stifles all constructive intelligence, and leaves little room even for improving aspirations. But the forty small communities which coalesced into Megalopolis, and the Messenians and other settlers who came for the first time together on the hill of Ithômê, were in a state in which new exigencies of every kind pressed for immediate satisfaction. There was no file to afford a precedent, nor any resource left except to submit all the problems to discussion by those whose character and judgment was most esteemed. Whether the problems were well- or ill-solved, there must have been now a genuine and earnest attempt to strike out as good a solution as the lights of the time and place permitted, with a certain latitude for conflicting views. Arrangements must have been made for the apportionment of houses and lands among the citizens, by purchase, or grant, or both together; for the political and judicial constitution; for religious and recreative ceremonies, for military defence, for markets, for the security and transmission of property, etc. All these and many other social wants of a nascent community must now have been provided for, and it would have been highly interesting to know how. Unhappily the means are denied to us. We can record little more than the bare fact that these two youngest members of the Hellenic brotherhood of cities were born at the same time, and under the auspices of the same presiding genius, Epaminondas; destined to sustain each other in neighborly sympathy and in repelling all common danger from the attacks of Sparta; a purpose, which, even two centuries afterwards, remained engraven on the mind of a Megalopolitan patriot like Polybius.[497] [496] The partiality towards Sparta, visible even from the beginning of Xenophon’s history, becomes more and more exaggerated throughout the two latter books wherein he recounts her misfortunes; it is moreover intensified by spite against the Thebans and Epaminondas as her conquerors. But there is hardly any instance of this feeling, so glaring or so discreditable, as the case now before us. In describing the expedition of Epaminondas into Peloponnesus in the winter of 370-369 B.C., he totally omits the foundation both of Messênê and Megalopolis; though in the after part of his history, he alludes (briefly) both to one and to the other as facts accomplished. He represents the Thebans to have come into Arcadia with their magnificent army, for the simple purpose of repelling Agesilaus and the Spartans, and to have been desirous of returning to Bœotia, as soon as it was ascertained that the latter had already returned to Sparta (vi, 5, 23). Nor does he once mention the name of Epaminondas as general of the Thebans in the expedition, any more than he mentions him at Leuktra.