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The reformers strove to alter the untoward circumstances, and in a later chapter we shall have occasion to note how Plato and Aristotle, with a blind faith in the power of education and of legislation, aimed to divert citizens from work to leisure and from war to peace, and both to eradicate the greed for land and money and to restrict the natural increase of population to which they traced the imperialistic spirit. Some of the statesmen followed their lead. Others, however, conceding that unity was demanded for the preservation and spread of civilization, and that the world needed not fewer but more Greeks, either, like the great publicist Isocrates, advocated an hegemony on the old lines but endowed with stability through being based on general consent, or favored one of several new devices for welding cities into a permanent territorial state. Respect for progress bids us to view at this point somewhat narrowly these unitarian movements.

The position attained by Thebes in Greece after her victory over Sparta at Leuctra in 371 B.C. was simply an hegemony of the earlier model—the reoccupation of lines proved twice already to be untenable.ssss1 On the other hand, the position occupied by Thebes in Bœotia prior to 387 B.C. was clearly anticipatory of what the future was to bring to Greece as a whole. Bœotia was thereby blocked off into six districts,ssss1 one (Thebes) with four electoral divisions, two (Orchomenus and Thespiæ) with two each, and three with one apiece. Six of the ten city-states of Bœotia—the six little lake cities—were confined to two of the eleven divisions. This was a setback to them and a boon to Thebes, seeing that each division furnished one of the eleven Bœotarchs who formed the executive of the league, sixty of the six hundred and sixty councillors who formed the Bœotian synod, and its corresponding share of the league judges. Thebes thus became the Prussia of Bœotia, and in return for the political advantages which it gained and four elevenths of the revenues which it received, it undertook to provide four elevenths of the soldiers and four elevenths of the taxes. In this way the burdens and the advantages of the league were distributed according to the population and wealth of the different parts of the country. That was equitable; and since the city-states, though thrust into the background and held responsible for decisions in the making of which they had often little influence, formed a single ethnos and spoke a single dialect, they were evidently fairly well satisfied. As the league was constituted, Thebes was forced to struggle with Orchomenus and Thespiæ for the control of the six little lake cities. In this she was normally successful—so successful, in fact, that in 387 B.C. Sparta, while enforcing the King's Peace, dissolved the league in order to destroy her influence. It was not revived when Thebes reunited Bœotia (377-371 B.C.), and under Epaminondas we may more properly speak of Bœotia as a single city-state like Attica than as a league of city-states.