The high-born sailors who lay inactive all this time at Samos had fallen into this convenient way of classifying their compeers and themselves, as their fathers had done before them. They were of the good, the better, and the very best, and they loved not the unclassed, the mere ‘hoi polloi,’ who actually ruled at Athens. They had often wondered how a gentleman like Alkibiades, who, they all admitted, was, by right of birth, one of the beltistoi, could, even in name, belong in politics to the party of that huge collection of undistinguished, indistinguishable human beings, ‘that balmy mass of puffed-up froth’ which called itself the demos. His ancestors certainly had set him the example; his family had belonged to that side, and had led these ungovernable masses, and perhaps that made a difference. There is something conservative in doing as your ancestors have done. He knew best. He was the cleverest man in Greece, and ought to know. But for the life of them they could not understand it. They could not believe that he really cared for tailors, and tinkers, and cobblers, and water-carriers, the riff-raff of the town. Their hearts had yearned towards him when they saw him at Miletos leading the poor Milesians and beating the stupid Argives. Some had caught sight of him one day on a Spartan trireme passing by Samos, defying the Athenians to come out into the open sea and fight. He stood there on the high deck of the Spartan ship defying them cheerily, dressed no better than a common Spartan. They recalled a day, three years ago, when he stood on his own good ship the _Eros_, with its purple sails,—the god Eros wrought in silver upon them, as it went proudly at the head of the fleet, which they thought was going to subdue the world, ‘and would have done so, had they left him alone, before his enemies brought those silly charges against him in his absence, and the sillier demos swallowed them.’ The _Eros_ had been taken into the service of the state—indeed, was there at Samos,—though its purple sails and silver gods of love had long been sacrificed to the necessities of Athens. These necessities were becoming serious. It was very well for the Spartans to stay shut up at Miletos or Rhodes. The Spartans were maintained by the Persian satrap. Tissaphernes paid regularly a whole drachma a day for every sailor in the Spartan fleet. They had all the ports and rich towns on the Ionian coast to victual in, ‘while we have only Samos we can call our own, and three oboloi a day per man, paid at long intervals, and the gods alone know how long even that pittance will last.’ So said the sailors. And, indeed, an army of some thousands, with one hundred and twenty triremes and their crews, cannot be kept for nothing. Each day news was expected from Athens that she could do no more, that the last obolos of the reserve of the ten thousand talents laid up by Perikles was gone, and that they must shift for themselves in future.