Prodigious was the change operated throughout the Grecian world during the eighteen months between June 371 b.c. (when the general peace, including all except Thebes, was sworn at Sparta, twenty days before the battle of Leuktra), and the spring of 369 b.c., when the Thebans, after a victorious expedition into Peloponnesus, were reconducted home by Epaminondas.

Changes in Peloponnesus since the battle of Leuktra.

How that change worked in Peloponnesus, amounting to a partial re-constitution of the peninsula, has been sketched in the preceding chapter. Among most of the cities and districts hitherto dependent allies of Sparta, the local oligarchies, whereby Spartan influence had been maintained, were overthrown, not without harsh and violent reaction. Laconia had been invaded and laid waste, while the Spartans were obliged to content themselves with guarding their central hearth and their families from assault. The western and best half of Laconia had been wrested from them; Messênê had been constituted as a free city on their frontier; a large proportion of their Periœki and Helots had been converted into independent Greeks bitterly hostile to them; moreover the Arcadian population had been emancipated from their dependence, and organized into self-acting jealous neigh bours in the new city of Megalopolis, as well as in Tegea and Mantinea. The once philo-Laconian Tegea was now among the chief enemies of Sparta; and the Skiritæ, so long numbered as the bravest of the auxiliary troops of the latter, were now identified in sentiment with Arcadians and Thebans against her.

Great ascendency of Sparta on land in 379 b.c.

At the beginning of 379 B.C, the empire of the Lacedæmonians on land had reached a pitch never before paralleled. On the sea, their fleet was but moderately powerful, and they seem to have held divided empire with Athens over the smaller islands; while the larger islands (so far as we can make out) were independent of both. But the whole of inland Greece, both within and without Peloponnesus–except Argos, Attica, and perhaps the more powerful Thessalian cities–was now enrolled in the confederacy dependent on Sparta. Her occupation of Thebes, by a Spartan garrison and an oligarchy of local partisans, appeared to place her empire beyond all chance of successful attack; while the victorious close of the war against Olynthus carried everywhere an intimidating sense of her far-reaching power. Her allies, too–governed as they were in many cases by Spartan harmosts, and by oligarchies whose power rested on Sparta–were much more dependent upon her than they had been during the time of the Peloponnesian war.

Such a position of affairs rendered Sparta an object of the same mingled fear and hatred (the first preponderant) as had been felt towards imperial Athens fifty years before, when she was designated as the “despot city”.