Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/105

 FLIGHT OP THE OLIGARCHICAL LEADERS. 83 made his flight the means of inflicting a new wound upon his country. Being among the number of the generals, he availed himself of this authority to march with some of the rudest among those Scythian archers, who did the police duty of the city to (Enoe, on the Boeotian frontier, which was at that moment under siege by a body of Corinthians and Boeotians united. Aristarchus, in concert with the besiegers, presented himself to the garrison, and acquainted them that Athens and Sparta had just concluded peace, one of the conditions of which was thai CEnoc should be surrendered to the Boeotians. He therefore, as general, ordered them to evacuate the place, under the benefit of a truce to return home. The garrison having been closely blocked up, and kept wholly ignorant of the actual condition of politics, obeyed the order without reserve; so that the Boeotians acquired possession of this very important frontier position, a new thorn in the side of Athens, besides Dekeleia. 1 Thus was the Athenian democracy again restored, and the divorce between the city and the armament at Samos terminated after an interruption of about four months by the successful con- spiracy of the Four Hundred. It was only by a sort of miracle or rather by the incredible backwardness and stupidity of her foreign enemies that Athens escaped alive from this nefarious aggression of her own ablest and wealthiest citizens. That the victorious democracy should animadvert upon and punish the principal actors concerned in it, who had satiated their own selfish ambition at the cost of so much suffering, anxiety, and peril to their country, was nothing more than rigorous justice. But the circumstances of the case were peculiar: for the counter- revolution had been accomplished partly by the aid of a minority among the Four Hundred themselves, Theramenes, Aristo- krates, and others, together with the Board of Elders called Pro- buli, all of whom had been, at the outset, either principals or came members of the senate which worked under the Thirty (Lysias cont. Agornt. sect. 80. c. 18. p. 495). "Whether Aristoteles and Chariklus were among the number of the Four Hundred who now went into exile, as Wattcnbach affirms (De Quadringcnt. Ath. Factione, p. CC), seems not clearly made out. 1 Thucyd. viii, 89, 90. 'Apiarapxof. uvftp tv roif pufaffTa not IK etc