 Victor Davis Hanson has suggested that Epaminondas may have planned for a united Greece composed of regional democratic federations, but even if this assertion is correct, no such plan was ever implemented.Simon Hornblower asserts that Thebes' great legacy to fourth century and Hellenistic Greece was federalism, "a kind of alternative to imperialism, a way of achieving unity without force", which "embodies a representative principle".For all his noble qualities, Epaminondas was unable to transcend the Greek city-state system, with its endemic rivalry and warfare, and thus left Greece more war-ravaged but no less divided than he found it.