Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/299

 MISSION OF PELOPIDAS. 277 to embarrass Thebes, unless the policy recommended by Epami- nondas in Achaia had been reversed, and unless he himself had fallen under the displeasure of his countrymen. His influence too was probably impaired, and the policy of Thebes affected for the worse, by the accidental absence of his friend Pelopidas, who was then on his mission to the Persian court at Susa. Such a journey and return, with the transaction of the business in hand, must have occupied the greater part of the year 367 B. c., being terminated probably by the return of the envoys in the beginning of 366 B. c. The leading Thebans had been alarmed by the language of Philiskus, who had come over a few months before as envoy from the satrap Ariobarzanes and had threatened to employ Asi- atic money in the interest of Athens and Sparta against Thebes, though his threats seem never to have been realized, as well as by the presence of the Lacedaemonian Euthykles (after the failure of. Antalkidas 1 ) at the Persian court, soliciting aid. Moreover Thebes had now pretensions to the headship of Greece, at least as good as either of her two rivals ; while since the fatal example set by Sparta at the peace called by the name of Antalkidas in 387 B. c., and copied by Athens after the battle of Leuktra in 371 B. c., it had become a sort of recognized fashion that the leading Grecian state should sue out its title from the terror-strik- ing rescript of the Great King, and proclaim itself as enforcing terms which he had dictated. On this ground of borrowed eleva- tion Thebes now sought to place herself. There was in her case a peculiar reason which might partly excuse the value set upon it by her leaders. Ik had been almost the capital act of her policy to establish the two new cities, Megalopolis and Messene. The vitality and chance for duration, of both, especially that of the latter, which had the inextinguishable hostility of Sparta to con- tend with, would be materially improved, in the existing state of the Greek mind, if they were recognized as autonomous under a Persian rescript. To attain this object, 2 Pelopidas and Isme- 1 Plutarch, Artaxerx. c. 22. mission to the Persian court ; we see this not only from Cornelius Nepos (Pelop. c. 4) and Diodorus (xv 81), but also even f-om Xenophon, Helleo vii. 1. 36.
 * It is plain that Messthie was the great purpose with Pelopidas in his