Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/57

 LAST ASSEMBx.1 AT KOLONUS 35 practice, this decree must previously have been approved in th senate of Five Hundred, before it was submitted to the people Such was doubtless the case in the present instance, and the lecree passed without any opposition. On the day fixed, a fresh assembly met, which Peisander and his partisans caused to be held, not in the usual place, called the Pynx, within the city walls, but at a place called Kolonus, ten stadia, rather more than a mile, without the walls, 1 north of the city. Kolonus was a tem- ple of Poseidon, within the precinct of which the assembly was inclosed for the occasion. Such an assembly was not likely to be numerous, wherever held, 2 since there could be little motive to attend, when freedom of debate was extinguished ; but the oligarchical conspirators now transferred it without the walls ; selecting a narrow area for the meeting, in order that they might lessen still farther the chance of numerous attendance, an assem bly which they fully designed should be the last in the history of Athens. They were thus also more out of the reach of an armed movement in the city, as well as enabled to post their own armed partisans around, under color of protecting the meeting against disturbance by the Lacedaemonians from Dekeleia. The proposition of the newly-appointed commissioners prob ably Peisander, Antiphon, and other partisans themselves was exceedingly short and simple. They merely moved the abolition 1 Thucyd. viii, 67. "Eireira, in-ci6i) q rjfifpa i(j>fjiie, t;vv E n^r/aav TIJV iKKhriaiav if rbv KoXuvov (earl 6' lepdv Hcoeiduvof f{u TroXfwf, une^ov <7~a<5Iot>f ftu?uara Jt'/ca), etc. The very remarkable word fyvtuZyoav, here used respecting the assem- bly, appears to me to refer (not, as Dr. Arnold supposes in his note, to any existing practice observed even in the usual assemblies which met in the 1'nyx, but rather) to a departure from the usual practice, and the employ ment of a stratagem in reference to this particular meeting. Kolonus was one of the Attic dcmcs : indeed, there seems reason to im- agine that two distinct dcmes bore this same name (see Boeckh, in the Commentary appended to his translation of the Antigone of Sophokles, pp. 190, 191 : and Ross, Die Dcmcn von Attika, pp. 10, 11). It is in the grove of the Eumenidfis, hard by this temple of Poseidon, that Sophokles has laid the scene of his immortal drama, the CEdipus Koloncus. respecting the small numbers who attended and voted at the assembly bj H-hich the subsequent oligarchy of Thirty was named.
 * Compare the statement in Lysias (Orat. xii, cont. Eratosth. s. 76, p. 127)