346 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE In 374 Euagoras was conquered and assassinated ; his son Nicocles succeeded him. Isocrates has left us an
- Exhortation to NicocleSj summoning him with tact and
enthusiasm to discharge the high duties of an Hellenic king ; a ' Nicocles^ or an address from that king to his subjects demanding their co-operation and loyal obedience ; and an Encomion on Euagoras — the first, it is said, ever written upon a character of current history. Meantime the political situation in Greece proper had changed. The league of Athens and Thebes against Sparta had enabled Thebes to resume more than her old power, while it involved Athens in heavy expense. The anti-Theban sentiment in Athens, always strong, became gradually unmanageable. One crisis seems to have come in 373, when the Thebans surprised and destroyed Plataea. The little town was nominally in alliance with Thebes, but it was notoriously disaffected ; so the act was capable of different interpretations. The remnant of the Plata;ans fled to Athens and asked to be restored to their country. Such a step on the part of Athens would have implied a declaration of war against Thebes and an alliance with Sparta. The Plata'icus of Isocrates is a glowing plea for the Plataean cause, a pam- phlet in the usual speech form. The chief real speakers on the occasion were Callistratus for Plataea-Sparta, and the great Epaminondas for Thebes. In 366 Isocrates strikes again on the same side. Thebes, in ' her Leuctric pride' — as Theopompus seems to have called it — had established the independence of Messenia, and insisted on the recognition of this independence as a condition of peace. Most of the Spartan allies were by this time anxious for peace on any terms. The liberation of the much-wronged province did not hurt them, and it had
