The people of Attica, reviving after the Peloponnesian war and the plague, raised themselves again only to be struck down a few years later by the ascendancy of Macedonia. From Macedonia the wrath of Alexander swooped like a thunderbolt on Thebes of Boeotia. The Lacedaemonians suffered injury through Epaminondas of Thebes and again through the war with the Achaeans. And when painfully, like a shoot from a mutilated and mostly withered trunk, the Achaean power sprang up, it was cut short, while still growing, by the cowardiceκακία means literally “badness,” and includes in this context all the bad qualities a στρατηγός could have—disloyalty and corruptibility as well as cowardice. of its generals.