SOURCE: Cartledge, Paul. “The Spartan Empire, 404-394.” In Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta, pp. 347-59. London: Duckworth, 1987.

[In the following essay, Cartledge recounts the historical events associated with the pinnacle of Spartan imperialism between the defeat of Athens (404) and the outbreak of the Corinthian War (395).]

The period from 404 to 360 … has been characterized generally as ‘The decline of the Greek Polis-world’ (Bengtson 1977, 253-91) and in specifically Spartan terms as ‘The policy of the Strong Hand and End’ (Berve 1966, 173-207).¹ Decline, power-politics, finis: few would cavil at this choice of categories to encapsulate Sparta's experience during this half-century. But the paradox it embodies is worth underlining. Sparta's most comprehensive military victory engendered or precipitated the downfall of what had long been accounted the model Greek military state.

So too the extent of Sparta's fall from grace and power should be emphasized. In 400, Xenophon would later nostalgically recall, the word of a Spartan commander or governor was virtually law throughout the Aegean Greek world. By 360 Sparta had been stripped not only of her Aegean empire, not only of her far more deeply rooted Peloponnesian hegemony, but even of half her own nuclear polis territory. Here in Messenia the former Helots had achieved in addition to their personal freedom the rights of citizenship in their own polis of Messene, and as ‘the Messenians’ they were actually allied to some of Sparta's former Peloponnesian League allies—the League itself, one of the major functions of which had been to help Sparta repress the Helots, being a thing of the past since 365. Between them Argos and two new foundations of the early 360s, Messene and Megalopolis, now hemmed Sparta into the south-east Peloponnese, a last bastion or enclave from which she would be unable to break out decisively for over a century. In short, the peripeteia of Sparta in the four and a half decades between the fall of Athens and the death of Agesilaos was as complete as it well could be. Why this should have happened we shall attempt to explain later. For the moment our object is to outline how.

Sparta was grouped by the grand systematizer A. J. Toynbee in his highly heterogeneous, multinational company of ‘arrested civilizations’ along with the Polynesians, Eskimos, Nomads and Osmanlis. In reality, though, Sparta had no divine dispensation from the immutable law of change to which all human societies are subject, and the Sparta that eventually won the Athenian War in 404 was very different—politically, economically, socially, militarily—from the Sparta that had begun it in 431. For Sparta had defeated Athens at sea, not on land, through the agency of largely mercenary sailors rather than her own citizen and allied hoplites. She owed her victory essentially to Persian money, notwithstanding the contradiction between Persian aid and Sparta's heavily advertized claim to be fighting for the liberty of all Hellenes; and she had won, finally, under the leadership of Lysander, a man who was not simply not a king nor even a member of the Gerousia (Spartan Senate) but of doubtful social origins and technically speaking not in supreme command of the Spartan forces at the time. Even so, it was again Lysander who set his seal on the manner in which Sparta exploited her paradoxical victory.

In autumn 405 Lysander had destroyed all but a handful of Athens' active warfleet at Aigospotamoi (‘Goat's Rivers’) in the Hellespont (modern Dardanelles). Athens' wheat-supply from the northern shore of the Black Sea being cut off, and with no immediate prospect of remedying the shortfall of cereals from other potential overseas sources (Cyprus, Egypt, Sicily), it was only a matter of time before Athens was forced to capitulate through the sort of mass starvation that the city was not to experience again until the Nazi occupation. Lysander did his best to shorten that interval by concentrating Athenian citizens and people of Athenian origin in Athens and its port city of Peiraieus. He also grabbed the chance offered by the temporary absence of his friend and benefactor Cyrus the Younger (younger son of the dying Persian Great King Darius II and Parysatis) to instal exceedingly narrow partisan regimes of fanatical oligarchs known generically as dekarchies (‘ten-man rules’) on the Aegean coast of Turkey and the major Aegean islands such as Thasos. The loyalty of these regimes was in the first instance to Lysander not Sparta.

This was the background against which Athens surrendered in early spring 404 and Sparta had to decide Athens' fate. Many of Sparta's inner circle of allies, the members of the so-called Peloponnesian League, were inclined to the harsh view that Athens should be made a desert and that that should be called a peace. But the leaders of opinion in Sparta were agreed that Athens should be spared, though demilitarized and diplomatically isolated, and their view prevailed first over the Spartan Assembly and then over the majority of Peloponnesian League delegates or representatives at a meeting in Sparta of the League congress. Reasons for holding this view differed, however. Men like the Agiad King Pausanias might genuinely have believed Sparta's officially expressed motive, namely that Sparta could not annihilate a city that had done so much to preserve Hellas during the Persian Wars of 480-479. But even the philo-Spartan Xenophon (author of the only surviving more or less continuous narrative account of the period under consideration here) allows us to perceive that Sparta's real reason for preserving Athens was rather less than altruistic. For Athens was to serve as a watchdog of Spartan interests in central Greece against the two allies who had spoken most vehemently in favour of Athens' destruction and who were the most aggrieved by the way in which Sparta appeared to them to be turning a joint victory to her sectional advantage: Corinth and (especially) the Boiotian Confederacy dominated by Thebes.

Naturally, the Spartan most warmly supporting the idea of a puppet Athens was Lysander, who at this juncture still enjoyed the co-operation of the Eurypontid King Agis II (the older half-brother of Agesilaos). Formally, Sparta's peace terms had not imposed any particular form of government on Athens. But Lysander had in mind a variation on the dekarchies already established or in process of being established elsewhere; and on the pretext that Athens had not destroyed her Long Walls linking Athens to Peiraieus and the fortifications of Peiraieus itself within the stipulated time-limit, he was able to intervene directly at Athens in the summer of 404. Through a mixture of deceit and terror he brought about the installation of a narrow oligarchy of thirty men, who were to be abetted by a commission of ten in the Peiraieus. As a political ideal, Sparta had long exercised a curious fascination over frustrated Athenian would-be oligarchs: now was the chance for the maverick intellectual Kritias (a relative of Plato), the supple Theramenes and their colleagues to knock some properly Spartan ‘good sense’ (sôphrosunê) and ‘good order’ (eunomia) into the unruly Athenian masses who so stubbornly clung to their democratic ideology. However, the resistance they expected and encountered soon prompted the junta to apply for a Spartan garrison, and their request was swiftly met by the dispatch of 700 men (perhaps of the elite class of ex-Helots specially liberated for military service called Neodamôdeis) under a Harmost or military governor.

Thus controlled Athens was but one cog in a machinery of Spartan empire that extended directly as far north as Byzantion at the gateway to the Black Sea and that had connections as far east as the Persian administrative capital of Susa (through Cyrus, who was at any rate preferable in the eyes of both the Asiatic Greeks and the Spartans to the new King Artaxerxes II's loyal henchman Tissaphernes, former viceroy of Lydia, Ionia and Caria) and as far west as Syracuse in Sicily (through Dionysios I, who was considerably indebted to Sparta for helping him maintain the tyranny he had usurped in 405 in face of a massive Carthaginian attack on Greek Sicily). It is not known in any detail how this new Spartan empire was run, but it was certainly no less and it was very likely more dictatorial and exploitative than its Athenian predecessor. A contemporary playwright likened Sparta's decision to step into the imperialist shoes she had yanked from the feet of Athens to the pouring of vinegar by tavern-women into the sweet wine of liberty. Yet the running of an overseas empire of this kind caused as many social, economic and political problems for Sparta as it did for her unfortunate subjects; and the very fact that Sparta had acquired an empire was sufficient to alienate—or alienate still further—the sympathies of some of Sparta's more prominent and powerful Peloponnesian League allies. Sparta has been charged, unfairly, with failing to grasp the opportunity to create a federal United States of Greece in and after 404. A justifiable charge would be that she exploited her victory over Athens extremely selfishly and shortsightedly, monopolizing the material perquisites of empire and paying little or no heed to the sensibilities of either subjects or allies.

It was the latter who first raised their heads in overt opposition at Thebes, Corinth, Megara and Elis by resisting Sparta's diktat that exiled opponents of the Athenian junta of the Thirty should not be harboured. Indeed, the Thebans at the presumed instigation of Hismenias, who was now commencing his two decades of remarkably successful opposition to Spartan policies, went so far as to pass a counter-decree penalizing any Thebans who did not give them sanctuary. It was from Thebes, too, and with Theban connivance and assistance, that a band of Athenian exiles under Thrasyboulos set out in midwinter 404/3 to do battle with the Thirty.

Out of deference to their Spartan suzerain and constrained by the shortage of funds that had encouraged them to rob and kill wealthy residents of Attika regardless of their political opinions, the Thirty had left unguarded the chain of forts along Athens' frontier with Boiotia. Too late did they react to the seizure of one of these, Phyle, and Thrasyboulos with a swelling body of followers was able to take advantage of the inclement seasonal weather to make his way to the Peiraieus, the heart of the democratic Resistance. There he fought and won the Battle of Mounychia early in 403, causing the deaths of Kritias and another relative of Plato, Charmides (one of the Peiraieus Ten commissioners), and precipitating the downfall of the Thirty. As a precaution the latter had prepared for themselves with characteristic brutality a retreat at Eleusis, the nearest point in Attika to the Peloponnese; and it was to this bunker that most of the surviving remnant of the Thirty now fled, while the government of Athens was assumed by another oligarchic clique.

Both sets of oligarchs appealed to Sparta for further support, which came in an unusual form. Rather than call out the Peloponnesian League levy, the enthusiasm if not the loyalty of which was seriously in question, the Spartans appointed Lysander as harmost for Attika. To enable him to hire mercenaries, of which the Athenian War had thrown up a plentiful supply, they entrusted him with the large sum of 100 talents out of the 1500-2000 talents of booty and tribute that Lysander had been responsible for bringing to Sparta in 404. Lysander's brother Libys, the current nauarchos or Admiral of the Fleet, was ordered to co-operate with him by blockading the Peiraieus.

Since installing the Thirty in the summer of 404 Lysander had been notably active and on the whole notably successful. He had finally defeated after a siege Athens' staunchest ally, democratic Samos, and had predictably established a dekarchy of his partisans guaranteed by a garrison and harmost (Thorax, whose name means ‘breastplate’, a firm adherent of his). Less predictably, the restored oligarchy had voted Lysander divine honours, an unprecedented award for a living mortal, and Thorax had been executed by the Spartans, ostensibly for peculating public funds but partly also as a warning to Lysander not to overreach himself. But although a ban on the private possession of coined money by Spartans was in consequence of the Thorax affair imposed (or re-imposed), the Spartan state decided to continue to use coin (minted elsewhere of course, since Sparta did not strike coins before the third century and made do locally with a ‘currency’ of iron spits) for public, imperialist purposes. Thus fortified, Lysander persisted in gratifying his will to power (rather than material greed, from which he was conspicuously free) by interventions in the northern Aegean and north-west Asia Minor. If he was recalled to Sparta in 403 at the insistence of Sparta's former benefactor Pharnabazus, Persian satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia and rival of Tissaphernes, that was a matter of prudence on Sparta's part and not the prelude to Lysander's political disgrace as a similar recall had been for Regent Pausanias in 478.

Perhaps, though, the Gerousia and Ephors did not expect Lysander to be quite so doggedly one-dimensional in his political outlook or so loyal to his clients among the Thirty when they appointed him harmost for Attika. For not long after he had made it clear that he intended simply to reinstate what was left of the junta, King Pausanias was able to persuade a majority of the Ephors and—no less importantly—King Agis that he should be sent at the head of a Peloponnesian League army to restore a different sort of Spartan control over Athens. The Corinthians and Boiotians professed to be unable to discern the distinction between Lysander and Pausanias and refused to contribute their quota of troops. But after a sharp encounter in the Peiraieus Pausanias was able to show the two contending Athenian camps—‘the men from Peiraieus’ (roughly the democrats) and ‘the men of the City’ (broadly the oligarchs)—just where the real power over their destinies resided. Under Pausanias' aegis and with the approval of the Spartan authorities (Gerousia and Ephors) a General Amnesty for all except the members and agents of the extreme oligarchic cliques was declared and sworn, democracy was restored for most Athenians, but the unity of the polis of Athens was now sundered after some three centuries by Sparta's recognition of the Thirty's Eleusis bunker as a separate (and rabidly oligarchic) statelet.

This was a wise and statesmanlike settlement, not at all to be reduced to a matter of Pausanias' personal jealousy of Lysander as Xenophon and other ancient (and too many modern) commentators would have it. For Athens was now no less defenceless than she had been at the time of the original peace settlement of 404 and was yet further impoverished by the Thirty's depredations and hamstrung by extreme civil dissensions arising out of the Thirty's brief year or so of blood-drenched misgovernment. Moreover, Pausanias had snapped the ‘unnatural’ bond tying democratic Athenians to Sparta's oligarchically governed allies Corinth and Boiotia in opposition to Spartan imperialism, besides appearing genuinely to be honouring Sparta's repeated pledge to respect the autonomy of even the most subject of her subject-allies. When the Boiotians seized the disputed borderland of Oropos from Athens in 402, the politic nature of Pausanias' settlement transpired.

The friends of Lysander in Sparta, however, were beside themselves with fury at Pausanias, and in Agis they found a champion of their cause. In his case jealousy rather than policy does seem to have been the motive that prompted him to vote—and perhaps instigate the criminal proceedings—against Pausanias at his capital trial held on his return from Athens. The precise charge is unknown, but the burden of the accusation clearly was that Pausanias had been excessively lenient towards democrats and democracy. Eight years later that charge could be repeated and made to stick, but in late 403 Pausanias was acquitted by majority vote of the Spartan Supreme Court: fifteen Gerontes including Agis voted ‘guilty’, the other fourteen Gerontes and all five Ephors ‘Not Guilty’. The retrospective bearing on public policymaking of major political trials in Sparta could hardly be more graphically illustrated.

It is a separate and formally unanswerable question whether the opposition of Pausanias to Lysander over the treatment of Athens was part of a principled opposition to Lysandreian imperialism in general, on the moral ground that absolute power was actually corrupting those Spartans (harmosts, navarchs, and their subordinate officers) who were entrusted with its exercise abroad. The most that can be affirmed is that in the enforced leisure of his exile after 395 Pausanias composed a tract in which he apparently defended his understanding of the constitution prescribed by ‘Lykourgos’ (a largely if not wholly mythical early Spartan lawgiver) against the usurpations of power-hungry and venal Ephors. All the same, it is probably not accidental that between 403 and 395 (when in the absence of Agesilaos he was appointed to joint command with Lysander of Sparta's attack on Boiotia) Pausanias was conspicuous by his absence from the fray in Sparta's most frenetically active phase of imperialist expansionism. The stage was thus left to the kings of the Eurypontid royal house, successively Agis and Agesilaos.

With Athens temporarily resubjugated, it was thought necessary to discipline those allies who since spring 404 had shown a regrettable willingness to oppose Spartan wishes with regard to Athens. Since they were not yet ready to take on Corinth and Boiotia directly, the Spartans aimed their punitive anger first at little Elis, with whom they had been at odds on and off since the Persian Wars. Agis, who had personally been humiliated by the Eleians and who burned to retrieve the severe political defeat he had suffered by the acquittal of Pausanias, was far from reluctant to lead the attack in 402. Even the ire of Agis, however, was overbalanced by his typically Spartan superstitious dread of earthquakes, which he thought betokened the displeasure of Poseidon. So it was not until 401 that the Peloponnesian League campaign began in earnest—once again without Boiotian or Corinthian participation.

Lysander's influence had been eclipsed in 403 when and because the two kings had transiently coalesced against him. But although it was probably in 403/2 that Sparta withdrew official support from the dekarchies and perhaps then too that Lysander failed in successive attempts to suborn oracular blessing for a revolutionary change in the terms of eligibility for the Spartan kingship, he was by no means a spent political force in Sparta, not least because Agis will have found him a useful ally against Pausanias. Thus Sparta's decision in 402 covertly and rather insubstantially to back Cyrus in his attempted coup against Artaxerxes bears the hallmark of Lysandreian thinking. Not only was Lysander personally friendly with and deeply in the debt of Cyrus, but the forcible replacement of Artaxerxes by Cyrus and the resultant power vacuum in western Asia Minor (where Cyrus had resumed his superior satrapal command in 404 or 403, thanks to Parysatis and greatly to the chagrin of Tissaphernes) would offer Lysander scope for recreating something like the personal network of empire that he had achieved in 405-4. Nor will Lysander have been displeased by Cyrus' appointment of Klearchos as chief recruiting and commanding officer of the Greek mercenaries on whom Cyrus was relying for victory; for Klearchos was a man in the Lysandreian mould whom the Spartans had recalled from his harmostship of Byzantion in 402 in the same anti-Lysandreian spirit in which they had withdrawn support from Lysander's dekarchies. If, on the other hand, Cyrus should fail in his risky venture, Sparta would not be irretrievably compromised in the eyes of Artaxerxes, whose father had been a good friend to Sparta when it mattered in 408/7.

In the event Cyrus did fail, being killed and so defeated on the battlefield of Cunaxa north of Babylon in summer 401. So much, it might have been thought, for Lysander's—or Sparta's—pretensions to imperial control in Asia as well as the Aegean proper and in the approaches to the Black Sea. Yet late in 400, as the culmination of a chronologically fortuitous conjunction of events and of a period of frantically unstable policy-making in respect of the Persian question, Sparta declared war on Artaxerxes in the name of the liberty of the Asiatic Greeks. Behind this fateful decision, which embroiled Sparta on the Asiatic mainland for a largely fruitless decade and distracted her from a sounder policy of retrenchment closer to home, lay two major developments: an extraordinary display of successful imperial expansion in mainland Greece; and the accession of Agesilaos.

Early in 400 Agis had eventually ‘brought the Eleians to their senses’, that is inflicted severe economic losses upon them and mulcted them of their perioikis or mini-empire in Triphylia and environs. He had not apparently stripped them of their democratic constitution, but he had borrowed another of Lysander's techniques of imperial rule by establishing a Spartan harmost at Epitalion with a garrison in 401. This is the only harmostship known to have been created by Sparta in the Peloponnese at any time, although the practice was imitated by Sparta's enemies Pharnabazus and Konon on the Spartan island of Kythera in 393 and by the Thebans at Sikyon and Tegea in the 360s. No more, however, is heard of the Epitalion harmost after he had done his job of bringing Elis to terms, and thereafter Sparta formally speaking ruled her Peloponnesian subjects in the traditional way, through ‘convenient’ oligarchies (with a couple of exceptions), even if her attitude towards them grew steadily more imperialistic. Elis remained an overtly loyal member of the Peloponnesian League until 371.

About the same time as Elis was disciplined Sparta saw to another piece of outstanding Peloponnesian business. Two generations earlier Sparta's enemy within, the Helots (especially those of Messenia) had risen in a great revolt. Perhaps conscious of an earlier act of sacrilege towards Helots suppliants, the Spartans in about 460 permitted the surviving Messenian Helot rebels to go free, provided that they never set foot in the Peloponnese again. The Athenians, then openly hostile to the Spartans, cunningly helped these Messenian exiles to resettle at Naupaktos at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf. From there they more than repaid the Athenian kindness by their aid to Athenian fleets during the Athenian (or Peloponnesian) War and by the crucial role they played in the seizure and garrisoning of Pylos in Messenia in 425. Eventually in 409 the Spartans extricated this dagger from their vitals by recapturing Pylos, and the Messenians withdrew to Naupaktos and the island of Kephallenia. In about 400 with the aid of treachery from inside the Spartans saw to the removal of the Messenian ex-Helots from Naupaktos and Kephallenia, from where they took ship to Sicily and North Africa. But it was not to be long before they and their descendants returned in triumph to the motherland of Messene.

After concluding the settlement with Elis Agis returned to central Greece after an interval of four years in order to fulfil the customary pious obligation to dedicate a tithe of the spoils of war to Apollo at Delphi in Phokis. It would not be unreasonable to suppose that he combined policy with his piety. For later in 400 Sparta became involved once more in an area of central Greece not far north of Delphi where Agis had been notably active in the winter of 413/2. Through Herippidas Sparta now regained control of her military colony of Herakleia in Trachis not far from Thermopylai (founded in 426 but bitterly resented both by the immediately local population and, scarcely less, by the Boiotians). By then Agis was dead, and Herippidas was at any rate later a particular associate of Agesilaos. But the policy is consistent with Agis' aggressively imperialist posture at the end of his life. At about the same time, too, Sparta was drawn yet further north into the complicated affairs of Thessaly, then a loose federation dominated by the ‘baronial’ families of the three major (and rival) centres of Larissa, Pherai and Pharsalos. To counteract the intervention of the unusually successful Macedonian king Archelaos at Larissa in northern Thessaly, it appears that Sparta was asked to contribute a garrison to the defence of Pharsalos, the most southerly of the major centres. Simultaneously Sparta established close relations with Lykophron, dynast of Pherai to the east, who had pretensions to a hegemony over all Thessaly. In short, Sparta now dominated the entire area from the northern border of Boiotia to the southern border of Achaia Phthiotis, a remarkable extension of imperial ambition and a menace most particularly to Sparta's disaffected ally the Boiotian Confederacy.

It was therefore when Sparta was in expansionist mood that Agis died in the summer of 400 and was succeeded by Agesilaos (II) after a sharp and prolonged wrangle over the succession. In this Lysander played a prominent part by persuading the Gerousia to prefer the claims of his former beloved to those of Agis' belatedly recognized teenage son Latychidas. Coincidentally in that same summer Tissaphernes returned to the Asia Minor coast with his satrapal powers renewed by a grateful Artaxerxes. He promptly sought to realize the titular authority over the Greek cities of Asia ceded by Sparta to Persia in 412/1 by besieging Kyme in Aiolis, but the Ionian Greeks collectively appealed for protection to the only possible Greek source of it, Sparta, despite her poor track record as a defender of the Hellenic faith.

Sparta was no friend of Artaxerxes or Tissaphernes, but it was another matter entirely to declare war openly on Persia. Not only could this be construed legitimately as the height of ingratitude for services rendered in the Athenian War, but it could also lead to extensive campaigning on the continent of Asia in conditions for which Sparta was militarily ill-equipped. On the other hand, there was a sense in which Sparta had to accede to the Greeks' request for aid, in order both to repair the damage caused by her previous cession of them to Persian suzerainty and to make good her present claim to be champion of Hellas. Moreover, Lysander and Agesilaos each had their reasons for favouring such an enterprise, the former to rebuild his power-network in the Aegean, the latter to win the kind of glory that his natal station and perhaps his physical disability (congenital lameness in one leg) had so far denied him. Thibron was thus despatched late in 400 as area harmost for western Asia Minor to command Sparta's war-effort against the oriental despotism of Artaxerxes' Persia embodied by Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes.

It would have been remarkable if Agesilaos had been sent at the outset instead of the non-royal (though doubtless elite) Thibron. No Spartan king, indeed no Spartan commander, had ever campaigned specifically and exclusively on the continent of Asia, though both Regent Pausanias and King Latychidas II had done so marginally. But even had Agesilaos burned to succeed Thibron when he was recalled in disgrace in autumn 399, there was a special obstacle to his doing so: the conspiracy hatched by one Kinadon some time before late summer of that year. The conspiracy proved abortive, thanks largely to the smooth functioning of Sparta's normal procedures for internal surveillance. But in this movement of the under-classes of Spartan society there surfaced briefly all the accumulated tensions, jealousies and hatreds engendered and exacerbated by the Athenian War and by Sparta's development of an Aegean empire. To judge from this affair, the wonder is not that Sparta collapsed as a great power after 371 but that she had ever assumed the position of Aegean dominance she held in 400.

The ringleader, Kinadon, is otherwise unknown to fame. He was by birth of Spartiate origin but had apparently been degraded from full Spartiate political status by poverty, that is by inability to meet his monthly mess-bills (paid in produce from Helot-worked allotments). Such men will have resented most keenly their exclusion from the fruits of empire. The other three major categories of plotters—or alleged plotters—were Perioikoi (personally free but disfranchised subjects of Sparta living within the borders of Lakonia and Messenia), the elite ex-Helot Neodamodeis already mentioned, and inevitably the Helots themselves. Not all individual members of these groups were as anxious to devour the Spartiates raw as Kinadon and his few close associates liked to pretend. But the conspiracy does perfectly capture the contradiction between the tiny and shrinking number of Spartiates (less than 3000 at this date, not much more than a thousand a quarter of a century later) and their many times more numerous subjects within the polis of Lakedaimon (as Sparta was officially called)—not to mention the perhaps three to four million souls in the Spartan empire as a whole. If the conspiracy was aborted so easily and secretly—but for Xenophon's intimacy with Agesilaos, we would surely never have heard of it—that was because the Spartan state was in a sense entirely organized for counter-insurgency and had long since mastered the art of dividing and ruling by multiplying social statuses and sub-statuses among the subordinate classes and applying judiciously the carrot and the stick as and when appropriate.

Thibron's campaign in Asia had begun satisfactorily enough, and after incorporating the remnant (?5000) of Cyrus' Greek mercenaries now led by Xenophon he had some 12,000 troops under his overall command. However, to the two structural deficiencies—in cavalry and siege-equipment—that were to mar Sparta's chances of lasting success for most of the Asiatic campaign as a whole (399-391) Thibron unfortunately added an alarming deficiency of tact. It was one thing to try to live off the country in the traditional Greek hoplite manner (rather than make elaborate, costly and insecure arrangements for long lines of supply by sea), but quite another to live off the country of one's allies at their expense. For allowing his troops to plunder the territory of Sparta's allies Thibron was recalled and replaced by the far cannier Derkylidas, another close associate of Agesilaos but one who allegedly had a distressingly un-Spartan fondness for spending long periods on service overseas far away from the officially imposed austerities and public humiliations of a bachelor Spartan life.

Derkylidas began more spectacularly well than had Thibron, prising a sort of sub-satrapy of Greek cities in the Troad from the grasp of Pharnabazus under cover of a truce with Tissaphernes. But by the end of 399 he was in a state of truce with both satraps and in spring 398 was only too happy to renew the truce with them in order to busy himself with staking Sparta's claim to hegemony of the Thracian Chersonese (Gallipoli peninsula) by rebuilding a wall across its neck that had originally been constructed by an Athenian dynasty in the later sixth century. Within the wall's protection there were now settled what can only be described as colonists from Sparta's own home territory. It is not known whether these settlers were degraded Spartiates, Perioikoi or liberated Helots, but it is hard to resist the notion that Sparta was not unwilling to disembarrass herself by this expedient of malcontents in the wake of the Kinadon affair. A similar motive could lie behind Sparta's granting permission to her friend and ally Dionysios of Syracuse to recruit mercenaries from the same geographical source in both 398 and 397.

Derkylidas next turned his attention to Atarneus in Aiolis, which had for several years been a nest of democratic, anti-Spartan exiles from the island-state of Chios. But the siege of Atarneus took him many months and was not concluded until spring or early summer 397. Pharnabazus had not been inactive in the interim. Seeing that Sparta could win no decisive victory in Asia over either him or Tissaphernes and that on the other hand he could only defeat Sparta decisively at sea, thereby cutting her communications with mainland Greece and forcing the recall of her troops, he had applied successfully to Artaxerxes for permission and funds to raise a substantial fleet. To this end he was warmly supported by Euagoras, vassal ruler of Cypriot Salamis, and it was through the good offices of Euagoras that his guest and friend Konon (one of the two Athenian admirals to escape the carnage of Aigospotamoi) was promoted to a position equivalent to vice-admiral under Pharnabazus of the proposed fleet. By concluding, together with Tissaphernes, a further armistice with Derkylidas in early summer 397, the wily satrap bought even more time for the build-up of his fleet in Cyprus and Phoenicia, and it was not until late 397 or early 396 that the Spartans back home were belatedly apprised of this substantial threat.

At the prompting of Lysander and Agesilaos Sparta decided to step up the Asiatic campaign by appointing Agesilaos to an unprecedented (and his first) command in Asia and by calling for increased contributions of men from her Peloponnesian League allies. Not unpredictably, Boiotia and Corinth refused, thus maintaining their consistent opposition to Spartan policy since 404. No doubt they regarded the Spartan initiative less as the ‘Panhellenic’ war of liberation against Persia advertized by Agesilaos than as a way of tightening further Sparta's imperial grip on mainland Greece. More interestingly and revealingly, Athens too refused to make a contribution. True, Athens had not merely been a Spartan catspaw since the restoration of democracy in 403: she had resisted Sparta's desire for a restriction of the Athenian franchise to solid landowners in 403, had paid back Sparta's loan to the oligarchs to demonstrate her independence, had reincorporated Eleusis and made large-scale grants of citizenship to active resistance fighters in 401, had sent only a token force of unwanted (because tainted with oligarchy) cavalrymen to Thibron in 399 and had tried to open negotiations with Artaxerxes in 397. But not before 396 had she openly refused to meet her military obligations as a subject-ally of Sparta. For the moment, though, Athens' opposition was only potentially a worry to Sparta. For by controlling what Perikles had aptly called the ‘eyesore of Peiraieus’, the island of Aigina, through a harmost and by using it as a naval base, Sparta was able effectively to dominate shipping into and out of Athens, an Athens that in any case had no warfleet to speak of and inadequate defensive fortifications.

Much more immediately significant, therefore, was the opposition of Boiotia, which was manifested in a peculiarly humiliating and aggravating way towards Agesilaos in person. A century earlier, during the Persian Wars, a Spartan envoy to the tyrant of Syracuse had claimed that Agamemnon would groan aloud if he knew that Spartans were agreeing to share the hegemony of Greece with Gelon. Agesilaos too in 396 decided to exploit Sparta's supposed heritage from Agamemnon and imitate his sacrificing at Aulis in Boiotian territory before sailing for Asia Minor. The Boiotarchs (the eleven elected chief executives of the then Boiotian Confederacy), especially the four Theban ones, had other ideas and sent horsemen literally to break up Agesilaos' sacrifice. That, they implied, was all they thought of Agesilaos' self-proclaimed Panhellenism, and behind this implication there lurked a threat of further resistance to Sparta in Greece. Agesilaos, anxious to take up his Asiatic command, chose to ignore the threat, but he interpreted the disruption of his pious and heroic sacrifice as personally as could possibly be imagined. This was the origin of his great hatred for the state of Thebes, despite his family connections with prominent Thebans through his father-in-law. At the time, perhaps, he did not also interpret the Boiotian effrontery as an inauspicious omen for the outcome of his Asiatic campaign. But when it was again the Boiotians who were most responsible for his recall to Greece in 394, such a supernatural construction will have recommended itself forcefully to his naturally superstitious disposition. His passionate and unremitting loathing of Thebes was not good for the health of Spartan foreign relations.

Nevertheless, in spite of the opposition of Boiotia, Corinth and Athens, and in spite of his lack of good cavalry and siege-equipment, Agesilaos was much the most successful of Sparta's commanders in Asia. He adapted far better than the rest to unfamiliar conditions of topography and manpower-resources, perhaps because he was not burdened by inherited traditions of command in mainland Greece; he displayed a strategic skill that occasionally bordered on brilliance; and he established his authority over what looks like a pioneering use of a General Staff from the very outset of his command by displacing Lysander both physically and figuratively. Thus both in 396 and 395 he inflicted great damage on the satrapy of Pharnabazus, not excluding his private ‘paradise’ (estates) at Daskyleion, and in 395 he defeated Tissaphernes in battle near Sardis so comprehensively that Artaxerxes was moved to arrange the execution of Tissaphernes and his replacement by the Grand Vizier of the entire Persian Empire, Tithraustes. At sea, however, Agesilaos failed and failed disastrously, chiefly through his neglect of this vital element.

It was the build-up of a Persian fleet (mainly Phoenician) under Pharnabazus and Konon with the aid of Euagoras that had prompted the appointment of Agesilaos in the first place. But Agesilaos did nothing to prevent Konon from bringing about the revolt of Rhodes, Sparta's main naval base hereabouts, in the summer or autumn of 396, and Konon was also able to intercept supplies sent to Agesilaos by Sparta's Egyptian ally Nepherites I (Egypt had been in revolt from Persia since 404 and was to remain so until 343). In 395, when Agesilaos' success on land led the Spartan home authorities rashly to entrust him unprecedentedly with the supreme command by sea as well as by land, Agesilaos committed a fatal error of nepotism in appointing his no doubt brave but totally inexperienced and (as it proved) fatally incompetent brother-in-law Peisandros as his locum tenens at sea.

The revolt of Rhodes was, in retrospect, the turning-point not just of Sparta's Asiatic venture but also of Sparta's imperial progress in mainland Greece. Towards the end of 396 Pharnabazus despatched to Greece a Rhodian agent bearing gifts of cash and promises of more to come to the leading anti-Spartan politicians in Thebes, Corinth, Athens and Argos. These were not strictly bribes (though the Greek word dôron did service for both ‘gift’ and ‘bribe’), since the politicians in question needed no persuading that Sparta ought to be resisted militarily. They were rather inducements to these men and their respective citizenries to turn from passive to active opposition. Even so, it was Sparta who made the first aggressive moves in what was to prove a decade of war by launching a two-pronged pre-emptive strike against Boiotia in or about August 395, using as a pretext Boiotia's support for her (West?) Lokrian allies in their quarrel with Sparta's allies in Phokis.

Lysander had been demoted by Agesilaos at Ephesos in the summer of 396 and sent off to perform useful service in detaching the Paphlagonians from Pharnabazus through the good offices of a high-ranking Persian subordinate of the satrap. He had returned to Sparta later that year and perhaps then brought a prosecution against the Ephor who had been most instrumental in undermining his policy towards Athens in 403. Probably, too, he had not abandoned his revolutionary plans to make himself eligible for the Spartan kingship. But although he was obviously at odds with Agesilaos on the question of which of them was to direct Spartan policy, he saw eye-to-eye with him on the policy to be adopted towards Boiotia. Lysander was as surely behind his own appointment to a joint command in Boiotia with Pausanias in late summer 395 as he had been behind the appointment of Agesilaos to the Asiatic command in 396.

The oddity of Lysander's collaborating with his former—and presumably present—opponent Pausanias is easily explained. Only a Spartan king could lead out the full Peloponnesian League levy, and with Agesilaos being in Asia Minor Pausanias was the only available king. Pausanias' subsequent conduct, however, strongly suggests that he was out of sympathy with the aims and objectives of Lysander in central Greece as well as Sparta, while the conduct of the latter implies that he was all too eager to capitalize on the absence of Agesilaos and the reluctance of Pausanias. For after collecting together an impressive force of Sparta's allies and dependencies in central Greece and effecting the considerable coup of severing Thebes' great rival Orchomenos from the Boiotian Confederacy, Lysander failed to wait for Pausanias as planned and plunged to his death in a headlong assault on Haliartos. Pausanias arrived shortly afterwards and, rather than fight on, concluded a truce with the Boiotians and their new Athenian allies in order to recover the bodies of the Spartan dead including Lysander (who was later buried outside Boiotian territory at Panopeus in Phokis). However, the friends of Lysander and Agesilaos, for once making common cause, were powerful enough to secure against Pausanias a sentence of death. This he obviated by going into permanent exile in Arkadia, from where he was reduced to largely symbolic acts of defiance towards the quickly established domination of Spartan counsels by Agesilaos.

The Battle of Haliartos is often seen as the first action of the so-called Corinthian War. It is perhaps better regarded as the last, that is the first unsuccessful, instance of the imperialist policy that Sparta had steadfastly pursued in Greece and the Aegean since the conclusion of the Athenian War. The failure of Sparta's smash-and-grab raid on Boiotia emboldened Corinth and Argos to combine forces with Athens and Boiotia (minus Orchomenos, where Sparta placed a garrison). It is the cementing of this Quadruple Alliance, to which other states in central and perhaps also northern Greece were soon attracted, that marks the beginning of the Corinthian War proper. It also signals the utter failure of Spartan foreign policy since the Athenian War.

The course of the Corinthian War is the subject of the following narrative chapter. But it remains to conclude here the story of Sparta's decade of aggressive imperialism since the defeat of Athens, by returning to the war at sea in the southern Aegean. The revolt of Rhodes from Sparta in 396 was consolidated in 395 by a democratic revolution. Peisandros nevertheless threw considerable energy into developing a fleet to match that of Pharnabazus and Konon, and by the summer of 394 he was in command of some 120 ships. This fleet was appreciably larger than either side had been able to muster in one place in the closing phase of the Athenian War (with the exception of the Battle of Arginousai in 406), but still it was inadequate both in quantity and in quality. The Persian satrap and the expatriate Athenian admiral between them crushed Peisandros off Knidos in early August 394 shortly before the solar eclipse of 14 August. This was the greatest Persian victory over Greeks since Athens' disaster in Egypt in 454.

Sparta did maintain a presence in Asia Minor until 389, but her trans-Aegean empire with its paraphernalia of harmosts, garrisons, narrow oligarchies, tribute in cash and kind, and obligatory military service was a thing of the past. Agesilaos, it is true, had not reimposed dekarchies in 396, as Lysander had wished. But he was no less committed to a policy of supporting oligarchy and opposing ideologically and pragmatically all manifestations of democracy. The force of the political reaction against Sparta after Knidos along the Aegean shoreline of Asia is largely to be explained by this oligarchic partisanship, and Agesilaos would have been well advised to heed the lesson for the future.

Note

1. Readers are … reminded that the absolute dating of this period is often controversial, although the sequence of events in the various areas of the world of Agesilaos is normally quite secure. Citations of ancient sources and modern bibliography may be found in the relevant introductory or thematic sections and are not repeated here in the narrative section. Perhaps it should also be added that these narrative chapters are in no way meant to contribute to what has been dubiously hailed as ‘the revival of narrative’.

Bibliography

Bengtson, H. (1977), Griechische Geschichte, von den Anfängen bis in die römische Kaiserzeit, 5th edn, Munich

Berve, H. (1966), Gestaltende Kräfte der Antike. Aufsätze und Vorträge zur griechischen und römischen Geschichte, 2nd edn, Munich

Toynbee, A. J. (1969), Some Problems of Greek History, Oxford (Part III: ‘The Rise and Decline of Sparta’, 152-417)