Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/213

 SPARTAN GRIEVANCES. 191 Taking all these causes of evil together, the dekarchies, the hannosts, and the overwhelming dictatorship of Lysander, and construing other parts of the Grecian world by the analogy of Athens under the Thirty, we shall be warranted in affirming that the first years of the Spartan Empire, which followed upon the victory of -ZEgospotami, were years of all-pervading tyranny and multifarious intestine calamity, such as Greece had never before endured. The hardships of war, severe in many ways, were now at an end, but they were replaced by a state of suffer- ing not the less difficult to bear because it was called peace. And what made the suffering yet more intolerable was, that it was a bitter disappointment, and a flagrant violation of promises pro- claimed, repeatedly and explicitly, by the Lacedaemonians them- selves. For more than thirty years preceding, from times earlier than the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, the Spar- tans had professed to interfere only for the purpose of liberating Greece, and of putting down the usurped ascendency of Athens. All the allies of Sparta had been invited into strenuous action, all those of Athens had been urged to revolt, under the soul- stirring cry of " Freedom to Greece." The earliest incitements addressed by the Corinthians to Sparta in 432 B. c., immediately after the Korkyraean dispute, called upon her to stand forward i0 fulfilment of her recognized function as " Liberator of Greece," and denounced her as guilty of connivance with Athens if she held back. 1 Athens was branded as the " despot city ;" which had already absorbed the independence of many Greeks, and Kai TTpoasTi elf e/caorof tt-L&v OVTS rovroif xpqrai, oi>$' olf fj aA/b? 'EA/laf vo- fii&c, After the recall of the regent Pausanias and of Dorkis from the Helles- pont (in 477 B.C.), the Lacedaemonians refuse to send out any successor, (j>o[3ov/j.evoi fir) aiffiv oi e^iovref %ipovf ytyvuvrai, onsp KOL kv rw Tlavaavip iveldov, etc. (i, 95.) Compare Plutarch Apophtheg. Laconic, p. 220 F. 1 Thucyd. i, 69. oil -yap 6 6ovliuaa[j.evof, aA/,' 6 dvvu/uevof [lev Travaai, irepiopijv 6e, d^tfeorepoi" avro Spa, elirep teal TT/V ugiuoiv TTJS dper^f (if We- vi9ep6Jv TTJV 'EA/lu(5a yeperai. To the like purpose the second speech of the Corinthian envoys at Sparta, C. 122-124 /J.% /*e/l/lcre HoTtddiuraif re Ttoiela-dm riuupiav . -,. K.ai T&V a.'k'kuv HETe^elv TTJV i^.EV&epiav, etc