Greece did not, of course, enjoy peace during the thirty years of Spartan predominance. It could never be said at any point of Greek history that the land had rest forty years. There was fighting in Asia Minor against the Persians, and fighting in Greece round the Isthmus, a tiresome and lengthy struggle with discontented allies, generally called the Corinthian War. We cannot get a clear conception of the life of a Greek state unless we realise that peace was an abnormal condition.
During the period of which we are speaking there had been some important developments in the art of war. As the soldier is the most conservative of men with the exception of the priest, so next to religion warfare is the most conservative of human activities. Field tactics had altered little since the Persian wars. A Greek battle still depended on the shock of two lines of hoplites, largely a question of weight in impact. If you could once cut your opponent’s line the victory was yours, because then you found his right or shieldless side open to your spear. A Greek soldier with his heavy shield on his left arm could only defend his front and left. For this purpose the men stood shoulder to shoulder in a line made as deep as possible, for the sake of weight in the scrimmage, and, I fear, to prevent the Greek disorder of running away.
It was the secret of Spartan pre-eminence in war that a Spartan hoplite never thought of running away. But now in this fourth century we enter upon a scientific age when men are beginning to apply their reason logically to all the activities of life instead of trusting to habit. Soldiering, as in the case of the Ten Thousand, is passing over from amateur patriots to mercenary professionals. It is clear that if new ideas are to revolutionise the art of war, the supremacy of Sparta is doomed. Strong arms and thick skulls flourished in the vale of Eurotas. Sparta had a rude shock when an Athenian condottiere named Iphicrates cut up a Spartan company of hoplites with a newfangled battalion of his own training, a body of drilled light infantry. And now in the fullness of time Bœotia was to produce its man of genius--Epaminondas the Theban.
In 378 Sparta had sold the Ionian cities back to the Great King, who sent down from Susa a beautiful treaty saying, “King Artaxerxes thinks it just that Asia Minor and the Ionian islands shall belong to him, and that the rest of the cities of Greece, both great and small, shall be independent.” That was really the end of Sparta’s dream of an oversea empire. She had found it too fatiguing for a land power. Armed with this treaty, she began to run amuck among her neighbours. She assailed the Arcadian city of Mantinea and tore it up into villages. One of her captains marching past Athens made a