Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/306

282 same stock, and they indicate "no inward organic development of the ." They are simply groups of independent without real political cohesion. There was indeed one league, that of the Bœotian cities, which even in the sixth century may have approached to the nature of a federation; but our knowledge of it in that period is extremely scanty, and I shall have an opportunity of adverting to it later on.

There were, however, certain centralising forces at work in Greece in the sixth century, one at least of which must be taken into account. Apart from the influence of the Delphic oracle, and the Olympic and other games, which brought the Greeks into more intimate relations with each other; and accentuated the feeling that they all belonged to a common race as distinct from the "barbarian," we have to notice the tendency of one City-State to assert a political predominance over others in the direction at once of empire and federation. This State was Sparta; the very one, it is curious to note, which in the following century assumed the position of champion of the free and self-sufficing against another far more dangerous centralising power.

By the middle of the sixth century, says Herodotus, Sparta had subdued the greater part of the Peloponnese; that is, she was already mistress of a