Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/99

 SENTIMENTS OF ISOKRATES. 77 telid to raise antipathy against Sparta. Lysias, in that portion of his speech which we possess, disguises his censure against her un- der the forms of surprise. But Isokrates, who composed an analo- gous discourse four years afterwards (which may perhaps have been read at the next Olympic festival of B. c. 380), speaks out more plainly. He denounces the Lacedaemonians as traitors to the gen- eral security and freedom of Greece, and as seconding foreign kings as well as Grecian despots to aggrandize themselves at the cost of autonomous Grecian cities, all in the interest of their own self- ish ambition. No wonder (he says) that the free and self-acting Hellenic world was every day becoming contracted into a narrower space, when the presiding city Sparta assisted Artaxerxes, Amyn- tas, and Dionysius to absorb it, and herself undertook unjust aggressions against Thebes, Olynthus, Phlius, and Mantinea. 1 The preceding citations, from Lysias and Isokrates, would be sufficient to show the measure which intelligent contemporaries took, both of the state of Greece and of the conduct of Sparta, during tlvi ?ight years succeeding the peace of Antalkidas (387-379 B.C.). But the philo-Laconian Xenophon is still more emphatic in his condemnation of Sparta. Having described her triumphant and seemingly unassailable position after the subjugation of Olynthus and Phlius, he proceeds to say, 2 "I could produce numerous oth- 1 Isokrates, Or. iv, (Panegyr.) s. 145, 146 : compare his Orat. viii, (Do Pace) s. 122; and Diodor. xv, 23. Dionysius of Syracuse had sent twenty triremes to join the Lacedaemo- nians at the Hellespont, a few months before the peace of Antalkidas (Xen- ophon, Hellen. v, 1, 26). 2 Xcn. Hellen. v, 4, 1. IIoAAa pev ovv uv rtf i%oi KOI uAAa "kiytw, nal 'E^TjviKu KOI (3ap{3apiKa, a>f i?eoi ovre TUV uaeftovvruv OVTE TUV avocria TTOI- OVVTUV UJIE^OVCL vvv ye fir/v /lew TU TrpOKsifiEva. KaKsSaifiovLoi re yu.p, 0} TEf avTovo/j.ovf EUGEIV raf 7ro/.e(f, TTJV EV Qrjpaic; ciKpo-rrohiv Karaa^ov ' avruv fiovov ruv udiKridEVTUv tKo^uadTjaav, Trpurov oi>6' vtj>' vbf rC>v U.V&PUTTUV KparrrdevTef. Toif re TUV TTO^ITUV Klaayayovraq elf rr/v uKpoTtohtv GVToiif, Ka'i povhri'&EVTC.f AaKe6ai/j.oviotf TTJV TroXiv dovheveiv, wore avToi TVpavvEiv ....... T//V TOVTUV upxyv ETTTU. /J.QVOV TUV This passage is properly characterized by Dr. Peter (in his Commentatio Critica in Xenophontis Hellenica, Hall. 1837, p. 82) as the turning-point in the history : " Hoc igitur in loco quasi editiore operis sui Xenophon subsistit, atqua uno in conspectu Spartanos, et ad suse felicitatis fastigium ascendere videt