In the year B.C. 370, Sparta was the ascendant power of Greece, and was feared, even as Athens was in the time of Pericles. She had formed an alliance with the Persian king and with Dionysius of Syracuse. All Greece, within and without the Peloponnesus, except Argos and Attica and some Thessalian cities, was enrolled in a confederacy under the lead of Sparta, and Spartan governors and garrisons occupied the principal cities. (M621) Thebes especially was completely under Spartan influence and control, and was apparently powerless. Her citadel, the Cadmea, was filled with Spartan soldiers, and the independence of Greece was at an end. Confederated with Macedonians, Persians, and Syracusans, nobody dared to call in question the headship of Sparta, or to provoke her displeasure. (M622) This destruction of Grecian liberties, with the aid of the old enemies of Greece, kindled great indignation. The orator Lysias, at Athens, gave vent to the general feeling, in which he veils his displeasure under the form of surprise, that Sparta, as the chief of Greece, should permit the Persians, under Artaxerxes, and the Syracusans, under Dionysius, to enslave Greece. The orator Isocrates spoke still more plainly, and denounced the Lacedæmonians as “traitors to the general security and freedom of Greece, and seconding foreign kings to aggrandize themselves at the cost of autonomous Grecian cities—all in the interest of their own selfish ambition.” Even Xenophon, with all his partiality for Sparta, was still more emphatic, and accused the Lacedæmonians with the violation of their oaths. (M623) In Thebes the discontent was most apparent, for their leading citizens were exiled, and the oligarchal party, headed by Leontiades and the Spartan garrison, was oppressive and tyrannical. The Theban exiles found at Athens sympathy and shelter. Among these was Pelopidas, who resolved to free his country from the Spartan yoke. Holding intimate correspondence with his friends in Thebes, he looked forward patiently for the means of effecting deliverance, which could only be effected by the destruction of Leontiades and his colleagues, who ruled the city. Philidas, secretary of the polemarchs, entered into the conspiracy, and, being sent in an embassy to Athens, concocted the way for Pelopidas and his friends to return to Thebes and effect a revolution. Charon, an eminent patriot, agreed to shelter the conspirators in his house until they struck the blow. Epaminondas, then living at Thebes, dissuaded the enterprise as too hazardous, although all his sympathies were with the conspirators.