The reforms made by the Thirty consisted chiefly in the murder of those who ventured to differ from them. They excelled the Four Hundred in their crimes. When Lysandros went off with his fleet for a short time to carry on the siege of Samos the people threatened to rise against their tyrants. Kritias, who now took the most active part amongst the thirty—Theramenes being too timid—sent in haste to the Spartan admiral for help against his outraged countrymen. Spartan soldiers were sent to prop up the usurpers and to disarm the people. Kritias was kept in power for a time by Spartan hoplites quartered in the Akropolis, who menaced the unarmed citizens from the sacred Parthenon. The reign of terror that ensued, when lists were opened on which all friends of the governing Thirty might write the name of him whom, for any reason, they might wish put out of the way, has had its counterpart once or twice since in the history of the world. The details are always much the same. Those who perished were the most worthy, the men who had done most for the state, and deserved most from it, or else those whose wealth made their death a thing to be desired by those who would share the plundering of it. The number of the slain in a short time exceeded fifteen hundred. The estates and all the belongings of the victims were taken by those who were their accusers, judges, and executioners. As is usual in such cases, the tyrants before long began to be suspicious of each other. Theramenes was the first to go. He got frightened. He ventured to point out to his colleagues that their excesses might, in the end, shorten their reign. That was enough. His conduct when a member of the old Four Hundred was not forgotten. Kritias accused him of treachery. He charged him, amongst other things, with having deserted the drowning men at the battle of Arginousai, and of having falsely thrown the odium of that desertion on the other generals, and of thus causing them to be unjustly sentenced. Theramenes made a spirited defence. Kritias, taking credit to himself for extraordinary patriotism and self-abnegation in sacrificing to his country this great friend of his, cut him short, called in the eleven Prison Commissioners, and ordered him off to death. He was dragged from the altar where he sought refuge, and carried through the town protesting against his fate, which few thought undeserved. This Kritias was the Kritias we know so well in the Platonic dialogues. There seems to have been a strange medley in his nature, and it is an instance of the fidelity of the portraits drawn in those dialogues that, when Sokrates, himself an ardent oligarch by conviction all his life, raised his voice against the iniquities of the thirty oligarchs, Kritias spared his master’s life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXX