extraneous force, alike irresistible and inauspicious, to defeat
these tendencies; and to frustrate that salutary change,—from
fractional autonomy and isolated action into integral and equal
autonomy with collective action,—which Olynthus was laboring to
bring about. She gave the victory to Amyntas, and prepared the
indispensable basis upon which his son Philip afterwards rose, to
reduce not only Olynthus, but Akanthus, Apollonia, and the major part
of the Grecian world, to one common level of subjection. Many of
those Akanthians, who spurned the boon of equal partnership and free
communion with Greeks and neighbors, lived to discover how impotent
were their own separate walls as a bulwark against Macedonian
neighbors; and to see themselves confounded in that common servitude
which the imprudence of their fathers had entailed upon them. By
the peace of Antalkidas, Sparta had surrendered the Asiatic Greeks
to Persia; by crushing the Olynthian confederacy, she virtually
surrendered the Thracian Greeks to the Macedonian princes. Never
again did the opportunity occur of placing Hellenism on a firm,
consolidated, and self-supporting basis, round the coast of the
Thermaic Gulf.
While the Olynthian expedition was going on, the Lacedæmonians
were carrying on, under Agesilaus, another intervention within
Peloponnesus, against the city of Phlius. It has already been
mentioned that certain exiles of this city had recently been
recalled, at the express command of Sparta. The ruling party in
Phlius had at the same time passed a vote to restore the confiscated
property of these exiles; reimbursing out of the public treasury,
to those who had purchased it, the price which they had paid,—and
reserving all disputed points for judicial decision.[153] The
returned exiles now again came to Sparta, to prefer complaint that
they could obtain no just restitution of their property; that the
tribunals of the city were in the hands of their opponents, many of
them directly interested as purchasers, who refused them the right
of appealing to any extraneous and impartial authority; and that
there were even in the city itself many who thought them wronged.
Such allegations were, probably, more or less founded in truth. At
the same time, the appeal to Sparta, abrogating the independence
of Phlius, so incensed the ruling Phliasians that they passed a
sentence of fine against all the appellants. The latter insisted on
this sentence as a fresh count for strengthening their complaints
at Sparta; and as a farther proof of anti-Spartan feeling, as well
as of high-handed injustice, in the Phliasian rulers.[154] Their
cause was warmly espoused by Agesilaus, who had personal relations
of hospitality with some of the exiles; while it appears that his
colleague, King Agesipolis, was on good terms with the ruling party
at Phlius,—had received from them zealous aid, both in men and money,
for his Olynthian expedition,—and had publicly thanked them for their
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