[In the following essay, Hamilton comments on the last portion of Agesilaos's reign in the 360s and the final collapse of the Spartan empire.]

Sparta's position after the Battle of Mantineia [362] was even worse than it had been before. Exhausted by some fifteen years of war, the various Greek states decided once again to make peace. As the sources show, this was to be a Common Peace, and there is some evidence that the Great King of Persia had a hand in it.¹ There was to be an end to hostilities, with each state keeping the territories it then possessed, disbandment of armed forces, and the recognition of the principle of autonomy for all poleis. Sparta refused to recognize the existence of Messene, and as a result it was excluded from the peace. But unlike previous situations, Sparta was now virtually without allies in Greece. So long as other differences were either resolved or under adjudication, no state was prepared to aid Sparta in what would prove to be an abortive effort to recover Messenia. Left to their own devices, the Spartans had to seek other means to pursue their objective of reconquering Messenia.

Slim though it is, the evidence suggests that Agesilaus and his partisans were still dominant in Sparta. If Agesilaus had commanded at Mantineia, and therefore bore some of the blame for the poor showing of the Lacedaemonians on that occasion, there is no hint of criticism for this in the sources. Instead he is chastised in particular for failing to heal his state's wounds and for continuing to stir up trouble over Messenia.² What Plutarch fails to recognize in this criticism is the contemporary perception that possession of Messenia was utterly essential to the integrity of the Lacedaemonian state; the land and its inhabitants had been held in subjection for 350 years, and the Spartans viewed its permanent loss as untenable.³ Because the political situation had changed frequently over the last dozen years, perhaps the Spartans can be forgiven for what may appear as a shortsighted attitude. From their perspective, however, the recovery of Messenia was a sine qua non for a return to normalcy within the Peloponnesus. They reasoned that without Messenia their dominance of the region was at an end, and the Peloponnesian League could not be reconstituted. Unfortunately for them, the Spartans' narrow focus on the recovery of Messenia, and their refusal to enter into a peace that recognized its right to exist, put them hors de combat to any effective degree in Peloponnesian politics for the next several decades.⁴ With the loss of their allies as sources of reinforcement, the Spartans were necessarily led to seek other means of augmenting their resources. They resorted to a policy often enough employed by the Athenians in this period, but one that seems rather pathetic in the case of Sparta: the hiring out of their best general, King Agesilaus, as a mercenary commander to the rebel king of Egypt, Tachos, for his planned invasion of Persian territory.

Xenophon makes every effort to put the best light on the Egyptian service of Agesilaus, providing several motives for his undertaking this assignment. Xenophon claims that the king was delighted when a summons came from Tachos to serve under him, for Agesilaus felt that he could thus repay the Egyptian for good offices to Sparta, set free the Greeks of Asia Minor once again, and pay back the Great King for his former hostility and for demanding that, while an ally of Sparta, they should surrender their claim to Messene. Quite clearly, Xenophon here tries to exonerate his hero from charges of demeaning himself by accepting mercenary service. The reasons he alleges for the act are at least slightly suspect.⁵ For one thing, the good offices of Tachos to Sparta are not otherwise known. The reference to the liberation of the Greeks of Asia Minor, taken by some scholars as further proof of Agesilaus' continued panhellenic policy, is almost gratuitous. There was little chance that mercenary service to the Egyptian king would result in the liberation of the Greek cities, unless as a by-product of contributing to the success of the so-called Great Satraps' Revolt. But Agesilaus could hardly have convinced anyone that he actually hoped to liberate the Greeks through this course of action, and we must ask whether this was not the invention of Xenophon in response to some critic of Agesilaus' last campaign (as suggested by Plutarch's account). Finally, the reference to the king as “saying that he was now an ally” is at least rather puzzling. As far as we can judge, Sparta had been at war, at least indirectly, with the king since his sponsorship of the Peace of Pelopidas in 367. Agesilaus had campaigned on behalf of Ariobarzanes for an indefinite period of time starting in 366. If the Great King took part in the Peace of 362, following Mantineia, and supported the independence of Messene, as Xenophon says, then he could hardly be regarded as an ally by the Spartans. Buckler, however, places the occasion of diplomatic negotiations which led to the suicide of a disappointed Antalcidas at roughly this time.⁶ But this scenario makes Antalcidas' mission to Susa coincide with Agesilaus' activity in Egypt. This is very difficult to accept, for it is not easy to see how the Spartans could hope to persuade the Great King to any beneficent course of action toward Sparta while their king was in service to a monarch regarded as a rebel by the Persian, and who was moreover planning an attack on Persian territory in Phoenicia at that very time. It seems best to accept the opinion of a majority of scholars who link the story of Antalcidas' last mission and suicide to the negotiations in Susa in 367.⁷

On the invitation of the Egyptian king, Agesilaus was sent out by formal decision of the Spartan state. He was accompanied by thirty councillors, as he had been in 396. With the money supplied by Tachos, he was able to recruit one thousand troops, which he took with him by ship to Egypt. These are much more likely to have been mercenaries than citizen troops, which Diodorus seems to imply.⁸ When he arrived in Egypt, Agesilaus became the object of widespread attention, but he disappointed practically everyone because of his modest demeanor and ordinary dress; indeed, he almost became an object of derision. There were, no doubt, other, more cogent reasons for Tachos' decision to restrict him to the command of the Greek mercenaries, rather than to give him the overall command of the operations that he desired and had expected. Tachos retained overall command himself, while delegating to Chabrias command of the fleet. Unlike Agesilaus, the latter had come as a private commander, and not in Athens' service. The date of Agesilaus' arrival in Egypt cannot be determined precisely, except that it was manifestly after the Peace Conference that followed Mantineia. I place his arrival sometime in the sailing season; that is, spring or summer 361. This would agree with the archon date given by Diodorus (Molon = 362/1), and, more importantly, with the information furnished by Xenophon and Plutarch about the king's age. Xenophon says that he was “about eighty” when he went out, and Plutarch records that he was eighty-four at the time of his death when returning from Egypt.⁹

After a period of preparation, Tachos launched his invasion of Phoenicia. This may have occurred in 360. While the army was conducting operations in Phoenicia and Syria, a revolt against the authority of Tachos took place in Egypt. Nameless in the sources, the rebel nominated his son Nektanebo, then in command of the Egyptian forces in Syria, to succeed as king. In the ensuing struggle, the support of Agesilaus, or rather of the mercenaries whom he commanded, proved the decisive factor. Agesilaus pretended to seek direction from Sparta, although he secretly sent asking the authorities there to order him to support Nektanebo. Both rivals also sent envoys to Sparta seeking support.¹⁰ Clearly, these negotiations would have required some time, and in the end Agesilaus swung his support to the upstart, Nektanebo. Tachos fled to Artaxerxes, from whom he received pardon and mercy. But in the meanwhile, Agesilaus and Nektanebo returned to Egypt to secure control there. A third pretender arose, also nameless, in the city of Mendes. As a result of the faint-heartedness of Nektanebo, Agesilaus' army was besieged in a delta town. The enemy began to encircle the town with a wall and a ditch, and Agesilaus showed his tactical skill by waiting until the ditch was almost complete before launching an attack upon the numerically superior enemy. Because fighting could only be conducted within a rather narrow area, delimited by the ends of the ditch, Agesilaus easily overcame his opponents and sent them into flight.¹¹

Agesilaus seems to have followed up this encounter some short time later with another attack upon the enemy, in which once again he proved his tactical skill. This time, he managed to bottle up his enemy on a piece of land surrounded by canals, so that the only way out was along the spit of land which Agesilaus held with his mercenaries. Again, the superior ability of the Greeks enabled them to defeat their Egyptian foes.¹² After this, Nektanebo tried to persuade Agesilaus to remain in his service, but the king was eager to return to Greece with the money he had received to bolster Sparta's war against Messene. He set off accordingly, even though it was still winter, with 230 talents of silver. On the homeward voyage, Agesilaus fell ill and died at a place on the coast of Libya known as the Harbor of Menelaus. His body was preserved in melted wax, for they had no honey, and transported back to Sparta for burial.¹³ Thus ended a long life and an extraordinary career.¹⁴

With the passing of Agesilaus, Sparta ended its last period of greatness on the international scene in Greece.¹⁵ Indeed, Sparta had lost its position as a major power in the years immediately following the Battle of Leuctra. Sparta's failure was not primarily a military one, nor even the result of demographic changes, important as these were, but rather a political one. Since the King's Peace, when Sparta was largely under the influence of Agesilaus and his policies, the state had followed a foreign policy that ever more alienated its subjects and allies. Once the myth of the invincibility of the Spartan army had been dispelled at Leuctra, Sparta was unable to devise new policies to stem the tide of disaffection from its league. And here again Agesilaus must be made to bear a major portion of the responsibility, because he was virtually unopposed within Sparta in this period. The Spartans seemed capable only of reaction to the initiatives of others from 370 on. Their one attempt to seize the diplomatic initiative, in 367, had resulted in disaster when Pelopidas persuaded the Great King to support his interpretation of the peace. And with the loss of the manpower of its allies, coupled with the disastrous decline in native Spartiate population and the refusal of the authorities to consider any measures that might have enlarged the franchise and the pool of homoioi, Sparta was no longer able to play the role of a great power. Its decline was swift, and it followed not so much from its military defeat at Leuctra as from the counterproductive foreign policy of repression and intervention which it had followed consistently from 386 on. To this extent, Agesilaus must shoulder the burden for the failure of the Spartan Hegemony.

Notes

1. Diod. 15.89.1; Plut. Ages. 35.3-4; Polyb. 4.33.8-9. See Ryder, Appendix 8, in Koine Eirene: General Peace and Local Independence in Ancient Greece, Oxford, 1965, pp. 140-44, and Tod, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions, 2 vols. Oxford, 1946-48, no. 145, 2:138-41.

2. Plut. Ages. 35.3-4.

3. See Isoc. 6 (Archid.) 11-13, 16-32, and 70-79, for arguments to this effect. The dramatic date seems to be about 367/6, but the ideas presented and their justification surely fit the end of the 360s.

4. See C. D. Hamilton, “Philip II and Archidamus,” in Philip II [Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Macedonian Heritage, edited by W. L. Adams and E. N. Borza. Washington, D.C., 1982], pp. 61-83, for detailed discussion of the reign of Archidamus, Agesilaus' son and successor, in this period.

5. Xen. Ages. 2.28-9.

6. J. Buckler, “Plutarch and the Fate of Antalkidas,” GRBS [Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies] 18 (1977):139-45.

7. Plut. Artax. 22.4; cf. Ryder, Koine Eirene, p. 81.

8. Diod. 15.92.2.

9. Xen. Ages. 2.28; Plut. Ages. 40.2. See Hamilton, “Etude chronologique” [“Etude chronologique sur le règne d'Agésilas.” Ktema 7 (1982)], 281-96. On the history of this period in Egypt, see F. K. Kienitz, Die politische Geschichte Aegyptens vom 7. bis zum 4. Jahrhundert vor der Zeitwende (Berlin, 1953), pp. 92-99.

10. Plut. Ages. 37.1-6; Diod. 15.92.3-5; cf. Xen. Ages. 2.30-31.

11. Plut. Ages. 38.1-39.4; Diod. 15.93.2-5.

12. Plut. Ages. 39.5.

13. Plut. Ages. 40; Nepos, Ages. 8.7; Diod. 15.93.6; cf. Xen. Ages. 2.31.

14. See M. A. Flower, “Agesilaus of Sparta and the Origins of the Ruler Cult,” CQ, [Classical Quarterly] n.s. 38 (1988):123-34, for a discussion of the tradition found in Plutarch (Mor. 210D) that Agesilaus had received, and rejected, an offer of divine honors, probably from the Samians, around 394. He had also forbidden the making of any images or pictures of himself (Plut. Ages. 2.2). Thus, his reputation would be based on the record of his deeds and his words, not as a god but as a hero, as he hoped. His accomplishments were filtered, first by Xenophon, and later by Plutarch, according to their own purposes and objectives in writing about the king.

15. For recent treatment of Sparta after the 360s, see L. J. Piper, Spartan Twilight (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1986); and P. Cartledge and A. Spawforth, Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: A Tale of Two Cities (New York, 1989). Cartledge and Spawforth argue, in particular, that Sparta played a role of some importance in the Hellenistic world, but it is undeniable that the shadow of Macedon lay over Greece from the reign of Philip II until the coming of Rome.