The Fall of the Athenian Empire-(A New History of the Peloponnesian War) Donald Kagan - (1987)

THE COUP 147
On the appointed day, the assembly met again but not in the usual
place on the Pnyx beside the Acropolis. Instead, the session took place
on the hill called "Colonus Hippius," somewhat more than a mile from
the city, where there were shrines to Poseidon, the Eumenides, and
Prometheus and possibly an enclosure convenient for an assembly of
not too great a size. 62 We are not told why the meeting was moved or
why this place in particular was chosen. Although the assembly some"
times met away from the Pnyx, it rarely seems to have done so in the
fifth century and never at Colonus. Modern scholars have guessed that
with the site outside the walls and with the Spartans freely roaming
Attica from the fort at Decelea, Athenians without arm or, that is, the
poor, would have been afraid to come or that a force of armed men,
justified by the danger, could have been used to intimidate the Athe"
nians." This might have played some part in the thinking of the con"
spirators, but just moving from familiar and comfortable surroundings
to an unusual and unfamiliar place would have been unsettling to the
ordinary Athenian and the politicians not involved in the conspiracy
and wou~d make it easier for Peisander and his collaborators to dom"
inate the ~cene. We are not told what pretext was used for the change
of venue, but with the support of the probouloi, the leaders of the
movement could easily persuade the prytanies to do as they were told.
Whether the board of syngrapheis studied the "ancestral laws of Cleis"
thenes," we do not know, but it turned out that they had little need
to do so. They made no proposals "for the best management of the
state" or "for its salvation" but limited themselves to a single motion:
"to allow any Athenian to make any proposal he liked without penalty."
The standing constitutional prohibition against illegal proposals, the
graphe paranomon, was suspended, with heavy penalties imposed on
necessity. The probouloi were much concerned with the financial problems of the state
after the Sicilian disaster. They would not have been elected in the first place had they
shown any strong inclination towards peace with Sparta, and Aristophanes depicts his
proboulos as an unreconstructed nationalist (Lysis._42 df.). The necessity they saw must
have been for Persian money held out by Peisander as available only through Alcibiades
and an oligarchic government. They may also have been sympathetic to recall of the
victims ofthe hysteria of 415 B.C., and especially the relatively competent Alcibiades,
impossible so long as the current democratic leaders were in control. They were motivated
by realism rather than dogma" (ibid.' s6o).
62
8.67.2; HCT V, I6S-I66 .
.sJFor a discussion, and rejection, of the importance of the military element, see
Busolt, GG III:2, 1478, n 2. See also HCT V, I65-167.