By the time volume three was published, the Revolution was already a fait accompli, the King of France had been executed, and although the period of Jacobin terror was over, by the year of its publication, 1797, the mandate of the Directory and its authority were contested. It was apparent that this government could again lose control to the mob at any moment. The Council of Five Hundred, a body that attracted attention, bearing the name already used in antiquity by the Athenian boulé of Cleisthenes, a continuation of Solon's Council of Four Hundred, summoned the huge armies that held the borders of revolutionary France when they had not yet managed to resolve the reaction of "La Vendée". There, the Directory had failed to recruit 300,000 men to face the first coalition on the Rhine frontier. Volume III is undoubtedly the most militantly anti-democratic and contains the most references to the contemporary political situation. Depending on the edition consulted, it generally covers the entire Peloponnesian War. The 1814/18 edition, which would cover Volumes III and IV. The remaining ones, Volume IV (1808), again depending on the edition, deal with the period of Athenian democracy and Spartan dominance, and especially Volume V (1810) are written during the Napoleonic Wars and refer especially to the Alexandrian period. In the 10-volume editions, from V to X, they deal only with the expansion of Alexander's empire, taking the facts from the time of his father Philip II.