=211.= Critias was their chief. Having been banished formerly by a vote of the people, he now wreaked his vengeance with unsparing cruelty on the best and noblest citizens. Blood flowed daily and fines, imprisonments, and confiscations were the events of every hour. By the advice of Theram´enes, who was the head of the more moderate party, three thousand citizens were chosen from the adherents of the Thirty, whose sanction was required for important proceedings. But all, except this enfranchised number, were placed beyond the protection of the law, and might be put to death, at the word of the tyrants, without even a show of trial. A list was made of those who were destined to death, and any of the ruling party might add to it such names as either avarice or hatred suggested to him. The wealthiest citizens were, of course, the first victims, for the estate of the murdered man went to his accuser. Theramenes, in his turn, was offered a wealthy alien to destroy and plunder, but he indignantly rejected the proposal. This implied protest against the reign of terror cost him his life. He was denounced as a public enemy, his name stricken from the roll of the Thirty, and from that of the Three Thousand, and he was ordered to instant execution. He sprang to the altar in the senate-house; but fear of divine vengeance had disappeared, together with humanity and justice, from the rulers of Athens. He was dragged away to prison, and condemned to drink the hemlock. =212.= The tide was already turning, both in the ill-fated city and throughout Greece. Athens, in her humiliation, no longer excited the fear or jealousy of her former allies; while Sparta, instead of making good her assumed title of “Liberator of the Greeks,” was setting up a new empire more oppressive than that of her rival. Even in Sparta itself, the pride and harshness of Lysander excited disgust, and the Thirty Tyrants at Athens were universally regarded as the tools of his scheming ambition. The Athenian exiles, who had been biding their time, now issued from Thebes, under the lead of Thrasybu´lus, and seized the fortress of Phy´le, in the mountain barrier of Attica, on the road to the capital. The tyrants, with the Spartan garrison of the Acropolis and the Three Thousand, marched out to attack them, but were repulsed with spirit, and a timely snow-storm broke up their attempt to besiege the fortress, and drove them back to the city. Foreseeing their expulsion, the Thirty now provided for themselves a place of refuge by another horrid outrage. They caused all the inhabitants of Salamis and Eleusis, who were capable of bearing arms, to be brought as prisoners to Athens, and the towns to be occupied by garrisons in their own interest. Then filling the Odeon with Spartan soldiers and their three thousand adherents, they extorted from this assembly a vote for the immediate massacre of the prisoners. [Sidenote: B. C. 403.]