Note 541 — Chapter LXXIV · FROM THE BATTLE OF KNIDUS TO THE REBUILDING OF THE LONG WALLS OF ATHENS.

Xenophon (Hellen. iii, 5, 3) says,—and Pausanias (iii, 9, 4) follows him,—That the Theban leaders, wishing to bring about a war with Sparta, and knowing that Sparta would not begin it, purposely incited the Lokrians to encroach upon this disputed border, in order that the Phokians might resent it, and that thus a war might be lighted up. I have little hesitation in rejecting this version, which I conceive to have arisen from Xenophon’s philo-Laconian and miso-Theban tendency, and in believing that the fight between the Lokrians and Phokians, as well as that between the Phokians and Thebans, arose without any design on the part of the latter to provoke Sparta. So Diodorus recounts it, in reference to the war between the Phokians and the Thebans; for about the Lokrians he says nothing (xiv, 81).

The subsequent events, as recounted by Xenophon himself, show that the Spartans were not only ready in point of force, but eager in regard to will, to go to war with the Thebans; while the latter were not at all ready to go to war with Sparta. They had not a single ally; for their application to Athens, in itself doubtful, was not made until after Sparta had declared war against them.