r as to comply with the demands of a Persian satrap.
Athens and Sparta, both, at different times, invoked the aid of Persia
against each other--the most mournful fact in the whole history of Greece,
showing how much more powerful were the rivalries of States than the
sentiment of patriotism, which should have united them against their
common enemy. The sacrifice of Ionia was the price which was paid by
Sparta, in order to retain her supremacy over the rest of Greece, and
Persia ruled over all the Greeks on the Asiatic coast. Sparta became
mistress of Corinth and of the Corinthian Isthmus. She organized
anti-Theban oligarchies in the Boeotian cities, with a Spartan harmost. She
decomposed the Grecian world into small fragments. She crushed Olythus,
and formed a confederacy between the Persian king and the Dionysius of
Syracuse. In short, she ruled with despotic sway over all the different
States.

We have now to show how Sparta lost the ascendency she had gained, and
became involved in a war with Thebes, and how Thebes became, under
Pelopidas and Epaminondas, for a time the dominant State of Greece.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE REPUBLIC OF THEBES.

(M620) After Sparta and Athens, no State of Greece arrived at
pre-eminence, until the Macedonian empire arose, except Thebes, the
capital of Boeotia; and the empire of this city was short, though
memorable, from the extraordinary military genius of Epaminondas.

In the year B.C. 370, Sparta was the ascendant power of Greece, and was
feared, even as Athens was in the time of Pericles. She had formed an
alliance with the Persian king and with Dionysius of Syracuse. All Greece,
within and without the Peloponnesus, except Argos and Attica and some
Thessalian cities, was enrolled in a confederacy under the lead of Sparta,
and Spartan governors and garrisons occupied the principal cities.

(M621) Thebes especially was completely under Spartan influence and
control, and was apparently powerless. Her citadel, the Cadmea, was filled
with Spartan soldiers, and the independence of Greece was at an end.
Confederated with Macedonians, Persians, and Syracusans, nobody dared to
call in question the headship of Sparta, or to provoke her displeasure.

(M622) This destruction of Grecian liberties, with the aid of the old
enemies of Greece, kindled great indignation. The orator Lysias, at
Athens, gave vent to the general feeling, in which he veils his
disple