Thus perished a Greek of preëminent vigor and intelligence, remarkably free from the vices usual in Grecian despots, and forming a strong contrast in this respect with his contemporary Dionysius, whose military energy is so deeply stained by crime and violence. Nikoklês, the son of Evagoras, reigned at Salamis after him, and showed much regard, accompanied by munificent presents, to the Athenian Isokrates; who compliments him as a pacific and well-disposed prince, attached to Greek pursuits and arts, conversant by personal study with Greek philosophy, and above all, copying his father in that just dealing and absence of wrong towards person or property, which had so much promoted the comfort as well as the prosperity of the city.[63]
We now revert from the episode respecting Evagoras,—interesting not less from the eminent qualities of that prince than from the glimpse of Hellenism struggling with the Phœnician element in Cyprus,—to the general consequences of the peace of Antalkidas in Central Greece. For the first time since the battle of Mykalê in 479 B.C., the Persians were now really masters of all the Greeks on the Asiatic coast. The satraps lost no time in confirming their dominion. In all the cities which they suspected, they built citadels and planted permanent garrisons. In some cases, their mistrust or displeasure was carried so far as to raze the town altogether.[64] And thus these cities, having already once changed their position greatly for the worse, by passing from easy subjection under Athens to the harsh rule of Lacedæmonian harmosts and native decemvirs,—were now transferred to masters yet more oppressive and more completely without the pale of Hellenic sympathy. Both in public extortion, and in wrong doing towards individuals, the commandant and his mercenaries, whom the satrap maintained, were probably more rapacious, and certainly more unrestrained, than even the harmosts of Sparta. Moreover, the Persian grandees required beautiful boys as eunuchs for their service, and beautiful women as inmates of their harems.[65] What was taken for their convenience admitted neither of recovery nor redress; and Grecian women, if not more beautiful than many of the native Asiatics, were at least more intelligent, lively, and seductive,—as we may read in the history of that Phokæan lady, the companion of Cyrus, who was taken captive at Kunaxa. Moreover, these Asiatic Greeks, when passing into the hands of Oriental masters, came under the maxims and sentiment of Orientals, respecting the infliction of pain or torture,—maxims not only more cruel than those of the Greeks, but also making little distinction between freemen and slaves.[66] The difference between the Greeks and Phœnicians in Cyprus, on this point, has been just noticed; and doubtless the difference between Greeks and Persians was still more marked. While the Asiatic Greeks were thus made over by Sparta and the Perso-Spartan convention of Antalkidas, to a condition in every respect worse, they were at the same time thrown in, as reluctant auxiliaries, to strengthen the hands of the Great King against other Greeks,—against Evagoras in Cyprus,—and above all, against the islands adjoining the coast of Asia,—Chios, Samos, Rhodes, etc.[67] These islands were now exposed to the same hazard, from their overwhelming Persian neighbors, as that from which they had been rescued nearly a century before by the Confederacy of Delos, and by the Athenian empire into which that Confederacy was transformed. All the tutelary combination that the genius, the energy, and the Pan-hellenic ardor, of Athens had first organized, and so long kept up,—was now broken up; while Sparta, to whom its extinction was owing, in surrendering the Asiatic Greeks, had destroyed the security even of the islanders.
It soon appeared, however, how much Sparta herself had gained by this surrender in respect to dominion nearer home. The government of Corinth,—wrested from the party friendly to Argos, deprived of Argeian auxiliaries, and now in the hands of the restored Corinthian exiles who were the most devoted partisans of Sparta,—looked to her for support, and made her mistress of the Isthmus, either for offence or for defence. She thus gained the means of free action against Thebes, the enemy upon whom her attention was first directed. Thebes was now the object of Spartan antipathy, not less than Athens had formerly been; especially on the part of King Agesilaus, who had to avenge the insult offered to himself at the sacrifice near Aulis, as well as the strenuous resistance on the field of Koroneia. He was at the zenith of his political influence; so that his intense miso-Theban sentiment made Sparta, now becoming aggressive on all sides, doubly aggressive against Thebes. More prudent Spartans, like Antalkidas, warned him[68] that his persevering hostility would ultimately kindle in the Thebans a fatal energy of military resistance and organization. But the warning was despised until it was too fully realized in the development of the great military genius of Epaminondas, and in the defeat of Leuktra.
I have already mentioned that in the solemnity of exchanging oaths to the peace of Antalkidas, the Thebans had hesitated at first to recognize the autonomy of the other Bœotian cities; upon which Agesilaus had manifested a fierce impatience to exclude them from the treaty, and attack them single-handed.[69] Their timely accession balked him in this impulse; but it enabled him to enter upon a series of measures highly humiliating to the dignity as well as to the power of Thebes. All the Bœotian cities were now proclaimed autonomous under the convention. As solicitor, guarantee, and interpreter, of that convention, Sparta either had, or professed to have, the right of guarding their autonomy against dangers, actual or contingent, from their previous Vorort or presiding city. For this purpose she availed herself of this moment of change to organize in each of them a local oligarchy, composed of partisans adverse to Thebes as well as devoted to herself, and upheld in case of need by a Spartan harmost and garrison.[70] Such an internal revolution grew almost naturally out of the situation; since the previous leaders, and the predominant sentiment in most of the towns, seem to have been favorable to Bœotian unity, and to the continued presidency of Thebes. These leaders would therefore find themselves hampered, intimidated, and disqualified, under the new system, while those who had before been an opposition minority would come forward with a bold and decided policy, like Kritias and Theramenes at Athens after the surrender of the city to Lysander. The new leaders doubtless would rather invite than repel the establishment of a Spartan harmost in their town, as a security to themselves against resistance from their own citizens as well as against attacks from Thebes, and as a means of placing them under the assured conditions of a Lysandrian dekarchy. Though most of the Bœotian cities were thus, on the whole, favorable to Thebes,—and though Sparta thrust upon them the boon, which she called autonomy, from motives of her own, and not from their solicitation,—yet, Orchomenus and Thespiæ, over whom the presidency of Thebes appears to have been harshly exercised, were adverse to her, and favorable to the Spartan alliance.[71] These two cities were strongly garrisoned by Sparta, and formed her main stations in Bœotia.[72]
The presence of such garrisons, one on each side of Thebes,—the discontinuance of the Bœotarchs, with the breaking up of all symbols and proceedings of the Bœotian federation,—and the establishment of oligarchies devoted to Sparta in the other cities,—was doubtless a deep wound to the pride of the Thebans. But there was another wound still deeper, and this the Lacedæmonians forthwith proceeded to inflict,—the restoration of Platæa.
A melancholy interest attaches both to the locality of this town, as one of the brightest scenes of Grecian glory,—and to its brave and faithful population, victims of an exposed position combined with numerical feebleness. Especially, we follow with a sort of repugnance the capricious turns of policy which dictated the Spartan behavior towards them. One hundred and twenty years before, the Platæans had thrown themselves upon Sparta, to entreat her protection against Thebes. The Spartan king Kleomenes had then declined the obligation as too distant, and had recommended them to ally themselves with Athens.[73] This recommendation, though dictated chiefly by a wish to raise contention between Athens and Thebes, was complied with; and the alliance, severing Platæa altogether from the Bœotian confederacy, turned out both advantageous and honorable to her until the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. At that time, it suited the policy of the Spartans to uphold and strengthen in every way the supremacy of Thebes over the Bœotian cities; it was altogether by Spartan intervention, indeed, that the power of Thebes was reëstablished, after the great prostration as well as disgrace which she had undergone, as traitor to Hellas and zealous in the service of Mardonius.[74] Athens, on the other hand, was at that time doing her best to break up the Bœotian federation, and to enrol its various cities as her allies; in which project, though doubtless suggested by and conducive to her own ambition, she was at that time (460-445 B.C.) perfectly justifiable on Pan-hellenic grounds; seeing that Thebes as their former chief had so recently enlisted them all in the service of Xerxes, and might be expected to do the same again if a second Persian invasion should be attempted. Though for a time successful, Athens was expelled from Bœotia by the defeat of Korôneia; and at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, the whole Bœotian federation (except Platæa, was united under Thebes, in bitter hostility against her. The first blow of the war, even prior to any declaration, was struck by Thebes in her abortive nocturnal attempt to surprise Platæa. In the third year of the war, king Archidamus, at the head of the full Lacedæmonian force, laid siege to the latter town; which, after an heroic defence and a long blockade, at length surrendered under the extreme pressure of famine; yet not before one half its brave defenders had forced their way out over the blockading wall, and escaped to Athens, where all the Platæan old men, women, and children, had been safely lodged before the siege. By a cruel act which stands among the capital iniquities of Grecian warfare, the Lacedæmonians had put to death all the Platæan captives, two hundred in number, who fell into their hands; the town of Platæa had been razed, and its whole territory, joined to Thebes, had remained ever since cultivated on Theban account.[75] The surviving Platæans had been dealt with kindly and hospitably by the Athenians. A qualified right of citizenship was conceded to them at Athens, and when Skionê was recaptured in 420 B.C., that town (vacant by the slaughter of its captive citizens) was handed over to the Platæans as a residence.[76] Compelled to evacuate Skionê, they were obliged at the close of the Peloponnesian war,[77] to return to Athens, where the remainder of them were residing at the time of the peace of Antalkidas; little dreaming that those who had destroyed their town and their fathers forty years before, would now turn round and restore it.[78]
Such restoration, whatever might be the ostensible grounds on which the Spartans pretended to rest it, was not really undertaken either to carry out the convention of Antalkidas, which guaranteed only the autonomy of existing towns,—or to repair previous injustice, since the prior destruction had been the deliberate act of themselves, and of King Archidamus the father of Agesilaus,—but simply as a step conducive to the present political views of Sparta. And towards this object it was skilfully devised. It weakened the Thebans, not only by wresting from them what had been, for about forty years, a part of their territory and property; but also by establishing upon it a permanent stronghold in the occupation of their bitter enemies, assisted by a Spartan garrison. It furnished an additional station for such a garrison in Bœotia, with the full consent of the newly-established inhabitants. And more than all, it introduced a subject of contention between Athens and Thebes, calculated to prevent the two from hearty coöperation afterwards against Sparta. As the sympathy of the Platæans with Athens was no less ancient and cordial than their antipathy against Thebes, we may probably conclude that the restoration of the town was an act acceptable to the Athenians; at least, at first, until they saw the use made of it, and the position which Sparta came to occupy in reference to Greece generally. Many of the Platæans, during their residence at Athens, had intermarried with Athenian women,[79] who now, probably, accompanied their husbands to the restored little town on the north of Kithæron, near the southern bank of the river Asôpus.
Had the Platæans been restored to a real and honorable autonomy, such as they enjoyed in alliance with Athens before the Peloponnesian war, we should have cordially sympathized with the event. But the sequel will prove—and their own subsequent statement emphatically sets forth—that they were a mere dependency of Sparta, and an outpost of Spartan operations against Thebes.[80] They were a part of the great revolution which the Spartans now brought about in Bœotia; whereby Thebes was degraded from the president of a federation into an isolated autonomous city, while the other Bœotian cities, who had been before members of the federation, were elevated each for itself into the like autonomy; or rather (to substitute the real truth[81] in place of Spartan professions) they became enrolled and sworn in as dependent allies of Sparta, under oligarchical factions devoted to her purposes and resting upon her for support. That the Thebans should submit to such a revolution, and, above all, to the sight of Platæa as an independent neighbor with a territory abstracted from themselves,—proves how much they felt their own weakness, and how irresistible at this moment was the ascendency of their great enemy, in perverting to her own ambition the popular lure of universal autonomy held out by the peace of Antalkidas. Though compelled to acquiesce, the Thebans waited in hopes of some turn of fortune which would enable them to reörganize the Bœotian federation; while their hostile sentiment towards Sparta was not the less bitter for being suppressed. Sparta on her part kept constant watch to prevent the reunion of Bœotia;[82] an object in which she was for a time completely successful, and was even enabled, beyond her hopes, to become possessed of Thebes itself,[83] through a party of traitors within,—as will presently appear.
In these measures regarding Bœotia, we recognize the vigorous hand, and the miso-Theban spirit, of Agesilaus. He was at this time the great director of Spartan foreign policy, though opposed by his more just and moderate colleague king Agesipolis,[84] as well as by a section of the leading Spartans, who reproached Agesilaus with his project of ruling Greece by means of subservient local despots or oligarchies in the various cities,[85] and who contended that the autonomy promised by the peace of Antalkidas ought to be left to develop itself freely, without any coërcive intervention on the part of Sparta.[86]
Far from any wish thus to realize the terms of peace which they had themselves imposed, the Lacedæmonians took advantage of an early moment after becoming free from their enemies in Bœotia and Corinth, to strain their authority over their allies beyond its previous limits. Passing in review[87] the conduct of each during the war, they resolved to make an example of the city of Mantinea. Some acts, not of positive hostility, but of equivocal fidelity, were imputed to the Mantineans. They were accused of having been slack in performance of their military obligations, sometimes even to the length of withholding their contingent altogether, under pretence of a season of religious truce; of furnishing corn in time of war to the hostile Argeians; and of plainly manifesting their disaffected feeling towards Sparta,—chagrin at every success which she obtained,—satisfaction, when she chanced to experience a reverse.[88] The Spartan ephors now sent an envoy to Mantinea, denouncing all such past behavior, and peremptorily requiring that the walls of the city should be demolished, as the only security for future penitence and amendment. As compliance was refused, they despatched an army, summoning the allied contingents generally for the purpose of enforcing the sentence. They intrusted the command to king Agesipolis, since Agesilaus excused himself from the duty, on the ground that the Mantineans had rendered material service to his father Archidamus in the dangerous Messenian war which had beset Sparta during the early part of his reign.[89]