History of the Peloponnesian War

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.

But though they said all this and more, the soldiers were none the more inclined to give heed to them, but were angry, and one after another offered various suggestions, but particularly that they should sail against the Peiraeus. And Alcibiades seems then in an eminent degree, and more than anyone else, to have benefited the state; for when the Athenians at Samos were bent upon sailing against their own people—and if they had the enemy would most certainly have been masters of Ionia and the Hellespont—it was he who prevented it.