Having first attempted to intimidate the Mantineans by ravaging their lands, Agesipolis commenced the work of blockade by digging a ditch around the town; half of his soldiers being kept on guard, while the rest worked with the spade. The ditch being completed, he prepared to erect a wall of circumvallation. But being apprised that the preceding harvest had been so good, as to leave a large stock of provision in the town, and to render the process of starving it out tedious both for Sparta and for her allies,—he tried a more rapid method of accomplishing his object. As the river Ophis, of considerable breadth for a Grecian stream, passed through the middle of the town, he dammed up its efflux on the lower side;[90] thus causing it to inundate the interior of the city and threaten the stability of the walls; which seem to have been of no great height, and built of sun-burnt bricks. Disappointed in their application to Athens for aid,[91] and unable to provide extraneous support for their tottering towers, the Mantineans were compelled to solicit a capitulation. But Agesipolis now refused to grant the request, except on condition that not only the fortifications of their city, but the city itself, should be in great part demolished; and that the inhabitants should be re-distributed into those five villages, which had been brought together, many years before, to form the aggregate city of Mantinea. To this also the Mantineans were obliged to submit, and the capitulation was ratified.
Though nothing was said in the terms of it about the chiefs of the Mantinean democratical government, yet these latter, conscious that they were detested both by their own oligarchical opposition and by the Lacedæmonians, accounted themselves certain of being put to death. And such would assuredly have been their fate, had not Pausanias (the late king of Sparta, now in exile at Tegea), whose good opinion they had always enjoyed, obtained as a personal favor from his son Agesipolis the lives of the most obnoxious, sixty in number, on condition that they should depart into exile. Agesipolis had much difficulty in accomplishing the wishes of his father. His Lacedæmonian soldiers were ranged in arms on both sides of the gate by which the obnoxious men went out; and Xenophon notices it as a signal mark of Lacedæmonian discipline, that they could keep their spears unemployed when disarmed enemies were thus within their reach; especially as the oligarchical Mantineans manifested the most murderous propensities, and were exceedingly difficult to control.[92] As at Peiræus before, so here at Mantinea again,—the liberal, but unfortunate, king Pausanias is found interfering in the character of mediator to soften the ferocity of political antipathies.
The city of Mantinea was now broken up, and the inhabitants were distributed again into the five constituent villages. Out of four-fifths of the population, each man pulled down his house in the city, and rebuilt it in the village near to which his property lay. The remaining fifth continued to occupy Mantinea as a village. Each village was placed under oligarchical government, and left unfortified. Though at first (says Xenophon) the change proved troublesome and odious, yet presently, when men found themselves resident upon their landed properties,—and still more, when they felt themselves delivered from the vexatious demagogues,—the new situation became more popular than the old. The Lacedæmonians were still better satisfied. Instead of one city of Mantinea, five distinct Arcadian villages now stood enrolled in their catalogue of allies. They assigned to each a separate xenâgus (Spartan officer destined to the command of each allied contingent), and the military service of all was henceforward performed with the utmost regularity.[93]
Such was the dissection or cutting into parts of the ancient city Mantinea; one of the most odious acts of high-handed Spartan despotism. Its true character is veiled by the partiality of the historian, who recounts it with a confident assurance, that after the trouble of moving was over, the population felt themselves decidedly bettered by the change. Such an assurance is only to be credited, on the ground that, being captives under the Grecian laws of war, they may have been thankful to escape the more terrible liabilities of death or personal slavery, at the price of forfeiting their civic community. That their feelings towards the change were those of genuine aversion, is shown by their subsequent conduct after the battle of Leuktra. As soon as the fear of Sparta was removed, they flocked together, with unanimous impulse, to reconstitute and refortify their dismantled city.[94] It would have been strange indeed had the fact been otherwise; for attachment to a civic community was the strongest political instinct of the Greek mind. The citizen of a town was averse—often most unhappily averse—to compromise the separate and autonomous working of his community by joining in any larger political combination, however equitably framed, and however it might promise on the whole an increase of Hellenic dignity. But still more vehemently did he shrink from the idea of breaking up his town into separate villages, and exchanging the character of a citizen for that of a villager, which was nothing less than great social degradation, in the eyes of Greeks generally, Spartans not excepted.[95]
In truth the sentence executed by the Spartans against Mantinea was in point of dishonor, as well as of privation, one of the severest which could be inflicted on free Greeks. All the distinctive glory and superiority of Hellenism,—all the intellectual and artistic manifestations,—all that there was of literature and philosophy, or of refined and rational sociality,—depended upon the city-life of the people. And the influence of Sparta, during the period of her empire, was peculiarly mischievous and retrograde, as tending not only to decompose the federations such as Bœotia into isolated towns, but even to decompose suspected towns such as Mantinea into villages; all for the purpose of rendering each of them exclusively dependent upon herself. Athens, during her period of empire, had exercised no such disuniting influence; still less Thebes, whom we shall hereafter find coming forward actively to found the new and great cities of Megalopolis and Messênê. The imperial tendencies of Sparta are worse than those of either Athens or Thebes; including less of improving or Pan-hellenic sympathies, and leaning the most systematically upon subservient factions in each subordinate city. In the very treatment of Mantinea just recounted, it is clear that the attack of Sparta was welcomed at least, if not originally invited, by the oligarchical party of the place, who sought to grasp the power into their own hands and to massacre their political opponents. In the first object they completely succeeded, and their government probably was more assured in the five villages than it would have been in the entire town. In the second, nothing prevented them from succeeding except the accidental intervention of the exile Pausanias; an accident, which alone rescued the Spartan name from the additional disgrace of a political massacre, over and above the lasting odium incurred by the act itself; by breaking up an ancient autonomous city, which had shown no act of overt enmity, and which was so moderate in its democratical manifestations as to receive the favorable criticism of judges rather disinclined towards democracy generally.[96] Thirty years before, when Mantinea had conquered certain neighboring Arcadian districts, and had been at actual war with Sparta to preserve them, the victorious Spartans exacted nothing more than the reduction of the city to its original district;[97] now they are satisfied with nothing less than the partition of the city into unfortified villages, though there had been no actual war preceding. So much had Spartan power, as well as Spartan despotic propensity, progressed during this interval.
The general language of Isokrates, Xenophon, and Diodorus,[98] indicates that this severity towards Mantinea was only the most stringent among a series of severities, extended by the Lacedæmonians through their whole confederacy, and operating upon all such of its members as gave them ground for dissatisfaction or mistrust. During the ten years after the surrender of Athens, they had been lords of the Grecian world both by land and sea, with a power never before possessed by any Grecian state; until the battle of Knidus, and the combination of Athens, Thebes, Argos, and Corinth, seconded by Persia, had broken up their empire at sea, and much endangered it on land. At length the peace of Antalkidas, enlisting Persia on their side (at the price of the liberty of the Asiatic Greeks), had enabled them to dissolve the hostile combination against them. The general autonomy, of which they were the authorized interpreters, meant nothing more than a separation of the Bœotian cities from Thebes,[99] and of Corinth from Argos,—being noway intended to apply to the relation between Sparta and her allies. Having thus their hands free, the Lacedæmonians applied themselves to raise their ascendency on land to the point where it had stood before the battle of Knidus, and even to regain as much as possible of their empire at sea. To bring back a dominion such as that of the Lysandrian harmosts and dekarchies, and to reconstitute a local oligarchy of their most devoted partisans, in each of those cities where the government had been somewhat liberalized during the recent period of war,—was their systematic policy.
Those exiles who had incurred the condemnation of their fellow-citizens for subservience to Sparta, now found the season convenient for soliciting Spartan intervention to procure their return. It was in this manner that a body of exiled political leaders from Phlius,—whose great merit it was that the city when under their government had been zealous in service to Sparta, but had now become lukewarm or even disaffected in the hands of their opponents,—obtained from the ephors a message, polite in form but authoritative in substance, addressed to the Phliasians, requiring that the exiles should be restored, as friends of Sparta banished without just cause.[100]
While the Spartan power, for the few years succeeding the peace of Antalkidas, was thus decidedly in ascending movement on land, efforts were also made to reëstablish it at sea. Several of the Cyclades and other smaller islands were again rendered tributary. In this latter sphere, however, Athens became her competitor. Since the peace, and the restoration of Lemnos, Imbros and Skyros, combined with the refortified Peiræus and its Long Walls,—Athenian commerce and naval power had been reviving, though by slow and humble steps. Like the naval force of England compared with France, the warlike marine of Athens rested upon a considerable commercial marine, which latter hardly existed at all in Laconia. Sparta had no seamen except constrained Helots or paid foreigners;[101] while the commerce of Peiræus had both required and maintained a numerous population of this character. The harbor of Peiræus was convenient in respect of accommodation, and well-stocked with artisans,—while Laconia had few artisans, and was notoriously destitute of harbors.[102] Accordingly, in this maritime competition, Athens, though but the shadow of her former self, started at an advantage as compared with Sparta, and in spite of the superiority of the latter on land, was enabled to compete with her in acquiring tributary dependencies among the smaller islands of the Ægean. To these latter, who had no marine of their own, and who (like Athens herself) required habitual supplies of imported corn, it was important to obtain both access to Peiræus and protection from the Athenian triremes against that swarm of pirates, who showed themselves after the peace of Antalkidas, when there was no predominant maritime state; besides which, the market of Peiræus was often supplied with foreign corn from the Crimea, through the preference shown by the princes of Bosphorus to Athens, at a time when vessels from other places could obtain no cargo.[103] A moderate tribute paid to Athens would secure to the tributary island greater advantages than if paid to Sparta,—with at least equal protection. Probably, the influence of Athens over these islanders was farther aided by the fact, that she administered the festivals, and lent out the funds, of the holy temple at Delos. We know by inscriptions remaining, that large sums were borrowed at interest from the temple-treasure, not merely by individual islanders, but also by the island-cities collectively,—Naxos, Andros, Tenos, Siphnos, Seriphos. The Amphiktyonic council who dispensed these loans (or at least the presiding members) were Athenians named annually at Athens.[104] Moreover, these islanders rendered religious homage and attendance at the Delian festivals, and were thus brought within the range of a central Athenian influence, capable, under favorable circumstances, of being strengthened and rendered even politically important.
By such helps, Athens was slowly acquiring to herself a second maritime confederacy, which we shall presently find to be of considerable moment, though never approaching the grandeur of her former empire; so that in the year 380 B.C., when Isokrates published his Panegyrical Discourse (seven years after the peace of Antalkidas), though her general power was still slender compared with the overruling might of Sparta,[105] yet her navy had already made such progress, that he claims for her the right of taking the command by sea, in that crusade which he strenuously enforces, of Athens and Sparta in harmonious unity at the head of all Greece, against the Asiatic barbarians.[106]
It would seem that a few years after the peace of Antalkidas, Sparta became somewhat ashamed of having surrendered the Asiatic Greeks to Persia; and that king Agesipolis and other leading Spartans encouraged the scheme of a fresh Grecian expedition against Asia, in compliance with propositions from some disaffected subjects of Artaxerxes.[107] Upon some such project, currently discussed though never realized, Isokrates probably built his Panegyrical Oration, composed in a lofty strain of patriotic eloquence (380 B.C.) to stimulate both Sparta and Athens in the cause, and calling on both, as joint chiefs of Greece, to suspend dissensions at home for a great Pan-hellenic manifestation against the common enemy abroad. But whatever ideas of this kind the Spartan leaders may have entertained, their attention was taken off, about 382 B.C. by movements in a more remote region of the Grecian world, which led to important consequences.