Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/352

 330 HISTORY OF GKEECE. others in the senate-house. 1 While the choice performers at Ccv. rinth were contending for the prize in the theatre, with judges formally named to decide, and while the market-place around was crowded with festive spectators, a number of armed men were introduced, probably Argeians, with leaders designating the victims whom they were to strike. Some of these select vic- tims were massacred in the market-place, others in the thea- tre, and one even while sitting as a judge in the theatre. Others again fled in terror to embrace the altars or statues in the market-place, which sanctuary, nevertheless, did not save their lives. Nor was such sacrilege arrested, repugnant as it was to the feelings of the assembled spectators and to Grecian feelings generally, until one hundred and twenty persons had perished.2 But the persons slain were chiefly elderly men ; for the younger portion of the philo-Laconian party, suspecting some mischief, had declined attending the festival, and kept themselves separately as- sembled under their leader Pasimelus in the gymnasium and cyprus-grove called Kranium, just without the city-gates. We find, too, that they were not only assembled, but actually in arms. For the moment that they heard the clamor in the market-place, and learned from some fugitives what was going on, they rushed up at once to the Akrokorinthus (or eminence and acropolis overhang- ing the city) and got possession of the citadel, which they mam- tamed with such force and courage that the Argeians and the Corinthians, who took part with the government, were repulsed in the attempt to dislodge them. This circumstance, indirectly re- vealed in the one-sided narrative of Xenophon, lets us into the real state of the city, and affords good ground for believing that Pasimelus and his friends were prepared beforehand for an armed outbreak, but waited to execute it, until the festival was over, a scruple which the government, in their eagerness to forestall the plot, disregarded, employing the hands and weapons of Argeians who were comparatively unimpressed by solemnities peculiar to Corinth. 3 1 Thucyd. iii, 70. 2 Diodorus (xiv, 86) gives this number, which seems very credible. Xen ophon (iv, 4, 4) only says noU.oi. 3 In recounting tbis alternation of violence projected, violence perpetra- ted, recourse on the one side to a foreign ally, treason on the other by ad- mitting an avowed enemy, which formed the modus operandi of opprsing