Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/117

KLEOMBBOTUS. 9o Kleombrotus conducted his army along the Isthmus of Corinth through Megara to Plataea, cutting to pieces an outpost of Thebans, composed chiefly of the prisoners set free by the recent revolu- tion, who had been placed for the defence of the intervening mountain-pass. From Plataea he went forward to Thespiae, aud from thence to Kynoskephalae in the Theban territory, where he lay encamped for sixteen days ; after which he retreated to Thes- piae. It appears that he did nothing, and that his inaction was the subject of much wonder in his army, who are said to have even doubted whether he was really and earnestly hostile to Thebes. Perhaps the exiles, with customary exaggeration, may have led him to hope that they could provoke a rising in Thebes, if he would only come near. At any rate the bad weather must have been a serious impediment to action; since in his march back to Peloponnesus through Kreusis and JEgosthenae the wind blew a hurricane, so that his soldiers could not proceed without leaving their shields and coming back afterwards to fetch them. Kleombrotus did not quit Boeotia, however, without leaving Spho- drias as harmost at Thespiae, with one third of the entire army, and with a considerable sum of money to employ in hiring merce- naries and acting vigorously against the Thebans. 1 The army of Kleombrotus, in its march from Megara to Plataea, had passed by the skirts of Attica ; causing so much alarm to the Athenians, that they placed Chabrias with a body of peltasts, to guard their frontier and the neighboring road through Eleutherae into Boeotia. This was the first time that a Lacedaemonian army had touched Attica (now no longer guarded by the lines of Cor- inth, as in the war between 394 and 388 B. c.) since the retire- ment of king Pausanias in 404 B. c. ; furnishing a proof of the exposure of the country, such as to revive in the Athenian mind all the terrible recollections of Dekeleia and the Peloponnesian war. It was during the first prevalence of this alarm, and seemingly while Kleombrotus was still with his army at Thespiae or Kynoskjphalae, close on the Athenian frontier, that three Lacedaemonian envoys, Etymokles and two others, arrived at Athens to demand satisfaction for the part taken by the two Athe- nian generals and the Athenian volunteers, in concerting and aid i v Hellen. v, 4, 15-18.