Thebes took up the war with a blazing enthusiasm. She had for a controlling spirit the coming man Epaminondas, a military genius of the very first rank, a gifted musician, a philosopher, and an orator. He had the rare qualities of modesty, of pure patriotism, of indifference to money and to partisanship. Allied with him was Pelopidas, who was in command of a new organisation which stood some chance of meeting the famous Spartan hoplite in equal combat. This _Hieros Lochos_, or Sacred Band of sworn friends, was a curious body of three hundred young men fighting in couples and bound together by Grecian ideas of friendship. They were trained to a high degree of gymnastic strength, and while chosen at first merely to serve as front-rank men, later came to be employed as a separate regiment of irresistible momentum in a charge. Before they had learned the power of this troop the Thebans dug a ditch and built a rampart around the most fertile part of their territory against the invasions of the Spartans. Soon after the revolt of the city, in 378 B.C., the Spartan king Cleombrotus had raided the land, but without result. Later came King Agesilaus for two expeditions, equally fruitless, except for pillage. The Spartan Phœbidas made an inroad in 377 and was killed in a disastrous defeat. To relieve a famine due to the destruction of two harvests, the Thebans sent for two galleys of corn which the Spartan Alcetas captured, putting the crews in prison in the citadel in Oreus in Eubœa. The prisoners captured the fortress and took possession of the town, which now joined the league with Athens. In 376, Agesilaus, who was ill from the bursting of a blood-vessel, on his previous campaign, was compelled to keep his room, and the Spartans sent an army under Cleombrotus, who was repulsed at the passes of Cithæron. The Spartans now sent a fleet to cut off the corn supplies of Athens and put her port under blockade. Athens, once more able to take the sea, fitted a fleet of eighty galleys which she entrusted to Chabrias. In order to decoy the Spartan fleet under Pollis away from the Piræus, he laid siege to Naxos which was wavering towards the Athenian confederacy. Pollis accepted the challenge, and, though he had only sixty galleys, gave battle between Paros and Naxos. It was a hard fight and the Spartans seem to have lost all their ships except eleven, and these would have been destroyed, says Diodorus, had it not been for the fate of the commanders in the battle of Arginusæ, who, as will be remembered, were in such haste to pursue the defeated enemy that they did not stop to pick up their own wounded and dead on the sinking wrecks of their own fleet. They had been put to death in their hour of triumph, and the lesson was not forgotten by Chabrias in his victory thirty years later. [Sidenote: [376-374 B.C.]]