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Hostilities were at first confined to Sparta and Thebes. A quarrel having arisen between the Opuntian Locrians and the Phocians respecting a strip of border land, the former people appealed to the Thebans, who invaded Phocis.
Apart from isolated specimens which are picked up everywhere, the Gizeh collection contains a set of fifteen from Sakkarah, forty-one from Tanis, and a dozen from Thebes and Medinet Habû. They were intended partly for the study of bas-reliefs, partly for the study of sculpture proper; and they reveal the method in use for both.
The greater number of these objects date from, and after, the first Saïte dynasty; but excavations in Thebes and Tell el Amarna have proved that the manufacture of coloured glass prevailed in Egypt earlier than the tenth century before our era.
Certainly the sentiment of human brotherhood has vastly widened since then. There are no two cities in the civilized world to-day that feel to each other as did Platæa and Thebes, only six miles apart, in that famous era of Grecian enlightenment. We have told how Platæa was taken and destroyed, and its defenders murdered, by a Spartan army.
How far the Greek architects were indebted to the Egyptian we cannot tell, for though columns are found amid the ruins of the Egyptian temples, they are of different shape from any made by the Greeks. In the structures of Thebes we find both the tumescent and the cylindrical columns, from which amalgamation might have been produced the Doric column.
"Generally they're said to be statues of the Goddess Pasht or Sehket but it's a riddle why the Amen-hotep person who built this temple to the goddess Mut should have put Sehket here. Sehket is in the trinity of Memphis and Mut in that of Thebes. And so some people say that this is not Pasht at all, but Mut herself, who was sometimes represented as lion-headed.
Thus, as the news of the destruction of Thebes, and the selling of so large a portion of the inhabitants into slavery, spread over the land, its effect was to turn over so great a part of the population to a feeling of admiration of Alexander's character, and confidence in his extraordinary powers, as to leave only a small minority disposed to take sides with the punished rebels, or resent the destruction of the city.
The kitten was curled up on the window-ledge outside in the sunshine, just as the sleek cats curled up in the warmth at Thebes of old Egypt five or six thousand years ago; the sparrow was happy at the rose tree; a bee was happy on a broad dandelion disc.
In a few days all the inhabitants of Thebes, from dissectors and water-carriers to scribes and merchants, whispered that Ramses XIII was affected with the disease which had deprived his older brothers of succession. Dread of the pharaoh and honor for him were so great that people feared to speak openly, especially before strangers. Still, all heard of it all save Ramses.
Meanwhile the Thebans took advantage of the victory to extend their authority, agreeably to the project conceived with Sparta. Thebes now attempted the reduction of all the cities of Boeotia. Some submitted, others opposed. X. Aware of the necessity of immediate measures against a neighbour, brave, persevering, and ambitious, the Athenian government lost no time in recruiting its broken forces.
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