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In estimating the territory of Sparta we have included in it not simply the land of the citizens which the serfs or Helots tilled for them, but also the much larger, but less valuable, mass of enveloping land which belonged to the Periœcs; for the hamlets of the latter were really Spartan municipalities. It was, moreover, with the resources of the whole complex that Sparta held the Peloponnesians united under her leadership for one hundred and eighty years (550-370 B.C.). On the other hand, it was with the combined strength of the Peloponnesians that Sparta broke up the Athenian empire in 405 B.C., and widened the area of her leadership so as to include all Hellas. Thereafter Sparta's Peloponnesian league was simply the core of a general Hellenic league. The question is: What position did Sparta occupy in it?

Her legal rights rested solely upon a treaty of alliance (symmachia) which she had struck with each city in the league. But there can be no doubt that she had often secured the treaty in the first place by force, and that she interfered thereafter in the local affairs of both the Peloponnesian and the other Hellenic allies in a way not provided by its stipulations. But, however outrageous her conduct might be in fact, it was never formally reprehensible so long as the interference achieved its object. This was to establish or maintain, first against tyranny, and later against democracy, an aristocratic government in the allied cities. Since the aristocrats were always in a minority, they were bound to invite Spartan intervention for their own defense. Hence it was only when they failed to retain control of the government that an ally could regard Sparta's intermeddling as anything but the welcome act of a friendly power. "Perhaps some one may expostulate," writes a pamphleteer in 400 B.C. while commending to his fellow-citizens of Larisa a proposal that they join the Hellenic league;ssss1 "but Sparta sets up an oligarchy everywhere. That is true. But it is such a one as we prayed and yearned for for ages, and lost when we had enjoyed it for but a brief moment. Just compare the oligarchy they favor with the one we have already. Where is there a city in their domain, be it ever so small, in which a third of the population does not take part in public affairs? It is not by the Lacedæmonians, but by fortune, that those who have no arms or other capacity for public service are disfranchised. Their exclusion lasts only so long as their political worthlessness. How do we stand by comparison? It's my belief that were we to pray for a constitution we would not ask the gods for a different one from that which Sparta wishes." To even moderate men who thought as this speaker did, unruly Spartan garrisons seemed quite compatible with local autonomy. They came to Larisa at the call of the home authorities and remained at the disposal of those who called them. Their captains, the long-haired harmosts, took orders and did not give them. Their presence involved no suspension of the constitution, no violation of the laws, no seizure of public revenues. Naturally, the two thirds who were disfranchised thought differently; but it is a good rule of international law that a foreign state deal with the Government, and not with the Opposition. The, mischief of this system, in the circumstances then existing in Greece, was that it bred civil war within the cities. "War," says the Larisæan pamphleteer just quoted, "is conceded to be the greatest of all evils by as much as peace is the greatest of all blessings. Yet stasis, or civil war, as far exceeds war in the magnitude of its evil as war exceeds peace." The incentive to stasis was that Athens, with a naval power as irresistible as was the land power of Sparta, and an equally imposing array of allies, had long continued to reach out a supporting or encouraging hand to the two thirds whom Sparta tried to keep down. Athens, too, was the apostle of a great political idea, "the constitutional equality of the many," and whenever she succeeded in putting those who believed in this creed in control of an allied city, or in keeping them in control once they had the advantage, her interference was formally justifiable or at least justified. Not she, but the government she upheld, had the responsibility.