Chapter 8
Introduction
Xenophon says that the Battle of Coronea was unlike any other battle fought during his lifetime. And he should know: he probably fought in it himself. Going into the thick of combat alongside his friend, Agesilaus, King of Sparta, Xenophon struggled against the side of his own countrymen, the Athenians. What made this battle unique, other than the fact that our most important source for fourth-century BCE history participated in it and became a traitor to his country, was that after the initial clash between great armies, the fighting devolved into a straight-ahead duel between the Spartan and Theban wings, bitter enemies and Greece’s most formidable hoplites. Though Coronea was fought during the time when the hoplite phalanx was being supplanted by combined-arms forces, this engagement provides one of the clearest examples of a hoplite battle being a one-onone fight between cities. As Xenophon tersely describes what happened, at Coronea the Spartans and Thebans simply pushed, fought, killed and died.
Directions to the Site
Coronea is on the road between Thiva and the site of Chaeronea, so it makes sense to explore both battlefields in a single day. As with the other battlefields in Boeotia, we recommend using Thiva (the location of ancient Thebes) as a base, since the town offers several decent and well-priced hotels, a surprisingly charming central square area with fine cafes and tavernas, and a recently opened archaeological museum that is one of the most spectacular in all of Greece. From Thiva, head west for 30km on the main road between Thiva and Livadia. The approximate site of the battle is at the fork in the road where the route to Ag. Giorgios veers off to the left. Chaeronea can be reached another 30km to the west.
Historical Outline of the Battle
The Battle of Coronea was the second of the two major set-piece land battles fought during the Corinthian War (395-387 BCE). The first of the two, also covered by this book, took place earlier in the same year at the Nemea River, a massive clash of arms that had been a resounding Spartan victory. Though not as large as the Battle of the Nemea River, and not as clear a victory – and not even a battle featuring large roles for the unconventional soldiers that were becoming ever more common – Xenophon was right to insist on the special nature of the Battle of Coronea. Witnessing the battle as one of its participants on the Spartan side, Xenophon was profoundly stirred by this experience of bloody combat.
The Spartan King Agesilaus was the pre-eminent figure of the early fourth century BCE. Despite being born with a physical disability that caused him to limp, and despite not being born in the direct line of succession for the kingship, Agesilaus was manoeuvred onto the throne by the wily Spartan general Lysander. In time, however, Lysander grew too famous for his own good, and his one-time protégé Agesilaus betrayed him and seized a prime position of influence for himself. With Lysander out of the way, Agesilaus, firmly in control of the Sparta that had won the Peloponnesian War, became as close to the king of all Greece as anyone would achieve before Philip of Macedonia. The central focus of his rule was to unite the Greeks against their great common enemy, the Persian Empire.
After the Peloponnesian War, the Persian prince Cyrus enlisted the famed Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries, many of whom were Spartan, to join him in an attempt to overthrow his brother Artaxerxes, the reigning king of Persia. Cyrus and his mercenaries fought their way to a tactical victory at Cunaxa in 401, in what is today Iraq, but Cyrus himself was killed, along with any reason the Greeks had to be so deep in Asia. These Ten Thousand Greeks found themselves many hundreds of miles from home, in the heart of hostile territory. Their generals were soon murdered by Persian trickery to boot. Despite these obstacles, the Greeks made their way back to the sea on an epic journey of many months that was chronicled by Xenophon, one of the Ten Thousand who had been elected to replace the murdered generals. What the famous March of the Ten Thousand showed to the world was the rot at the heart of the Persian Empire. The Persians were so militarily weak and disorganized that they could not dispatch even a relatively small group of Greeks stranded deep in Persia’s own lands. Agesilaus took notice, and saw his chance to unite the Greeks once and for all.
Agesilaus styled himself as a new Agaememnon, that first Greek king to unite his countrymen against an enemy in Asia. In 396, Agesilaus gathered an army and invaded the Persian Empire itself, after first trying to sacrifice at Aulis in Boeotia, just as Agamemnon had done. Agesilaus was prevented from emulating his epic predecessor, however, when the Thebans took exception to this ostentatious sacrifice happening so close to their own territory. In Asia, Agesilaus racked up success after success, and took a great hoard of Persian plunder to boot. He was so successful that the Persians were forced to resort to their old tricks, namely using their vast wealth to bribe the Greeks into fighting each other. The Persians managed to convince many major Greek states, including Thebes, Athens, Argos and Corinth, to unite against the Spartans, which sparked the Corinthian War. When this coalition had united against them, the Spartan authorities sent word to Agesilaus that he was needed back in Greece. Rending his garments in protest, Agesilaus left a few soldiers in Asia, but took the majority of his army back across the Hellespont. The Persian plan had worked.
The first significant action of the new war was the Battle of the Nemea River, which was fought as Agesilaus was still on his return journey. Despite their king, who was a skilled commander, being absent, the Spartans managed to confront the coalition forces before the latter invaded Spartan territory, as had been the coalition’s plan. On the plain stretching between Corinth and Sikyon, where the Nemea River runs to the sea, the Spartan phalanx devastated their enemies’ forces, killing many thousands according to the ancient sources. When word of this Spartan victory reached Agesilaus at Amphipolis, he supposedly lamented the loss of so many fellow Greeks, who should have been allies in the fight to crush Persia. Moving on from Amphipolis, he crossed into Macedonia and then Thessaly, where he had to employ innovative tactics – including hollow infantry squares supported by cavalry – to contend with his mounted Thessalian enemies.
On his march, Agesilaus followed the same route as had been travelled by Xerxes nearly a century earlier, though the Spartan king found the pass at Thermopylae undefended. As he crossed into Boeotia, the coalition forces, fresh from their humiliation at the Nemea River, gathered en masse at Coronea, a town commanding a narrow plain in western Boeotia between Mt Helikon and Lake Kopais. Like Chaeronea a little further to the west, Coronea was one of those places in Greece where several battles were fought, since it had a flat and relatively confined plain and was located on a strategic route between north and south. Bolstered by his successes in Asia and Thessaly, Agesilaus opted to take his enemies head-on at this defensive position.
The best scholarly estimates reckon that each side at Coronea had around 15,000 hoplites. J.F. Lazenby provides the fullest discussion about the troops on either side, gleaning what he can from Xenophon’s account and later sources. Agesilaus had a division, or mora, and a half of full Spartiates, as much as 1,680 men. Among the Lacedaemonian contingent he also had the force of freed slaves he had with him in Asia; the remnants of the Ten Thousand (among whom was Xenophon) who were commanded by the Spartan Herippidas; allies from Greek cities in Asia Minor and the Hellespont; and troops from Phocis and Orchomenos who had joined him as he marched south. He also had lots of mercenaries, including peltasts, and plenty of cavalry, but these troops only played a small role in the battle even though they outnumbered the similar troops of the other side. Agesilaus placed the Lacedaemonians on his right wing, which he commanded, the troops under Herippidas in the centre and the Orchomenians on the left, who were fighting only a few kilometres from Orchomenos itself. The anti-Spartan alliance had essentially the same forces that had been defeated at the Nemea River: the primary members of the alliance, including Thebes, Athens, Argos and Corinth, and various other allied states. Fighting close to their own homes, the Thebans were on the right wing, opposite the troops from Orchomenos. The Argives took up the coalition left, dangerously positioned across from the Spartans. The other allies held various positions in the centre of the line.
Coronea Map 1. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
Xenophon’s eyewitness account of the fighting is stirring. The two phalanxes approached each other in total silence until within a stade of each other, just under 200 metres. Then the Thebans belted out their war cry and charged towards their enemy. When the armies were half this distance apart, the troops with Herippidas, who were in the centre of the Spartan line and included battle-hardened veterans of the Ten Thousand – along with Ionians, Aeolians and Greeks from the Hellespont – dashed out at a run in front of the main Spartan phalanx. This sudden attack, so unusual for Spartan armies, utterly perplexed the soldiers in the centre of the confederate line, who turned and ran as soon as spear clashed with spear. The Argives on the confederate left fared even worse: they ran for the hills of Helikon before Agesilaus and the Spartan right even reached them.
Some mercenaries in the Spartan line, so elated with their easy victory, were actually about to crown Agesilaus as a victor, when word came that the Thebans on the confederate right had broken through the troops from Orchomenos and were now plundering the Spartan baggage train, which, as J.K. Anderson points out, was full of the unheard-of treasures plundered from Asia. Agesilaus then wheeled his army around to face the Thebans, either turning to the left as the Spartans had done at Mantinea and the Nemea River, or performing a complete about-face, perhaps by a complicated manoeuvre, as suggested by Lazenby, that had the Spartan hoplites turn around and then rearrange themselves until they held their original positions in the line. So far, the battle had gone like so many hoplite battles had before. The right wings of both sides had easily defeated the left of the other, leaving the right wings to duke it out. At this point, however, the Battle of Coronea took on the character that forced Xenophon to consider it the standalone and defining struggle of the early fourth century BCE.
What Agesilaus decided to do regarding the Thebans was, according to Xenophon, certainly courageous but by no means safe. Plutarch, offering moral lessons to his readers from the characters of history, goes further. He says that Agesilaus was carried away by a lust for conquest and by thumos, a Homeric word meaning something like ‘passion’ or ‘fire’. When the plundering Thebans saw that the Spartans were on to them, they wanted to quit the field and join their comrades on Helikon. Agesilaus could have let the Thebans walk past the Spartan lines, and then hit them in the sides and rear, from a position of relative safety. This was the tactic employed by the victorious Spartan wing at the Nemea River, just weeks earlier. At Coronea, the Spartan king chose instead to plough into the Theban hoplites ‘face–to–face’, in Xenophon’s words. For their part, the Thebans had massed themselves in a deep formation, perhaps like that used at Delium to great effect, and were marching toward Helikon in strength. What Agesilaus had in mind was a true showdown between the Spartans and Thebans.
Coronea Map 2: The first phase of the battle. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
A straight-ahead battle between Spartan and Theban hoplites – instead of the Spartans and Thebans merely crushing the weaker left wings of their enemy, as was typical – was not a bad idea for Agesilaus. Thebes was now clearly the power Sparta had to reckon with, and if Agesilaus could kill large numbers of its best hoplites, and teach it a lesson like the one Sparta taught its enemies at Mantinea in 418, Thebes would pose much less of a threat in the future. As Xenophon would see in his lifetime, this was far from the last time Spartans and Thebans came face-to-face on the field of battle. At Coronea, the Thebans gave the Spartans a preview of what was to come. In later decades, Theban hoplites learned how to defeat the Spartans at their own game, but at Coronea it was not so clear who the superior troops were.
Xenophon is almost poetically spare in his description of the final clash. He simply says that the Spartans and Thebans pushed, fought, killed and died. For Xenophon, a lifelong soldier writing for others who likely had experience with battle, this was enough to convey the bloody melee. He adds only the chilling detail that there were neither shouts nor total silence, but only that strange sound that wrath and battle together produce. Plutarch adds some descriptive elements, especially regarding the valour and competence of the Thebans. According to Plutarch, the Theban hoplites fought vigorously and well, and Agesilaus was saved only by the dedication of the so-called volunteers, a hand-picked bodyguard that Xenophon does not mention. Despite the bravery of the volunteers, Agesilaus was still struck several times and wounded, and had to be carried away from the battle. In the end, the Thebans managed to get through the Spartan phalanx – either because the Spartans opened ranks to let them through, as Diodorus says, or because they broke through the old-fashioned way – and made it to Helikon. Diodorus, our only source for the battle’s casualties, says that 600 of the anti-Spartan alliance were killed, many of whom were Thebans, while 350 died on the Spartan side.
Coronea Map 3: The second phase of the battle. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
Xenophon’s account makes the battle seem like a Spartan victory, and technically the Spartans did win because they held the field and erected a trophy, while the Thebans needed to ask for a truce to collect their dead. Some of the Thebans had also taken refuge in the Temple of Athena Itonia, and Agesilaus, as master of the field, magnanimously and piously let them go. However, strategically the situation was different. The Thebans had broken through the Spartan lines, a feat with which they were overjoyed, gaining a new confidence in their abilities – as Plutarch emphasizes, but Xenophon ignores. Also, Agesilaus and the Spartans no longer tried to march through Boeotia. Instead, they went west to Delphi, where they dedicated a tithe, amounting to an astonishing 100 talents, from their Persian booty. They also tried to do some damage to the Locrians, but suffered many casualties in a few gritty skirmishes. Agesilaus and the main body of the Spartan army soon returned to the Peloponnese by crossing the Corinthian Gulf in ships, rather than trying to march through Boeotia and Theban territory again. Thus, the Battle of Coronea accomplished precious little for the Spartans, while it encouraged the Thebans to continue their own pursuit of hoplite excellence. As for the Corinthian War, events of the next several years centred on Corinth itself, with the Spartans avoiding all-out defeat but being harried enough to do the unthinkable in 387: ask the Persian king to broker a peace among the Greeks.
The Battle Site Today
Like Thermopylae, the Battle of Coronea is difficult to visualize today. In antiquity, much of Boeotia was covered by Lake Kopais, a large but shallow lake famous for its eels. In the early twentieth century, the lake was fully drained – after centuries of land reclamation – to allow for more agricultural production. Now the Kephissos River, which flows past Chaeronea, continues on past the site of Coronea, whereas in antiquity the river ended in the lake before crossing the plain where the battle was fought. Just as Chaeronea was an important chokepoint in antiquity where many battles were fought as armies tried to make their way into Boeotia from points north, the plain of Coronea was similarly strategic, forming a relatively narrow strip of land between Mt Helikon in the south and Kopais in the north. More than one battle was fought here, including an engagement during the so-called First Peloponnesian War in 447, in which the Athenians were decisively defeated. Before the Battle of Leuctra in 371, the Thebans massed most of their forces in front of Coronea, expecting the Spartan army to make its way toward Thebes by this route. In the event, however, the Spartans in 371 found a difficult, alternate passage into Boeotia. Today, some imagination is required to picture this plain, which is now many kilometres across, as a strategic pass fit for hoplite battle.
Another complication for the modern visitor is the fact that the modern village of Koroneia is at least 2km or so further into Mt Helikon than ancient Coronea would have been, a situation all too common when it comes to the modern names of Greek towns and villages. To find the approximate site of ancient Coronea, which offers a good view of the battlefield, turn south towards Ag. Giorgios at the crossroads about halfway between Thebes and Chaeronea (N38° 24.306"; E022° 57.744"). The crossroads themselves, lying as they do on the flat ground to the north of the mountain, are probably not far from where the battle was actually fought, though Pritchett locates the action some 3km to the north, near modern Mavrogia. Pritchett and others locate the sanctuary of Athena Itonia at the Church of the Metamorphosis in Mavrogia. Since Plutarch tells us that this sanctuary was near the Spartan camp at the time of the battle, the main action took place some distance to the south of the shrine, thus somewhere between the crossroads and Mavrogia. Lake Kopais was not far beyond the Spartan camp.
Fig. 8.1: The plain of Coronea, looking north towards the battle site. Authors’ photo.
Driving south from the crossroads, towards Ag. Giorgios and into the mountain, you can see the passes and slopes of Helikon, from which the Thebans and their allies came to the battle. Turning left off the road to Ag. Giorgios, follow the signs for Hiera Moni, which will lead you up the foothills of the northern part of Helikon, allowing you to gain some height and get a view of the plain. There is a lot of pottery scattered on the surface of this hill, perhaps indicating the site of ancient Coronea (N38° 23.763"; E022° 57.489"). Looking out over the battlefield from this position, visualize the Thebans and their allies moving north, with the Thebans on the right and the Argives on the left. The Spartan army came from the distance, moving south from a position near Mavrogia, which you can make out on a clear day. Agesilaus was on the right of his own line, matched against the unfortunate sacrificial lambs in the Argive contingent. The initial orientation of the armies is somewhat counterintuitive, since they didn’t fight in an east-west direction, as one might expect, with the lake on one flank and the mountain on another. After the opening clash, the Thebans broke through towards the Spartan camp at Mavrogia, whereas the Spartan right had pushed towards the mountain, driving their enemy into the hills in the direction of Coronea itself. The two right wings then marched against each other, either in a direction perpendicular to the original battle lines, or the complete reverse of the initial clash, before the Theban survivors also made their way back to the safety of Helikon.
Fig 8.2: Looking south towards the hills of Coronea and the pass over Helikon. Authors’ photo.
Further Reading
Ancient Sources
–Xenophon, Hellenica 4.3; Agesilaus 2.9-16
Our main source for this battle, Xenophon was probably a participant in the combat, and as such offers an unusually full account of the action. In addition, Xenophon was close friends with Agesilaus, the commander of the Spartan forces. This battle made a deep impression on Xenophon, who says that it was unlike any other battle of his age.
–Diodorus 14.84
This first-century BCE universal historian offers little additional information to supplement Xenophon’s account, other than plausible numbers for the casualties on both sides.
–Plutarch, Agesilaus 18-19
A first and second-century CE biographer, Plutarch was from nearby Chaeronea, and thus knew the area very well. Plutarch corrects Xenophon’s account somewhat, by emphasizing the Theban achievement in the battle since they bravely stood up to the Spartans. He also suggests that the Spartans deliberately opened gaps in their lines to let the Thebans through, which is unlikely to have taken place given the tactical capabilities of hoplite armies in combat.
Modern Sources
Books
–Anderson, J.K., Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley, 1970).
A pioneering study on fourth-century BCE warfare, Anderson offers a good narrative of this battle and other contemporary battles like it, complete with copious annotated quotations from Xenophon’s account.
–Lazenby, J.F., The Spartan Army (Warminster, 1985).
This leading military historian provides a critical account of the battle and its context, and is particularly useful in offering suggestions as to the size and composition of the two armies despite Xenophon’s usual silence on such matters.
–Pritchett, W.K., Studies in Ancient Greek Topograpy, Part II (Berkeley, 1969).
A thorough and convincing study of the battlefield topography, a must for any serious consideration of the battle. Pritchett, following other scholars before him, identifies the chapel of the Metamophosis, just north of Mavrogia, as the sanctuary of Athena Itonia, clarifying where the Spartan camp was, and therefore the location of the battle.