“Thus at one blow Athens was again the ruling power in the Ægean Sea; she could now take again in hand the trusteeship of the temple of Delos, which she had lost for some years. “At the same time the reorganisation of the Attic marine was begun. That was strongly needful: since in the Corinthian War the material had been rendered largely useless, and efforts at its repair had been very insufficiently made. There existed well over one hundred triremes, but most of them old and hardly seaworthy. The building of a great number of new battleships was begun and pushed so skilfully that after the lapse of twenty years (357-6) an array of 289 triremes remained in spite of the great demands made on the Attic fleet. To cover these expenses and for the payment of the costs of the war an extraordinary tax was levied on the property in Attica.” [Sidenote: [378-376 B.C.]] Thus we find Athens again with an array of allies behind her. She no longer has the prestige of old. The moneys that they entrust to her are contributions (_syntaxeis_), and no longer tribute (_phoros_). So jealous are they, indeed, of Athenian ambition that no citizen of Athens may even acquire property among the allies. The very tablet on which this treaty was carved is still in existence, though broken in a score of fragments. The chief purpose of the league is, it states, to be one of defence, a combination “to compel the Spartans to leave the Greeks in peace and freedom with unviolated lands.” The chief agents in the organisation of this confederacy and in the proselyting of allies were the brilliant orator Callistratus, who has been called the Aristides of the second confederacy, and the shrewd generals, Iphicrates, Chabrias, and Timotheus, the worthy son of the great admiral, Conon. The chief fault with the confederacy was that it bound Athens into an unnatural alliance with Thebes, its inveterate enemy, who could serve little further purpose than that of a ladder to be discarded as soon as it had been climbed over. The war, therefore, becomes mainly a war between Sparta and Athens, in which, as Holm[h] notes, “Athens played always the rôle of the spectator who sits quiet, saving his strength in order to act as peace-maker over both the antagonists.”