up; while Sparta, to whom its extinction was owing, in surrendering the Asiatic Greeks, had destroyed the security even of the islanders.[e] THE REVOLT OF THEBES The ambition of making conquests in the East, which it now appeared impossible to retain, had deprived the Lacedæmonians of an authority, or rather dominion in Greece, acquired by the success of the Peloponnesian War, and which they might have reasonably expected to preserve and to confirm. Not only their power, but their safety, was threatened by the arms of a hostile confederacy, which had been formed and fomented by the wealth of Persia. Athens, their rival, their superior, their subject, but always their unrelenting enemy, had recovered her walls and fleet, and aspired to command the sea. Thebes and Argos had become sensible of their natural strength, and disdained to acknowledge the pre-eminence, or to follow the standard, of any foreign republic. The inferior states of Peloponnesus were weary of obeying every idle summons to war, from which they derived not any advantage but that of gratifying the ambition of their Spartan masters. The valuable colonies in Macedon and Thrace, and particularly the rich and populous cities of the Chalcidic region, the bloodless conquests of the virtuous Brasidas, had forsaken the interest of Sparta, when Sparta forsook the interest of justice. Scarcely any vestige appeared of the memorable trophies erected in a war of twenty-seven years. The eastern provinces (incomparably the most important of all) were irrecoverably lost; and this rapid decline of power had happened in the course of ten years, and had been chiefly occasioned by the fatal splendour of Agesilaus’ victories in Asia. During five years the Spartans maintained, in the Cadmea at Thebes, a garrison of fifteen hundred men. Protected by such a body of foreign troops, which might be reinforced on the shortest warning, the partisans of aristocracy acquired an absolute ascendency in the affairs of the republic, which they conducted in such a manner as best suited their own interest, and the convenience of Sparta. Without pretending to describe the banishments, confiscations, and murders of which they were guilty, it is sufficient for the purpose of general history to observe, that the miserable victims of their vengeance suffered similar calamities to those which afflicted Athens under the Thirty Tyrants. The severity of the government at length drove the Thebans to despair; and both the persecuted exiles abroad, and the oppressed subjects at home, prepared to embrace any measures, however daring and hazardous, which promised them a faint hope of relief. [Sidenote: [382-379 B.C.]]