the enemies of Greece. But against Athenian aggression she only too gladly took the lead, and at Delium in 424 was at the head of an army of an almost united Bœotia. Thus the Athenian Empire had its natural result in strengthening this league as well as the Peloponnesian; but it was the Spartan Empire that completed the work by occupying the Theban fortress with a garrison, and treating Thebes as a dependency. The rise of Thebes to supremacy in Bœotia was the result of a sudden revolt against this Spartan tyranny. Only eight years after that revolt (371 B.C.) Theban envoys could claim at Sparta to be enrolled in the peace of that year, not as Theban but as Bœotian. The policy of Thebes must be the policy of Bœotia, and any rebellious city must pay the penalty.[1] Orchomenus was utterly destroyed, in the absence, we are glad to learn, of Epaminondas. It would seem as though no City-State could rise to power as the champion of Hellenic autonomy without using that power to take her share in destroying it. Athens, Sparta, Thebes, all in turn yield to the temptation; they deal successive blows at the πόλις, and they all negotiate with Persia for help in gaining their ends. Even such a man as Epaminondas, a Greek man of action of the noblest type, is not free from the prevailing
- ↑ So, too, with the coinage; from 374 to 338 B.C. the other Bœotian cities have no independent coinage; see the Brit. Mus. Catalogue of Greek Coins, Central Greece, introduction, p. xlii. At this time there was a real federal currency, and the coins beat the name not of any city, but of the federal magistrate. Orchomenus alone, the ancient rival of Thebes, issued a few "separatist" coins of her own.
