POLITICAL WRITINGS 169 half-measures are of the least use ; and to strike a death- blow at the Democracy is desperately hard. There are not enough malcontents; the Demos has not been unjust enough. On the whole, a land invasion is the only hope; if Athens were an island she would be invulnerable. The work reads like the address of an Athenian aristo- crat to the aristocrats of the Empire, defending Athens at the expense of the Demos. ' We aristocrats sympathise with you ; your grievances are not the results of de- liberate oppression or of the inherent perversity of the Athenians, they are the natural outcome of the demo- cratic system. If a chance comes for a revolution, we shall take it ; at present it would be madness.' Critias the * Tyrant ' wrote Constitutions* ; his style, to judge from the fragments, was like our Oligarch's, and he is quoted as using the peculiar word SiaSiKu^ehv in the exact sense in which it occurs here. The spirit of this tract indeed is quite foreign to the restless slave of ambition whom we know in the Critias of 404. Never- theless, the Critias who objected to action in the revolu- tion of 411, who proposed the recall of Alcibiades, and the banishment of the corpse of Phrynichus, may perhaps lead us back to a moderate and not too youthful Critias of 417-414, the date given to our Oligarch by Muller- Strijbing and Bergk. Among the other political writings of this time were Antiphon's celebrated Defence* Critias's Lives'^ and Pamphlets* Thrasymachus's explanation of the Consti- tution of our Fathers* and a history of the events of 411 which serves as the basis of Aristotle's account in his Constitution of Athens. It contained a glorification of Theramenes's action, and a bold theory that the revolu- tion he aimed at was really the restoration of the true
