"On the day of the Thesmophoria, a religious festival celebrated by the women apart from the men, during which the acropolis, or Kadmeia, was consecrated to their exclusive use, Phœbidas, affecting to have concluded his halt, put himself in march to proceed as if towards Thrace; seemingly rounding the walls of Thebes, but not going into it. The Senate was actually assembled in the portico of the agora, and the heat of a summer's noon had driven everyone out of the streets, when Leontiades, stealing away from the Senate, hastened on horseback to overtake Phœbidas, caused him to face about, and conducted the Lacedæmonians straight up to the Kadmeia; the gates of which, as well as those of the town, were opened to his order as Polemarch. There were not only no citizens in the streets, but none even in the Kadmeia; no male person being permitted to be present at the feminine Thesmophoria; so that Phœbidas and his army became possessed of the Kadmeia without the smallest opposition. … The news of the seizure of the Kadmeia and of the revolution at Thebes [was] … received at Sparta with the greatest surprise, as well as with a mixed feeling of shame and satisfaction. Everywhere throughout Greece, probably, it excited a greater sensation than any event since the battle of Ægospotami. Tried by the recognised public law of Greece, it was a flagitions iniquity, for which Sparta had not the shadow of a pretence. … It stood condemned by the indignant sentiment of all Greece, unwillingly testified even by the philo-Laconian Xenophon himself. But it was at the same time an immense accession to Spartan power. … Phœbidas might well claim to have struck for Sparta the most important blow since Ægospotami, relieving her from one of her two really formidable enemies." _G. Grote, History of Greece, part 2, chapter 76._ ALSO IN: _C. Thirlwall, History of Greece, chapter 37 (volume 5)._ GREECE: B. C. 383-379. Overthrow of the Olynthian confederacy by Sparta.