That fate was deplorable in the extreme. The arrival of Eurymedon opens a third unexpected transition in this checkered narrative,—the Korkyræan Demos passing, abruptly and unexpectedly, from intense alarm and helplessness to elate and irresistible mastery. In the bosom of Greeks, and in a population seemingly amongst the least refined of all Greeks,—including too a great many slaves just emancipated against the will of their masters, and of course the fiercest and most discontented of all the slaves in the island,—such a change was but too sure to kindle a thirst for revenge almost ungovernable, as the only compensation for foregone terror and suffering. As soon as the Peloponnesian fleet was known to have fled, and that of Eurymedon was seen approaching, the Korkyræan leaders brought into the town the five hundred Messenian hoplites who had hitherto been encamped without; thus providing a resource against any last effort of despair on the part of their interior enemies. Next, the thirty ships recently manned,—and held ready, in the harbor facing the continent, to go out against the Peloponnesian fleet, but now no longer needed, were ordered to sail round to the other or Hyllaic harbor. Even while they were thus sailing round, some obnoxious men of the defeated party, being seen in public, were slain: but when the ships arrived at the Hyllaic harbor, and the crews were disembarked, a more wholesale massacre was perpetrated, by singling out those individuals of the oligarchical faction who had been persuaded on the day before to go aboard as part of the crews, and putting them to death.[461] Then came the fate of those suppliants, about four hundred in number, who had been brought back from the islet opposite, and were yet under sanctuary in the sacred precinct of the Heræum. It was proposed to them to quit sanctuary and stand their trial; and fifty of them having accepted the proposition, were put on their trial,—all condemned, and all executed. Their execution took place, as it seems, immediately on the spot, and within actual view of the unhappy men still remaining in the sacred ground;[462] who, seeing that their lot was desperate, preferred dying by their own hands to starvation or the sword of their enemies. Some hung themselves on branches of the trees surrounding the temple, others helped their friends in the work of suicide, and, in one way or another, the entire band thus perished: it was probably a consolation to them to believe, that this desecration of the precinct would bring down the anger of the gods upon their surviving enemies.