Plataea seized by Thebes.

371 B.C.

Peace of
Callias

come to Athens to bear testimony in his favour, the Epirot king Alcetas, and Jason the despot of Thessalian Pherae. It was through Timotheus that these potentates had joined the Athenian league; and it was through them that he had been able to transport across Thessaly and Epirus the 600 peltasts who had been sent in advance to Corcyra. The interest of Jason-of whom more will have to be said presently-was particularly effective. Timotheus entertained these distinguished guests in his house in Piraeus, but he was obliged to borrow bedding, two silver bowls, and other things from his rich neighbour, the banker Pasion, in order to lodge them suitably. Though acquitted, Timotheus was discredited in public opinion, and he soon left Athens to take service in Egypt under the Great King.

Sparta had lost heart at the decisive check which she had received in Corcyra, and the discouragement was increased by a series of terrible earthquakes, in which Poseidon seemed to declare his wrath. She was therefore disposed to peace, and she thought to bring peace about, as before, through the mediation of Persia. Antalcidas was once more sent up to the Persian court. But this intervention from without was not really needed. Athens, uneasy under the burdens of the war and feeling rather jealousy of Thebes than bitterness against Sparta, was also well inclined to peace, and the influential orator Callistratus made it the object of his policy. The recent aggressions of Thebes against the Phocians, who were old allies of Athens, tended to estrange the two cities; and to this was added the treatment of that unfortunate little mountain burg, Plataea, by her Theban enemies. Restored Plataca had perforce been enrolled in the Boeotian confederacy, but she was secretly scheming for annexation to Attica. Suspecting these plots, Thebes determined to forestall them, and a small Theban force, surprising the town one day when the men were in the fields, took possession of it and drove all the Plataeans forth from Plataean soil. Many of the people, thus bereft of land and city, found a refuge at Athens; where the publicist Isocrates took up their cause and wrote his Platacic Discourse, a denunciation of Thebes. This incident definitely, though not formally, loosened the bonds between the two northern powers. The overtures came from Athens and her Confederacy. When the Lacedaemonian allies met at Sparta in spring, three Athenian envoys appeared at the congress. Of these the chief spokesman was Callistratus, and one of his associates was Callias, Torchbearer of the Eleusinian Mysteries, who had also worked to bring about the abortive peace three years before. Thebes likewise sent ambassadors. one of whom was Epaminondas. The basis of the peace which was now concluded was the principle which had been affirmed by the Kingd d Peace, the principle of the autonomy of every Hellenic city. Ten

Athenian and Lacedaemonian Confederacies were thus both rendered invalid. No compulsion could be exercised on any city to fulfil engagements as member of a league. Cities might co-operate with each other freely so far as they chose, but no obligation could be contracted or enforced. Yet while Athens and Sparta resigned empire, they mutually agreed to recognise each other's predominance, that of Athens by sea, that of Sparta on land-a predominance which must never be asserted by aggression and must always be consistent with the universal autonomy.

The question immediately arose whether the Boeotian League The was condemned by this doctrine of universal autonomy. Sparta Boeotian and Athens, of course, intended to condemn it. But it might be question. pleaded that the Confederacy of Boeotian cities under the presidency of Thebes was not on the same footing as the Confederacies which had been formed, for temporary political purposes, without any historical or geographical basis of union, under the presidencies of Athens and Sparta. It might be contended that Boeotia was a geographical unity, like Attica and Laconia, and had a title to political unity too, especially as the League was an ancient institution. The question came to the issue when it was the turn of Thebes to take the oath. Her representative Epaminondas claimed to take it on behalf of the Boeotian cities; and Thebes, represented by him, was not so easily cowed as when she made the same claim at the conclusion of the King's Peace. He seems to have developed the view that Boeotia was to be compared to Laconia, not to the Lacedaemonian Confederacy; and when Agesilaus asked him, curtly and Thebes angrily: "Will you leave each of the Boeotian towns independent?" excluded. he retorted: "Will you leave each of the Laconian towns independent?” The name of Thebes was thereupon struck out of the treaty.

There was an argument as well as a sting in this retort of Epaminondas. The argument was: Sparta has no more right to. interfere in the internal affairs of Boeotia than we have to interfere in the domestic administration of Laconia; Laconia, Boeotia, Attica, each represents a distinct kind of constitution, and each constitution is justified; the union of Boeotia in a federation is as natural as the union of Attica in a single city, as legitimate as the union of Laconia in its subjection to the Spartan oligarchy. The union of Boeotia, like the union of Laconia, could not have been realised and could not be maintained without the perpetration of outrages upon the freewill of some communities. Yet it is hardly legitimate for one state to say to another: "We have committed certain acts of violence, but you must not interfere; for at a remote period of history which none of us remember, your ancestors used even more high-handed methods for similar purposes, and you now maintain what they

established." But the tyrannical method by which Laconia was governed was certainly a weak point in the Spartan armour; and the reply of Epaminondas may have well set Greece thinking over a question of political science. Setting aside the arguments of diplomacy, the point of the situation was this: Thebes could never become a strong power, the rival of Sparta or of Athens, except at the head of an united Boeotia, and it was the interest of Athens and Sparta to hinder her from becoming such a power.

Positions of So far as the two chief contracting parties were concerned, this Athens and bargain—which is often called the "Peace of Callias”—put an end, Sparta. to a war which was contrary to the best interests of both. They were both partly to blame, but Sparta was far more to blame than her old rival. Her witless policy in overlooking the raid of Sphodrias had caused the war; for it left to Athens no alternative but hostility. At the end of four years, they seemed to have come to their senses; they made peace, but they were stupid enough to allow the incident of Zacynthus to annul the bargain. Three more , years of fighting were required to restore their wits. But, although Athens was financially exhausted by her military efforts, the war had brought its compensations to her. The victory of Naxos, the circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus and revival of her influence in Western Greece, were achievements which indisputably proved that Athens was once more a first-rate Hellenic power, the peer of Sparta; and this fact was fully acknowledged in the Peace of Callias. But the true policy of Athens-from which the raid of Sphodrias had forced her was that of a watchful spectator; and this policy she now resumes, though only for a brief space, leaving Sparta and Thebes in the arena. As for Sparta, she had lost as much as Athens had gained; the defeat of Naxos, the defeat of Tegyra, the failure at Corcyra, had dimmed her prestige. After the King's Peace, she had begun her second attempt to dominate Greece; her failure is confessed by the Peace of Callias. If a third attempt was to be successful, it was obvious that it must begin by the subjugation of Thebes.

SECT. 5. ATHENS UNDER THE RESTORED DEMOCRACY

When Pericles declared that Athens was the school of Greece, this was rather his ideal of what she should be than a statement of a reality. It would have surprised him to learn that, when imperial Athens fell from her throne, his ideal would be fulfilled. This was what actually happened. It was not until Athens lost her empire that she began to exert a great decisive influence on Greek thought and civilisation. This influence was partly exerted by the establish

Greece.

ment of schools in the strict sense-the literary school of Isocrates Influence of and the philosophical school of Plato-which attracted to Athens Athens on men from all quarters of the Hellenic world. But the increase in the intellectual influence of Athens was largely owing to the fact that she was becoming herself more receptive of influence from without. She was becoming Hellenic as well as Athenian; she was beginning to become even something more than Hellenic. This tendency towards cosmopolitanism had been promoted by philosophical speculation, which rises above national distinctions; and it is manifested variously in the pan-Hellenism of Isocrates, in the attitude of such different men as Plato and Xenophon towards Athens, in the increasing number of foreign religious worships established at Athens or Piraeus, in a general decline of local patriotism, and in many other ways. There was perhaps no institution which had a wider influence in educating Greek thought in the fourth century than the theatre; its importance in city life was recognised by practical statesmen. It was therefore a matter of the utmost moment that the old Athenian comedy, turning mainly on local politics, ceased to be written, and a new school of comic poets arose who dealt with subjects of general human interest. Here Athens had a most effectual instrument for spreading ideas. And the tragedies of the fourth century, though as literature they were of less note and consequence than the comedies, were not less significant of the spirit of the time. They were all dominated by the influence of Euripides, the great teacher of rationalism, the daring critic of all established institutions and beliefs. And the comic poets were also under his spell.

vidualism.

It can easily be seen that the cultivation of these wider sym- Growth of pathies was connected with the growth of what is commonly called indi"individualism." (By this it is meant that the individual citizen no longer looks at the outside world through the medium of his city, but regards it directly, as it were, with his own eyes and in its bearings on him individually. He is no longer content to express his religious feelings, simply as one member of the state, in the common usages of the state religion, but seeks to enter into an immediate personal relation with the supernatural world. And since his own life has thus become for him something independent of the city, his attitude to the city itself is transformed. The citizen of Athens has become a citizen of the world. His duty to his country may conflict with his duty to himself as a man; and thus patriotism ceases to be unconditionally the highest virtue. Again, men begin to put to themselves, more or less explicitly, the question, whether the state is not made for the individual and not the individual for the state,— a complete reversal of the old unquestioning submission to the authority of the social organism. It followed that greater demands

Sophro

niscus

(born c. 469 B.C.).

were made upon the state by the citizen for his own private welfare ; and that the citizen, feeling himself tied by no indissoluble bond to his country, was readier than formerly to seek his fortune elsewhere. Thus we find, in the single field of military service, Athenian officers acting independently of their country, in the pay of foreign powers, whenever it suited them-Conon, Xenophon, Iphicrates, Chabrias, and others.

A vivid exaggerated description of this spirit has been drawn by Plato in one of his famous contributions to political science, the Republic. "The horses and asses," he says, "have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they will run at anybody whom they meet in the street if he does not leave the road clear for them and all things are just ready to burst with liberty."1 When he describes the excessive freedom of democracy, he is dealing with the growth of individualism, as a result of freedom in its constitutional sense; but his argument that individualism is the fatal fruit of a democratic constitution rests largely on the double sense of the word "freedom." The notable thing is that no man did more to promote the tendencies which are here deplored by Plato than Plato himself and his fellow philosophers. If any single man could be held responsible for the inevitable growth of individualism, it would be perhaps Euripides;2 but assuredly, next to Euripides, it would be Plato's revered master, Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus.

Socrates, When the history of Greece was being directed by Pericles and the sculptor, Cleon, Nicias and Lysander, men little dreamed either at Athens or son of elsewhere that the interests of the world were far more deeply concerned in the doings of one eccentric Athenian who held aloof from public affairs. The work of Pericles and Lysander affected a few generations in a small portion of the globe; but the spirit of that eccentric Athenian was to lay an impress, indelible for ever, upon the thought of mankind. The ideas which we owe to Socrates are now so organically a part of the mind of civilised men, so familiar and commonplace, that it is hard to appreciate the intellectual power His spirit. which was required to originate them. Socrates was the first champion of the supremacy of the intellect as a court from which there is no appeal; he was the first to insist, without modification or compromise, that a man must order his life by the guidance of his own intellect, without any regard for mandates of external authority or for the impulses of emotion, unless his intellect approves. Socrates

1 Transl. Jowett.

2 Euripides first; for, though he did not exert nearly as great influence on the world as Socrates, he reached a larger public in his own and the two next generations.