Book 9
6.1
Of the successes and failures of the Thebans in battle I found the most famous to be the following. They were overcome in battle by the Athenians, who had come to the aid of the Plataeans, when a war had arisen about the boundaries of their territory. They met with a second disaster when arrayed against the Athenians at Plataea,479 B.C at the time when they are considered to have chosen the cause of King Xerxes rather than that of Greece.
6.2
The Theban people are in no way responsible for this choice, as at that time an oligarchy was in power at Thebes and not their ancestral form of government. In the same way, if it had been while Peisistratus or his sons still held Athens under a despotism that the foreigner had invaded Greece, the Athenians too would certainly have been accused of favouring Persia.
6.3
Afterwards, however, the Thebans won a victory over the Athenians at Delium in the territory of Tanagra,424 B.C where the Athenian general Hippocrates, son of Ariphron, perished with the greater part of the army. During the period that began with the departure of the Persians and ended with the war between Athens and the Peloponnesus, the relations between Thebes and the Lacedaemonians were friendly. But when the war was fought out and the Athenian navy destroyed, after a brief interval Thebes along with Corinth was involved in the war with Lacedaemon.394 B.C
6.4
Overcome in battle at Corinth and Coroncia, they won on the other hand at Leuctra the most famous victory we know of gained by Greeks over Greeks. They put down the boards of ten, which the Lacedaemonians had set up in the cities, and drove out the Spartan governors. Afterwards they also waged for ten years consecutively the Phocian war, called by the Greeks the Sacred war.
