No such struggles could have appeared within the limits of possibility, even to the most far-sighted politician either of Greece or of Macedon—at the time when Philip mounted the throne. Among the hopes and fears of most Grecian cities, Macedonia then passed wholly unnoticed; in Athens, Olynthus, Thasus, Thessaly, and a few others, it formed an item not without moment, yet by no means of first-rate magnitude. The Hellenic world was now in a state different from anything which had been seen since the repulse of Xerxes in 480-479 B. C. The defeat and degradation of Sparta had set free the inland states from the only presiding city whom they had ever learned to look up to. Her imperial ascendency, long possessed and grievously abused, had been put down by the successes of Epaminondas and the Thebans. She was no longer the head of a numerous body of subordinate allies, sending deputies to her periodical synods—submitting their external politics to her influence—placing their military contingents under command of her officers (xenagi)—and even administering their internal government through oligarchies devoted to her purposes, with the reinforcement, wherever needed, of a Spartan harmost and garrison. She no longer found on her northern frontier a number of detached Arcadian villages, each separately manageable under leaders devoted to her, and furnishing her with hardy soldiers; nor had she the friendly city of Tegea, tied to her by a long-standing philo-Laconian oligarchy and tradition. Under the strong revolution of feeling which followed on the defeat of the Spartans at Leuktra, the small Arcadian communities, encouraged and guided by Epaminondas, had consolidated themselves into the great fortified city of Megalopolis, now the centre of a Pan-Arcadian confederacy, with a synod (called the Ten thousand) frequently assembled there to decide upon matters of interest and policy common to the various sections of the Arcadian name. Tegea too had undergone a political revolution; so that these two cities, conterminous with each other and forming together the northern frontier of Sparta, converted her Arcadian neighbors from valuable instruments into formidable enemies. But this loss of foreign auxiliary force and dignity was not the worst which Sparta had suffered. On her north-western frontier (conterminous also with Megalopolis) stood the newly-constituted city of Messênê, representing an amputation of nearly one-half of Spartan territory and substance. The western and more fertile half of Laconia had been severed from Sparta, and was divided between Messênê and various other independent cities; being tilled chiefly by those who had once been Periœki and Helots of Sparta.