Chapter 9
In This Chapter
● Ending the Peloponnesian War
● Marching to safety with Xenophon
● Heralding the Hegemony of Thebes
● Foretelling the rise of Macedonia
As the Peloponnesian War dragged on toward a finish (see Chapter 8), the era that historians consider ‘Classical Greece’ was also drawing to a close. The dominance of the Greek city-states like Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth didn’t have long to run. By around 350 BC, a new power emerged in the north - Macedonia - and the Greek world was never the same.
In this chapter, I look at what happened at the end of the Peloponnesian War and the chaos that followed. The end of Classical Greece is a complicated - but fascinating - period of ancient Greek history!
Weathering Tough Times: Athens
The failure of the Sicilian expedition in 413 BC (see Chapter 8) was almost a mortal blow for Athens in its long battle with Sparta and its allies, which had lasted decades. At a stroke, Athens lost several thousand fighting men, three of its leading generals and a large portion of its fleet. But although Athens was down, it certainly wasn’t out.
Preying on Athens: Another round of Persian intrigue
The rest of the Mediterranean was watching, including the Persians who’d waged a brutal on/off war against Greece from 490 to 478 BC. (See Chapter 6 for all the gory details.)
Unsurprisingly, the Spartans were the first to take advantage of Athens’s weakened stature. In 413 BC, the Spartans actually occupied Attica by making a permanent fort outside the town of Dekeleia. The Spartans also began constructing a new fleet.
Elsewhere, Athens’s empire was breaking up. Several places such as the island of Lesbos revolted, knowing that the Athenians were unlikely to be able to do anything about it.
Over-extending itself: Athens pesters Persia
At a time like this, you may be thinking that the last thing that the Athenians wanted was to get involved in another foreign war - but that’s exactly what happened. They threw their support behind the rebel Amorges who were trying to bring Karia away from Persian control.
Lending support to Amorges raised Persian awareness of Athens’s troubles, and the Persians began to negotiate with Sparta. In return for Spartan support, Persia made large financial contributions to help build the new Spartan fleet.
Staging a coup in Athens
By 411 BC Persia wasn’t the only power that was trying to benefit from Athens’s diminished status. While some of the Athenian fleet was moored at Samos, its commanders were contacted by good old Alcibiades (see Chapter 8). After doing a bunk to Sparta, Alcibiades became (unsurprisingly) unpopular with the Spartans and travelled to the Greek cities in Asia Minor, ending up as a paid advisor at the court of a Persian satrap (regional governor) called Tissaphernes. However, Alcibiades had his eye on returning to Athens - but on his own terms.
Alcibiades knew that returning to Athens was going to be immensely difficult. He was still technically on the run and had previously collaborated with Sparta, Athens’s prime enemy. So he tried to convince the generals sent to support Amorges to go back to Athens and represent him by stirring up trouble against the current Athenian government. Alcibiades was effectively proposing that Athens stage a revolution so that he could return. He would gain support from the new regime from Persia. Say what you like about Alcibiades, but he must have been some talker!
Many of the Athenian generals rejected Alcibiades’s proposal and stayed on Samos, forming a pro-democracy group, but one general called Peisandros headed back to Athens and began agitating for revolt. A mixture of violence and intimidation led to a coup taking place in Athens. A number of leading members of the ekklesia were killed and others were forced to flee for their safety - many of them went to the island of Samos.
A new body of 400 was established, made up of 40 men (mostly aristocrats) from each of Athens’s ten tribes. (See Chapter 7 for more on the composition of Athens’s legislative bodies.) These new leaders made a pledge to divert all financial resources to furthering the war against Sparta. In addition, 5,000 of the wealthiest citizens agreed to pay for their own hoplite armour (see Chapter 5) and form a fighting force.
That's the way the 'coup' crumbles
But like so many political pledges the promise initiated in the coup was never fulfilled. Vast numbers of the wealthier citizens left Athens, and the 400 new aristocrats were unable to raise the money that they needed to fund more fighting. Alcibiades fell out with Tissaphernes, so the promised Persian support never materialised either. In the end, Alcibiades ended up offering advice to the exiled democrats that had fled to Samos from Athens after the coup!
By September 411 BC the Athenians had run out of patience with the 400 new political leaders who’d failed to bring about anything in particular. The democrats that remained, led by a man called Cleophon, re-established democracy, known as the ‘rule of 5,000’. It was so named because rule had been handed back to the people, rather than 400 people ruling. It wasn’t that 5,000 people seized control!
By the way, Cleophon was known as the ‘lyremaker’ because he came, like Kleon, from an artisan background.
Thucydides passes the torch to Xenophon
Around time of the Athenian coup (411 BC), Thucydides's historical narrative History of the Peloponnesian Warruns out. Fortunately, readers have another history that picks up almost directly after, written by a man called Xenophon.
Xenophon was a gentleman farmer from Attica who had an eventful life (see the section
'Mounting Problems in the Persian Empire' later in this chapter). In his retirement, Xenophon wrote an extensive account of Greek history during his lifetime. He is also one of the best sources that we have for the philosopher Socrates. Xenophon wrote many essays and works of philosophy based around his method of argument (see Chapter 23).
The whole coup didn’t achieve much, but it did prove two things:
● Athens’s devotion to democracy was surviving - even while engaged in a long war with Sparta.
● The divide between Athenian aristocrats and ‘new men’ (see Chapter 8) was still carrying on.
Wrapping Up the Peloponnesian War
With the return of democracy, Athens started doing rather well again. Several naval victories occurred between 410 and 407 BC - some of them involving Alcibiades (see the earlier section ‘Staging a coup in Athens’) who had thrown in his lot with the democrats who’d fled into exile on Samos and returned to Athens with them.
Alcibiades’s success didn’t last. Sparta entered into another deal with Persia. This time Cyrus, the youngest son of King Darius (who had invaded Greece in 479 BC - refer to Chapter 6), agreed to finance the Spartan fleet, and the new Spartan ships won a famous victory off the coast of Asia Minor in 406 BC. Alcibiades wasn’t present at the battle but was blamed for the defeat, so he went into exile again, this time to Thrace.
Enduring great losses at Arginoussai
Athens’s boost was ultimately short-lived. In 406 BC, during what had been a successful battle with the Spartan fleet near the Arginoussai islands, 13 Athenian ships were lost and 12 damaged. The two captains, or trierarchs, in charge were unable to pick up the survivors due to a terrible storm. Around 3,000 Athenians were left to drown.
Waiting in the wings: Going into exile
As you might have noticed, exile was a very popular punishment in ancient Greece. In essence it meant being sent away from your city of origin and losing your rights as a citizen. Exile was rarely permanent (due mostly to the fractious nature of Greek politics!) and was an obviously preferable alternative to being put to death. Finding somewhere to be exiled could be a problem because most exiles tended to be aristocrats or leading politicians, so tended to be wealthy and/or well connected. Aristocratic exiles might stay with friends in another city or set themselves up in a new town at their own expense. People must have found it frustrating to lose the opportunity to participate in the political games in their native city, but they were usually back in action again pretty soon. Two of the most famous (and frequent) exiles were Alcibiades and Pausanius; check out Chapter 27 for the full story on both of them.
Six of the strategoi (generals) who were in charge of the campaign were put on trial in Athens and executed. Athens could ill-afford the loss of some of its most senior military minds and the decision proved a very unpopular one.
Running out of options
The following year Athens’s defeat was final. The Athenian fleet was beached at the Hellespont (between Thrace and Asia Minor) when the Spartan commander Lysander initiated a surprise attack. Almost the entire Athenian fleet was captured with only nine ships escaping. The 26-year-long Peloponnesian War was effectively over. With no fleet to protect Athens, Sparta and her allies seemed likely to lay siege to the city.
Xenophon paints a vivid picture of what it was like in Athens on the evening the lone ship Paralos brought news of defeat to the city:
It was at night when the Paralos arrived at Athens. As the news of the disaster was told, one man passed it to another, and a sound of wailing arose and extended first from Piraeus, then along the long walls until it reached the city. That night no one slept. They mourned for the lost, but more still for their own fate.
Bowing to the Spartans: Athens after the war
After the crushing final naval defeats, Athens expected the worst from Sparta. As I explain in Chapter 8, cities that resisted siege attacks typically suffered heavily after they were finally defeated. Also, Sparta and her allies had 25 years’ worth of grudges to avenge.
Socrates: Victim of a shifting society
One famous victim of the new regime in Athens was the philosopher Socrates. Many Athenian aristocrats didn't trust Socrates, and he'd refused to cooperate with the 30 tyrants. The new democracy in Athens was distrustful of anything different or against tradition. Socrates held no official post but was one of the leading intellectuals in Athens and had developed a system of philosophical argument that involved him challenging people's assumptions and questioning their beliefs. Usually this was about moral and ethical questions but he was also interested in justice and the way that the state ran. He famously said, 'All that I know is that I know nothing' meaning that he didn't claim to know any answers himself.
In 399 BC, he was put on trial for not respecting the gods and corrupting the youth of the city. These charges were trumped-up, and he was most certainly framed - nevertheless he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He died by drinking hemlock - his own choice. This was a relatively quick death but still a very painful one because a person's body would go very cold before being gripped by a seizure. It was a sad end for a great man in human history.
Living under Spartan conditions
In the end, Athens wasn’t destroyed nor its population enslaved. After the best part of a year in negotiation, Athens finally agreed to Sparta’s surrender terms, which included the following:
● All territories that had previously been part of the Athenian empire were set free of any obligations to Athens. They no longer had to pay tribute or supply men for military service when asked.
● Athens’s fleet was to be limited to 12 ships. This number would be just about enough to guard their harbours and was a dramatic reduction of the fleet of over 100 that Athens had once enjoyed.
● The protective ‘long walls’ of the city (see Chapter 7) were to be demolished.
● All Athenian exiles had to be recalled.
● Athens was now a Spartan territory under Spartan control.
The surrender was a huge blow to a city that only 30 years before was the dominant force in the Mediterranean world.
Establishing the rule of the Thirty
The Spartans forced Athens to break up its democracy and go back to oligarchic rule (oligarchy means ‘rule of the few’). In 404 BC, the Spartan general Lysander forced the Athenians to establish a new committee of 30 individuals to run the city (under Spartan supervision, or course). Many of ‘the Thirty’ were formerly exiled aristocrats who’d been involved in the oligarchic coup in 411 BC (see the earlier section ‘Staging a coup in Athens’) and had only recently returned to the city. The Thirty’s authority was backed up by 700 Spartan troops who served as a garrison in the city.
Unsurprisingly, the Thirty had a few scores to settle in Athens, and they used their new authority to take full advantage. In his book Politics, the philosopher Aristotle describes what happened when the Thirty came to power:
But when they had firmer control of the city, they spared none of the citizens, but put to death those who were noted for their property, family, and reputation, because this removed their own fear and they wanted to appropriate their property; and in a short space of time they had done away with no less than 1,500. . .
No honour among thieves
So the 30 newly instated tyrants began turning on each other - and trials and executions followed. At the same time democrats who’d left when the Spartans arrived were trying to find support in other cities such as Thebes (see the later section ‘Waging the Corinthian War’). Eventually, the democrats returned to Athens in force in early 403 BC. The Thirty and their supporters fought a battle against the democrats during which several of the tyrants were killed.
The Spartan king Pausanias arrived to try and sort out the mess. Rather than continue to force the oligarchy on Athens, he allowed a limited form of democracy to return. The tyrants and their supporters were allowed to leave and lived in exile in the town of Eleusis. Democracy was back but an atmosphere of distrust and plotting continued.
Winning at a cost: Sparta
Presumably the Spartans were relishing the fact that they’d won a crushing victory against their old enemy after a 26-year war? Well, not really. Victory in the Peloponnesian War proved to be almost as devastating for Sparta as defeat was for Athens.
The first mistake that the Spartans made at the end of the war was the way they dealt with the Athenian empire. Now that they controlled Athens the Spartans were technically the rulers of all the territories that had been a part of the Athenian empire. As a result the Spartans forced many Greek towns and cities to adopt new oligarchic systems of government like that in Athens.
Many of these towns had never directly opposed Sparta during the war, so they now resented the harsh treatment they were receiving. Equally resentful were Sparta’s allies in the former Peloponnesian League (see Chapter 8). None of Sparta’s former allies got any reward at all when Sparta took control of Athens despite the help that they’d given during the war.
Because the Spartans kept all the spoils, cities such as Thebes were happy to shelter the pro-democracy exiles who fled from Athens during the time of the rule of the Thirty. Sparta had almost become Thebes’s and Athens’s mutual enemy.
Mounting Problems in the Persian Empire
At the same time as Athens and Sparta’s woes, trouble was brewing in the Persian empire - and it had big consequences for Sparta and the rest of Greece.
Marching through the desert with Cyrus
The Persian king Darius died in 404 BC and was succeeded by his son Artaxerxes. Artaxerxes’s younger brother Cyrus decided to try and steal the crown and set about recruiting an army.
Cyrus’s first port of call was Sparta, which he had helped greatly in the Peloponnesian War (see the preceding section ‘Wrapping Up the Peloponnesian War’). The Spartans were pretty much obliged to help Cyrus, and they did so by sending an unofficial force to join up with the Greek mercenary army that Cyrus was putting together.
The expedition didn’t go well. Cyrus was defeated and killed in a massive battle at a place called Cunaxa near the Persian city of Babylon. His army of Greek mercenaries was left stranded and leaderless in the middle of the Persian desert!
Among Cyrus’s mercenary soldiers was Xenophon who’d signed up after the Peloponnesian War ended (see the sidebar ‘Thucydides passes the torch to Xenophon’). Xenophon and the other officers embarked on an incredible march back through Persia and Asia Minor at the head of a force of 10,000 men. Xenophon wrote a book about the experience called the Anabasis, or ‘march up country’, which reads like a daily journal. The narrative’s details are said to be so accurate that Alexander the Great used it as a travel guide when he made the journey heading in the opposite direction 75 years later. Reading these details, it’s easy to see why:
On this march the army ran short of corn and it was impossible to buy any except in the Lydian market. . . where one could get a capithe of wheat flour or pearl barley for four sigli. The siglus is worth seven and a half attic obols, and the capithe is equal to three pints.
Xenophon and the other generals superbly brought 10,000 men all the way back to Greek territory (in Asia Minor), but Xenophon didn’t get any thanks for it. When he returned to Athens, Xenophon was put on trial. The charge was that he commanded Spartan troops - which was true - but he was also seen as a radical and was a known associate of Socrates.
Xenophon was eventually sent into exile. Bad news for him but good for historians because during this time of enforced retirement he started writing history! He lived in Olympia for a while and then Corinth before returning to Athens shortly before he died around 360 BC.
Seeking support from Sparta
After the failure of Cyrus’s campaign, many of the Greek cities in Asia Minor that had supported him worried they would be punished by the Persian king Artaxerxes. The cities appealed to Sparta for help because the Spartans had supported Cyrus and were now the dominant Greek state.
The Spartans didn’t let them down, fighting a series of campaigns to defend the cities in Asia Minor. The Spartan king Agesilaos led the biggest of these campaigns in 396 BC.
Unfortunately, the Spartans were about to learn that while taking responsibility for Greeks abroad, they left the back door open at home . . .
Waging the Corinthian War
While the Spartans engaged in events in Asia Minor, the other Greek states took advantage. The main players were the Thebans who were still sore about events of a few years before when they felt they hadn’t been adequately compensated by Sparta for their support during the Peloponnesian War.
Forging an alliance with Thebes
In 395 BC, Thebes made a treaty with Athens to join forces against Sparta. The partnership was a success, and they inflicted a heavy defeat on the Spartans in a battle near Haliartos during which the Spartan commander Lysander was killed. The Theban victory encouraged the other Greek states, and by the end of 395 BC, Corinth and Argos had joined the partnership too.
This new powerful alliance set about the attack of Sparta. Due to the fact that most of the action took place around the Isthmus of Corinth, the attack was known as the Corinthian War.
Everybody fighting everybody else
The few years following 395 BC were a blur of battles in Greece and abroad with the Corinthian War and Sparta still involved with Persia. In 394 BC the Spartans were very successful against their Greek enemies, and the Spartan king Agesilaos was recalled to help finish the job.
Having suffered some heavy defeats, the other Greek cities avoided open battles with the Spartans, preferring to carry out spoiling attacks on Spartan territories. At the same time the Spartan fleet was almost completely destroyed by the Persians near Knidos.
With the Spartans unable to stop them, the Persians sailed all round the western Mediterranean, kicking out Spartan garrisons from the former Athenian allies that Sparta had taken over at the end of the Peloponnesian War (see the preceding section ‘Bowing to the Spartans: Athens after the war’). The Spartan hold on much of Greece and the surrounding areas had lasted just eight years.
Portending a dim future: Defeat at Lekhaion
The era of the Greek city-states was nearing an end - partly because their continual wars were weakening them all! A particularly bleak omen of the future came in 390 BC when a large Spartan force was defeated by a Greek mercenary army at Lekhaion, near the city of Corinth. Once the greatest and most feared army in the Mediterranean, the Spartans were humbled by men fighting in a different way - as lightly-armed peltastai(see Chapter 5). And by 338 BC, the whole of Greece came under control of new fighters from the north - the Macedonians (see Chapter 10).
Taking a breather - the King's Peace (386 BC)
The Corinthian War rumbled on throughout the next decade with neither side ever seeming likely to win a victory. (As Athens and Sparta found out before, winning a war in mainland Greece was very difficult!) In the end, diplomacy won out. In 386 BC, the Persian king Artaxerxes intervened and brokered a major peace treaty. In the so-called King’s Peace:
● The Greeks agreed to allow Persia to control all the Greek cities in Asia Minor.
● All the other Greek cities were allowed to rule themselves and be free from any kind of control by another state.
● Any country that broke these terms faced attack by the Persian forces.
In a way, Artaxerxes was trying to put an end to all the empire building that had been going on for the past century. The idea was brave - and good for Persia too - but it was never going to last.
Forming the Athenian League
The Spartans first broke the truce set down by King Artaxerxes. Although avoiding any interference in the Greek islands, for the next ten years Sparta continually attacked the Greek towns in the Peloponnese.
The King’s Peace had been designed to stop the many Greek towns from ganging up together, but in the end it had the opposite effect. In 378 BC, Athens and Thebes entered into another alliance. Others joined and the new group of allies took the name of the Athenian League.
This new league was very different from the Delian League (see Chapter 7). Athens’s weakened position meant that the new league was a group with common interests rather than an empire. Athens took no tribute from its allies - it was a group of equals.
The Athenian League made war on Sparta for the best part of the next ten years. The Persians did nothing, despite the fact that these attacks clearly broke the terms of the King’s Peace. In reality, the Persian king was perfectly happy for the Greeks to fight among themselves - they were less of a problem for him.
Figuring out the Battle of Leuktra: Greece versus Sparta - and Thebes wins!
The ensuing war between the Athenian League and Sparta - surprise! - followed the pattern of nearly all the other campaigns of the past 50 years. (The real winners appeared to be the Thebans who were building up their territory and revenues from successful battles.)
Playing in the Sacred Band
Thebes's ascent was partly due to the flexible tactics that it had shown at Leuktra, but key to its success were its new elite soldiers.
Although they sound like a Christian rock group, the 'Sacred Band' was actually 300 elite troops from Thebes trained by a man called Pelopidas. These soldiers were called 'sacred' because they were originally created to guard the sacred citadel of the city (an area like the Acropolis in Athens).
What made the Sacred Band even more unusual was that each man was paired with another who was both his companion in the battle line and his lover. The idea was that each man would be inspired to fight even harder with his lover next to him. Homosexuality wasn't thought unusual in Greece (see Chapter 15), but this was still a radical idea.
As the war ground on, Athens found the fighting a real financial burden and struggled to impose new taxes on the citizens to pay for it. The Athenians organised a peace conference at which Sparta and Thebes fell out over who would control the territories of Boiotia.
Before long Sparta and some of her allies (including Corinth which had swapped sides) met the Thebans in battle outside the village of Leuktra in Boiotia. Sparta and her allies easily outnumbered the Thebans and an easy victory was expected.
Only it didn’t turn out like that. The Thebans won a stunning victory over Sparta and the Spartan king Kleombrotos was killed, along with more than 400 of Sparta’s crack troops, the Spartiates.
The Thebans won the Battle of Leuktra fair and square by lining up their phalanx in a wedged formation. Traditionally, the phalanx was 12 lines deep, but the Thebans lined up 50 deep on the left to make a kind of triangle, like a wedge of cheese. This formation meant their strongest troops (on the left) heavily attacked the Spartans’ right (their strongest point) before the weaker Theban troops had even joined the battle.
The Spartans reacted to the defeat in a typically strange way. According to Xenophon:
Also, while [the Spartans] gave the names of all the dead to the relatives concerned they told them to bear their suffering in silence and avoid any cries of lamentation. And so on the following day you could see those whose relatives had been killed going about in public looking bright and happy, while those whose relatives had been reported living... were walking about looking gloomy and sorry for themselves.
Celebrating the Hegemony of Thebes
For a brief time Thebes became the dominant city in Greece, and this period from 371 to 362 BC became known as the ‘Hegemony of Thebes’.
Dismantling the Athenian League
As Sparta declined, Athens used its now-restored fleet to try the same trick that it had with the Delian League (see Chapter 7). Athenian ships began sailing to islands in the Mediterranean and asking for tribute money; eventually, allies became territories.
In contrast to the era under the Delian League, Athens wasn’t powerful enough to sustain this kind of policy. By 357 BC, members of the Athenian League who were refused permission to leave went into open revolt and a small war followed until 355 BC. The Athenian League eventually broke up as members drifted away.
Signalling the end of classical Greece
By the middle of the fourth century BC, the once proud city-states of Greece were in trouble. A new power, Macedonia, was developing in the north and soon its king, Philip II, had most of southern Greece under his control. Imagine - the Greek city-states that only 150 years earlier had combined to beat Persia were now about to become insignificant.
Xenophon ends his history Hellenica with a description of the battle of Mantineia in 362 BC. At this battle, the Thebans beat a collection of other cities, including both Athens and Sparta. He concludes by pointing out that yet another big battle had really solved nothing:
Both sides claimed the victory, but it cannot be said that... either side was any better off after the battle than before it. In fact, there was even more uncertainty and confusion in Greece after the battle than there had been previously.
Xenophon gives a pretty good summary of everything that happened to the Greek city-states since the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. Unfortunately, the Greek city-states had nobody to blame but themselves. After all that had happened - all the wars, treaties, small empires, leagues, and broken promises - the once-great city-states were at the mercy of another foreign invader, the Macedonians, which I cover in Chapter 10.