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488 shock would have been sufficient, as was soon proved, to level it with the dust.

It was nearly at the same juncture that Sparta seemed to have attained the summit of her power: her old enemy had been reduced to insignificance: her two most formidable rivals converted into useful dependants: her refractory allies chastised and cowed: in no quarter of the political horizon, neither in nor out of Greece, did it seem possible for the keenest eye to discover any prognostics of danger: her empire, says the contemporary historian, appeared in every respect to have been now established on a glorious and solid base. Yet in a few years the Spartan women saw for the first time the smoke of the flames with which a hostile army ravaged their country in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital: and a Spartan embassy implored the pity of the Athenians, and pleaded the magnanimity with which Sparta in her day of victory had preserved Athens from annihilation, as a motive for the exercise of similar generosity toward a fallen enemy. The historian sees in this reverse the judgement of the gods against treachery and impiety. But when we inquire about the steps by which the change was effected, we find that the mistress of Greece had lost—nearly a thousand of her subjects, and about four hundred of her citizens, at the battle of Leuctra.

It would be impertinent to accumulate illustrations which will present themselves uncalled to every reader's mind: we might otherwise find some amusement in comparing the history of great cities with that of their respective states, and in observing how often the splendour of the one has increased in proportion to the weakness and rottenness of the other. The ages of conquest and of glory had past, before Rome began to exhibit a marble front; and the old consuls who in the wars of a century scarcely quelled the Samnite hydra, and who brought army after army into the field to be destroyed by Hannibal, would have gazed with wonder on the magnificence in the midst of which the master of the empire, in anguish and dismay, called upon Varus to restore his three legions. Yet Rome under Augustus was probably less gorgeous than Byzantium under Constantine, whose city was