On these grounds (as well as on others which I shall state when I recount the history of Dionysius), it appears to me that this oration of Lysias is unsuitable to B.C. 388—but perfectly suitable to 384 B.C. [164] Lysias, Orat. Olymp. Frag. καιομένην τὴν Ἑλλάδα περιορῶσιν, etc. It is easy to see how much such feeling of grief and shame would tend to raise antipathy against Sparta. Lysias, in that portion of his speech which we possess, disguises his censure against her under the forms of surprise. But Isokrates, who composed an analogous discourse four years afterwards (which may perhaps have been read at the next Olympic festival of B.C. 380), speaks out more plainly. He denounces the Lacedæmonians as traitors to the general security and freedom of Greece, and as seconding foreign kings as well as Grecian despots to aggrandize themselves at the cost of autonomous Grecian cities,—all in the interest of their own selfish ambition. No wonder (he says) that the free and self-acting Hellenic world was every day becoming contracted into a narrower space, when the presiding city Sparta assisted Artaxerxes, Amyntas, and Dionysius to absorb it,—and herself undertook unjust aggressions against Thebes, Olynthus, Phlius, and Mantinea.[165] [165] Isokrates, Or. iv, (Panegyr.) s. 145, 146: compare his Orat. viii, (De Pace) s. 122; and Diodor. xv, 23. Dionysius of Syracuse had sent twenty triremes to join the Lacedæmonians at the Hellespont, a few months before the peace of Antalkidas (Xenophon, Hellen. v, 1, 26). The preceding citations, from Lysias and Isokrates, would be sufficient to show the measure which intelligent contemporaries took, both of the state of Greece and of the conduct of Sparta, during the eight years succeeding the peace of Antalkidas (387-379 B.C.). But the philo-Laconian Xenophon is still more emphatic in his condemnation of Sparta. Having described her triumphant and seemingly unassailable position after the subjugation of Olynthus and Phlius, he proceeds to say,[166]—“I could produce numerous other incidents, both in and out of Greece, to prove that the gods take careful note of impious men and of evil-doers; but the events which I am now about to relate are quite sufficient. The Lacedæmonians, who had sworn to leave each city autonomous, having violated their oaths by seizing the citadel of Thebes, were punished by the very men whom they had wronged,—though no one on earth had ever before triumphed over them. And the Theban faction who had introduced them into the citadel, with the deliberate purpose that their city should be enslaved to Sparta in order that they might rule despotically themselves,—were put down by no more than seven assailants, among the exiles whom they had banished.”