endure what the gods might send. Epaminondas with true insight determined to raise up a counterbalancing power in the Peloponnesus to hang upon the flank of Sparta if she should ever again try to tyrannise over Greece. His plan was to form city-states among the Arcadians and Messenians, those backward children of Nature who had always preferred a village life among their hills. Mantinea was restored to the rank of a state, Messenia was given a new capital, and a new and splendid city was specially constructed to unite several scattered Arcadian villages in one interesting federal constitution. But the Great City, as she was proudly named, was not a great success. Perhaps the Arcadians were too arcadian in their habits to fulfil the scheme of Epaminondas. It is very characteristic of the Greek mind that the news of Theban triumph was very ill received in the city of her ally Athens. Athens might cherish a respectable hereditary feud with Sparta, but Thebes she had always detested. Thebes was her next-door neighbour. Though you might have to fight a Spartan, you couldn’t help liking him. Once again the orators drew upon that inexhaustible precedent of the Persian wars, when Sparta and Athens had stood together against Thebes and Persia. So Athens was persuaded to draw away from [Illustration: PLATE LXVI. THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES: HEAD _English Photo Co., Athens_] Thebes and form an alliance upon equal terms with Sparta. But her action was not very vigorous. The nine years between the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea are commonly described by historians as a period of Theban hegemony. It is true that Thebes was probably on land the most powerful state in Greece, and that Epaminondas played the foremost part in the diplomacy of that period, but she had no great following of states, and as Athens, Sparta, and Corinth were among those who declined to follow she can hardly be said to have led Greece. Also it is interesting to notice that the liberal-minded Epaminondas found it just as impossible as Athens and Sparta had done to hold a Greek alliance together without the use of garrisons. He sent harmosts into Achaia and Sicyon. Thebes also was as ready as Sparta to interfere with constitutions. We can understand Sparta, with her aristocratic habits, showing a prejudice for oligarchy, or Athens, the city of liberty and free speech, encouraging democracy, but that Thebes, herself oligarchically constituted, should now enforce democracy upon her allies can only be a piece of cold-blooded diplomacy due to the knowledge that oligarchies were generally committed to the Spartan side. Nor can Thebes be acquitted of trafficking with the enemy. For Pelopidas was sent to Susa to plead the ancient alliance of Thebes and Persia at the battle of Platæa! In these three respects all the hegemonies of Greece are alike, all tarred with the same brush.