Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/57

 SPARTANS ATTACK MANT3NEA 35 Far from any wish thus to realize the terms of peace which they had themselves imposed, the Lacedaemonians took advantage of an early moment after becoming free from their enemies in Boeotia and Corinth, to strain their authority over their allies be- yond its previous limits. Passing in review 1 the conduct of each during the war, they resolved to make an example of the city oi Mantinea. Some acts, not of positive hostility, but of equivocal fidelity, were imputed to the Mantineans. They were accused of having been slack in performance of their military obligations, sometimes even to the length of withholding their contingent alto- gether, under pretence of a season of religious truce ; of furnish- ing corn in time of war to the hostile Argeians ; and of plainly manifesting their disaffected feeling towards Sparta, chagrin at every success which she obtained, satisfaction, when she chanced to experience a reverse. 2 The Spartan ephors now sent an envoy to Mantinea, denouncing all such past behavior, and peremptorily requiring that the walls of the city should be demolished, as the only security for future penitence and amendment. As compli- ance was refused, they despatched an army, summoning the allied contingents generally for the purpose of enforcing the sentence. intrinsically improbable. After what we have heard of the dekarchies under Sparta, no extent of violence in the reaction against them is incredible, nor can we doubt that such reaction would carry with it some new injustice, along with much well-merited retribution. Hardly any but Athenian citi- zens were capable of the forbearance displayed by Athens both after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty. Nevertheless, I believe that Diodorus is here mistaken, and that he has assigned to the period immediately suc- ceeding the peace of Antalkidas, those reactionary violences which took place in many cities about sixteen years subsequently, after the battle of Leuktra. For Xenophon, in recounting what happened after the peace of Antalkidas, mentions nothing about any real autonomy granted by Sparta to her various subject-allies, and subsequently revoked; which he would never have omitted to tell us, had the fact been so, because it would have supplied a, plausible apology for the high-handed injustice of the Spartans, and would have thus lent aid to the current of partiality which manifests itself in his history. 1 Xen. Hellen. v, 2, 1-8. Aia'dofievoi TOVQ A.aKnda.i(j.oviovf k-KiaKoirovvTCf roi'f t;vnna.%ovr, OKOIO'I rivef luaaroi iv T& trote/M avrolf iyeytVTjvTo, etc. really shown themselves pleased, when the Lacedaemonian Mora was de- stroyed neat Corinth by Iphikrates (iv, 5, 18).
 * Xen. Hellen. v, 2, 2. He had before stated, that the Mantineans had