παρειλήΦασι ϒἀρ ψευδῆ λόϒον, ὡς ἒστιν αὐτοῖς ἡϒεῖσθαι πἀτριον This is Isocrates' judgment (IV. 18) on the claim of the Spartans to be the leaders of Greece. He rightly saw that the tradition of hegemony had been the force behind most of Sparta's active foreign policy for more than two hundred years down till his own day. He might truthfully have added that the hegemony exercised by contemporary Sparta was of a kind which Spartans no more than a generation earlier had never imagined. Though they had long desired to control all Greece, the particular form of control which they came to possess over the members of their second empire was determined for them by the Peloponnesian war.Sparta did not enter upon that long struggle with the deliberate intention of creating for herself a subject empire. She desired to destroy the Athenian ἀρχή, which appeared as a threat to her own Peloponnesian league: and in opposition to Athens, she asserted a principle of city autonomy, which was to prove both then and later wholly incompatible with the conception of a subject empire. At the outset, the Spartans can have contemplated no higher success than that the Athenian democracy might be so humbled as to abandon part, at least, of its ἀρχή and perhaps even to return to its earlier position as a member of the Peloponnesian league. But the war with Athens compelled Sparta to develop her social, political, and military organisation, and the conquest of Athens offered Sparta the temptation of securing a new kind of supremacy—not ἡγεμονία, but ἀρχή.