Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/76

54 HISTORY OF GREECE. affirming, ill-usage to have been offered to the relatives of thi Boldiers at Athens, were utterly false and calumnious. Such were the topics on which the envoys insisted, in a& apologetic strain, at considerable length, but without any effect in conciliating the soldiers who heard them. The general resent- ment against the Four Hundred was expressed by several per- sons present in public speech, by others in private manifestation of feeling against the envoys : and so passionately was this sen- timent 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 Peiraaus was re- vived with greater ardor than before. Alkibiades, 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, 1 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 g? about their business, and reinstate the senate of Five Hundred as it was before. We are much obh'ged 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 tiny flinching before the enemy. For if the city be now safely ?.t'yoiTCf roi'f ~e TcevraKta^i/uovr inroQavelv, KOI IK TOVTUV iv pepet,tj i> roif xEVTaKiffxiS-ioif 6oKy, T o t) c r c rpa KO aiovf ea cad at, etc. Dr. Arnold's designation of these Five Thousand as " the sovereign as- sembly," 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 jrevra.Kiox&ioi. oi IT paoa ov - e ( (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 nntil considerably after the Four Hundred had been put down. 1 Plutarch, Alkibiad&r, c. 25