Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/221

 POWER OF SPARTA. I9y We must recollect that no other dependent city would possess the same means of offering energetic resistance to its local decemvirs, as Athens offered to the Thirty ; and that the insular Grecian cities were not only feeble individually, but naturally helpless against the lords of the sea. 1 Such then was the result throughout Greece, when that long war, which had been undertaken in the name of universal auto- nomy, was terminated by the battle of JEgospotami. In place of imperial Athens was substituted, not the promised autonomy, but yet more imperial Sparta. An awful picture is given by the philo-Laconian Xenophon, in 399 B. c., of the ascendency exer- cised throughout all the Grecian cities, not merely by the ephors and the public officers, but even by the private citizens, of Sparta. " The Lacedaemonians (says he in addressing the Cyreian army) are now the presidents of Greece ; and even any single private Lacedaemonian can accomplish what he pleases." 2 " All the cities (he says in another place) then obeyed whatever order they might receive from a Lacedaemonian citizen." 3 Not merely was the general ascendency thus omnipresent and irresistible, but it was enforced with a stringency of detail, and darkened by a thousand accompaniments of tyranny and individual abuse, such as had never been known under the much-decried empire of Athens. We have more than one picture of the Athenian empire, in speeches made by hostile orators who had every motive to work up the strongest antipathies in the bosoms of their audience against it. We have the addresses of the Corinthian envoys at Sparta when stimulating the Spartan allies to the Peloponnesian war, 4 subsequent passage. The Theban envoys say to the public assembly at Athens, respecting the Spartans : 'AAAa [irjv Kal oiif vuuv uTTEaTTjcrav Qavepoi daiv f?7rar77K6ref VTTO TE yap TUV apfioaTuv rvpavvovvrai, Kal inrb deica avdpuv, ovf A.i>cravSpof Karea- rrjasv h inaari) Trofai where the decemvirs are noted as still subsisting, in 395 B. c. See also Xen. Agesilaus, i, 37. 1 Xen. Hellen. iii, 5, 15. 2 Xen. Anab. vi, 6, 12. ~Eial fiev yap rjSri iyyve ai 'Ehfyvidee irofatr (this was spoken at Kalpe in Bithynia) r^f <5e 'E/U,ac5of AaKedaipovioi TrpoeaTq* Kaaiv IK aval 6s el a i Kal elf l/caerrof AaKsdaifioviuv if raif Tcoheaiv O,TI ftov^ovTai diaTrpuTTea&ai,. 9 Xen Hellen. iii, 1, 5. ILiam yap Tore al Tro/le^f kirei&ovTO, O,TI A<ZK* taifioviof avrip emTaTTOi.
 * Thucyd. i, 68-120.