TE RESCUE OL THEBES,

On a certain cold and wet evening, in the month
of December of the year 379 B.c., seven men, dressed
as rustics or hunters, and to all appearance unarmed,
though each man had a dagger concealed beneath his
clothes, appeared at the gate of Thebes, the principal
city of the Beotian confederacy. They had come
that day from Athens, making their way afoot across
Mount Citheron, which lay between. It was now
just nightfall and most of the farmers had come
into the city from the fields, but some late ones were
still returning. Mingling with these, the seven
strangers entered the gates, unnoticed by the
guards, and were quickly lost to sight in the city
streets. Quietly as they had come, the noise of their
coming was soon to resound throughout Greece, for
the arrival of those seven men was the first step in
a revolution that was destined to overturn all the
existing conditions of Grecian states.

We should like to go straight on with their story ;
but to make it clear to our readers we must go back
and offer a short extract from earlier history. Hith-
erto the history of Greece had been largely the his-
tory of two cities, Athens and Sparta. The other

cities had all played second or third parts to these
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