Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/60

38 HISTORY OF GREECE. here ut Mantinea again, the liberal, but unfortunate, king Pau- sanias is found interfering in the character of mediator to soften the ferocity of political antipathies. The city of Mantinea was now broken up, and the inhabitants were distributed again into the five constituent villages. Out of four-fifths of the population, each man pulled down his house in the city, and rebuilt it in the village near to which his property lay. The remaining fifth continued to occupy Mantinea as a vil- lage. Each village was placed under oligarchical government, and left unfortified. Though at first (says Xenophon) the change proved troublesome and odious, yet presently, when men found themselves resident upon their landed properties, and still more, when they felt themselves delivered from the vexatious dema- gogues, the new situation became more popular than the old. The Lacedaemonians were still better satisfied. Instead of one city of Mantinea, five distinct Arcadian villages now stood enrolled in their catalogue of allies. They assigned to each a separate xenagus (Spartan officer destined to the command of each allied contingent), and the military service of all was henceforward per- formed with the utmost regularity. 1 Such was the dissection or cutting into parts of the ancient city Mantinea ; one of the most odious acts of high-handed Spartan despotism. Its true character is veiled by the partiality of the historian, who recounts it with a confident assurance, that after the trouble of moving was over, the population felt themselves deci- TKTTOI TUV Movrtve u v Kal TOVTO fj.ev eiprja&u fieya TeK/xffpiov Trei&ap- X'tac. I have remarked more than once, and the reader will here observe a new example, how completely the word P&TIGTOI which is applied to the wealthy or aristocratical party in politics, as its equivalent is in other lan- guages, by writers who sympathize with them is divested of all genuine ethical import as to character. 1 Xen. Hellen. v, 2, 7. He says of this breaking up of the city of Mantinea, 6iuKicr&ij rj Mav- rivEia rerpaxri, Kcr&uTrep rd up^alov $KOVV. Ephorus (Fr. 138, ed. Didot) states that it was distributed into the Jive original villages ; and Strabo af- firms that there were five original constituent villages (viii, p. 337). Hence it is probable that Mantinea the city was still left, after this dio'uctaie, to subsist as one of the five unfortified villages ; so that Ephorus, Strabo, and Xenophon may be thus made to agree, in substance.