But a worse fate awaited them--namely, a fight among themselves. The mutual jealousies that had long existed between Athens and Sparta broke out afresh, and soon terminated in an open war between the two republics, and most of the minor states of Greece took a part in the quarrel. The first declaration of hostilities, however, was compromised before they came to actual conflict; but it proved to be only a smouldering, and not an extinguishment, of the fire that had long burned in the breast of each--a fire that afterwards broke forth in what was known as the "Peloponnesian war," and lasted twenty-eight years. Our plan and space will not permit any details of this. A history of the first twenty-two years of the war was admirably written by Thucydides, and of the last six years by Xenophon, to whom we must refer the reader who would know its particulars. Suffice it to say here that during this long internecine war each achieved victories and each suffered defeats. At one time the Spartans so reduced Athens as to make an entire change in its constitution. The republic was abolished and thirty governors, or, as the Greek historians style them, "thirty tyrants" were substituted, whose power seems to have been absolute, unless in so far as each was restrained by the equally arbitrary will of his colleagues. So fearful and terrible was their rule, that Xenophon thinks "a greater number of Athenian citizens lost their lives by the sentence of these tyrants, in the short space of eight months, than had fallen in the whole twenty-eight years of the Peloponnesian war." Hundreds of the most eminent of the Athenian families left their country in despair, and what remained were for a time awed into silence, and dumb with consternation.