First, he convoked a public assembly, in which he proposed a decree, naming ten commissioners with full powers, to prepare propositions for such political reform as they should think advisable, and to be ready by a given day.[44] According to the usual practice, this decree must previously have been approved in the senate of Five Hundred, before it was submitted to the people. Such was doubtless the case in the present instance, and the decree passed without any opposition. On the day fixed, a fresh assembly met, which Peisander and his partisans caused to be held, not in the usual place, called the Pnyx, within the city walls, but at a place called Kolônus, ten stadia, rather more than a mile, without the walls,[45] north of the city. Kolônus was a temple of Poseidon, within the precinct of which the assembly was inclosed for the occasion. Such an assembly was not likely to be numerous, wherever held,[46] since there could be little motive to attend, when freedom of debate was extinguished; but the oligarchical conspirators now transferred it without the walls; selecting a narrow area for the meeting, in order that they might lessen still farther the chance of numerous attendance, an assembly which they fully designed should be the last in the history of Athens. They were thus also more out of the reach of an armed movement in the city, as well as enabled to post their own armed partisans around, under color of protecting the meeting against disturbance by the Lacedæmonians from Dekeleia. [44] Thucyd. viii, 67. Καὶ πρῶτον μὲν τὸν δῆμον ξυλλέξαντες εἶπον γνώμην, δέκα ἄνδρας ἑλέσθαι ~ξυγγραφέας αὐτοκράτορας~, τούτους δὲ ξυγγράψαντας γνώμην ἐσενεγκεῖν ἐς τὸν δῆμον ἐς ἡμέραν ῥητὴν, καθ᾽ ὅτι ἄριστα ἡ πόλις οἰκήσεται. In spite of certain passages found in Suidas and Harpokration (see K. F. Hermann, Lehrbuch der Griechischen Staats Alterthümer, sect. 167, note 12: compare also Wattenbach, De Quadringentor. Factione, p. 38), I cannot think that there was any connection between these ten ξυγγραφεῖς, and the Board of πρόβουλοι mentioned as having been before named (Thucyd. viii, 1). Nor has the passage in Lysias, to which Hermann makes allusion, anything to do with these ξυγγραφεῖς. The mention of Thirty persons by Androtion and Philochorus, seems to imply that they, or Harpokration, confounded the proceedings ushering in this oligarchy of Four Hundred, with those before the subsequent oligarchy of Thirty. The σύνεδροι, or ξυγγραφεῖς, mentioned by Isokratês (Areopagit. Or. vii, sect. 67) might refer either to the case of the Four Hundred or to that of the Thirty. [45] Thucyd. viii, 67. Ἔπειτα, ἐπειδὴ ἡ ἡμέρα ἐφῆκε, ~ξυνέκλῃσαν~ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἐς τὸν Κόλωνον (ἔστι δ᾽ ἱερὸν Ποσειδῶνος ἔξω πόλεως, ἀπέχον σταδίους μάλιστα δέκα), etc.