Some doubt exists as to the terms obtained; the French writers assert that the place surrendered at discretion; the Spaniards say the following conditions were obtained: that the garrison should march out with the honours of war, to be constituted prisoners and marched to France; the peasants to be sent home, and property and religion to be guaranteed. On the 21st, from 12,000 to 15,000 sickly men laid down the arms which they could scarcely support, and this memorable siege was terminated. CHAPTER XIV. Corcyrean sedition—Civil wars of Rome—Jacquerie—Factions of the Circus at Constantinople—Massacre of Sept. 2, 1792. The year which witnessed the unhappy fate of the brave Platæans was made remarkable by the Corcyrean sedition also: on which, as on the plague of Athens, the pen of Thucydides has conferred a lasting celebrity. Corcyra, an island situated on the western coast of Greece, by sedulous attention to commerce, had risen, a little before the Peloponnesian war, to the possession of a navy capable of rivalling in strength that of any Grecian state, except Athens. It was a colony of Corinth; but, in consequence of some disputes which arose out of the affairs of Epidamnus, a Corcyrean colony, war broke out between Corcyra and the mother country, the Corcyreans concluded a defensive alliance with the Athenians, and the democratical interest was of course established in power. A naval battle ensued, in which the Corinthians had the advantage, and took upwards of a thousand prisoners. It rarely happened in any of the smaller Grecian states, that either the democratic or the oligarchical party obtained an uncontested and permanent ascendancy; and the Corinthians were not inclined to resign without a struggle that respect and influence which the manners and religion of Greece taught to be due from the colony to the mother country. Of the prisoners above mentioned, eight hundred, who were slaves, were sold by the victors; the rest, to the number of two hundred and fifty, were citizens, most of them men of consequence in Corcyra, who probably looked with no friendly eye on the Athenian alliance, and at all events were ready to break it off, and revert to the connexion of Corinth, as the price of their liberty. They were accordingly suffered to return home. The tumults to which their subsequent attempts to restore the oligarchy gave rise are celebrated in history under the name of the Corcyrean sedition. A more heinous scene of treachery and murder has seldom been exhibited even in civil warfare; or a more deplorable state of morals described than that which is said by Thucydides in the following passage to have prevailed, not only in Corcyra, but throughout Greece.