If we refuse to Thebes the credit of a glory genuine and pure for her first successful struggle against the tyranny of Lacedæmon, we have Epaminondas himself with us, who would take no part in the revolution till the business of conspiracy, treachery, and assassination was over, and the affair came into the hands of the people at large, ready for leaders, and wanting them. We may have more difficulty to decide upon the merit or demerit of that obstinacy with which the Thebans afterwards persisted in asserting dominion over the cities of Bœotia, and thus denying peace to Greece, when proposed upon a condition which might seem, on first view, all that true Grecian patriotism could desire--universal independency. For where was to be found the sanction of that peace? Unfortunately the efficacy of any great interest pervading the country was overborne and lost in the multitude of narrow, yet pressing interests, of parties and of individuals, dividing every little community. No sooner would the independency of the Bœotian towns have been established than a revolution would have been made, or attempted in every one of them. The friends of Thebes once overpowered, and the friends of Lacedæmon prevailing among those towns, how long might Thebes itself have been secure against a second subjection to Lacedæmon, more grievous than the former? As far, then, as these considerations may apologize for the refusal of accession to the treaty of Athens, so far it may also justify the Persian embassy; though scarcely the haughtiness which success in that negotiation seems to have inspired. But what should have been the farther conduct of Thebes to secure her own quiet, without interfering in the affairs of surrounding states, or how to insure quiet among those states, without the possession and the use of power to control them, is not so easy to determine. For the business of the honest statesman, amid the seldom failing contention of factions within, and the ambition of interested neighbours without, is not so easy and obvious as presumptuous ignorance is commonly ready to suppose, and informed knavery often, with interested purposes, to affirm. How ill prepared Greece was at this time for internal quiet, what follows will but concur with all that has preceded of its history to show.[e] FOOTNOTES [12] [These are Hector’s words in the _Iliad_, XII, 243. The omens having been unfavourable, Polydamas warns him not to fight, but the “crest-tossing Hector” answers scornfully as above, “The best omen of all is to defend the fatherland,” and so saying he assailed the Greeks with more than common success.] [13] [Grote says: “To the discredit of Xenophon, Epaminondas is never named in his narrative of the battle, though he recognises in substance that the battle was decided by the irresistible Theban force brought to bear upon one point of the enemy’s phalanx; a fact which both Plutarch and Diodorus expressly referred to the genius of the general.”]