Johnny Shumate Illustrations
For the first time in Greek history, a single state was
dominant, but Sparta’s position as leader of the Greeks did little to unify
them, and in fact did not long remain unchallenged. The refusal of members of
the Peloponnesian League to obey Spartan orders over Athens in 404–403 was a
foretaste of the future. Within just a few years of the end of the
Peloponnesian War, several of Sparta’s former allies had joined forces instead
with a resurgent Athens and were waging war against Sparta and its remaining allies.
The extent of the turnaround may be measured by the fact that the Athenians
allied themselves with those who had demanded the destruction of their city in
404 against those who had argued for its preservation.
The major players continued to pursue the elusive goal of
ascendancy over other Greeks—and pursued it, paradoxically, under the banner of
liberating them. The Ionian–Dorian division of the fifth century was dropped as
a diplomatic tool, since it no longer reflected reality in a world of shifting
alliances. But this struggle was ultimately futile, since it only helped a new
power grow in the north. “For all their attempts to impose their rule on one
another, they succeeded only in losing their ability to rule themselves,” was a
late historian’s somber but accurate comment. In 338, at the battle of
Chaeronea, the Macedonians under Philip II defeated the Greeks and curtailed
their cherished freedoms forever.
The Spartans also managed to irritate Artaxerxes of Persia
enough for him to get involved again in Greek affairs. First, they supported
the attempt of his younger brother, Cyrus, to take his throne (a young Athenian
called Xenophon joined the expedition and memorably recorded the march of the
“ten thousand” Greek mercenaries in his Anabasis), and then they invaded
Anatolia in an attempt to keep the Eastern Greek cities out of Persian hands.
Since the Spartans had recognized the Persians’ right to these cities in 411,
this was treachery, but there had always been those in Sparta who saw the
subjection of the Eastern Greeks to Persia as a temporary measure, to be
revisited after the war.
The Greeks found it impossible to live at peace with one
another. Internally, communities continued to be racked by conflict between
oligarchs and democrats, which increasingly came to mirror tension between rich
and poor. Externally, the most successful peaces of the fourth century were
imposed by outside powers, while most Greek attempts at reconciliation were
derailed by self-interested parties. Each of these peace treaties constituted a
switch-point when the Greeks could have moved toward greater unity, but
competitive belligerence and self-interested particularism were built into the
fabric of Greek statehood, and the opportunities were never fully grasped. The
fourth century showed that the polis system had run its course, because it was
no longer capable of serving the Greeks’ best interests.
The Corinthian War
The Spartan forces in Anatolia at first achieved little.
Their main weakness was at sea, so Pharnabazus, with Artaxerxes’ blessing,
raised a large fleet and appointed as his admiral the Athenian Conon, who was
working for Evagoras of Salamis, a Persian vassal king on Cyprus. By the summer
of 396, Conon had won over the Rhodians and acquired a base in the Aegean. In
response, the Spartans sent reinforcements east, and a fresh commander—King
Agesilaus II, with an entourage that included Lysander. The Persians in their
turn responded by sending money to political leaders in Greek states known to
be hostile to Sparta, urging them to war.
Lame Agesilaus had come unexpectedly to the Eurypontid
throne in 400. He was already over forty years old, since he succeeded his
half-brother, Agis II, when on Agis’ death his son was refused the kingship on
the grounds that his father was probably Athenian Alcibiades. It was Lysander,
formerly Agesilaus’ “inspirer” (pp. 109–10), who had been the prime mover of
his elevation, in the expectation that it would allow him to retain power. But
in Anatolia, Agesilaus, eager for his own glory, made it clear that he was the
king and that Lysander was just one of his advisers. In the end, however,
Agesilaus was scarcely more effective than his predecessors in Anatolia, but
only because in 394 he was recalled to mainland Greece for the Corinthian War,
just as he was poised to push deep into Persian territory. He left garrisons to
protect the Greek cities, and obeyed the command to return.
The point of the Corinthian War (395–386) was to curb
Sparta. It achieved exactly the opposite; at the end, Sparta was more dominant
than ever. All over the Mediterranean, the Spartans had been settling matters
to their liking, just as the Athenians had before them. In the 400s, they
campaigned in the northern Aegean, in Sicily, and even in Egypt, which was once
again in revolt from Persia, and would remain so until 343. Then in 400, at the
conclusion of a two-year war with Elis, in which the Eleans had suffered
terribly, the Spartans deprived them of their democracy and over half their
territory, the inhabitants of which promptly formed themselves into
confederacies, and in the same year they advanced into Anatolia. Sparta had to
be stopped before it got too powerful.
It was the Boeotians who started the war, just as they had
in 431. They provoked a border incident between the Locrians (their allies) and
the Phocians (Spartan allies), knowing that the Spartans would retaliate, and
formed an anti-Spartan alliance made up of their central Greek friends, along
with Athens, Corinth, and Argos. The Spartan invasion of Boeotia in 395 was not
a great success. Lysander succeeded in getting Orchomenus, which had long been
an unwilling member of the Boeotian Confederacy, to secede from it, but he was
too impatient to rendezvous with Pausanias as planned, and he lost his life
trying to defeat the Boeotian forces by himself. How are the mighty fallen! On
his return, Pausanias was prosecuted—for a crime for which he had already been
acquitted once, that in 403 he had allowed the Athenian oligarchy, friends of
Sparta, to be replaced by democracy—and went into exile. He was replaced by his
son, Agesipolis.
After this failure in Boeotia, the war developed two main
fronts: on land around Corinth (hence the name of the war) and at sea in the
Aegean. Two major battles were fought on land early in the war: the Spartans
won (just) at the Nemea River, near Corinth, in 394, and then again a few weeks
later at Coronea in Boeotia, when Agesilaus, marching his men home from
Anatolia, overcame an attempt to halt his progress. But after that the land war
settled down to a stalemate. The allies dug in at Corinth and the Spartans did
the same at neighboring Sicyon, and a war of skirmishing dragged on for another
seven years. It was most significant for the demonstration the Athenian General
Iphicrates gave of the effectiveness of light-armed troops, when he used
lighter-armed hoplites (known as “peltasts” because of their crescent-shaped
pelta shield) to sow death and panic in a Spartan troop of six hundred heavy
hoplites.
At sea, the Spartans were thoroughly humiliated. In 394
their fleet of 120 ships was annihilated by Conon and Pharnabazus. The Eastern
Greek cities celebrated the ending of Sparta’s ten-year dominance of the Aegean
by mass defection. Then, early in 393, the Persian fleet freed the Cyclades
from Spartan control, ravaged the coastline of Laconia, and occupied the island
of Cythera. The Spartans could do nothing. Pharnabazus soon sailed home, but he
left the fleet and Conon at the allies’ service and distributed large amounts
of money, which the allies spent on hiring mercenaries, and rebuilding their
fleets and their fortifications. Only ten years after its fortifications had
been demolished, Athens was secure again.
The Spartans tried to end Persian aid to their enemies by
arguing (or pointing out) that Conon was now plainly working for the Athenians,
not the Persians. Tiribazus, the Persian satrap in Lydia, imprisoned Conon, but
Artaxerxes was still angry with the Spartans and he ordered him released. Conon
died shortly afterwards, but he had done his job and returned the Aegean to
Athenian control. He was the first Athenian to receive the singular honor of a
statue in the Agora in his own lifetime.
The Athenians’ recovery had been remarkable, and they began
to wonder whether they could not regain, in some form, their grand naval
alliance of the previous century. In 390 Thrasybulus took a step in that
direction when he entered into a series of alliances with Greek cities and
Thracian kings from Thasos to Byzantium, and resuscitated the questionable 10
percent tax on shipping passing through the Bosporus (p. 253). Since Athens was
no longer the wealthy superpower it had been, Athenian Generals were frequently
short of money in the fourth century, and they found creative ways of raising
it—even hiring their men out as laborers at harvest time. Thrasybulus extracted
some from his new friends, but more was needed, and he went to southern
Anatolia to try his luck there. At Aspendus, however, some of his men got out
of hand, and the furious inhabitants stormed his camp one night and killed him.
It was a sorry end for the Hero of Phyle.
The King’s Peace
The Athenians’ successes in the Hellespont, where their
forces were now commanded by Iphicrates, alarmed Artaxerxes, and he ordered his
satraps to do what they could to check him. Sensing a change of heart, in 388
the Spartans sent Antalcidas, who had a long history of negotiating with the
Persians, to Susa to secure peace on favorable terms. Artaxerxes was persuaded.
His most pressing problem was the ongoing rebellion of Egypt, his most valuable
province. He wanted his army of invasion to be spearheaded by Greek
mercenaries, the best soldiers in the known world. He needed the Greeks to stop
fighting so that the mercenary market in Greece could revive. So, in the spring
of 387, Antalcidas returned with Artaxerxes’ terms.
There had been multilateral treaties before, but for the
first time this peace was to be binding on all Greek states equally—a common
peace, not restricted just to the belligerents and not limited in time. The
Greeks were recognized as a people in their own right; finally, the futility of
war taught the Greeks to accept a kind of unity. The principle that states
should be allowed to govern themselves, free of external influence, was
enshrined in the requirement that all states were to respect one another’s
autonomy and territorial integrity, and were jointly to retaliate against any
state that breached the treaty. There was very likely a clause stipulating the
use of arbitration rather than military action as a way of resolving conflicts.
The Eastern Greek states were ceded to the Persians, of course. But there was a
stinger: any state that did not accept these terms would face the king’s wrath
in military form. And who would police the Greeks for the Persian king? The
Spartans, naturally. It would be up to them to decide what counted as autonomy
and make sure that the Greek states obeyed.
It was likely that some parties would need persuading. The
Spartans used the threat of force to break up the Boeotian Confederacy so that
a weakened Thebes would toe the line, and also to dismantle the union of Argos
and Corinth (the two states had surprisingly and uneasily joined together in
392, in an anti-Spartan democracy). As for the Athenians, on his return from
Susa, in a brilliant campaign Antalcidas undid all of Thrasybulus’ and
Iphicrates’ gains in the Hellespontine region, and trapped the grain ships
bound for Athens in the narrow Bosporus. As at the end of the Peloponnesian
War, the Spartans were now funded by Persia, and the Athenians were faced with
real difficulties if the grain ships could not deliver. The King’s Peace, or
the Peace of Antalcidas, was accordingly sworn into existence in 386.
So far from having been laid low by the war, Sparta’s
position as mistress of Greece had been confirmed. The cost was high, however.
Agesilaus might quip that it was not so much that the Spartans had medized as
that the Persians had laconized—that the Persians had helped the Spartans more
than the other way around—but in fact the Spartans had betrayed the Eastern
Greek cities. The Persians at last regained their long-lost subjects, and by
381 they had also brought Evagoras to heel on Cyprus, where he had been trying
for ten years to make himself master of the entire island. They made no claim
to any of the Aegean islands, so Athens kept Scyros, Lemnos, and Imbros, but
lost the prospect of increasing its influence in general, since that would now
be understood as impinging on others’ autonomy.
The Boeotian War
Ignoring their own oppressed and unfree populations, the
Spartans drove the Olynthians out of Macedon, as a favor to King Amyntas III of
Macedon, and broke up their new Chalcidian Confederacy on the grounds that it
denied its members their autonomy. Without even the excuse of the autonomy
clause, they also punished Mantinea and Phleious, former allies who had
betrayed them. Mantinea had its walls demolished, and was broken up into
villages, each ruled by an aristocratic, pro-Spartan family. The Spartans’
power was at its height, but they were using it in ways that worried their
enemies and alienated some of their friends.
The most significant act of Spartan aggression took place in
382, when their general Phoebidas, ostensibly leading an army north to help
Amyntas, accepted an invitation by pro-Spartan Thebans to seize and occupy the
Cadmea, the Theban acropolis. This was a blatant breach of the principle of
autonomy and the Spartans were compelled to punish Phoebidas, but he was
Agesilaus’ man, and this was Agesilaus’ Sparta. So he received a fine rather
than the death penalty—and the garrison remained in Thebes. The rest of the
Greek world expressed shock, but did nothing except take in Theban exiles.
Their leader, Pelopidas, was made welcome in Athens.
In the winter of 379/8, Pelopidas and a band of exiles
slipped into Thebes and linked up with their friends inside. They assassinated
the leaders of the pro-Spartan faction, released political prisoners, reclaimed
the city, and instituted democracy. The Athenians broke out of the general
passivity that had followed the King’s Peace and supported the conspirators
with a small force, which was especially useful in besieging the Spartan troops
on the Cadmea into surrender—just in time, because Cleombrotus (who had come to
the Agiad throne in 381 on the death of his brother Agesipolis) was only a day
or two away with a relieving force. In the event, Cleombrotus was foiled by
wintry conditions and achieved little.
The Athenians were naturally frightened that they might have
provoked the Spartans to action against them, but the reaction, when it came,
early in 478, was half-hearted. The Spartans had occupied Thespiae in Boeotia,
and their general there, Sphodrias, marched into Attica and plundered the
countryside near Eleusis. This was an act of war, but, not wishing to come to
blows, the Athenians indicated that they would be satisfied if Sphodrias were
suitably punished—but, just like Phoebidas a few years earlier, and again at
the urging of Agesilaus (“the city needs men like him”), Sphodrias was scarcely
punished. So the Athenians reaffirmed their support for Thebes, and stepped up
their rearmament program.
They also decided to secure themselves by forming another
grand alliance. They already had a few alliances here and there, and had been
careful to make sure that the terms never transgressed the King’s Peace: “The
Chians shall be treated as allies on terms of freedom and autonomy.”4 Now they
decided to offer this kind of alliance to the Aegean world at large, along with
an anti-Spartan stance. This was the beginning of the Second Athenian League,
which would endure, somewhat shakily, until 338.
The league was announced in the summer of 378 with a
manifesto that survives on an inscription published a year or two later. As
well as keeping safely within the guidelines of the King’s Peace, the manifesto
was careful to suggest that this new alliance would be nothing like the Delian
League of the fifth century. Allied states would pay no involuntary tribute and
would have access to league funds; Athens would not take over allied court
cases; the allies would retain their autonomy and receive no garrisons or
Athenian officials; and so far from having cleruchies imposed on them, no
Athenian would be allowed to own land in any allied state at all. The allies
would have their own council, which met in Athens, where their delegates could
debate and vote (one vote per state) on league business without Athenian
influence, before putting a proposal to the Athenian Assembly.
The Spartans kept hammering away at Boeotia with annual
invasions, but they achieved little, and the Thebans began the process of
recovering for their confederacy the Boeotian towns the Spartans had
garrisoned. This renewed confederacy was to be democratic, but with Thebes
firmly and forcefully at its head, and this was an embarrassment to their
allies, the Athenians, who were promising prospective members of their new
alliance autonomy. Having failed on land, the Spartans turned to the sea, but
were twice thoroughly defeated by the Athenians. Athenian control of the sea
was re-established, and would endure for the next few decades before being
brought to a final end. A peace conference in Sparta in 375 was ineffective,
except that, in adhering to the principle that everyone could keep what they
had, the Athenians gained official recognition for their new alliance.
The Humbling of
Sparta
In 371 the states made another attempt to bring the Boeotian
War to an end. But instead of peace, the conference, in Sparta, led within
twenty days to further fighting. The Spartans snubbed the Thebans by refusing
to let them swear the oath for the Boeotians as a whole; they refused to
recognize the Boeotian Confederacy and wanted each Boeotian town to swear
separately. Showing the way—and revealing the Athenian drift toward friendship
with Sparta rather than Thebes—every member present from the Athenian alliance
swore separately. But the Thebans, led by their dynamic general Epaminondas,
argued that the Spartans should free their Perioecic communities before the
Thebans dissolved their confederacy, and the meeting broke up in rancor. The
Spartans already had an army near Boeotia in Phocis, to protect the Phocians
against Theban attacks, and Cleombrotus now delivered the Thebans an ultimatum:
free the Boeotian towns or face the consequences. The Thebans refused, and
Cleombrotus invaded.
The Spartan army well outnumbered the Thebans, but
Cleombrotus was up against the two best tacticians of the era: he was
outgeneraled by Epaminondas, and his men were outclassed by the Theban elite
corps, the Sacred Band, commanded by Pelopidas. The battle of Leuctra (a
village near Thespiae), fought in June 371, was won by Epaminondas’ brilliant
use of cavalry and infantry working together, and it was a decisive victory for
Thebes. Leaving aside other casualties, four hundred out of the seven hundred
Spartiates present lost their lives, including the king, and they constituted
at least a quarter of the existing Spartiate population. It was the first
formal infantry battle that the Spartans had lost for three centuries.
The Athenians greeted the news with dismay, knowing that it heralded
Theban ascendancy in Greece. They arranged a conference at which the Greek
states reaffirmed their allegiance to the King’s Peace, and to the principle
that each state was to rest content with what it had, or face obligatory
retaliation from all the other signatories. It was a warning against Theban
expansion. The Eleans, however, refused to take the oath, because the treaty
recognized the independence of the Triphylian Confederacy; they had recovered
some of the dependent communities they had lost in 400, but the Triphylians
remained stubbornly independent for over a hundred years.
The Athenians, leaders of an expressly anti-Spartan
alliance, were now paradoxically drawing closer to the Spartans. Thebes dropped
out of the Second Athenian League and formed its friends, effectively all of
central Greece, into an alliance of its own. In theory, this was an alliance of
equals (and therefore not in breach of the King’s Peace), but in practice
Thebes was dominant.
