MEGALOPOLIS was the most recent among the Arcadian towns, for it was built after the expedition of Epaminondas. He, like many others, saw the great defect of separate and isolated peoples, whose strength was broken, and he was bent upon forming and enlarging several central points which, in the end, necessarily led to a complete division. Hence he conceived the idea of uniting all the Arcadians against the Spartans, for it was not yet clear at the time that Sparta had permanently fallen in the battle of Leuctra. The new city was built by the Arcadians themselves, under the direction of Epaminondas. These late occurrences are enveloped in strange obscurity, for we do not know whether it was intended also to draw the great Arcadian towns, Mantinea, etc., into this κοινὸν βουλευτήριον; this intention, however, was pre-supposed, and hence the undertaking was generally disliked. People looked upon it with distrust; the form prescribed to them was disapproved of, and even if it had not been insisted on, the spirit of independence of those people seemed to suffer in the undertaking. The form, moreover, in which it was intended to carry out the plan seems to have been extremely absurd. The undertaking had been announced as something grand, yet it proved to be ill-devised and useless, and did not by any means succeed as well as had been anticipated. The circumference of Megalopolis was only about five English miles, and in this space it was contemplated to crowd together the inhabitants of more than thirty places, and no one seems to have perceived that such a scheme could not succeed. The Arcadians were country people (αὐτουργοί), whose fields were not tilled by slaves; they would have been obliged to carry on their rustic pursuits at a great distance, which, as they had to live in the city, with civic institutions, was a matter of impossibility. Epaminondas was indeed a great man, but this scheme does him no credit; taking all in all, I do not think that he was as great a man as he is generally believed to have been. The population dispersed, and the coercion employed was felt to be more galling than the Spartan dominion, against which the whole plan was directed. Hence Megalopolis remained the union of only a portion of Arcadia. It had to fight against the Spartans at an early time, and, therefore, threw itself into the arms of Philip, who endeavoured to protect it by a strong frontier on the side of Sparta. After the time of Alexander, in the war of Polysperchon, it suffered severely, and had to sustain a vigorous siege; but the greatest misfortune was its capture by Cleomenes, from which it never recovered. Cleomenes took the town by surprise, because the walls were too extensive for the population, and, therefore, could not be defended; the inhabitants partly fled, and others were put to the sword. From that time Megalopolis, notwithstanding its circumference, had no more importance than an ordinary town of