This oration, composed only five or six years after the battle of Leuktra, is exceedingly valuable as a testimony of the Spartan feeling under such severe humiliations.
[495] The freedom of the Messenians had been put down by the first Messenian war, after which they became subjects of Sparta. The second Messenian war arose from their revolt.
No free Messenian legation could therefore have visited Olympia since the termination of the first war; which is placed by Pausanias (iv, 13, 4) in 723 B.C.; though the date is not to be trusted. Pausanias (iv, 27, 3) gives two hundred and eighty-seven years between the end of the second Messenian war and the foundation of Messênê by Epaminondas. See the note of Siebelis on this passage. Exact dates of these early wars cannot be made out.
[496] The partiality towards Sparta, visible even from the beginning of Xenophon’s history, becomes more and more exaggerated throughout the two latter books wherein he recounts her misfortunes; it is moreover intensified by spite against the Thebans and Epaminondas as her conquerors. But there is hardly any instance of this feeling, so glaring or so discreditable, as the case now before us. In describing the expedition of Epaminondas into Peloponnesus in the winter of 370-369 B.C., he totally omits the foundation both of Messênê and Megalopolis; though in the after part of his history, he alludes (briefly) both to one and to the other as facts accomplished. He represents the Thebans to have come into Arcadia with their magnificent army, for the simple purpose of repelling Agesilaus and the Spartans, and to have been desirous of returning to Bœotia, as soon as it was ascertained that the latter had already returned to Sparta (vi, 5, 23). Nor does he once mention the name of Epaminondas as general of the Thebans in the expedition, any more than he mentions him at Leuktra.
Considering the momentous and striking character of these facts, and the eminence of the Theban general by whom they were achieved, such silence on the part of an historian, who professes to recount the events of the time, is an inexcusable dereliction of his duty to state the whole truth. It is plain that Messênê and Megalopolis wounded to the quick the philo-Spartan sentiment of Xenophon. They stood as permanent evidences of the degradation of Sparta, even after the hostile armies had withdrawn from Laconia. He prefers to ignore them altogether. Yet he can find space to recount, with disproportionate prolixity, the two applications of the Spartans to Athens for aid, with the favorable reception which they obtained,—also the exploits of the Phliasians in their devoted attachment to Sparta.
[497] See a striking passage in Polybius, iv, 32. Compare also Pausan. v, 29, 3; and viii, 27, 2.
[498] Xenoph. Hellen. vii, 1, 38; vii, 4, 2, 33, 34; vii, 3, 1.
[499] Demosthen. Fals. Legat. p. 344, s. 11, p. 403, s. 220, Æschines, Fals. Leg. p. 296, c. 49; Cornel. Nepos. Epamin. c. 6.
[500] Xenoph. Hellen. vii, 1, 38; vii, 4, 33; Diodor. xv, 59; Aristotle—Ἀρκάδων Πολιτεία—ap. Harpokration, v. Μύριοι, p. 106, ed. Neumann.
[501] Polybius, ii, 55.