It is at this period that we find mention made of a fresh intestine commotion in Korkyra, less stained, however, with savage enormities than that recounted in the seventh year of the war. It appears that the oligarchical party in the island, which had been for the moment nearly destroyed at that period, had since gained strength, and was encouraged by the misfortunes of Athens to lay plans for putting the island into the hands of the Lacedæmonians. The democratical leaders, apprized of this conspiracy, sent to Naupaktus for the Athenian admiral Konon. He came, with a detachment of six hundred Messenians, by the aid of whom they seized the oligarchical conspirators in the market-place, putting a few to death, and banishing more than a thousand. The extent of their alarm is attested by the fact, that they liberated the slaves and conferred the right of citizenship upon the foreigners. The exiles, having retired to the opposite continent, came back shortly afterwards, and were admitted, by the connivance of a party within, into the market-place. A serious combat took place within the walls, which was at last made up by a compromise and by the restoration of the exiles.[165] We know nothing about the particulars of this compromise, but it seems to have been wisely drawn up and faithfully observed; for we hear nothing about Korkyra until about thirty-five years after this period, and the island is then presented to us as in the highest perfection of cultivation and prosperity.[166] Doubtless the emancipation of slaves and the admission of so many new foreigners to the citizenship, contributed to this result. [165] Diodor. xiii, 48. Sievers (Commentat. ad Xenoph. Hellen. p. 12; and p. 65, note 58) controverts the reality of these tumults in Korkyra, here mentioned by Diodorus, but not mentioned in the Hellenika of Xenophon, and contradicted, as he thinks, by the negative inference derivable from Thucyd. iv, 48, ὅσα γε κατὰ τὸν πόλεμον τόνδε. But it appears to me that F. W. Ullrich (Beiträge zur Erklärung des Thukydides, pp. 95-99), has properly explained this phrase of Thucydidês as meaning, in the place here cited, the first ten years of the Peloponnesian war, between the surprise of Platæa and the Peace of Nikias. I see no reason to call in question the truth of these disturbances in Korkyra, here alluded to by Diodorus. [166] Xenoph. Hellen. vi, 2, 25.