Death to Tyrants!
“In the spring of that year, the Athenians surrendered to the Spartans, thereby losing both the lengthy Peloponnesian War (431–404) and their naval empire. During the following several months, enterprising anti-democrats diligently worked within their network of conspiratorial clubs in order to overthrow the Athenian democracy and establish a politeia inspired by the Spartan system.1 The conspiracy of the oligarchs culminated in late summer 404, during a notorious meeting of the Athenian assembl...y wherein the dēmos, under strong pressure from the Spartan admiral Lysander, ratified a decree establishing a board of thirty men to “draw up the ancestral laws according to which they would govern” (Xen. Hell. 2.3.2).2 Those thirty men, known to history as the Thirty Tyrants, subsequently dominated the polis. With help from a Spartan garrison, they controlled the council and other magistrates and restricted citizenship to three thousand men; those excluded from citizenship—if not executed—were disarmed and scattered.MoreLess
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