Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/228

2C HISTORY OF GREKCK. pleted the rebuilding of their city, on a level site, and in an ellip- tical form, surrounded with elaborate walls and towers. The affront here offered, probably studiously offered, by Man- tincan leaders who had either been exiles themselves, or sym- pathized with the exiles, was only the prelude to a series of others (presently to be recounted) yet more galling and intolerable. But it was doubtless felt to the quick both by the ephors and by Agesilaus, as a public symptom of that prostration into which they had so suddenly fallen. To appreciate fully such painful senti- ment, we must recollect that an exaggerated pride and sense of dignity, individual as well as collective, founded upon military excellence and earned by incredible rigor of training, was the chief mental result imbibed by every pupil of Lykurgus, and probability made known to, and encouraged by, Epaminondas. It formed the first step to that series of anti-Spartan measures in Arcadia, which I shall presently relate. Either the city of Mantinea now built was not exactly in the same situ- ation as the one dismantled in 385 B. c., since the river Ophis did not run through it, as it had run through the former, or else the course of the Ophis has altered. If the former, there would be three successive sites, the oldest of them being on the hill called Ptolis, somewhat north of Gurzuli. Ptolis was perhaps the larger of the primary constituent villages. Ernst Curtuis (Peloponnesos, p. 242) makes the hill Gurzuli to be the same as the hill called Ptolis ; Colonel Leake distinguishes the two, and places Ptolis on his map northward of Gurzuli (Peloponnesiaca, p. 378-381 ). The summit of Gurzuli is about one mile distant from the centre of Mantiuea (Leake, Peloponnes. p. 383). The walls of Mantinea, as rebuilt in 370 B. c., form an ellipse of about eighteen stadia, or a little more than two miles in circumference. The greater axis of the ellipse points north and south. It was surrounded with a wet ditch, whose waters join into one course at the west of the town, and form a brook which Sir William Cell calls the Ophis (Itinerary of the Mo- rea, p. 142). The face of the wall is composed of regularly cut square stones ; it is about ten feet thick in all, four feet for an outer wall, two feet for an inner wall, and an intermediate space of four feet filled up with rubbish. There were eight principal double gates, each with a narrow winding ap- proach, defended by a round tower on each side. There were quadrangu- lar towers, eighty feet apart, all around the circumference of the walls (Ernst Curtius, Peloponnesos, p. 236, 237). These are instructive remains, indicating the ideas of the Greeks res pecting fortification in the time of Epaminondas. It appears that Manti- nea was not so large as Tegea, to which last Curtius assigns a circurafe rencj of more than three miles (p. 253).