Having taken this precaution, the Four Hundred marched in a body to the senate-house, each man with a dagger concealed under his garment, and followed by their special body-guard of one hundred and twenty young men from various Grecian cities, the instruments of the assassinations ordered by Antiphon and his colleagues. In this array they marched into the senate-house, where the senators were assembled, and commanded them to depart; at the same time tendering to them their pay for all the remainder of the year,—seemingly about three months or more down to the beginning of Hecatombæon, the month of new nominations,—during which their functions ought to have continued. The senators were no way prepared to resist the decree just passed under the forms of legality with an armed body now arrived to enforce its execution. They obeyed and departed, each man as he passed the door receiving the salary tendered to him. That they should yield obedience to superior force, under the circumstances, can excite neither censure nor surprise; but that they should accept, from the hands of the conspirators, this anticipation of an unearned salary, was a meanness which almost branded them as accomplices, and dishonored the expiring hour of the last democratical authority. The Four Hundred now found themselves triumphantly installed in the senate-house; without the least resistance, either within its walls, or even without, by any portion of the citizens.[52] [51] See the jests of Aristophanês, about the citizens all in armor, buying their provisions in the market-place and carrying them home, in the Lysistrata, 560: a comedy represented about December 412 or January 411 B.C., three months earlier than the events here narrated. [52] Thucyd. viii, 69, 70. Thus perished, or seemed to perish, the democracy of Athens, after an uninterrupted existence of nearly one hundred years since the revolution of Kleisthenês. So incredible did it appear that the numerous, intelligent, and constitutional citizens of Athens should suffer their liberties to be overthrown by a band of four hundred conspirators, while the great mass of them not only loved their democracy, but had arms in their hands to defend it, that even their enemy and neighbor Agis, at Dekeleia, could hardly imagine the revolution to be a fact accomplished. We shall see presently that it did not stand,—nor would it probably have stood, had circumstances even been more favorable,—but the accomplishment of it at all, is an incident too extraordinary to be passed over without some words in explanation.