When the period of his command in the field expired, Epaminondas returned home, where he was once more to experience the ingratitude of his fellow-citizens. Not only did the people, now again roused against him, pass him over in the election of the Bœotarchs; it is related that the deluded mob appointed him overseer of roads and canals (telearchus), but that by his conscientious administration he gave importance to this insignificant office. Alike in the highest and in the lowest position, this magnanimous man endeavoured to work for the good of his country; his soul was free from the petty human weaknesses which so often cling, like a dark shadow, to talent and worth. This was exhibited in another scene in the year which followed. From his expedition in Thessaly he, to save Pelopidas, returned joyfully home too late to preserve the Theban state from a disgraceful act of bloodshed. In the interval, armed mobs, stirred up by passionate demagogues, had marched against Orchomenos, where an aristocratic conspiracy was said to have been discovered, had destroyed the detested city, murdered the nobles and chief citizens, and sold the rest into servitude, together with their wives and children. Thus the ancient and famous city of Orchomenos, once the wealthy seat of the Minyæ, disappeared from the number of Greek towns. “Had I been at home,” Epaminondas lamented, “this atrocity would never have been committed.” At Susa, in spite of his refusal to bend the knee, Pelopidas had won such high favour with the king, by reason of the fame of his deeds and the recollection of the ancient brotherhood in arms so long subsisting between Thebes and Persia, that the conditions of peace which Artaxerxes declared to the envoys proved to be entirely in accordance with the ideas and interests of Thebes and her skilful representative. But this award whose fulfilment, and with it the supremacy over Hellas, was entrusted to the Thebans, provoked indignation and resistance in the other states. At Athens, the envoy, Timagoras, was condemned to death for his intimacy with Pelopidas; at Sparta, exception was taken to the recognition of the rebellious Messenians; in Arcadia, the people resented the recognition of the Elean claims to suzerainty over the district of Triphylia, which had joined the Arcadian confederacy, and the deputy, Antiochus, famous as a pugilist and wrestler, vented his anger at home in ridicule of the Persians: “The king,” he said, “had bakers, cooks, cup-bearers, and door-keepers in large numbers, but in spite of a zealous search he had not been able to find men who should be able to stand against the Hellenes in a fight; abundance of money and wealth was a vain show; the celebrated golden plane tree could hardly give shade to a locust.” [Sidenote: [368-365 B.C.]]