Greek city-state wars (395-362 bc). Defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian wars ended the artificial order imposed on a normally fragmented Greece by the great alliances headed by Athens and Sparta. What followed was a chaotic period in which Sparta, Thebes, and a renascent Athens jostled for power, with Persia stirring the pot. Fear of any one state growing powerful enough to dominate the others is the key to understanding the shifting alliances.
Thus fear of Sparta was essentially the cause of the Corinthian war (395-386), in which her former allies, Thebes and Corinth, made common cause with Athens and Sparta's inveterate rival in the Peloponnese, Argos. In attempting to coerce Thebes before the rest joined in, Lysander was killed at Haliartus, in 395, but in 394 Sparta crushed coalition forces at the battle of Nemea and King Agesilaus, returning from Asia Minor, thwarted an attempt to block his path at Koroneia. Thereafter the war on land became increasingly desultory, fought largely in and around Corinthian territory—hence the name. One significant incident was the defeat, in 390, near Corinth, of a force of 600 Spartans by Athenian light troops under Iphrikates.
In the end, the war was won and lost at sea. At first Persia, exasperated by Spartan interference in Asia Minor, culminating in Agesilaus' campaigns in 396-365, financed the building of a fleet. Under the command of the Athenian Conon, this defeated a Spartan fleet off Cnidus in 394, and rapidly removed all but a few vestiges of Spartan control in the Aegean. But the Persians, becoming alarmed at Conon's apparent revival of an Athenian empire, patched up relations with Sparta, and when a Spartan fleet, with Persian help, again cut Athens' supply line through the Hellespont, as Lysander had done in 405, the anti-Spartan coalition collapsed. The result was the notorious ‘King's Peace’, which, under cover of obliging all Greek states to respect each other's autonomy, in effect handed them over to the whims of a Persia-backed Sparta.
Sparta was now at the height of her power. Athens lost all her new-found empire, apart from some small islands; Thebes had to submit to the break-up of the Boeotian League, and in 382 came under the control of a pro-Spartan government after her citadel, the Cadmea, had been captured in a surprise Spartan attack. Corinth was obliged to abandon her alliance with Argos, in which, interestingly, the citizens of each apparently had reciprocal rights when in the other, and elsewhere in the Peloponnese, Sparta disciplined recalcitrant allies such as Mantineia and Phlius. Finally, in the north, Olynthus was forced to accept the status of a subject ally.
But then all began to go wrong for Sparta. In the winter of 379/8 Thebes was liberated by patriotic exiles, and Athens, infuriated by an abortive Spartan attack on the Piraeus, invited the Aegean states to join her in a new confederacy, to which Thebes also adhered. Repeated Spartan invasions of Boeotia were ineffective, and with Athens increasingly dominant at sea, Spartan was increasingly hard put to hold her own. Although punctuated by a series of ‘common peaces’, the 370s were a decade of almost continuous warfare, culminating in the Theban defeat of the Spartans at Leuctra, in 371.
The shattering of the myth of Spartan invincibility led to the break-up of the alliance through which she had dominated the Peloponnese for almost two centuries, and in 370 the Theban general, Epaminondas, led an army into the Peloponnese, and on into the Spartan homeland. Although he avoided a direct attack on Sparta itself, he re-established the Spartan helots' long-suppressed state of Messenia, confining a consequently weakened Sparta into the south-east corner of the Peloponnese, cut off from allies still loyal to her such as Corinth and Phlius.
But Thebes overstretched herself in turn by seeking to dominate both Thessaly in the north and the Peloponnese in the south, and the removal of the fear of Sparta weakened the ties binding her allies to her—typical was Athens' cold response to the news of Leuctra. Eventually she found herself facing a coalition of Sparta and her erstwhile friends, including Athens, Corinth, and even some of the Arcadian states. At the second battle of Mantineia, in 362, Epaminondas was killed in the moment of victory, and although Thebes remained the greatest military power in Greece for a number of years, her hegemony was effectively ended.
Bibliography
- Buckler, John, The Theban Hegemony 371-362 bc (London, 1980).
- Hamilton, Charles D., Sparta's Bitter Victories (London, 1979)
— John Lazenby
