tility to the democracy, however, was so generally known, that he despaired of accomplishing his return, unless he could connect it with an oligarchical revolution ; which, moreover, was not less gratifying to his sentiment of vengeance for the past, than to his ambition for the future. Accordingly, he sent over a private message to the officers and trierarchs at Samos, several of them doubtless his personal friends, desiring to be remembered to the " best men " in the armament,[1] such was one of the standing phrases by which oligarchical men knew and described each other ; and intimating his anxious wish to come again as a citizen among them, bringing with him Tissaphernes as their ally. But he would do this only on condition of the formation of an oligar- chical government ; nor would he ever again set foot amidst the odious democracy to whom he owed his banishment.[2]
Such was the first originating germ of that temporary calamity, which so nearly brought Athens to absolute ruin, called the Oli- garchy of Four Hundred : a suggestion from the same exile who had already so deeply wounded his country by sending Gylippus to Syracuse, and the Lacedaemonian garrison to Dekeleia. As yet, no man in Samos had thought of a revolution ; but the moment that the idea was thus started, the trierarchs and wealthy men in the armament caught at it with avidity. To subvert the democracy for their own profit, and to be rewarded for doing so with the treasures of Persia as a means of carrying on the war against the Peloponnesians, was an extent of good fortune greater than they could possibly have hoped. Amidst the exhaustion of the public treasure at Athens, and the loss of tribute from her dependencies, it was now the private proprietors, and most of all, the wealthy proprietors, upon whom the cost of military opera- tions fell : from which burden they here saw the prospect of relief, coupled with increased chance of victory. Elate with so tempting a promise, a deputation of them crossed over from Samos to the mainland to converse personally with Alkibiades,
