hopes of Epaminondas to make his city a naval power, and thus protects the great Theban from a charge of political vanity, often repeated[116:1].
The second Athenian Confederacy;
its details,
The second was the well-known Athenian Confederacy of 377 B.C. of which, however, the details are only preserved in an important inscription (No. 81 in Mr. Hicks' collection) which gives us most interesting information. It included Byzantium, Lesbos, Chios, Rhodes, Eubœa, and also Thebes. Western tribes and islands brought up the members to seventy in number. But its declared object was mainly to protect these members against Spartan tyranny, and it acknowledged the Persian supremacy in Asia Minor. The safeguards against Athenian tyranny, which were far more important, are a clause forbidding the acquisitions of cleruchies, and the appointment of a synod of the allies to sit at Athens, in which Athens was not represented. Decrees proposed either in the Athenian assembly or in this synod (synedrion) must be sanctioned by the other body before becoming law[116:2].
its defects.
As might be expected, all these Leagues failed. The precautions against the tyranny of the leading States only hampered the unity and promptness of action of the League, and did not allay jealousy in the smaller, or ambition in the greater, members. Yet these abortive attempts are important to the historian, as showing the intermediate stages in the history of Confederations between the old Attic Empire and the Achæan League.
Political theories in the fourth century.
§ 49. The century at which we have now arrived in our survey—the fourth before Christ—was eminently the age of political theories devised by philosophers in their studies; and they give us the conclusions to which able thinkers had come, after the varying conflicts which had tested the capacities of all the existing States to attain peace with plenty at home, or power abroad. The Athenian supremacy had broken down; the Spartan, a still more complete hegemony, as the Greeks called it, had gone to pieces, not so much by the shock of the Theban military power, as by its own inherent defects. Epaminondas has passed across the political sky, a splendid meteor, but leaving only a brief track of brilliancy which faded into night.
Greece and Persia.