Pelopidas

Therefore Archias, Leontidas, and Philip, men of the oligarchical faction who were rich and immoderately ambitious, sought to persuade Phoebidas the Spartan, as he was marching past with an army, to take the Cadmeia by surprise, expel from the city the party opposed to them, and bring the government into subserviency to the Lacedaemonians by putting it in the hands of a few men.

Phoebidas yielded to their persuasions, made his attack upon the Thebans when they did not expect it, since it was the festival of the Thesmophoria, and got possession of the citadel.[*](In the winter of 382 B.C. Cf. the Agesilaüs, xxiii. 3-7. ) Then Ismenias was arrested, carried to Sparta, and after a little while put to death; while Pelopidas, Pherenicus, Androcleides and many others took to flight and were proclaimed outlaws. Epaminondas, however, was suffered to remain in the city, because his philosophy made him to be looked down upon as a recluse, and his poverty as impotent.

But when the Lacedaemonians deprived Phoebidas of his command and fined him a hundred thousand drachmas, and yet held the Cadmeia with a garrison notwithstanding, all the rest of the Greeks were amazed at their inconsistency, since they punished the wrong-doer, but approved his deed. And as for the Thebans, they had lost their ancestral form of government and were enslaved by Archias and Leontidas, nor had they hopes of any deliverance from this tyranny,

which they saw was guarded by the dominant military power of the Spartans and could not be pulled down unless those Spartans should somehow be deposed from their command of land and sea. Nevertheless, Leontidas and his associates, learning that the fugitive Thebans were living at Athens, where they were not only in favour with the common people but also honoured by the nobility, secretly plotted against their lives, and sending men who were unknown, they treacherously killed Androcleides, but failed in their designs upon the rest.

There came also letters from the Lacedaemonians charging the Athenians not to harbour or encourage the exiles, but to expel them as men declared common enemies by the allied cities.

The Athenians, however, not only yielding to their traditional and natural instincts of humanity, but also making a grateful return for the kindness of the Thebans, who had been most ready to aid them in restoring their democracy,[*](In 403 B.C., when Thrasybulus set out from Thebes on his campaign against the Thirty Tyrants at Athens (Xenophon, Hell. ii. 4, 2).) and had passed a decree that if any Athenians marched through Boeotia against the tyrants in Athens, no Boeotian should see or hear them, did no harm to the Thebans in their city.

But Pelopidas, although he was one of the youngest of the exiles kept inciting each man of them privately, and when they met together pleaded before them that it was neither right nor honourable for them to suffer their native city to be garrisoned and enslaved, and, content with mere life and safety, to hang upon the decrees of the Athenians, and to be always cringing and paying court to such orators as could persuade the people;