over all the rest. Athens, as we learn from
Demosthenes, was the arbiter of Greece seventy-three years. The
Lacedaemonians next governed it twenty-nine years; at a subsequent
period, after the battle of Leuctra, the Thebans had their turn of
domination.

It happened but too often, according to Plutarch, that the deputies of
the strongest cities awed and corrupted those of the weaker; and that
judgment went in favor of the most powerful party.

Even in the midst of defensive and dangerous wars with Persia and
Macedon, the members never acted in concert, and were, more or fewer
of them, eternally the dupes or the hirelings of the common enemy.
The intervals of foreign war were filled up by domestic vicissitudes
convulsions, and carnage.

After the conclusion of the war with Xerxes, it appears that the
Lacedaemonians required that a number of the cities should be turned
out of the confederacy for the unfaithful part they had acted. The
Athenians, finding that the Lacedaemonians would lose fewer partisans by
such a measure than themselves, and would become masters of the public
deliberations, vigorously opposed and defeated the attempt. This piece
of history proves at once the inefficiency of the union, the ambition
and jealousy of its most powerful members, and the dependent and
degraded condition of the rest. The smaller members, though entitled by
the theory of their system to revolve in equal pride and majesty around
the common center, had become, in fact, satellites of the orbs of
primary magnitude.

Had the Greeks, says the Abbe Milot, been as wise as they were
courageous, they would have been admonished by experience of the
necessity of a closer union, and would have availed themselves of
the peace which followed their success against the Persian arms, to
establish such a reformation. Instead of this obvious policy, Athens
and Sparta, inflated with the victories and the glory they had acquired,
became first rivals and then enemies; and did each other infinitely more
mischief than they had suffered from Xerxes. Their mutual jealousies,
fears, hatreds, and injuries ended in the celebrated Peloponnesian war;
which itself ended in the ruin and slavery of the Athenians who had
begun it.

As a weak government, when not at war, is ever agitated by internal
dissentions, so these never fail to bring on fresh calamities from
abroad. The Phocians having ploughed up some consecrated ground
belonging to the temple of Apoll