Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/49

 OLIGARCHS AT SAMOS. 27 tent, Thucydides observes, to defray the cost out of their ow purses, now that they were contending, not for their country, but for their own power and profit. 1 They lost no time in proceeding to execution, immediately after returning to Samos from the abortive conference with Alki- biades. While they despatched Peisander with five of the envoys back to Athens, to consummate what was already in progress there, and the remaining five to oligarchize the dependent allies, they organized all their partisan force in the armament, and began to take measures for putting down the democracy in Samos itself. That democracy had been the product of a forcible revolution, effected about ten months before, by the aid of three Athenian triremes. It had since preserved Samos from revolting like Chios : it was now the means of preserving the democracy at Athens itself. The partisans of Peisander, finding it an in- vincible obstacle to their views, contrived to gain over a party of the leading Samians now in authority under it. Three hun- dred of these latter, a portion of those who ten months before had risen in arms to put down the preexisting oligarchy, now enlisted as conspirators along with the Athenian oligarchs, to put down the Samian democracy, and get possession of the govern- ment for themselves. The nejv alliance was attested and cemented, according to genuine oligarchical practice, by a murder without judicial trial, or an assassination, for which a suitable victim was at hand. The Athenian Hyperbolus, who had been ostracized some years before by the coalition of Nikias and Alki- biades, together with their respective partisans, ostracized as Thucydides tells us, not from any fear of his power and over- ascendent influence, but from his low character, and from his being a disgrace to the city, and thus ostracized by an abuse of the institution, was now resident at Samos. As he was not a Samian, and had, moreover, been in banishment during the last five or six years, he could have had no power either in the island or the armament, and therefore his death served no prospective 1 Thuryd. viii, 63. A{irof)f 6e Ixl a fi?/ ave&riaeTai TU irpuyfiara, xal Tci rov iroTiffiov upa avre^eiv, Kal lafyipeiv avrovf itpo'&vfius xP*ll laTa K i V v ri u/Ao dr'/, (if oixsin d A ^ o t c ?i a io iv avr ol c