268 HISTORICAL TALES.

their warlike neighbors. Only a short time before
one of their principal cities, Mantinea, had been
robbed of its walls and converted into open villages.
Since the battle of Leuctra the villagers had rebuilt
their walls and defied a Spartan army. Now the
Arcadians proved even more daring than the The-
bans. They met a Spartan force and annihilated it.

Into the country of Laconia pushed the invaders.
The city of Sellasia was taken and burned. The
river Eurotas was forded. Sparta lay before Epam-
inondas and his men.

It lay before them without a wall or tower.
Through its whole history no foreign army had
come so near it. It trusted for defence not to walls,
but to Spartan hearts and hands. Yet now conster-
nation reigned. Sparta the inviolate, Sparta the un-
assailable, was in imminent peril of suffering the
same fate it had often meted out freely to its foes.

But the Spartans had not been idle. Allies had
sent aid in all haste to the city. Even six thousand
of the Helots were armed as hoplites, though to see
such a body of their slaves in heavy armor alarmed
the Spartans almost as much as to behold their foes
so near at hand. In fact, many of the Helots and
country people joined the Theban army, while others
refused to come to the aid of the imperilled city.

Epaminondas marched on until he was in sight of
the city. He did not attempt to storm it. Though
without walls, Sparta had strong -natural defences,
and heaps of earth and stones had been hastily
thrown up on the most open roads. A strong army
had been gathered. The Spartans would fight to