Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/141

 RENEWED TROUBLES AT KORKYRA. H9 gained strength, and was encouraged by the misfortunes of Athens to lay plans for putting the island into the hands of the Lacedaemonians. The democratical leaders, apprized of this conspiracy, sent to Naupaktus for the Athenian admiral Konon. He came, with a detachment of six hundred Messenians, by the aid of whom they seized the oligarchical conspirators in the market-place, putting a few to death, and banishing more than a thousand. The extent of their alarm is attested by the fact, that they liberated the slaves and conferred the right of citizenship upon the foreigners. The exiles, having retired to the opposite continent, came back shortly afterwards, and were admitted, by the connivance of a party within, into the market-place. A se- rious combat took place within the walls, which was at last made up by a compromise and by the restoration of the exiles. 1 We know nothing about the particulars of this compromise, but it seems to have been wisely drawn up and faithfully observed ; for we hear nothing about Korkyra until about thirty-five years after this period, and the island is then presented to us as in the highest perfection of cultivation and prosperity. 2 Doubtless the emancipation of slaves and the admission of so many new for- eigners to the citizenship, contributed to this result. Meanwhile Tissaphernes, having completed his measures in Ionia, arrived at the Hellespont not long after the battle of Aby- dos, seemingly about November, 411 B.C. He was anxious ti regain some credit with the Peloponnesians, for which an oppor- tunity soon presented itself. Alkibiades, then in command of the Athenian fleet at Sestos, came to visit him in all the pride of 1 Diodor. xiii, 48. Sievcrs (Comraentat. ad Xcnoph. Hellen. p. 12; and p. 65, note 58) controverts the reality of these tumults in Korkyra, here mentioned by Diodoru?, but not mentioned in the Hcllenika of Xenophon, and contradicted, as he thinks, by the negative inference derivable from Thucyd. iv, 48, baa ye Karti rbv iroleftov Tovde. But it appears to me that F. W. T'llrich (Bcitriige zur Erklarung dcs Thukydidcs, pp. 95-99), has prop- erly explained this phrase of Thucydidcs as meaning, in the place here cited, the first ten years of the Peloponnesian war, between the surprise of Plataea and the Peace of Xikias. I see no reason to call in question the truth of these disturbances in Kor kyra, here alluded to by Diodorus.
 * Xenoph. Hellen, vi, 2, 25.