Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/100

 78 HISTORY OF GREECE. er incidents, both in and out af Greece, to prove that the gods tak* careful note of impious men and of evil-doers ; but the events which 1 am now about to relate are quite sufficient. The Lacedaemoni- ans, who had sworn to leave each city autonomous, having violated their oaths by seizing the citadel of Thebes, were punished by the very men whom they had wronged, though no one on earth had ever before triumphed over them. And the Theban faction who had introduced them into the citadel, with the deliberate purpose that their city should be enslaved to Sparta in order that they might rule despotically themselves, were put down by no more than seven assailants, among the exiles whom they had banished." What must have been the hatred, and sense of abused ascen- dency, entertained towards Sparta by neutral or unfriendly Greeks, when Xenophon, alike conspicuous for his partiality to her and for his dislike of Thebes, could employ these decisive words in ushering in the coming phase of Spartan humiliation, representing it as a well-merited judgment from the gods ? The sentence which I have just translated marks, in the commonplace manner of the Xenophontic Hellenica, the same moment of pointed contrast and transition, past glory suddenly and unexpectedly darkened by supervening misfortune, which is foreshadowed in the narrative of Thucydides by the dialogue between the Athe- nian envoys and the Melian 1 council ; or in the CEdipus and An- tigone of Sophokles, 2 by the warnings of the prophet Teiresias. The government of Thebes had now been for three years (since the blow struck by Phoebidas) in the hands of Leontiades and his oligarchical partisans, upheld by the Spartan garrison in the Kadmeia. Respecting the details of its proceedings we have scarce any information. "VVe can only (as above remarked) judge of it by the analogy of the Thirty tyrants at Athens, and of the Lysandrian Dekarchies, to which it was exactly similar in origin, position, and interests. That the general spirit of it must have been cruel, oppressive, and rapacious, we cannot doubt ; though in what degree we have no means of knowing. The appetites et rursus ab eo delabi : tant& autem divin.TJ justitise conscicntifi tangitur in hac Spartanorum fortunft conspicuoe. ut vix suum judicium, quanquam id Bolet facere, suppresserit." 1 See Vol. VII. of this History, the close of Chapter Ivi.
 * Soph. CEdip. Tyr. 450 ; Antigon. 1066