The proposals bore a specious aspect of moderation, and seemed to promise that the new constitution should be something like the old constitution of Cleisthenes. The assembly gave its assent to these proposals: but, as soon as that assent had been given, it found that further and more radical changes awaited it. A motion was made and carried that a second committee of a hundred citizens should be appointed to give more precise shape to the new constitution. The report of this second committee, an elaborate document, disclosed the real intentions of Pisander and his party. It set forth a complicated scheme of government which was to come into force at some future time: but it also did what was more important by proposing that for the present a council of Four Hundred should be elected, that the Four Hundred should appoint ten generals and a secretary to the generals, and that the eleven men thus appointed should have power to do everything except alter the laws[211]. The proposals were ratified by the assembly; the council of Four Hundred, being elected during the reign of terror which had been established, was no doubt entirely filled with the adherents of Pisander, and the ten generals and their secretary no doubt included Pisander himself and his most ardent partisans. No steps were taken to call the assembly of Five Thousand into existence, and thus all political rights had been taken away from the mass of the citizens, and unrestrained power was conferred upon Pisander and his fellow-conspirators[212]. [211] Aristotle, _Constitution of Athens_, 31. [212] Aristotle, _Constitution of Athens_, 31, 32. The proceedings of the oligarchy which had thus been founded are not narrated in detail by our authorities: but we are told that the new rulers governed violently, and made many changes in the administration: that they "put to death some few men who seemed convenient to be got rid of, imprisoned others, and removed others from Attica[213]," that they fell to quarrelling with one another[214], and that at last they were suspected of a design to introduce a garrison of Spartans into the Piræus, the port of Athens. As soon as this suspicion gained credence the days of the oligarchy were numbered. A battalion of Athenian hoplites, employed by Pisander to build a fortress at the mouth of the Piræus for the reception of a Lacedæmonian garrison, rose in mutiny against their officers, held a meeting in Munychia, which adjoins the Piræus, to decide on their course of action, and after due deliberation marched into Athens and piled arms at the foot of the Acropolis. Many specious offers of ineffectual reforms were made to them by envoys from the Four Hundred: but they insisted on the one thing which the oligarchy most dreaded, a free assembly of the citizens to be held within the city. The citizens met in assembly at the Pnyx, and their first resolution declared that the power of the Four Hundred was at an end[215]. [213] Thucydides VIII. 70.