spoken of, did not even mention the name of the democracy,—they took up simply the name of the Five Thousand,—yet they are still called πρόσταται τοῦ δήμου, inasmuch as the Five Thousand were a sort of qualified democracy, compared to the Four Hundred.

The words denote the leader of a popular party, as opposed to an oligarchical party (see Thucyd. iii, 70; iv, 66; vi, 35), in a form of government either entirely democratical, or at least, in which the public assembly is frequently convoked and decides on many matters of importance. Thucydidês does not apply the words to any Athenian except in the case now before us respecting Theramenês: he does not use the words even with respect to Kleon, though he employs expressions which seem equivalent to it (iii, 36; iv, 21)—ἀνὴρ δημαγωγὸς κατ᾽ ἐκεῖνον τὸν χρόνον ὢν καὶ τῷ πλήθει πιθανώτατος, etc. This is very different from the words which he applies to Periklês—ὢν γὰρ ~δυνατώτατος~ τῶν καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸν καὶ ~ἄγων τὴν πολιτείαν~ (i, 127). Even in respect to Nikias, he puts him in conjunction with Pleistoanax at Sparta, and talks of both of them as σπεύδοντες τὰ μάλιστα ~τὴν ἡγεμονίαν~ (v, 16).

Compare the note of Dr. Arnold on vi, 35.

Against this popular opposition, Antiphon and Phrynichus exerted themselves, with demagogic assiduity, to caress and keep together the majority of the Four Hundred, as well as to uphold their power without abridgment. They were noway disposed to comply with this requisition that the fiction of the Five Thousand should be converted into a reality. They knew well that the enrollment of so many partners[80] would be tantamount to a democracy, and would be, in substance at least, if not in form, an annihilation of their own power. They had now gone too far to recede with safety; while the menacing attitude of Samos, as well as the opposition growing up against them at home, both within and without their own body, served only as instigation to them to accelerate their measures for peace with Sparta, and to secure the introduction of a Spartan garrison.

[80] Thucyd. viii, 92. τὸ μὲν καταστῆσαι μετόχους τοσούτους, ἄντικρυς ἂν δῆμον ἡγούμενοι, etc.

Aristotle (Polit. v, 5, 4) calls Phrynichus the _demagogue_ of the Four Hundred; that is, the person who most strenuously served _their_ interests and struggled for _their_ favor.

With this view, immediately after the return of their envoys from Samos, the two most eminent leaders, Antiphon and Phrynichus, went themselves with ten other colleagues in all haste to Sparta, prepared to purchase peace and the promise of Spartan aid almost at any price. At the same time, the construction of the fortress at Ectioneia was prosecuted with redoubled zeal; under pretence of defending the entrance of Peiræus against the armament from Samos, if the threat of their coming should be executed, but with the real purpose of bringing into it a Lacedæmonian fleet and army. For this latter object every facility was provided. The northwestern corner of the fortification of Peiræus, to the north of the harbor and its mouth, was cut off by a cross wall reaching southward so as to join the harbor: from the southern end of this cross wall, and forming an angle with it, a new wall was built, fronting the harbor and running to the extremity of the mole which narrowed the mouth of the harbor on the northern side, at which mole it met the termination of the northern wall of Peiræus. A separate citadel was thus inclosed, defensible against any attack either from Peiræus or from the harbor; furnished, besides, with distinct broad gates and posterns of its own, as well as with facilities for admitting an enemy within it.[81] The new cross wall was carried so as to traverse a vast portico, or open market-house, the largest in Peiræus: the larger half of this portico thus became inclosed within the new citadel; and orders were issued that all the corn, both actually warehoused and hereafter to be imported into Peiræus, should be deposited therein and sold out from thence for consumption. As Athens was sustained almost exclusively on corn brought from Eubœa and elsewhere, since the permanent occupation of Dekeleia, the Four Hundred rendered themselves masters by this arrangement of all the subsistence of the citizens, as well as of the entrance into the harbor; either to admit the Spartans or exclude the armament from Samos.[82]

[81] Thucyd. viii, 90-92. τὸ τεῖχος τοῦτο, καὶ πυλίδας ἔχον, καὶ ἐσόδους, καὶ ἐπεισαγωγὰς τῶν πολεμίων, etc.

I presume that the last expression refers to facilities for admitting the enemy either from the sea-side, or from the land-side; that is to say, from the northwestern corner of the old wall of Peiræus, which formed one side of the new citadel.

See Leake’s Topographie Athens, pp. 269, 270, Germ. transl.

[82] Thucyd. viii, 90. διῳκοδόμησαν δὲ καὶ στοὰν, etc.

I agree with the note in M. Didot’s translation, that this portico, or _halle_, open on three sides, must he considered as preëxisting; not as having been first built now; which seems to be the supposition of Colonel Leake, and the commentators generally.

Though Theramenês, himself one of the generals named under the Four Hundred, denounced, in conjunction with his supporters, the treasonable purpose of this new citadel, yet the majority of the Four Hundred stood to their resolution, and the building made rapid progress under the superintendence of the general Alexiklês, one of the most strenuous of the oligarchical faction.[83] Such was the habit of obedience at Athens to an established authority, when once constituted,—and so great the fear and mistrust arising out of the general belief in the reality of the Five Thousand unknown auxiliaries, supposed to be prepared to enforce the orders of the Four Hundred,—that the people, and even armed citizen hoplites, went on working at the building, in spite of their suspicions as to its design. Though not completed, it was so far advanced as to be defensible, when Antiphon and Phrynichus returned from Sparta. They had gone thither prepared to surrender everything,—not merely their naval force, but their city itself,—and to purchase their own personal safety by making the Lacedæmonians masters of Peiræus.[84] Yet we read with astonishment that the latter could not be prevailed on to contract any treaty, and that they manifested nothing but backwardness in seizing this golden opportunity. Had Alkibiadês been now playing their game, as he had been doing a year earlier, immediately before the revolt of Chios,—had they been under any energetic leaders, to impel them into hearty coöperation with the treason of the Four Hundred, who combined at this moment both the will and the power to place Athens in their hands, if seconded by an adequate force,—they might now have overpowered their great enemy at home, before the armament at Samos could have been brought to the rescue.

[83] Thucyd. viii, 91, 92. Ἀλεξικλέα, στρατηγὸν ὄντα ἐκ τῆς ὀλιγαρχίας καὶ μάλιστα πρὸς τοὺς ἑταίρους τετραμμένον, etc.

[84] Thucyd. viii, 91. Ἀλλὰ καὶ τοὺς πολεμίους ἐσαγαγόμενοι ἄνευ τειχῶν καὶ νεῶν ξυμβῆναι, καὶ ὁπωσοῦν τὰ τῆς πόλεως ἔχειν, εἰ τοῖς γε σώμασι σφῶν ἄδεια ἔσται.

_Ibid._ ἐπειδὴ οἱ ἐκ τῆς Λακεδαίμονος πρέσβεις οὐδὲν πράξαντες ἀνεχώρησαν τοῖς πᾶσι ξυμβατικὸν, etc.

Considering that Athens was saved from capture only by the slackness and stupidity of the Spartans, we may see that the armament at Samos had reasonable excuse for their eagerness previously manifested to come home; and that Alkibiadês, in combating that intention, braved an extreme danger which nothing but incredible good fortune averted. Why the Lacedæmonians remained idle, both in Peloponnesus and at Dekeleia, while Athens was thus betrayed, and in the very throes of dissolution, we can render no account: possibly, the caution of the ephors may have distrusted Antiphon and Phrynichus, from the mere immensity of their concessions. All that they would promise was, that a Lacedæmonian fleet of forty-two triremes, partly from Tarentum and Lokri, now about to start from Las in the Laconian gulf, and to sail to Eubœa on the invitation of a disaffected party in that island, should so far depart from its straight course as to hover near Ægina and Peiræus, ready to take advantage of any opportunity for attack laid open by the Four Hundred.[85]

[85] Thucyd. viii, 91. ἦν δέ τι καὶ τοιοῦτον ἀπὸ τῶν τὴν κατηγορίαν ἐχόντων, καὶ ~οὐ πάνυ διαβολὴ μόνον~ τοῦ λόγου.

The reluctant language, in which Thucydidês admits the treasonable concert of Antiphon and his colleagues with the Lacedæmonians, deserves notice; also c. 94. ~τάχα μέν τι καὶ~ ἀπὸ ξυγκειμένου λόγου, etc.

Of this squadron, however, even before it rounded Cape Malea, Theramenês obtained intelligence, and denounced it as intended to operate in concert with the Four Hundred for the occupation of Ectioneia. Meanwhile Athens became daily a scene of greater discontent and disorder, after the abortive embassy and return from Sparta of Antiphon and Phrynichus. The coercive ascendency of the Four Hundred was silently disappearing, while the hatred which their usurpation had inspired, together with the fear of their traitorous concert with the public enemy, became more and more loudly manifested in men’s private conversations as well as in gatherings secretly got together within numerous houses; especially the house of the peripolarch, the captain of the peripoli, or youthful hoplites, who formed the chief police of the country. Such hatred was not long in passing from vehement passion into act. Phrynichus, as he left the senate-house, was assassinated by two confederates, one of them a peripolus, or youthful hoplite, in the midst of the crowded market-place and in full daylight. The man who struck the blow made his escape, but his comrade was seized and put to the torture by order of the Four Hundred:[86] he was however a stranger, from Argos, and either could not or would not reveal the name of any directing accomplice. Nothing was obtained from him except general indications of meetings and wide-spread disaffection. Nor did the Four Hundred, being thus left without special evidence, dare to lay hands upon Theramenês, the pronounced leader of the opposition, as we shall find Kritias doing six years afterwards, under the rule of the Thirty. The assassins of Phrynichus remaining undiscovered and unpunished, Theramenês and his associates became bolder in their opposition than before. And the approach of the Lacedæmonian fleet under Agesandridas,—which, having now taken station at Epidaurus, had made a descent on Ægina, and was hovering not far off Peiræus, altogether out of the straight course for Eubœa,—lent double force to all their previous assertions about the imminent dangers connected with the citadel at Ectioneia.

[86] Thucyd. viii, 91. The statement of Plutarch is in many respects different (Alkibiadês, c. 25).

Amidst this exaggerated alarm and discord, the general body of hoplites became penetrated with aversion,[87] every day increasing, against the new citadel. At length the hoplites of the tribe in which Aristokratês, the warmest partisan of Theramenês was taxiarch, being on duty and engaged in the prosecution of the building, broke out into absolute mutiny against it, seized the person of Alexiklês, the general in command, and put him under arrest in a neighboring house; while the peripoli, or youthful military police, stationed at Munychia, under Hermon, abetted them in the proceeding.[88] News of this violence was speedily conveyed to the Four Hundred, who were at that moment holding session in the senate-house, Theramenês himself being present. Their wrath and menace were at first vented against him as the instigator of the revolt, a charge against which he could only vindicate himself by volunteering to go among the foremost for the liberation of the prisoner. He forthwith started in haste for the Peiræus, accompanied by one of the generals, his colleague, who was of the same political sentiment as himself. A third among the generals, Aristarchus, one of the fiercest of the oligarchs, followed him, probably from mistrust, together with some of the younger knights, horsemen, or richest class in the state, identified with the cause of the Four Hundred. The oligarchical partisans ran to marshal themselves in arms, alarming exaggerations being rumored, that Alexiklês had been put to death, and that Peiræus was under armed occupation; while at Peiræus the insurgents imagined that the hoplites from the city were in full march to attack them. For a time all was confusion and angry sentiment, which the slightest untoward accident might have inflamed into sanguinary civil carnage. Nor was it appeased except by earnest intreaty and remonstrance from the elder citizens, aided by Thucydidês of Pharsalus, proxenus or public guest of Athens, in his native town, on the ruinous madness of such discord when a foreign enemy was almost at their gates.

[87] Thucyd. viii, 92. τὸ δὲ μέγιστον, τῶν ὁπλιτῶν τὸ στῖφος ταῦτα ἐβούλετο.

[88] Plutarch, Alkibiad. c. 26, represents Hermon as one of the assassins of Phrynichus.

The perilous excitement of this temporary crisis, which brought into full daylight every man’s real political sentiments, proved the oligarchical faction, hitherto exaggerated in number, to be far less powerful than had been imagined by their opponents. And the Four Hundred had found themselves too much embarrassed how to keep up the semblance of their authority even in Athens itself, to be able to send down any considerable force for the protection of their citadel at Ectioneia; though they were reinforced, only eight days before their fall, by at least one supplementary member, probably in substitution for some predecessor who had accidentally died.[89] Theramenês, on reaching Peiræus, began to address the mutinous hoplites in a tone of simulated displeasure, while Aristarchus and his oligarchical companions spoke in the harshest language, and threatened them with the force which they imagined to be presently coming down from the city. But these menaces were met by equal firmness on the part of the hoplites, who even appealed to Theramenês himself, and called upon him to say whether he thought the construction of this citadel was for the good of Athens, or whether it would not be better demolished. His opinion had been fully pronounced beforehand; and he replied, that if they thought proper to demolish it, he cordially concurred. Without farther delay, hoplites and unarmed people mounted pell-mell upon the walls, and commenced the demolition with alacrity; under the general shout, “Whoever is for the Five Thousand in place of the Four Hundred, let him lend a hand in this work.” The idea of the old democracy was in every one’s mind, but no man uttered the word; the fear of the imaginary Five Thousand still continuing. The work of demolition seems to have been prosecuted all that day, and not to have been completed until the next day; after which the hoplites released Alexiklês from arrest, without doing him any injury.[90]

[89] See Lysias, Orat. xx, pro Polystrato. The fact that Polystratus was only eight days a member of the Four Hundred, before their fall, is repeated three distinct times in this Oration (c. 2, 4, 5, pp. 672, 674, 679, Reisk.), and has all the air of truth.

[90] Thucyd. viii, 92, 93. In the Oration of Demosthenês, or Deinarchus, against Theokrinês (c. 17, p. 1343), the speaker, Epicharês, makes allusion to this destruction of the fort at Ectioneia by Aristokratês uncle of his grandfather. The allusion chiefly deserves notice from its erroneous mention of Kritias and the return of the Demos from exile, betraying a complete confusion between the events in the time of the Four Hundred and those in the time of the Thirty.

Two things deserve notice, among these details, as illustrating the Athenian character. Though Alexiklês was vehemently oligarchical as well as unpopular, these mutineers do no harm to his person, but content themselves with putting him under arrest. Next, they do not venture to commence the actual demolition of the citadel, until they have the formal sanction of Theramenês, one of the constituted generals. The strong habit of legality, implanted in all Athenian citizens by their democracy,—and the care, even in departing from it, to depart as little as possible,—stand plainly evidenced in these proceedings.

The events of this day gave a fatal shock to the ascendency of the Four Hundred; yet they assembled on the morrow as usual in the senate-house; and they appear now, when it was too late, to have directed one of their members to draw up a real list, giving body to the fiction of the Five Thousand.[91] Meanwhile the hoplites in Peiræus, having finished the levelling of the new fortifications, took the still more important step of entering, armed as they were, into the theatre of Dionysus hard by, in Peiræus, but on the verge of Munychia, and there holding a formal assembly; probably under the convocation of the general Theramenês, pursuant to the forms of the anterior democracy. They here took the resolution of adjourning their assembly to the Anakeion, or temple of Castor and Pollux, the Dioskuri, in the city itself and close under the acropolis; whither they immediately marched and established themselves, still retaining their arms. So much was the position of the Four Hundred changed, that they who had on the preceding day been on the aggressive against a spontaneous outburst of mutineers in Peiræus, were now thrown upon the defensive against a formal assembly, all armed, in the city, and close by their own senate-house. Feeling themselves too weak to attempt any force, they sent deputies to the Anakeion to negotiate and offer concessions. They engaged to publish the list of _The_ Five Thousand, and to convene them for the purpose of providing for the periodical cessation and renewal of the Four Hundred, by rotation from the Five Thousand, in such order as the latter themselves should determine. But they entreated that time might be allowed for effecting this, and that internal peace might be maintained, without which there was no hope of defence against the enemy without. Many of the hoplites in the city itself joined the assembly in the Anakeion, and took part in the debates. The position of the Four Hundred being no longer such as to inspire fear, the tongues of speakers were now again loosed, and the ears of the multitude again opened, for the first time since the arrival of Peisander from Samos, with the plan of the oligarchical conspiracy. Such renewal of free and fearless public speech, the peculiar life-principle of the democracy, was not less wholesome in tranquillizing intestine discord than in heightening the sentiment of common patriotism against the foreign enemy.[92] The assembly at length dispersed, after naming an early future time for a second assembly, to bring about the reëstablishment of harmony in the theatre of Dionysus.[93]

[91] Lysias, Orat. xx, pro Polystrato, c. 4, p. 675, Reisk.

This task was confided to Polystratus, a very recent member of the Four Hundred, and therefore probably less unpopular than the rest. In his defence after the restoration of the democracy, he pretended to have undertaken the task much against his will, and to have drawn up a list containing nine thousand names instead of five thousand.

It may probably have been in this meeting of the Four Hundred, that Antiphon delivered his oration strongly recommending concord, Περὶ ὁμονοίας. All his eloquence was required just now, to bring back the oligarchical party, if possible, into united action. Philostratus (Vit. Sophistar. c. xv, p. 500, ed. Olear.) expresses great admiration for this oration, which is several times alluded to both by Harpokration and Suidas. See Westermann, Gesch. der Griech. Beredsamkeit, Beilage ii, p. 276.

[92] Thucyd. viii, 93. Τὸ δὲ πᾶν πλῆθος τῶν ὁπλιτῶν, ~ἀπὸ πολλῶν καὶ πρὸς πολλοὺς λόγων γιγνομένων, ἠπιώτερον ἦν ἢ πρότερον, καὶ ἐφοβεῖτο μάλιστα περὶ τοῦ παντὸς πολιτικοῦ~.

[93] Thucyd. viii, 93. ξυνεχώρησαν δὲ ὥστ᾽ ~ἐς ἡμέραν ῥητὴν~ ἐκκλησίαν ποιῆσαι ἐν τῷ Διονυσίῳ ~περὶ ὁμονοίας~.

The definition of time must here allude to the morrow, or to the day following the morrow; at least it seems impossible that the city could be left longer than this interval without a government.

On the day, and at the hour, when this assembly in the theatre of Dionysus was on the point of coming together, the news ran through Peiræus and Athens, that the forty-two triremes under the Lacedæmonian Agesandridas, having recently quitted the harbor of Megara, were sailing along the coast of Salamis in the direction towards Peiræus. Such an event, while causing universal consternation throughout the city, confirmed all the previous warnings of Theramenês as to the treasonable destination of the citadel recently demolished, and every one rejoiced that the demolition had been accomplished just in time. Foregoing their intended assembly, the citizens rushed with one accord down to Peiræus, where some of them took post to garrison the walls and the mouth of the harbor; others got aboard the triremes lying in the harbor: others, again, launched some fresh triremes from the boat-houses into the water. Agesandridas rowed along the shore, near the mouth of Peiræus; but found nothing to promise concert within, or tempt him to the intended attack. Accordingly, he passed by and moved onward to Sunium, in a southerly direction. Having doubled the Cape of Sunium, he then turned his course along the coast of Attica northward, halted for a little while between Thorikus and Prasiæ, and presently took station at Orôpus.[94]

[94] Thucyd. viii, 94.

Though relieved, when they found that he passed by Peiræus without making any attack, the Athenians knew that his destination must now be against Eubœa; which to them was hardly less important than Peiræus, since their main supplies were derived from that island. Accordingly, they put to sea at once with all the triremes which could be manned and got ready in the harbor. But from the hurry of the occasion, coupled with the mistrust and dissension now reigning, and the absence of their great naval force at Samos, the crews mustered were raw and ill-selected, and the armament inefficient. Polystratus, one of the members of the Four Hundred, perhaps others of them also, were aboard; men who had an interest in defeat rather than victory.[95] Thymocharês, the admiral, conducted them round Cape Sunium to Eretria in Eubœa, where he found a few other triremes, which made up his whole fleet to thirty-six sail.

[95] Lysias, Orat. xx, pro Polystrato, c. 4, p. 676, Reisk.

From another passage in this oration, it would seem that Polystratus was in command of the fleet, possibly enough, in conjunction with Thymocharês, according to a common Athenian practice (c. 5, p. 679). His son, who defends him, affirms that he was wounded in the battle.

Diodorus (xiii, 34) mentions the discord among the crews on board these ships under Thymocharês, almost the only point which we learn from his meagre notice of this interesting period.

He had scarcely reached the harbor and disembarked, when, without allowing time for his men to procure refreshment, he found himself compelled to fight a battle with the forty-two ships of Agesandridas, who had just sailed across from Orôpus, and was already approaching the harbor. This surprise had been brought about by the anti-Athenian party in Eretria, who took care, on the arrival of Thymocharês, that no provisions should be found in the market-place, so that his men were compelled to disperse and obtain them from houses at the extremity of the town; while at the same time a signal was hoisted, visible at Orôpus on the opposite side of the strait, less than seven miles broad, indicating to Agesandridas the precise moment for bringing his fleet across to the attack, with their crews fresh after the morning meal. Thymocharês, on seeing the approach of the enemy, ordered his men aboard; but, to his disappointment, many of them were found to be so far off that they could not be brought back in time, so that he was compelled to sail out and meet the Peloponnesians with ships very inadequately manned. In a battle immediately outside of the Eretrian harbor, he was, after a short contest, completely defeated, and his fleet driven back upon the shore. Some of his ships escaped to Chalkis, others to a fortified post garrisoned by the Athenians themselves, not far from Eretria; yet not less than twenty-two triremes, out of the whole thirty-six, fell into the hands of Agesandridas, and a large proportion of the crews were slain or made prisoners. Of those seamen who escaped, too, many found their death from the hands of the Eretrians, into whose city they fled for shelter. On the news of this battle, not merely Eretria, but also all Eubœa,—except Oreus in the north of the island, which was settled by Athenian kleruchs,—declared its revolt from Athens, which had been intended more than a year before, and took measures for defending itself in concert with Agesandridas and the Bœotians.[96]

[96] Thucyd. viii, 5; viii, 95.

Ill could Athens endure a disaster, in itself so immense and aggravated, under the present distressed condition of the city. Her last fleet was destroyed, her nearest and most precious island torn from her side; an island, which of late had yielded more to her wants than Attica itself, but which was now about to become a hostile and aggressive neighbor.[97] The previous revolt of Eubœa, occurring thirty-four years before, during the maximum of Athenian power, had been even then a terrible blow to Athens, and formed one of the main circumstances which forced upon her the humiliation of the Thirty years’ truce. But this second revolt took place when she had not only no means of reconquering the island, but no means even of defending Peiræus against the blockade by the enemy’s fleet. The dismay and terror excited by the news at Athens was unbounded, even exceeding what had been felt after the Sicilian catastrophe, or the revolt of Chios. Nor was there any second reserve now in the treasury, such as the thousand talents which had rendered such essential service on the last-mentioned occasion. In addition to their foreign dangers, the Athenians were farther weighed down by two intestine calamities in themselves hardly supportable,—alienation of their own fleet at Samos, and the discord, yet unappeased, within their own walls; wherein the Four Hundred still held provisionally the reins of government, with the ablest and most unscrupulous leaders at their head. In the depth of their despair, the Athenians expected nothing less than to see the victorious fleet of Agesandridas—more than sixty triremes strong, including the recent captures—off the Peiræus, forbidding all importation, and threatening them with approaching famine, in combination with Agis and Dekeleia. The enterprise would have been easy for there were neither ships nor seamen to repel him; and his arrival at this critical moment would most probably have enabled the Four Hundred to resume their ascendency, with the means as well as the disposition to introduce a Lacedæmonian garrison into the city.[98] And though the arrival of the Athenian fleet from Samos would have prevented this extremity, yet it could not have arrived in time, except on the supposition of a prolonged blockade: moreover, its mere transfer from Samos to Athens would have left Ionia and the Hellespont defenceless against the Lacedæmonians and Persians, and would have caused the loss of all the Athenian empire. Nothing could have saved Athens, if the Lacedæmonians at this juncture had acted with reasonable vigor, instead of confining their efforts to Eubœa, now an easy and certain conquest. As on the former occasion, when Antiphon and Phrynichus went to Sparta prepared to make any sacrifice for the purpose of obtaining Lacedæmonian aid and accommodation, so now, in a still greater degree, Athens owed her salvation only to the fact that the enemies actually before her were indolent and dull Spartans, not enterprising Syracusans under the conduct of Gylippus.[99] And this is the second occasion, we may add, on which Athens was on the brink of ruin in consequence of the policy of Alkibiadês in retaining the armament at Samos.

[97] Thucyd. viii, 95. To show what Eubœa became at a later period, see Demosthenês, De Fals. Legat. c. 64, p. 409: τὰ ἐν Εὐβοίᾳ κατασκευασθησόμενα ὁρμητήρια ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς, etc.; and Demosthenês, De Coronâ, c. 71; ἄπλους δ᾽ ἡ θάλασσα ὑπὸ τῶν ἐκ τῆς Εὐβοίας ὁρμωμένων λῃστῶν γέγονε, etc.

[98] Thucyd. viii, 96. Μάλιστα δ᾽ αὐτοὺς καὶ δι᾽ ἐγγυτάτου ἐθορύβει, εἰ οἱ πολέμιοι τολμήσουσι νενικηκότες εὐθὺς σφῶν ἐπὶ τὸν Πειραιᾶ ἔρημον ὄντα νεῶν πλεῖν· καὶ ὅσον οὐκ ἤδη ἐνόμιζον αὐτοὺς παρεῖναι. ~Ὅπερ ἄν, εἰ τολμηρότεροι ἦσαν, ῥᾳδίως ἂν ἐποίησαν~· καὶ ἢ διέστησαν ἂν ἔτι μᾶλλον τὴν πόλιν ἐφορμοῦντες, ἤ εἰ ἐπολιόρκουν μένοντες, καὶ τὰς ἀπ᾽ Ἰωνίας ναῦς ἠνάγκασαν ἂν βοηθῆσαι, etc.

[99] Thucyd. viii, 96; vii, 21-55.

Fortunately for the Athenians, no Agesandridas appeared off Peiræus; so that the twenty triremes, which they contrived to man as a remnant for defence, had no enemy to repel.[100] Accordingly, the Athenians were allowed to enjoy an interval of repose which enabled them to recover partially both from consternation and from intestine discord. It was their first proceeding, when the hostile fleet did not appear, to convene a public assembly; and that too in the Pnyx itself, the habitual scene of the democratical assemblies, well calculated to reinspire that patriotism which had now been dumb and smouldering for the four last months. In this assembly, the tide of opinion ran vehemently against the Four Hundred:[101] even those, who, like the Board of elders entitled probûli had originally counselled their appointment, now denounced them along with the rest, though severely taunted by the oligarchical leader Peisander for their inconsistency. Votes were finally passed: 1. To depose the Four Hundred; 2. To place the whole government in the hands of _The Five Thousand_; 3. Every citizen, who furnished a panoply, either for himself or for any one else, was to be of right a member of this body of _The_ Five Thousand; 4. No citizen was to receive pay for any political function, on pain of becoming solemnly accursed, or excommunicated.[102] Such were the points determined by the first assembly held in the Pnyx. The archons, the senate of Five Hundred, etc., were renewed: after which many other assemblies were also held, in which nomothetæ, dikasts, and other institutions essential to the working of the democracy, were constituted. Various other votes were also passed; especially one, on the proposition of Kritias, seconded by Theramenês,[103] to restore Alkibiadês and some of his friends from exile; while messages were farther despatched, both to him and to the armament at Samos, doubtless confirming the recent nomination of generals, apprizing them of what had recently occurred at Athens, as well as bespeaking their full concurrence and unabated efforts against the common enemy.

[100] Thucyd. viii, 97.

[101] It is to this assembly that I refer, with confidence, the remarkable dialogue of contention between Peisander and Sophoklês, one of the Athenian probûli, mentioned in Aristotel. Rhetoric. iii, 18, 2. There was no other occasion on which the Four Hundred were ever publicly thrown upon their defence at Athens.

This was not Sophoklês the tragic poet, but another person of the same name, who appears afterwards as one of the oligarchy of Thirty.

[102] Thucyd. viii, 97. Καὶ ἐκκλησίαν ξυνέλεγον, μίαν μὲν εὐθὺς τότε πρῶτον ἐς τὴν Πνύκα καλουμένην, οὗπερ καὶ ἄλλοτε εἰώθεσαν, ἐν ᾗπερ καὶ τοὺς τετρακοσίους καταπαύσαντες ~τοῖς πεντακισχιλίοις~ ἐψηφίσαντο τὰ πράγματα παραδοῦναι· ~εἶναι δὲ αὐτῶν, ὁπόσοι καὶ ὅπλα παρέχονται~· καὶ μισθὸν μηδένα φέρειν, μηδεμιᾷ ἀρχῇ, εἰ δὲ μὴ, ἐπάρατον ἐποιήσαντο. Ἐγίγνοντο δὲ καὶ ἄλλαι ὕστερον πυκναὶ ἐκκλησίαι, ἀφ᾽ ὧν καὶ ~νομοθέτας καὶ τἄλλα ἐψηφίσαντο ἐς τὴν πολιτείαν~.

In this passage I dissent from the commentators on two points. First, they understand this number Five Thousand as a real definite list of citizens, containing five thousand names, neither more nor less. Secondly, they construe νομοθέτας, not in the ordinary meaning which it bears in Athenian constitutional language, but in the sense of ξυγγραφεῖς (c. 67), “persons to model the constitution, corresponding to the ξυγγραφεῖς appointed by the aristocratical party a little before,” to use the words of Dr. Arnold.

As to the first point, which is sustained also by Dr. Thirlwall (Hist. Gr. ch. xxviii, vol. iv, p. 51, 2d ed.), Dr. Arnold really admits what is the ground of my opinion, when he says: “Of course the number of citizens capable of providing themselves with heavy arms must _have much exceeded five thousand_: and it is said in the defence of Polystratus, one of the Four Hundred (Lysias, p. 675, Reisk.), that he drew up a list of nine thousand. But we must suppose that all who could furnish heavy arms _were eligible into the number of the Five Thousand_, whether the members were fixed on by lot, by election, or by rotation; as it had been proposed to appoint the Four Hundred by rotation out of the Five Thousand (viii, 93).”

Dr. Arnold here throws out a supposition which by no means conforms to the exact sense of the words of Thucydidês—εἶναι δὲ αὐτῶν, ὁπόσοι καὶ ὅπλα παρέχονται. These words distinctly signify, that all who furnished heavy arms _should be of the Five Thousand, should belong of right to that body_, which is something different from _being eligible_ into the number of the Five Thousand, either by lot, rotation, or otherwise. The language of Thucydidês, when he describes, in the passage referred to by Dr. Arnold, c. 93, the projected formation of the Four Hundred by rotation out of the Five Thousand, is very different: καὶ ἐκ τούτων ἐν μέρει τοὺς τετρακοσίους ἔσεσθαι, etc. M. Boeckh (Public Economy of Athens, bk. ii, ch. 21, p. 268, Eng. Tr.) is not satisfactory in his description of this event.

The idea which I conceive of the Five Thousand, as a number existing from the commencement only in talk and imagination, neither realized nor intended to be realized, coincides with the full meaning of this passage of Thucydidês, as well as with everything which he had before said about them.

I will here add that ὁπόσοι ὅπλα παρέχονται means persons furnishing arms, not for themselves alone, but for others also (Xenoph. Hellen. iii, 4, 15.)

As to the second point, the signification of νομοθέτας, I stand upon the general use of that word in Athenian political language: see the explanation earlier in this History, vol. v, ch. xlvi, p. 373. It is for the commentators to produce some justification of the unusual meaning which they assign to it: “persons to model the constitution; commissioners who drew up the new constitution,” as Dr. Arnold, in concurrence with the rest, translates it. Until some justification is produced, I venture to believe that νομοθέται, is a word which would not be used in that sense with reference to nominees chosen by the democracy, and intended to act with the democracy; for it implies a final, decisive, authoritative determination; whereas the ξυγγραφεῖς, or “commissioners to draw up a constitution,” were only invested with the function of submitting something for approbation to the public assembly or competent authority; that is, assuming that the public assembly remained an efficient reality.

Moreover, the words καὶ τἄλλα would hardly be used in immediate sequence to νομοθέτας, if the latter word meant that which the commentators suppose: “Commissioners for framing a constitution, _and the other things towards the constitution_.” Such commissioners are surely far too prominent and initiative in their function to be named in this way. Let us add, that the most material items in the new constitution, if we are so to call it, have already been distinctly specified as settled by public vote, before these νομοθέται are even named.

It is important to notice, that even the Thirty, who were named six years afterwards to draw up a constitution, at the moment when Sparta was mistress of Athens, and when the people were thoroughly put down, are not called Νομοθέται, but are named by a circumlocution equivalent to Ἔδοξε τῷ δήμῳ, τριάκοντα ἄνδρας ἑλέσθαι, οἳ τοὺς πατρίους νόμους συγγράψουσι, καθ᾽ οὓς πολιτεύσουσι.—Αἱρεθέντες δὲ, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ τε συγγράψαι νόμους καθ᾽ οὕστινας πολιτεύσοιντο, τούτους μὲν ἀεὶ ἔμελλον ξυγγράφειν τε καὶ ἀποδεικνύναι, etc. (Xenophon, Hellen. ii, 3, 2-11.) Xenophon calls Kritias and Chariklês the nomothetæ of the Thirty (Memor. i, 2, 30), but this is not democracy.

For the signification of Νομοθέτης (applied most generally to Solon, sometimes to others, either by rhetorical looseness or by ironical taunt), or Νομοθέται, a numerous body of persons chosen and sworn, see Lysias cont. Nikomach. sects. 3, 33, 37; Andokidês de Mysteriis, sects. 81-85, c. 14, p. 38, where the nomothetæ are a sworn body of Five Hundred, exercising, conjointly with the senate, the function of accepting or rejecting laws proposed to them.

[103] Plutarch, Alkibiadês, c. 33. Cornelius Nepos (Alkibiad.