Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/104

 82 HISTORY OF GREECE. thii^s in abundance ; but upon him who breaks it, destruction fcl himself as well as for his family." Such was the remarkable decree which the Athenians not only passed in senate and public assembly, less than a year after the deposition of the Four Hundred, but also caused to be engraved on a column close to the door of the senate-house. It plainly indicates, not merely that the democracy had returned, but an unusual intensity of democratical feeling along with it. The constitution which all the Athenians thus swore to maintain by the most strenuous measures of defence, must have been a con- stitution in which all Athenians had political rights, not one of Five Thousand privileged persons excluding the rest. 1 This de- cree became invalid after the expulsion of the Thirty, by the general resolution then passed not to act upon any laws passed before the archonship of Eukleides, unless specially reenacted. But the column on which it stood engraved still remained, and the words were read upon it, at least down to the time of the orator Lykurgus, eighty years afterwards. 2 The mere deposition of the Four Hundred, however, and the transfer of political power to the Five Thousand, which took place in the first public assembly held after the defeat oft' Ere- tria, was sufficient to induce most of the violent leaders of the Four Hundred forthwith to leave Athens. Peisander, Alexikles, and others, went off secretly to Dekeleia : 3 Aristarchus alone 1 Those who think that a new constitution was established, after the de- position of the Four Hundred, are perplexed to fix the period at which the old democracy was restored. K. F. Hermann and others suppose, without any special proof, that it was restored at the time when Alkibiades returned to Athens in 407 B.C. See K. F. Hermann, Griech. Staats Alterthumer, s. 167, note 13. adv. Leptin. sect. 138, c. 34, p. 506. If we wanted any proof, how perfectly reckless and unmeaning is the mention of the name of Solon by the orators, we should find it in this pas- sage of AndokidSs. He calls this psephism of Demophantus a law of Solon (sect. 96) : see above in this History, vol. iii, ch. xi, p. 122. 3 Thucyd. viii, 98. Most of these fugitives returned six years afterwards, after the battle of JKg:>spotami, when the Athenian people again became subject to an oligarch} in the persons of the Thirty. Several of them lx>
 * Lykurgns adv. Leokrat. sect. 131, c. 31, p. 225 : compare Demosthen.