He spoke to them simply of what he had suffered since they had thought fit to cast him out, and his hearers were moved to tears. Then he spoke modestly of some of the services he had been able to render to the state while absent from them. He deigned not to defend himself against the charges on which he had been condemned, for long ago they had been given up as baseless calumnies. But he did not spare his hearers as he touched upon the fickleness and injustice often shown by popular assemblies. Then skilfully he turned the fault from them, attributing all the wrongs to his own bad fortune, from which he had so long suffered, and to the influence of some evil genius. Then, as though brushing aside, and forgetting all his own grievances and troubles, and coming before them only as strategos, to give an account of his conduct since they had conferred that post upon him, with all his peculiar grace and terseness, he went through the actions of the late campaign. He explained graphically the present position of the enemy, and closed his speech by an appeal to them to keep up their courage, to be ever true to themselves and their traditions; true, too, to those to whom they confided the command of their forces; to hope on still, to quit themselves like men; and he, for his part, promised them a great and glorious ending to their struggle. Then, and not till then, they broke out into a burst of loud applause. Their ringing voices could be heard in the most distant corner of the Agora and in the high Akropolis, and all men knew that he had spoken. They vowed vengeance against the authors of his banishment, as though it had been some others and not they who had brought it about. In their joy at seeing him again they dried their tears. With one voice they recalled the sentence of death which had been passed upon him, and restored to him all his wealth and patrimonial estates, which they had confiscated. They ordered the pillar on which the awful sentence was inscribed to be demolished. They made the Eumolpidai, the sacred Eleusinian priests, revoke the sacerdotal curses which they had pronounced upon him. They conferred on him the office of Autokrator, or generalissimo of all the forces, both by land and sea, which only on three other, and most perilous, occasions in the whole history of Athens was ever entrusted to anyone. It made him absolute over the other generals, and gave him complete and autocratic power in all matters which concerned the war.