314 HISTORY OF GREECE.
- ancient Boeotian right and usage." i The Theban government
was then in discredit for its previous medism, — even in the eyes of Thebans themselves ; ^ while the party opposed to Thebes in the other towns was so powerful, that many of them would probably have been severed from the federation to become allies of Athens like Platsea, if the interference of Lacedaemon had not arrested such a tendency. The latter was in every other part of Greece an enemy to organized aggregation of cities, either equal or unequal, and was constantly bent on keeping the little autonomous communities separate ; ^ whence she sometimes be- came by accident the protector of the weaker cities against com- pulsory alliance imposed upon them by the stronger: the interest of her own ascendency was in this respect analogous to that of the Persians when they dictated the peace of Antalkidas, — of the Romans in administei'ing their extensive conquests, — and of the kings of medieval Europe in breaking the authority of the, barons over their vassals. But though such was the policy of Sparta elsewhere, her fear of Athens, which grew up during the ensuing twenty years, made her act differently in regard to Bojotia : she had no other means of maintaining that country as her own ally and as the enemy of Athens, except by organizing the federation effectively, and strengthening the authority of Thebes. It is to this revolution in Spartan politics that Thebes owed the recovery of her ascendency,^ — a revolution so con- spicuously marked, that the Spartans even aided in enlarging her circuit and improving her fortifications : nor was it without diffi- culty that she maintained this position, even when recovered, against the dangerous nenghborhood of Athens, a circumstance which made her not only a vehement partisan of Sparta, but even more furiously anti- Athenian than Sparta, down to the close of the Peloponnesian war. The revolution, just noticed, in Spartan politics towards Boeo* tia, did not manifest itsel f until about twenty years after the com-
- Ta Tuv BoKD-Civ narpia — ru KOivu ruv navTUi' Bocutuv irarpia (Thucyd.
iii, 61-65). ^ Thucyd. iii, 62. ^ See, among many other evidences, the remarkable case of the Olyn- thian confederacy (Xenophc ni, Ilellen. v, 2, 16).
- "Diodor. xi, 81 ; Justin, i ii, 6.
