It is necessary to insist upon these things,--the want of representation in a common assembly, the want of scope for talent in the outlying States, the difficulty of redress against the dominant people if they transgressed their State-treaties,--especially for a practical writer, who holds that historical analogies are most serviceable, and help to explain both ancient and modern history. But we must see clearly that the analogies are genuine, and that we are not arguing from an irrelevant antecedent or to an irrelevant consequent. [Sidenote: Attempt at federation] Yet the necessity of combination was so great, and so keenly felt during the tyrannical ascendency of Sparta at the opening of the next century, that several attempts were made to obtain the advantages, while avoiding the evils, of the old Athenian supremacy. The first, which was made immediately after the battle of Cnidos (394 B.C.) and which seems to have been originated by Thebes, is passed over in silence by all our literary authorities, and was only discovered upon the evidence of coins. We know that Rhodes, Cnidos, Naxos, Samos, Ephesus, belonged to it, and that they adopted for their common coinage an old Theban emblem--Heracles throttling the snakes. The existence of this confederation seems to justify the hopes of Epaminondas to make his city a naval power, and thus protects the great Theban from a charge of political vanity, often repeated[116:1]. [Sidenote: The second Athenian Confederacy;] [Sidenote: its details,] The second was the well-known Athenian Confederacy of 377 B.C. of which, however, the details are only preserved in an important inscription (No. 81 in Mr. Hicks' collection) which gives us most interesting information. It included Byzantium, Lesbos, Chios, Rhodes, Eubœa, and also Thebes. Western tribes and islands brought up the members to seventy in number. But its declared object was mainly to protect these members against Spartan tyranny, and it acknowledged the Persian supremacy in Asia Minor. The safeguards against Athenian tyranny, which were far more important, are a clause forbidding the acquisitions of _cleruchies_, and the appointment of a synod of the allies to sit at Athens, in which Athens was not represented. Decrees proposed either in the Athenian assembly or in this synod (_synedrion_) must be sanctioned by the other body before becoming law[116:2]. [Sidenote: its defects.] As might be expected, all these Leagues failed. The precautions against the tyranny of the leading States only hampered the unity and promptness of action of the League, and did not allay jealousy in the smaller, or ambition in the greater, members. Yet these abortive attempts are important to the historian, as showing the intermediate stages in the history of Confederations between the old Attic Empire and the Achæan League. [Sidenote: Political theories in the fourth century.]