The Age of Spartan Leadership 209 It was one of the saddest things in the whole tangled situa- War between tion that when Sparta finally fell out with Persia, and stepped p^^sJa ^" in to defend the Ionian cities, a fleet of Athens made common cause with the Persians and helped to fasten Persian despotism on the Greek cities of Asia. The Greeks had learned nothing by their long and unhappy experience of fruitless wars. When peace was at last established it was under the humiliating terms of a treaty accepted by Hellas at the hands of the Persian king, to whom the Greek states had appealed. It is known as the King's Peace (387 B.C.). It recognized the leadership of Sparta King's Peace over all the Greek states ; but the Greek cities of Asia Minor ^ ^ ^'^' were shamefully abandoned to Persia. The period of the King's Peace brought only discontent .with Greece under Sparta's control and no satisfactory solution of the question of the King's the relations of the Greek states among themselves. The un- ^^^^^ •yielding military organization of Sparta had long ago crushed individual aspirations for a higher culture, and even all individ- ual genius in leadership had been suppressed. Even men like Pausanias, the victor over the Persians at Plataea, or Lysander, the conqueror of the Athenian fleet at ^Egospotami, were unable to transform the rigid Spartan system into a government which should sympathetically include and direct the activities of the whole Greek world. At Athens the burning question had now become the problem Rise of the of the proper form of a free state — the problem which the government efforts of Socrates toward an enlightened citizenship had thrust into the foreground. What should be the form of the ideal state ? The Orient had already had its social idealism. By 2000 B.C. the Egyptian sages were striving for a state which should realize brotherly kindness and social justice. The more hopeful among them thought to find it under a righteous king and just officials. Later on in the eighth century B.C. the Hebrews also had begun to dream of an ideal state ruled by a righteous king like the David of their fond idealization of the past. In the Orient, how- ever, it had never occurred to these social dreamers to discuss
