The mere deposition of the Four Hundred, however, and the transfer of
political power to the Five Thousand, which took place in the first
public assembly held after the defeat off Eretria, was sufficient to
induce most of the violent leaders of the Four Hundred forthwith to
leave Athens. Peisander, Alexiklês, and others, went off secretly
to Dekeleia:[116] Aristarchus alone made his flight the means of
inflicting a new wound upon his country. Being among the number of
the generals, he availed himself of this authority to march—with
some of the rudest among those Scythian archers, who did the police
duty of the city—to Œnoê, on the Bœotian frontier, which was at that
moment under siege by a body of Corinthians and Bœotians united.
Aristarchus, in concert with the besiegers, presented himself to
the garrison, and acquainted them that Athens and Sparta had just
concluded peace, one of the conditions of which was that Œnoê should
be surrendered to the Bœotians. He therefore, as general, ordered
them to evacuate the place, under the benefit of a truce to return
home. The garrison having been closely blocked up, and kept wholly
ignorant of the actual condition of politics, obeyed the order
without reserve; so that the Bœotians acquired possession of this
very important frontier position, a new thorn in the side of Athens,
besides Dekeleia.[117]
[116] Thucyd. viii, 98. Most of these fugitives returned six
years afterwards, after the battle of Ægospotami, when the
Athenian people again became subject to an oligarchy in the
persons of the Thirty. Several of them became members of the
senate which worked under the Thirty (Lysias cont. Agorat. sect.
80, c. 18, p. 495).
Whether Aristotelês and Chariklês were among the number of the
Four Hundred who now went into exile, as Wattenbach affirms (De
Quadringent. Ath. Factione, p. 66), seems not clearly made out.
[117] Thucyd. viii, 89, 90. Ἀρίσταρχος, ἀνὴρ ἐν τοῖς μάλιστα καὶ
ἐκ πλείστου ἐναντίος τῷ δήμῳ, etc.
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