Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/339

GRECIAN CONFEDERACY UNDER ATHENS. 3ig mencement of the Athenian maritime confederacy. Daring the course of those twenty years, we know that Sparta had had more than one battle to sustain in Arcadia, against the towns and vil- lages of that country, in which she came forth victorious : but we have no particulars respecting these incidents. "We also know that a few years after the Persian invasion, the inhabitants of Elis concentrated themselves from many dispersed townships into the one main city of Elis : ^ and it seems probable that Le- preum in Triphylia, and one or tM'o of the towns of Achaia, were either formed or enlarged by a similar process near about the same time.2 Such aggregation of towns out of preexisting sep- arate villages was not conformable to the views, nor favorable to the ascendency, of Lacedjemon : but there can be little doubt that her foreign policy, after the Persian invasion, was both embar- rassed and discredited by the misconduct of her two contem- porary kings. Pausanias, who, though only regent, was practically equivalent to a king, and Leotychides, — not to mention the rapid development of Athens and Peiraeus. But in the year b.c. 464, the year preceding the surrender of Thasos to the Athenian armament, a misfortune of yet more terrific moment befell Sparta. A violent earthquake took place in the immediate neighborhood of Sparta itself, destroying a large portion of the town, and a vast number of lives, many of them Spartan citizens. It was the judgment of the earth-shaking god Poseidon, according to the view of the Lacedaemonians themselves, for a recent viola- tion of his sanctuary at T^enarus, from whence certain suppliant Helots had been di-agged away not long before for punishment,3 — not improbably some of those Helots whom Pausanias had instigated to revolt. The sentiment of the Helots, at all times one of enmity towards their masters, appears at this moment to have been unusually inflammable : so that an eai'thquake at Sparta, especially an earthquake construed as divine vengeance for Helot blood recently spilt, was sufficient to rouse many of them at once into revolt, together with some even of the Periceki. The insurgents took arms and marched directly upon Sparta, ' Diodor. xi. 54 ; Strabo, viii, p. 337. - Strabo, viii. pp. 337, 348, 356. ^ Thucyd. i, 101-128; Diodor. xi, 62.