Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/64

 42 mSTORY OF GREECE. like Antiphon, would have understood the art of thus making the constitutional feeling of his countrymen subservient to the success of his conspiracy, and of maintaining the forms of legal dealing towards assembled and constitutional bodies, while he violated them in secret and successive stabs directed against individuals. Political assassination had been unknown at Athens, as far as our information reaches, since it was employed, about fifty years before, by the oligarchical party against Ephialtes, the coadjutor of Perikles. 1 But this had been an individual case, and it was reserved for Antiphon and Phrynichus to organize a band of as- sassins working systematically, and taking off a series of leading victims one after the other. As the Macedonian kings in after- times required the surrender of the popular orators in a body, so the authors of this conspiracy found the same enemies to deal with, and adopted another way of getting rid of them ; thus reducing the assembly into a tame and lifeless mass, capable of being intimidated into giving its collective sanction to measures which its large majority detested. As Grecian history has been usually written, we are instructed to believe that the misfortunes, and the corruption, and the degra- dation of the democratical states are brought upon them by the class of demagogues, of whom Kleon, Hyperbolus, Androkles, etc., stand forth as specimens. These men are represented as mischief-makers and revilers, accusing without just cause, and converting innocence into treason. Now the history of this con- spiracy of the Four Hundred presents to us the other side of the picture. It shows that the political enemies against whom the Athenian people were protected by their democratical institutions, and by the demagogues as living organs of those institutions were not fictitious but dangerously real. It reveals the continued existence of powerful anti-popular combinations, ready to come together for treasonable purposes when the moment appeared safe and tempting. It manifests the character and morality of the leaders, to whom the direction of the anti-popular force naturally fell. It proves that these leaders, men of uncommon ability, re- quired nothing more than the extinction or silence of the dema- 1 See Plutarch. Perikles. c. 10; Diodor. xi, 77 ; and vol. v, of this His tory chap, xlvi, p. 370.