Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/78

 56 HISTORY OF GREECE. secure, profitable, and dignified. It is curious to observe how perfectly the orator is conscious that this repugnance, though at the moment preponderant, was nevertheless essentially transitory, and would give place to attachment when the union came to be felt as a reality ; and how eagerly he appeals to Sparta to lose no time in clenching the repugnance, while it lasted. He appeals tc her, not for any beneficial or Pan-hellenic objects, but in the inter- est s of her own dominion, which required that the Grecian work should be as it were pulverized into minute, self-acting, atoms without cohesion, so that each city, or each village, while pro- tected against subjection to any other, should farther be prevented from equal political union or fusion with any other ; being thus more completely helpless and dependent in reference to Sparta. It was not merely from Akanthus and Apollonia, but also from the dispossessed Macedonian king Amynthus, that envoys reached Sparta to ask for aid against Olynthus. It seems that Amyntas, after having abandoned the kingdom and made his cession to the Olynthians, had obtained some aid from Thessaly and tried to re- instate himself by force. In this scheme he had failed, being de- feated by the Olynthians. Indeed we find another person named Argaeus, mentioned as competitor for the Macedonian sceptre, and possessing it for two years. 1 After hearing these petitioners, the Lacedaemonians first declared their own readiness to comply with the prayer, and to put down Olynthus ; next, they submitted the same point to the vote of the assembled allies. 2 Among these latter, there was no genuine an- tipathy against the Olynthians, such as that which had prevailed against Athens before the Peloponnesian war, in the synod then held at Sparta. But the power of Sparta over her allies was now far greater than it had been then. Most of their cities were_under oligarchies, dependent upon her support for authority over their fellow-citizens ; moreover, the recent events in Boeotia and at 1 Diodor. xiv, 92 ; xv, 19. Demosthenes speaks of Amyntas as having been expelled from his king- dom by the Thessalians (cont. Aristokrat. c. 29, p. 657). If this be histori- cally correct, it must he referred to some subsequent war in which he was engaged with the Thessalians, perhaps to the time when Jason of Plieus acquired dominion over Macedonia (Xenoph Hellen. vi, 1, 11). 1 See above in this History, Vol. VI. Ch. xfviii, p. 79.