indeed, yet still not forgotten. There would hardly remain any fresh enormity still to commit, over and above the multiplied executions, except to banish from the city all but their own immediate partisans, and to reward these latter with choice estates confiscated from the victims.[311] If called upon to excuse such tyranny, the leader of a dekarchy would have sufficient invention to employ the plea of Kritias,—that all changes of government were unavoidably death-dealing, and that nothing less than such stringent measures would suffice to maintain his city in suitable dependence upon Sparta.[312] [307] Plutarch, Lysand. c. 13. τοῦ Λυσάνδρου τῶν ὀλίγων τοῖς θρασυτάτοις καὶ φιλονεικοτάτοις τὰς πόλεις ἐγχειρίζοντος. [308] Xen. Hellen. ii, 3, 13. ... ἔπεισαν Λύσανδρον φρουροὺς σφίσι ξυμπρᾶξαι ἐλθεῖν, ἕως δὴ ~τοὺς πονηροὺς~ ἐκποδὼν ποιησάμενοι καταστήσαιντο τὴν πολιτείαν, etc. [309] Xen. Hellen. ii, 3, 14. Τῶν δὲ φρουρῶν τούτου (the harmost) συμπέμποντος αὐτοῖς, οὓς ἐβούλοντο, συνελάμβανον οὐκέτι τοὺς πονηροὺς καὶ ὀλίγου ἀξίους, ἀλλ᾽ ἤδη οὓς ἐνόμιζον ἥκιστα μὲν παρωθουμένους ἀνέχεσθαι, ἀντιπράττειν δέ τι ἐπιχειροῦντας πλείστους τοὺς συνεθέλοντας λαμβάνειν. [310] Xen. Hellen. ii, 3, 21. [311] Xen. Hellen. ii, 4, 1. [312] Xen. Hellen. ii, 3, 24-32. Καὶ εἰσὶ μὲν δήπου πᾶσαι μεταβολαὶ πολιτειῶν θανατήφοροι, etc. Of course, it is not my purpose to affirm that in any other city, precisely the same phenomena took place as those which occurred in Athens. But we are nevertheless perfectly warranted in regarding the history of the Athenian Thirty as a fair sample, from whence to derive our idea of those Lysandrian dekarchies which now overspread the Grecian world. Doubtless, each had its own peculiar march; some were less tyrannical; but, perhaps, some even more tyrannical, regard being had to the size of the city. And in point of fact, Isokrates, who speaks with indignant horror of these dekarchies, while he denounces those features which they had in common with the triakontarchy at Athens,—extrajudicial murders, spoliations, and banishments,—notices one enormity besides, which we do not find in the latter, violent outrages upon boys and women.[313] Nothing of this kind is ascribed to Kritias and his companions;[314] and it is a considerable proof of the restraining force of Athenian manners, that men who inflicted so much evil in gratification of other violent impulses, should have stopped short here. The decemvirs named by Lysander, like the decemvir Appius Claudius at Rome, would find themselves armed with power to satiate their lusts as well as their antipathies, and would not be more likely to set bounds to the former than to the latter. Lysander, in all the overweening insolence of victory, while rewarding his most devoted partisans with an exaltation comprising every sort of license and tyranny, stained the dependent cities with countless murders, perpetrated on private as