Respecting the proximate causes of this outbreak, we find, unfortunately, little information. There was now, and had always been since 378 B. C., a synod of deputies from all the confederate cities habitually assembling at Athens; such as had not subsisted under the first Athenian empire in its full maturity. How far the Synod worked efficiently, we do not know. At least it must have afforded to the allies, if aggrieved, a full opportunity of making their complaints heard; and of criticising the application of the common fund, to which each of them contributed. But I have remarked in the preceding volume, that the Athenian confederacy, which had begun (378 B. C.) in a generous and equal spirit of common maritime defence,[462] had gradually become perverted, since the humiliation of the great enemy Sparta at Leuktra, towards purposes and interests more exclusively Athenian. Athens had been conquering the island of Samos—Pydna, Potidæa, and Methônê, on the coast of Macedonia and Thrace—and the Thracian Chersonese; all of them acquisitions made for herself alone, without any advantage to the confederate synod—and made, too, in great part, to become the private property of her own citizens as kleruchs, in direct breach of her public resolution, passed in 378 B. C., not to permit any appropriation of lands by Athenian citizens out of Attica. [462] Demosthenes, De Rhodior. Libertat. p. 194. s. 17. παρὸν αὐτοῖς (the Rhodians) Ἕλλησι καὶ ~βελτίοσιν αὐτῶν ὑμῖν ἐξ ἴσου συμμαχεῖν~, etc.