Yes, and who of my own generation does not remember that the democracy so adorned the
 city with temples and public buildings that even today visitors from other lands consider
 that she is worthy to rule not only over Hellas 
 but over all the world; In almost the same terms he praises
 Pericles for his adornment of Athens , Isoc. 15.234 . while the Thirty neglected the public
 buildings, plundered the temples, and sold for destruction for the sum of three talents
 the dockyards The bitterest denunciation of the misrule of
 the Thirty is in the oration Against Eratosthenes , by Lysias ( Lys. 12 ). At its close, he speaks of the sacrilege of the Thirty,
 particularly in selling off the treasures stored in the temples, and of their tearing
 down the dockyards of the Piraeus . 
 upon which the city had spent not less than a thousand talents? And surely no one could find grounds to praise the mildness An example of irony (litotes), a figure sparingly used by Isocrates. Cf.
 “outworn” in Isoc. 4.92 . of the Thirty as against
 that of the people’s rule! For when the Thirty took over the city, by vote of the
 Assembly, Under duress. See Xen. Hell. 2.3.2 . they put to death fifteen hundred Athenians The same number is given in Isoc.
 20.11 . without a trial and compelled more than five thousand to leave
 Athens and take refuge in the Piraeus , Only those
 enjoyed the franchise under the Thirty who were in the catalogue of the approved “three
 thousand.” See Isoc. 18.17 . whereas when the exiles
 overcame them and returned to Athens under
 arms, these put to death only the chief perpetrators of their wrongs and dealt so
 generously and so justly by the rest Cf. Plat. Menex. 243e . that those who had driven the
 citizens from their homes fared no worse than those who had returned from exile. But the best and strongest proof of the fairness of the people is that, although those
 who had remained in the city had borrowed a hundred talents from the Lacedaemonians See Lys. 12.59 . with which
 to prosecute the siege of those who occupied the Piraeus , yet later when an assembly of the people was held to consider the
 payment of the debt, and when many insisted that it was only fair that the claims of the
 Lacedaemonians should be settled, not by those who had suffered the siege, but by those
 who had borrowed the money, nevertheless the people voted to pay the debt out of the
 public treasury. This is attested to by Aristotle ( Aristot. Ath. Pol. 40 ) in a passage which pays a high
 compliment to the admirable spirit in which the feud between the two parties was wiped
 out. 
 And in truth it was because of this spirit that they brought us into such concord with
 each other and so far advanced the power of the city that the Lacedaemonians, who under
 the rule of the oligarchy laid their commands upon us almost every day, under the rule of
 the people came begging and supplicating us not to allow them to be driven from their
 homes. After the Battle of Leuctra. See Isoc. 8.105 ; Xen. Hell. 6.5.33
 ff. In a word the spirit of the two parties was this: the oligarchies
 were minded to rule over their fellow-citizens and be subject to their enemies; the
 people, to rule over the world at large and share the power of the state on equal terms
 with their fellow-citizens. I have recounted these things for two reasons: because I wanted to show, in the first
 place, that I am not in favor of oligarchy or special privilege, but of a just and orderly
 government of the people, and, in the second place, that even badly constituted
 democracies are responsible for fewer disasters than are oligarchies, while those which
 are well-ordered are superior to oligarchies in that they are more just, more impartial,
 and more agreeable to those who live under them.