n arms. See Thuc. vi. 58. It seems probable that while
the men were being reviewed in the market-place and elsewhere, the
ruling party gave orders to seize their weapons (which they had
left at home), and this was done except in the case of the Three
Thousand. Cf. Arnold, "Thuc." II. 2. 5; and IV. 91.

The ground being thus cleared, as it were, and feeling that they had
it in their power to do what they pleased, they embarked on a course of
wholesale butchery, to which many were sacrificed to the merest hatred,
many to the accident of possessing riches. Presently the question
rose, How they were to get money to pay their guards? and to meet this
difficulty a resolution was passed empowering each of the committee to
seize on one of the resident aliens apiece, to put his victim to death,
and to confiscate his property. Theramenes was invited, or rather told
to seize some one or other. "Choose whom you will, only let it be done."
To which he made answer, it hardly seemed to him a noble or worthy
course on the part of those who claimed to be the elite of society to go
beyond the informers (8) in injustice. "Yesterday they, to-day we; with
this difference, the victim of the informer must live as a source of
income; our innocents must die that we may get their wealth. Surely
their method was innocent in comparison with ours."

(8) See above.

The rest of the Thirty, who had come to regard Theramenes as an obstacle
to any course they might wish to adopt, proceeded to plot against him.
They addressed themselves to the members of the senate in private,
here a man and there a man, and denounced him as the marplot of the
constitution. Then they issued an order to the young men, picking out
the most audacious characters they could find, to be present, each with
a dagger hidden in the hollow of the armpit; and so called a meeting
of the senate. When Theramenes had taken his place, Critias got up and
addressed the meeting:

"If," said he, "any member of this council, here seated, imagines that
an undue amount of blood has been shed, let me remind him that with
changes of constitution such things can not be avoided. It is the rule
everywhere, but more particularly at Athens it was inevitable there
should be found a specially large number of persons sworn foes to any
constitutional change in the direction of oligarchy, and this for two
reasons. First, because the population of this city, compared with other
Helleni