History of the Peloponnesian War

And the envoys who had been sent by the Four Hundred, at the time above mentioned,[*](cf. 8.72.1.) to appease the soldiers at Samos and explain matters, now arrived from Delos when Alcibiades was already there; and at a meeting of the assembly they attempted to speak.

But the soldiers were at first unwilling to hear them, and with shouts threatened to kill the subverters of the democracy; afterwards, however, when with difficulty they had quieted down, they heard them.

The envoys announced that the revolution had been made, not for the destruction of the state, but for its preservation, not in order that Athens might be betrayed to the enemy (for that could have been done at the time of the Lacedaemonian invasion, when the revolutionists were already in power); they stated, moreover, that all the Five Thousand would participate in the government in their turn; furthermore, their relatives were neither being insulted, as Chaereas was slanderously saying, nor suffering any ill, but remained in their homes, each in possession of his own property.

But though they said all this and more, the soldiers were none the more inclined to give heed to them, but were angry, and one after another offered various suggestions, but particularly that they should sail against the Peiraeus. And Alcibiades seems then in an eminent degree, and more than anyone else, to have benefited the state; for when the Athenians at Samos were bent upon sailing against their own people—and if they had the enemy would most certainly have been masters of Ionia and the Hellespont—it was he who prevented it.

And in that critical moment no other man would have been able to restrain the crowd, but he stopped them from sailing, and reproaching those who were on their own private account angry at the envoys, he caused them to desist.

And he sent the envoys away with this answer from himself: he did not object to the Five Thousand ruling, but bade them depose the Four Hundred and set up the senate as it had been before—the body of Five Hundred;

and if there had been any curtailment with a view to economy, so that the soldiers in the field might have better maintenance, he quite approved of that. As for the rest, he bade them not yield a step to the enemy;

for so long as the city was saved there was great hope of a reconciliation among themselves, but if once one party or the other should go to the ground, whether the one at Samos or that at Athens, there would be no one left to be reconciled with. Envoys from the Argives also came to Samos with offers of assistance to the Athenian democracy there; but Alcibiades dismissed them with words of commendation, telling them to come when summoned.

Now the Argives had come with the crew of the Paralus, who at the time above mentioned[*](cf. 8.74.2.) had been sent out in the troop-ship with instructions to cruise round Euboea and to convey to Lacedaemon the three Athenian envoys from the Four Hundred, Laespodias, Aristophon and Melesias. But when they had got as far as Argos on their voyage, the crew had seized the envoys and delivered them to the Argives, on the ground that they were among those who had been chiefly instrumental in overthrowing the democracy. They themselves, however, did not go back to Athens thereafter, but came from Argos to Samos, bringing with them the envoys in their trireme.