A few words will suffice to complete their tale. Reaching the city of Trebizond, they took ship for home. Fifteen months had passed since they set out with the army of Cyrus. After various further adventures, Xenophon led them on a pillaging expedition against the Persians of Asia Minor, paid them all richly from the plunder, and gained himself sufficient wealth to enrich him for the remainder of his days. _THE RESCUE OF THEBES._ On a certain cold and wet evening, in the month of December of the year 379 B.C., seven men, dressed as rustics or hunters, and to all appearance unarmed, though each man had a dagger concealed beneath his clothes, appeared at the gate of Thebes, the principal city of the Boeotian confederacy. They had come that day from Athens, making their way afoot across Mount Cithaeron, which lay between. It was now just nightfall and most of the farmers had come into the city from the fields, but some late ones were still returning. Mingling with these, the seven strangers entered the gates, unnoticed by the guards, and were quickly lost to sight in the city streets. Quietly as they had come, the noise of their coming was soon to resound throughout Greece, for the arrival of those seven men was the first step in a revolution that was destined to overturn all the existing conditions of Grecian states. We should like to go straight on with their story; but to make it clear to our readers we must go back and offer a short extract from earlier history. Hitherto the history of Greece had been largely the history of two cities, Athens and Sparta. The other cities had all played second or third parts to these great and proud municipalities. But now a third city, Thebes, was about to come forward, and assume a leading place in the history of Greece. And of the two men who were to guide it in this proud career, one was among the seven who entered the gates of the city in rustic garb that rainy December night.