Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/90

68 HISTORY OF GREECE. speedily reduced to such straits as to be compelled to solicit peace. They were obliged to break up their own federation, and to enrol themselves as sworn members of the Lacedaemonian confederacy, with its obligations of service to Sparta. 1 The Olynthian union be- ing dissolved, the component Grecian cities were enrolled several- ly as allies of Sparta, while the maritime cities of Macedonia were deprived of their neighboring Grecian protector, and passed again under the dominion of Amyntas. Both the dissolution of this growing confederacy, and the recon- stitution of maritime Macedonia, were signal misfortunes to the Grecian world. Never were the arms of Sparta more mischiev- ously or more unwarrantably employed. That a powerful Grecian confederacy should be formed in the Chalkidic peninsula, in the bor- der region where Hellas joined the non-Hellenic tribes, was an incident of signal benefit to the Hellenic world generally. It would have served as a bulwark to Greece against the neighboring Mace- donians and Thracians, at whose expense its conquests, if it made any, would have been achieved. That Olynthus did not oppress her Grecian neighbors that the principles of her confederacy were of the most equal, generous, and seducing character, that she employed no greater compulsion than was requisite to surmount an unreflecting instinct of town-autonomy, and that the very towns who obeyed this instinct would have become sensible themselves, in a very short tune, of the benefits conferred by the confederacy on each and every one, these are facts certified by the urgency of the reluctant Akanthians, when they entreat Sparta to leave no interval for the confederacy to make its workings felt. Nothing but the intervention of Sparta could have crushed this liberal and beneficent promise ; nothing but the accident, that during the three years from 382 to 379 B. c., she was at the maximum of her power and had her hands quite free, with Thebes and its Kadmeia under her garrison. Such prosperity did not long continue unabated. Only a few months after the submission of Olynthus, the Kadmeia was retaken by the Theban exiles, who raised so vigorous a war against Sparta, that she would have been disabled from meddling with Olynthus, as we shall find illustrated by the fact (hereafter to be recounted), that she declined interfering in Thessaly to pro- 1 Xen. HeUen. v, 3 26 ; Diodor. xv, 22, 23.