By additional enactments, security was taken that the proceedings of the courts of justice should be in full conformity with the amnesty recently sworn, and that, neither directly nor indirectly, should any person be molested for wrongs done anterior to Euclides. And in fact the amnesty was faithfully observed: the re-entering exiles from Piræus, and the horsemen with other partisans of the Thirty in Athens, blended again together into one harmonious and equal democracy. [Illustration: GREEK SEALS] Eight years prior to these incidents, we have seen the oligarchical conspiracy of the Four Hundred, for a moment successful, and afterwards overthrown; and we have had occasion to notice, in reference to that event, the wonderful absence of all reactionary violence on the part of the victorious people, at a moment of severe provocation for the past and extreme apprehension for the future. We noticed that Thucydides, no friend to the Athenian democracy, selected precisely that occasion--on which some manifestation of vindictive impulse might have been supposed likely and natural--to bestow the most unqualified eulogies on their moderate and gentle bearing. Had the historian lived to describe the reign of the Thirty and the restoration which followed it, we cannot doubt that his expressions would have been still warmer and more emphatic in the same sense. Few events in history, either ancient or modern, are more astonishing than the behaviour of the Athenian people, on recovering their democracy, after the overthrow of the Thirty: and when we view it in conjunction with the like phenomenon after the deposition of the Four Hundred, we see that neither the one nor the other arose from peculiar caprice or accident of the moment; both depended upon permanent attributes of the popular character. If we knew nothing else except the events of these two periods, we should be warranted in dismissing, on that evidence alone, the string of contemptuous predicates,--giddy, irascible, jealous, unjust, greedy, etc.--one or other of which have been so frequently pronounced by unsympathetic or hostile critics respecting the Athenian people. A people, whose habitual temper and morality merited these epithets, could not have acted as the Athenians acted both after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty. Particular acts may be found in their history which justify severe censure; but as to the permanent elements of character, both moral and intellectual, no population in history has ever afforded stronger evidence than the Athenians on these two memorable occasions.