Theramenes, one of the earliest promoters of the new order, was the first to desert his colleagues. He was followed by a large number of the four hundred. These reformers of the others proposed a constitution which would allow all citizens capable of bearing arms to be joined to the new government. Antiphon, Phrynichos, and Peisandros opposed this proposition with all their might. To save themselves from their impending doom, Antiphon and Phrynichos went off in haste to Sparta, empowered to offer the most shameful terms to the old inveterate enemy of Athens. There is a point of land called Eetiôneia, which, starting from the spot where the long walls ended at the Peiræus, juts out some way into the harbour. This piece of land the four hundred had been for some time mysteriously fortifying by erecting a wall along it on the harbour side, and connecting it with another wall already existing on the other side at its extreme point, where they met and ended in a tower. They also enclosed the great granary and warehouse at the harbour, and compelled the corn ships coming from Euboia to unload there. These fortifications were pushed on apace, but not without exciting the suspicions of the people. It was spread about—and Theramenes was at the bottom of the rumour—that the real design of this new fort was to give the four hundred, as they were still called, absolute command of Athens, and power to admit a Spartan force, whenever it might come to help them. Theramenes, more and more breaking away from the others, as he found the people willing to listen to him, at length declared, without disguise, what the object of the new wall at Eetiôneia was. He told them that Antiphon and Phrynichos had gone to Sparta to implore the Spartans to send a fleet to Athens, to make the people the slaves of the usurpers and their enemy, who had combined together for their ruin. This so enraged the people against Phrynichos that, soon after his return, he was openly slain in daylight by a young soldier in the market-place, and his bones were afterwards cast out of Attika as being those of a traitor and unworthy of sepulture within that territory, and the soldier was rewarded for the deed. The hoplites who were engaged upon the building of the defence-works rose against the government, and began to demolish the new walls they had been ordered to construct, and imprisoned one of the officers set over them. Then news came that a Spartan fleet was actually approaching, and that forty-two ships were seen off the coast of Salamis. The whole city rushed down to the Peiræus to defend it, got together as many ships as they could find, and, hastily arming, followed the enemy’s fleet, which, passing Sunion, put in at Orôpos.