Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/234

206 aside for a time. We have now to contemplate a Spartan Greece—a Greece, that is, in which any combined action that might be undertaken must be approved and led by the Spartans, and in which Sparta will claim the right of placing a resident or harmost and a garrison in any of the states formerly belonging to the Athenian alliance in which it seemed necessary. These residents speedily became more odious than the Athenian officers had ever been, and before many years had passed revolts were frequent and often successful.

But the prime duty of a state occupying the position now held by Sparta was to champion Greek freedom against the unceasing intrigues of the Persian satraps. Her ultimate failure to do this was consummated by the Peace of Antalcidas (B.C. 387), which surrendered to the king all that it had been the object of the hundred years' opposition to prevent.

At first Sparta seemed inclined to undertake the duty with some vigour, and with the freer hand because of the disappearance of her great supporter and patron, Cyrus, in B.C. 401. That prince in the previous year had collected a large army, including a contingent of 10,000 Greeks, under the pretext of crushing the predatory Pisidians, but really to depose his brother Artaxerxes, who had just succeeded his father, Darius II. All went well on the march, and he found his brother in force near Cunaxa, on the Euphrates, some fifty miles north of Babylon. But though in the battle which followed the Greek contingent won a victory, Cyrus himself was killed, and