The case is altered when we come to the period succeeding the battle of Ægospotami. Here indeed also, we find the Spartan empire complained of (as the Athenian empire had been before), in contrast with that state of autonomy to which each city laid claim, and which Sparta had not merely promised to ensure, but set forth as her only ground of war. Yet this is not the prominent grievance,—other topics stand more emphatically forward. The decemvirs and the harmosts (some of the latter being Helots), the standing instruments of Spartan empire, are felt as more sorely painful than the empire itself; as the language held by Brasidas at Akanthus admits them to be beforehand. At the time when Athens was a subject-city under Sparta, governed by the Lysandrian Thirty and by the Lacedæmonian harmost in the acropolis,—the sense of indignity arising from the fact of subjection was absorbed in the still more terrible suffering arising from the enormities of those individual rulers whom the imperial state had set up. Now Athens set up no local rulers,—no native Ten or native Thirty,—no resident Athenian harmosts or garrisons. This was of itself an unspeakable exemption, when compared with the condition of cities subject, not only to the Spartan empire, but also under that empire to native decemvirs like Kritias, and Spartan harmosts like Aristarchus or Aristodemus. A city subject to Athens had to bear definite burdens enforced by its own government, which was liable in case of default or delinquency to be tried before the popular Athenian Dikastery. But this same dikastery (as I have shown in a former volume, and as is distinctly stated by Thucydides)[343] was the harbor of refuge to each subject-city; not less against individual Athenian wrong-doers than against misconduct from other cities. Those who complained of the hardship suffered by a subject-city, from the obligation of bringing causes to be tried in the dikastery of Athens,—even if we take the case as they state it, and overlook the unfairness of omitting those numerous instances wherein the city was thus enabled to avert or redress wrong done to its own citizens,—would have complained both more loudly and with greater justice of an ever-present Athenian harmost; especially if there were coexistent a native government of Ten oligarchs, exchanging with him guilty connivances, like the partnership of the Thirty at Athens with the Lacedæmonian harmost Kallibius.[344] [343] See the remarkable speech of Phrynichus in Thucyd. viii, 48, 5, which I have before referred to. [344] Xen. Hellen. ii, 3, 14. Compare the analogous case of Thebes, after the Lacedæmonians had got possession of the Kadmeia (v. 2, 34-36).