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[2] Accordingly the Spartans gave secret instructions1 to their commanders, if ever they found an opportunity, to take possession of the Cadmeia. Acting under these instructions, Phoebidas the Spartan, who had been assigned to a command and was leading an expeditionary force against Olynthus, seized the Cadmeia.2 When the Thebans, resenting this act, gathered under arms, he joined battle with them and after defeating them exiled three hundred of the most eminent Thebans. Then after he had terrorized the rest and had stationed a strong garrison in the Cadmeia, he went off on his own business. For this act the Lacedaemonians, being now discredited in the eyes of the Greeks,3 punished Phoebidas with a fine but would not remove the garrison from Thebes.

1 Diodorus alone speaks of these secret instructions which have no existence in Xenophon's fuller account. In fact Xenophon expressly says (Xen. Hell. 5.2.32) ὅτι οὐ προσταχθέντα ὑπὸ τῆς πόλεως ταῦτα ἐπεπράχει. But then we must remember Xenophon's pro-Spartan bias. Plut. Agesilaus 23-24 virtually admits the complicity of Agesilaus, and Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 5.298, accepts the notion of a secret commission, as does Laistner, The Greek World from 479 to 323 B.C., p. 190.

2 See Xen. Hell. 5.2.25-31.

3 The reaction of the Greek world and the punishment of Phoebidas are recounted in Isoc. 4.126; Xen. Hell. 5.4.1; Plut. Pelopidas 6 and Plut. De Genio Socratis 576a; Nepos Pelopidas 1; and Polybius 4.27.4.

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