Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/91

OLYNTHUS SUBDUED, (,J tect the Thessalian cities against Jason of Pherae. Had the Olyn- thian confederacy been left to its natural working, it might well have united all the Hellenic cities around it in harmonious action, so as to keep the sea coast in possession of a confederacy of free and self-determining communities, confining the Macedonian prin- ces to the interior. But Sparta threw in her extraneous force, alike irresistible and inauspicious, to defeat these tendencies ; and to frustrate that salutary change, from fractional autonomy and isolated action into integral and equal autonomy with collective action, which Olynthus was laboring to bring about. She gave the victory to Amyntas, and prepared the indispensable basis upon which his son Philip afterwards rose, to reduce not only Olynthus, but Akanthus, Apollonia, and the major part of the Grecian world, to one common level of subjection. Many of those Akan- thians, who spurned the boon of equal partnership and free com- munion with Greeks and neighbors, lived to discover how impotent were their own separate walls as a bulwark against Macedonian neighbors ; and to see themselves confounded in that common ser- vitude which the imprudence of their fathers had entailed upon them. By the peace of Antalkidas, Sparta had surrendered the Asiatic Greeks to Persia ; by crushing the Olynthian confederacy, she virtually surrendered the Thracian Greeks to the Macedonian princes. Never again did the opportunity occur of placing Hel- lenism on a firm, consolidated, and self-supporting basis, round the coast of the Thermaic Gulf. While the Olynthian expedition was going on, the Lacedaemo- nians were carrying on, under Agesilaus, another intervention within Peloponnesus, against the city of Phlius. It has already been mentioned that certain exiles of this city had recently been recalled, at the express command of Sparta. The ruling party in Phlius had at the same time passed a vote to restore the con- fiscated property of these exiles ; reimbursing out of the public treasury, to those who had purchased it, the price which they had paid, and reserving all disputed points for judicial decision.' The returned exiles now again came to Sparta, to prefer complaint that they could obtain no just restitution of their property ; that the tribunals of the city were in the hands of their opponents, 1 Xen. Hellen. v. 2, 10.