History of the Peloponnesian War

But Tissaphernes sent with him as envoy one of his retinue, Gaulites, a bilingual Carian, to lay accusation against the Milesians for taking his fort and at the same time to make a defence of himself, since he knew that the Milesians were on their way to Sparta chiefly to denounce him, and that with them went Hermocrates, who was intending to show that Tissaphernes, together with Alcibiades, was ruining the cause of the Peloponnesians and pursuing a two-faced policy.

Tissaphernes had always been at enmity with Hermocrates in connection with the payment of the wages;[*](cf. 8.75.3.) and more recently, when Hermocrates had been banished from Syracuse and another set of generals had come to Miletus to take command of the Syracusan fleet[*](cf. Xen. Hell. 1.1.27 ff.)—and they were Potamis, Myscon and Demarchus—Tissaphernes set upon Hermocrates, now that he was an exile, much more violently than ever, charging against him, among other things, that he had once asked him for money, and because he did not obtain it had shown him enmity.

Astyochus, then, together with the Milesians and Hermocrates, sailed away to Lacedaemon; Alcibiades, on the other hand, had already left Tissaphernes and crossed over again to Samos.

And the envoys who had been sent by the Four Hundred, at the time above mentioned,[*](cf. 8.72.1.) to appease the soldiers at Samos and explain matters, now arrived from Delos when Alcibiades was already there; and at a meeting of the assembly they attempted to speak.

But the soldiers were at first unwilling to hear them, and with shouts threatened to kill the subverters of the democracy; afterwards, however, when with difficulty they had quieted down, they heard them.

The envoys announced that the revolution had been made, not for the destruction of the state, but for its preservation, not in order that Athens might be betrayed to the enemy (for that could have been done at the time of the Lacedaemonian invasion, when the revolutionists were already in power); they stated, moreover, that all the Five Thousand would participate in the government in their turn; furthermore, their relatives were neither being insulted, as Chaereas was slanderously saying, nor suffering any ill, but remained in their homes, each in possession of his own property.