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Updated: April 30, 2025
Hence there arose among the allies not only a fear of the grasping dominion, but a hatred of the monopolizing rapacity of Sparta. This was manifested by the Thebans and Corinthians when they refused to join Pausanias in his march against Thrasybulus and the Athenian exiles in Piræus.
The spirit animating the movement is shown by the two resolutions, that all clubs should be permanent and all actions for debt should be suspended till the restoration of peace. The Achaeans thus had war; and they had even actual allies, namely the Thebans and Boeotians and also the Chalcidians.
"Still, in the name of the gods who once presided over our confederacy, and of our own good service in the Hellenic cause, we adjure you to relent; to recall the decision which we fear that the Thebans may have obtained from you; to ask back the gift that you have given them, that they disgrace not you by slaying us; to gain a pure instead of a guilty gratitude, and not to gratify others to be yourselves rewarded with shame.
The Thespians alone voluntarily remained to partake his fate; but he detained also the suspected Thebans, rather as a hostage than an auxiliary. The rest of the confederates precipitately departed across the mountains to their native cities.
Then the surviving Greeks, with the exception of the Thebans, fell back within the pass and took their final stand upon a hillock, where they fought with the valor of desperation until every man was slain. The Thebans, however, who from the first had been distrusted by Leonidas, threw down their arms early in the fight, and begged for quarter.
This city had long been hated by Thebes as a deserter from her own league; it alone of Boeotian towns had not joined the Persians. Burning with the desire to capture it, a body of Thebans entered the place by night, seizing the chief positions. But in the morning their scanty numbers were apparent; recovering from panic the Plataeans overwhelmed the invaders and massacred them.
And the words of Mentu seemed very fitting, "I like him not." The Thebans were in raptures. The splendors of the pageant had far surpassed their expectations. Priests, soldiers and officials came in companies, rank upon rank, of exalted and ornate dignity. Chariots and horses shone with gilding, polished metal and gay housings, while the marching legions clanked with pike and blade and shield.
After this, as he heard that the Thebans had revolted, and that the Athenians sympathised with them, he marched his army straight through Thermopylæ, with the remark that Demosthenes, who had called him a boy while he was fighting the Illyrians and Triballi, and a youth while he was marching through Thessaly, should find him a man when he saw him before the gates of Athens.
The Thessalians shall never again wait on the living Pelopidas, never give honors, of which he can be sensible, but if we may have his body, adorn his funeral, and inter him, we shall hope to show that we esteem his death a greater loss to the Thessalians than to the Thebans. You have lost only a good general, we both a general and our liberty.
But the glory of the expedition chiefly excited him; for he was extremely desirous at this time, when the Lacedaemonians were sending out military officers to assist Dionysius the Sicilian tyrant, and the Athenians took Alexander's pay, and honored him with a brazen statue as a benefactor, that the Thebans should be seen, alone, of all the Greeks, undertaking the cause of those who were oppressed by tyrants, and destroying the violent and illegal forms of government in Greece.
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