I have already recounted, in the preceding chapter, how the Asiatic Greeks, breaking loose from the Spartan Pausanias, entreated Athens to organise a new confederacy, and to act as presiding city (Vorort) –and how this confederacy, framed not only for common and pressing objects; but also on prinsparta ciples of equal rights and constant control on the part of the members, attracted soon the spontaneous adhesion of a large proportion of Greeks, insular or maritime, near the Ægean sea. I also noticed this event as giving commencement to a new æra in Grecian politics. For whereas there had been before a tendency, not very powerful, yet on the whole steady and increasing, towards something like one Pan-hellenic league under Sparta as president– from henceforward that tendency disappears, and a bifurcation begins: Athens and Sparta divide the Grecian world between them, and bring a much larger number of its members into cooperation, either with one or the other, than had ever been so arranged before.

Thucydidês marks precisely, as far as general words can go, the character of the new confederacy during the first years after its commencement: but unhappily he gives us scarcely any particular facts, –and in the absence of such controlling evidence, a habit has grown up of describing loosely the entire period between 477 B.C. and 405 B.C. (the lat- ter date is that of the battle of Ægos-potamos) as constituting “ the Athenian empire.”