The proud people had not yet reached the end of all their punishment and degradation. There was a secret clause in the terms of the capitulation which Theramenes had not thought it necessary to mention publicly, but which had been agreed upon between him and Lysandros,—one to which Theramenes, at least, did not object. As soon as the Spartans had made themselves masters of the city and the Akropolis, a meeting of the people was held, as usual, in the Pnyx, as though they were still a self-governing democracy. An agent of Theramenes, following the private convention made with the conqueror, contended before the Ekklesia that the people had shown itself unapt to manage the great affairs of state, and that its inconstancy had brought them to their present lamentable plight; and he suggested that it would be better, for the present, to make over the direction of its affairs to a chosen body of thirty of the wisest citizens. The Athenians had lost their walls, their dependencies, their fleet,—all that could make them great and glorious; but they had not yet lost the semblance of their freedom: they had their Assembly. They declared they would never part with that. Who could tell but that some day fortune might return again, and bring back something of what they had thrown away? As long as they had their constitution, they might at least imagine that they were free; and when the dark time passed away, they would still have the Ekklesia in which to make their own laws and choose their own rulers, as in the past. They remembered the condition of the city when the four hundred were in power. It might be even worse if the whole government were in the hands of but thirty untried, possibly ambitious, men,—friends of such well-known and distrusted oligarchs as Theramenes. They rejected the proposal with indignation. Lysandros was watching them. His sanguinary will was law in what had been free and stately Athens. He solemnly counselled the people to accept the proposed new constitution. He let them know that his counsel, if it was not accepted, would become something more urgent. A fresh session of the Ekklesia was called; the late decision was reversed. The people, under compulsion, voted themselves and their power away. Theramenes and twenty-nine other persons named by him were elected and had authority given them to reform the constitution.