The withdrawal of Sparta and her Peloponnesian…

The withdrawal of Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies from the Greek flee has left the perils and the glories of the Persian War to Athens, which, though at the outset merely the leading state in a confederacy of free allies, soon begins to make herself the mistress of an empire.

The reluctant withdrawal of Sparta is ominous, but Greek unity remains intact by the middle of the 470s.

At the Olympic Games of 476, an unusually political celebration (the first after the last of the Persian Wars and held in the honored presence of the Athenian Themistocles), there are still victorious competitors from Sparta, as well as from other Dorian states such as Argos and Aegina and from Italy and Sicily.