GRECIAN CONFEDERACY UNDER ATHENS. 313 embarrassments immediately around Attica. But this freedom was not destined to last much longer ; and during the ensuing ten yeai's, their foreign relations near home become both active and complicated ; while their strength expands so wonderfully, that they are found competent at once to obligations on both sides of
- he -^gean sea, the distant as well as the near.
Of the incidents which had taken place in Central Greece during the twelve or fifteen years immediately succeeding the battle of Platasa, we have scarcely any information. The feelings of the time, between those Greeks who had supported and those who had resisted the Persian invader, must have remained un- friendly even after the war was at an end, and the mere occupation of the Persian numerous host must have inflicted severe dam- age both upon Thessaly and Boeotia. At the meeting of the Am- phiktyonic synod which succeeded the expulsion of the invaders, a reward was proclaimed for the life of the Melian Ephialtes, who had betrayed to Xerxes the mountain-path over Qi^ta, and thus caused the ruin of Leonidas at Thermopylae : moreover, if we may trust Plutarch, it was even proposed by Lacedaemon that all the medizing Greeks should be expelled from the synod,i — a proposition which the more long-sighted views of Themistokles successfully resisted. Even the stronger measure, of razing the fortifications of all the extra-Peloponnesian cities, from fear that they might be used to aid some future invasion, had suggested itself to the Lacedaemonians, — as we see from their language on the occasion of rebuilding the walls of Athens ; and in regard to Boeotia, it appears that the headship of Thebes as well as the coherence of the federation was for the time almost suspended. The destroyed towns of Platfea and Thespiae were restored, and the latter in part repeopled,^ under Athenian influence ; and the general sentiment of Peloponnesus as well as of Athens would have sustained these towns against Thebes, if the latter had tried at that time to enforce her supremacy over them in the name of ' Plutarch, Themistokl. c. 20.
- Sec the case of Sikinnus, the person through whom Themistokles com
municated with Xerxes before the battle of Salamis, and for whom he after- wards iirocured admission amonj^ the batch of newly-introduced citizens at Thespia; (Herodot. viii. 75). VOL. V. 11
