Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/284

 260 HISTORY OF GREECE. make the Lacedaemonians distrust the conduct of their Herak- leid leaders when on foreign service, and this feeling weighed much in inducing them to abandon the Asiatic headship in favor of Athens. It appears that their Peloponnesian allies retired from this contest at the same time as they did, so that the prose- cution of the war was thus left to Athens as chief of the newly- emancipated Greeks.! It was from these considerations that the Spartans were in- duced to submit to that loss of command which the misconduct of Pausanias had brought upon them. Their acquiescence facil- itated the immense change about to take place in Grecian politics. According to the tendencies in progress prior to the Persian invasion, Sparta had become gradually more and more the presi- dent of something like a Pan-Hellenic union, comprising the greater part of the Grecian states. Such at least was the point towards which things seemed to be tending ; and if many sepa- rate states stood aloof from this union, none of them at least sought to form any counter-union, if we except the obsolete and impotent pretensions of Argos. The preceding volumes of this history have shown that Sparta had risen to such ascendency, not from her superior competence in the management of collective interests, nor even in the main from ambitious efforts on her own part to acquire it, — but from the converging tendencies of Gre- cian feeling, which required some such presiding state, and from the commanding military power, rigid discipline, and ancient undisturbed constitution, which attracted that feeling towards Sparta. The necessities of common defence against Persia greatly strengthened these tendencies, and the success of the de- fence, whereby so many Greeks were emancipated who required protection against their fonner master, seemed destined to have many years in banishment, was aftei-wards restored : and the years which he had passed in banishment were counted as a part of his reign (Fast. Hellen. I.e. p. 211). The date of Archidamus may, perhaps, have been reckoned in one account from the banishment of Leotychides, — in another, from his death ; the rather, as Archidamus must have been very young, since he reigned forty-two years even after 469 B.C. And the date which Diodorus has given as that of the death of Leotychides, may really be only the date of his banishment, in which he lived.until 469 b, 3- 'Thucjd. i, 18.