Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/382

 360 HISTORY OF GREECE. as to the second proposition, guaranteeing autonomy to every distinct city of Greece, they would admit it only under special reserves, which it did not suit the purpose of Antalkidas to grant. In truth the proposition went to break up (and was framed with that view) both the Boeotian confederacy under the presidency of Thebes, and the union between Argos and Corinth ; while it also deprived Athens of the chance of recovering Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, 1 islands which had been possessed and recognized by her since the first commencement of the confederacy of Delos ; indeed the two former, even from the time of Miltiades the con- queror of Marathon. Here commences a new era in the policy of Sparta. That she should abnegate all pretension to maritime empire, is noway difficult to understand seeing that it had already been irrevocably over- thrown by the defeat of Knidus. Nor can we wonder that she should abandon the Greeks on the Asiatic continent to Persian sway ; since this was nothing more than she had already consented to do in her conventions with Tissaphernes and Cyrus during the latter years of the Peloponnesian war, 2 and consented, let us add, not under any of that stringent necessity which at the same time pressed upon Athens, but simply with a view to the maximum of victory over an enemy already enfeebled. The events which followed the close of that war (recounted in a former chapter) had indeed in- duced her to alter her determination, and again to espouse their It is true that Athens, during her desperate struggles in the last years of the Peloponnesian war, had consented to this concession, and even to greater, without doing herself any good (Thucyd. viii, 56). But she was not now placed in circumstances so imperious as to force her to be equally yielding. Plato, in the Menexenus (c. 17, p. 245), asserts that all the allies of Athens Boeotians, Corinthians, Argeians, etc., were willing to surrender the Asi- atic Greeks at the requisition of Artaxerxes ; but that the Athenians alone resolutely stood out, and were in consequence left without any allies. The latter part of this assertion, as to the isolation of Athens from her allies, is certainly not true ; nor do I believe that the allies took essentially different views from Athens on the point. The Menexenus, eloquent and compli- mentary to Athens, must be followed cautiously as to matters of fact. Plato goes the length of denying that the Athenians subscribed the convention of Antalkidas. Aristeides (Panathen. p. 172) says that they were forced to subscribe it, because all their allies abandoned them. 1 Xen. Hellen. iv, 8, 15. 8 See a striking passage in the Or. xii, (Pauathen.) of Isokrafis, s. 110.