The Hegemonies of Sparta and Thebes: 403 to 360
403
Winter – Thrasyboulus and around seventy Athenians in exile in Thebes, backed by that city, cross the frontier and seize the hilltop fortress of Phyle overlooking the Attic plain; the Thirty march on it with their ‘3000’ loyalists and the city’s (wealthy) cavalry, but are hampered by heavy snow; after a raid on their camp they give up and retire to Athens. Around 700 men now rally to the democrats. The Thirty send for the Spartan garrison, who march to Phyle and camp a few miles away but are routed in a surprise dawn attack with 120 killed.
The Thirty decide to fortify Eleusis as a base in case they have to flee Athens, and go there with the Athenian cavalry to hold a meeting of the populace to allegedly have a census but really to round up those they suspect, who are sent out of the city to be seized by waiting troops and deported to Athens. Once there, Critias holds a public meeting of the ‘3000’ in the Odeum with a large Spartan military contingent on hand and forces them to condemn the accused to death, thus making them complicit in his massacres and less likely to defect.
Alcibiades heads for the Great King’s court to encourage his support and save his career, in the manner of Themistocles, and visits Pharnabazus in Phrygia en route; reportedly the alarmed Lysander asks Pharnabazus to kill him, which the latter does using his brother Margaeus and a ‘hit squad’, or else it is done at the satrap’s own initiative. Alternatively, the killing is a private feud with the brothers of Alcibiades’ latest mistress. The house that he is staying at in a village is set alight and he is killed charging out with his sword aged around forty-five; he is given a private funeral by his final mistress, local girl Timandra.
Thrasyboulus and the democrats march on the Piraeus by night and seize control from the ‘Ten’; the Thirty and their allies attack the town, and Thrasyboulus abandons the walls as he does not have enough men to man the circuit (he has around 1000) and defends the road up onto Munychia hill instead; in the battle Critias, leader of the Thirty, is among the dead along with around 70 others. The Thirty retreat back to the city, and next day as the ‘Three Thousand’ are losing heart and quarrelling they leave the ‘Ten’ in command and withdraw to their base at Eleusis. They are able to hold out there, and the ‘Three Thousand’ temporarily rule Athens; both appeal to Sparta for aid as the democrats raid around Athens at will, and Lysander asks the Spartan ‘Gerousia’ to make him governor of Athens so he can aid the oligarchs. They agree and he advances to Eleusis to summon Peloponnesian support.
King Pausanias, jealous of Lysander’s power and ambitions, persuades the ‘ephors’ to send him to command the Spartan/Peloponnesian army instead and warns that Lysander could take Athens for his personal fief and loot it to gain money for his personal gain, posing a threat to the Spartan constitution; Pausanias supersedes Lysander at Eleusis, and the latter is reduced to commanding Pausanias’ left wing as he leads out the army to confront the democrats at Piraeus. Some clashes follow, but Pausanias is better-disposed to the democrats and to conciliating Athens than Lysander is and he does not press his military advantage; he asks the democrats to send envoys to him who will receive a fair hearing, and urges the ‘Three Thousand’ to realize that he does not want to attack Piraeus and they should reconcile with their foes. The two ‘ephors’ with the army back Pausanias, and a truce is agreed; both parties in Athens send delegates to Sparta with the oligarchs proposing that the two factions dismantle their fortifications and let Sparta adjudicate, and Sparta agrees and sends a fifteen-man mediation mission.
The settlement is brokered by the Spartan mission, with amnesty for all and free residence in Athens without prosecution for all except the survivors of the Thirty, the ‘Ten’ and the ‘Eleven’, who must leave (i.e. for Eleusis) plus any who wish to go to Eleusis for their safety. Pausanias sends his army home, and Thrasyboulus leads his troops into Athens to sacrifice to Athena on the Acropolis.
403/2
The oligarchs at Eleusis march on Athens armed in a further clash, but are met by the citizen army and agree to a conference; the democrats arrest and execute their generals at this, and their leaderless oligarchs in the Eleusis army agree to ask the others at the town to give in, in return for amnesty. Peace returns to Athens.
401
Spring – Sparta demands that its neighbour Elis free some local cities that it has made ‘periocoi’ (i.e. non-citizens of Elis banned from the political process) and pay its share of the costs of the recent war; Elis refuses and claims it conquered the towns and so is entitled to them. Sparta is also dissatisfied over a recent ban from the Olympics by Elis and a refusal to King Agis’ request to sacrifice at the temple of Zeus in Olympia for success in the Peloponnesian War as it was against fellow-Greeks. Agis invades but withdraws quickly on the excuse of an earthquake implying divine disfavour.
Elis rallies support against her punishment among Sparta’s allies, sending envoys around to collect military help.
Persia
Spring – Prince Cyrus of Persia recruits a large Greek mercenary army (largely Peloponnesian), by sending envoys around the Greek cities, to assemble at Sardes for an unnamed campaign. It amounts to around 13,000 men and is commanded by Clearchus the Spartan, who has been assembling a contingent for him at the Chersonese with the excuse of a local campaign against the Thracians. The Athenian Xenophon (born c. 430), later historian of the expedition and probably discontented with the new democratic regime given his literary admiration for Sparta, is one of the recruits: Cyrus’ friends Aristippus the Thessalian and Proxenus the Boeotian also collect troops from their home areas with Cyrus’ money. The excuse given is to help satrap Tissaphernes with an expedition against Ionia, particularly Miletus whose exiles have asked him for help, but, in fact, Cyrus is planning to overthrow his brother after the threat posed by his near-arrest earlier. Cyrus blockades Miletus, and fools his brother into sending him money for the war.
Cyrus tells his recruits that he is to attack the hill-tribe brigands in Pisidia, southern central Asia Minor; Xenias brings around 4000 men and Proxenus about 1500 infantry and 500 cavalry; Cyrus leads them all off from Sardes along the ‘Royal Road’ to the River Maeander (three days) and to Celaenae in Phrygia; the suspicious Tissaphernes decides the army is too large to tackle just the Pisidians and hurries to the Great King to warn him. Cyrus halts at Celaenae for thirty days, and Clearchus joins him with 1000 infantry, 800 Thracian light infantry skirmishers, and 200 Crean archers; other contingents arrive, and Cyrus holds a review of his army with Games; then he proceeds up the River Cayster to Thymbrion, with the satrap/king Synnesis of Cilicia’s wife Epyaxa (?Cyrus’ mistress) joining him. They go on to Iconium in Isauria, then via Lycaonia (where the queen leaves to go home) into Cappadocia as Menon’s troops proceed overland into Cilica to hold the loyalist Synessis back.
Cyrus sends an embassy to Sparta asking for its support against his brother; as a result Sparta orders its admiral Samius to assist Cyrus, and he links up his squadron with Cyrus’ Asia Minor fleet and sails parallel to the rebel army along the south coast to Cilicia; as a result Synessis, satrap/king of Cilica, is unable to bring his troops to Artaxerxes’ aid and block Cyrus’ route.
Cyrus enters Cilicia unchallenged as the passes are open, and Synessis evacuates Tarsus where his wife and Menon occupy the city before Cyrus arrives; Epyaxa persuades her husband to obey a summons to Cyrus and pledge allegiance and money.
Clearchus’ troops start to murmur about what Cyrus intends and refuse to march into the interior of Asia against the Great King who is now said to be the real target, and Clearchus takes his lead from them; Clearchus persuades them not to risk trouble by antagonizing their employer who can hinder them if they try to leave; delegates are elected to go with Clearchus to Cyrus and ask his intentions with a demand for more money if he is proposing a more risky expedition than he told them, and Cyrus raises their pay by 50 per cent but will not confirm his destination except that a hostile Persian force under satrap Abrocomas of Syria is blocking his route towards the Euphrates.
Cyrus leads his army for four days to the River Pyramus, then two days to Issus on the Gulf at the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean; a day’s march brings them to the Syrian Gates pass over the Amanus mountains into Syria, and Abrocomas abandons his garrison in the pass as the rebel fleet moves south to outflank him; he retires to join the Great King in Mesopotamia and Cyrus crosses the pass. Cyrus occupies Myriandrus, where he stays for a week and his senior Greek commanders Xenias (the Arcadian) and Pasion desert and sail home. A twelve-day march follows to Thapsacus at the crossing of the Euphrates, where Cyrus finally tells his officers that he is marching against his brother who is around Babylon. The officers tell the troops, who are angry and have to be paid extra; Menon persuades his men to cross the river on their own initiative to ‘show willing’, impress Cyrus to their future benefit, and shame the others into following; this has the desired effect.
The army marches for nine days to the river ‘Araxes’, and for five days across the desert to the river ‘Mascas’ at Corsote; after a three-day rest they go on for thirteen days on the left (north) bank of the Euphrates, downstream towards Babylon; the loyal troops burn the countryside ahead of them and avoid battle. One of Cyrus’ Persian officers, Orontas, proposes to take a cavalry force off to deal with the enemy but, in fact, to defect to Artaxerxes, but his letter to the Great King is intercepted and he is arrested and executed. Cyrus holds a midnight review of his army as he approaches the convergence of the Euphrates and Tigris ahead of Babylon, expecting a battle at daybreak, and receives defectors at dawn as the army is drawn up; there are 10,400 Greek ‘hoplites’ and 2500 ‘peltasts’, and up to ‘100,000’ Persians (Xenophon). Aborcomus, Tissaphernes, Gobrias and Arbaces command the Great King’s army – around a million according to Xenophon.
The rebels advance to and across the defensive ditch, which has been dug near the ‘Median Wal’ from Euphrates to Tigris to hold him up; the Great King’s army evades battle. On the third day, the rebels are finally told by an arriving defector that the enemy is advancing.
Battle of Cunaxa – Clearchus is on the rebel right wing by the Euphrates, with the Greeks; then Cyrus is in the centre, and his ally Ariaeus is on the left. Cyrus orders an advance, though his smaller army is outflanked on the Greeks’ wing by the loyalists. The Greeks charge and break through the Persians opposite them, and Cyrus with his 600 personal cavalry in their centre moves against Artaxerxes so the Great King cannot cut the Greeks off and surround them. Cyrus is killed in combat attacking his brother’s escort, and his head is cut off; his troops break, and Ariaeus and his troops flee their camp back to the previous night’s position. The Greeks are moving forward and chasing the wing opposite them oblivious of their leader’s death, but later hear that the Persians have taken their camp; the Great King draws up his army ready for battle again, and after some manoeuvres his men attack the Greeks but are chased off; the Greeks proceed to a useful local hill, which they occupy for the night as evening is encroaching, and camp.
Next morning, with the Persians still keeping back, witnesses confirm that Cyrus is dead and Ariaeus sends a message saying that he is heading back to Ionia and they should join him; Clearchus takes command of the Greeks and sends him a message offering to make him Great King as Cyrus is dead and Artaxerxes defeated, and the Great King sends messengers that Cyrus is dead so he is the victor and they should hand in their weapons and negotiate terms. The Greeks decide to refuse, and head back under cover of darkness to join Ariaeus; the latter still intends to retreat up the Euphrates to Asia Minor. The march commences with the Great King’s men avoiding a clash and following at a distance; Tissaphernes arrives with envoys a few days later to negotiate, and the Greeks (led by Clearchus) say that they were not invading the Great King’s territory in hostility as Cyrus deceived them about his purpose and now they want a safe exit home but they will attack any who hinder them. A truce is negotiated, with the Greeks not being molested but having to pay for their supplies and leave the countryside which they cross alone as if on friendly territory. Tissaphernes promises to escort them back to Ionia, as he is marching his contingent back to his own province.
After a twenty-day delay, Tissaphernes returns with his colleague Orontas and the two armies march up the Tigris to the ‘Wall of Media’, though the ex-rebel Ariaeus and his men join Tissaphernes and Orontas and mutual Greek/Persian suspicion grows. A few days later they all reach Sittace on the Tigris, where the Greeks are warned via a message to Proxenus and Xenophon from Ariaeus of impending treachery by the locals and Tissaphernes; Clearchus does not believe it; they post guards on the bridge over the nearby canal in case of an attack but none materializes. A few days later, up the river at Opis an illegitimate brother of Artaxerxes and Cyrus arrives belatedly from Persia with a contingent for the recent war, and then a ten-day march follows up the Tigris to the town of Caenae.
At the river Great Zab, Tissaphernes summons Clearchus to a meeting and convinces him of his good intentions despite continuing rumours of treachery; he returns in good spirits and accuses his doubters of malevolent intentions; Clearchus suspects his rival Menon of stirring up trouble to undermine his authority and get elected as the new commander, and persuades five of the generals and around twenty captains to come with him to a second meeting with the satrap; generals Proxenus and Menon join him with Agias the Arcadian and Socrates the Athenian, and at Tissaphernes’ tent the Persians suddenly seize and kill them all. Seeing the dust of the Persian cavalry as they attack the Greeks’ escort, the Greek army immediately stands to arms; Ariaeus comes over to say that the treacherous Clearchus has been killed but Proxenus and Menon are alive and under arrest as honoured hostages and the Greeks should hand over their weapons and await their late employer Cyrus’ brother’s orders as their new master. They refuse to believe him unless they have it confirmed by the two Greek officers, who he cannot produce; as the Greeks are in camp that night, Xenophon (by his own account) decides to take command if nobody else will and lead the survivors to safety, not trusting any Persians and getting out of their country as soon as possible. He calls together the surviving officers for a night-time meeting, and they agree to follow his advice and elect him and other new officers; next morning the army assembles, receives their new leaders’ report, and accepts Xenophon’s advice on the need for a retreat to the coast and how to confuse the Persians by not making their destination or intentions clear.
The army sets out up the Tigris for the Armenian mountains, rather than risking attack by the huge Persian army in the plains to the west en route for the upper Euphrates and Persia; it marches in formation, fighting off the army of Tissaphernes in a number of skirmishes, and reaches the foothills of Cardousia (Kurd territory) where native guides are questioned and it is decided that the safest route is north over the mountains to the Black Sea despite the need to fight their way through the native tribes. With Chirisophus commanding the vanguard and Xenophon the rearguard, they reach the cover of the hills at night by a forced march before the Persians can catch them; the locals abandon their villages, which are plundered for food.
Midwinter 401/400
Harassed by the local tribesmen, the Greeks struggle on across Cadousia into Armenia through the mountains, and are intercepted by the local satrap of western Armenia, Tiribazus, who professes a willingness to let them pass if they leave the villages alone and escorts them at a distance; later they hear from the locals that he plans to ambush them in a narrow pass so they attack his camp by surprise and loot it. They cross the mountains in heavy snow through the regions of the ‘Chalybes’ and the ‘Phasians’ (a generic term for the tribes around Phasis i.e. Colchis, the region south of modern Batumi) and have some help from villagers who loan them guides but are harassed by others and suspect them all; the fierce ‘Taochi’ defy them. They refuse to give up their provisions, and man hilly strongpoints to throw stones on them and when their positions are stormed commit suicide by throwing themselves off the cliffs. Seven days of fighting with the ‘Chalybes’ follow, and the Greeks gain no food and have to live off what they seized from the ‘Taochi’; finally the Greeks cross a river and climb over a pass, and the advance-guard starts shouting so Xenophon hurries up from the rear thinking it is another attack. The shout is ‘Thalassa, thalassa’ – ‘The sea, the sea’ – and they are in sight of the coast.
The Greeks cross the country of the ‘Macones’ to the coastal city of Trapezus/Trebizond, after fighting their way through a hostile local force in a pass, and camp there for thirty days.
400
Chirisophus goes off by sea to contact Anaxibius, the commander of the Spartan navy, and get ships from him, and Xenophon organizes the army to borrow a few local ships from Trapezus and set up a fortified camp; they raid the local tribes for supplies, and as no help arrives they eventually put the sick and elderly on the ships and the rest march parallel to them along the coast west to Cerasus near Sinope. At the review they hold there they are numbered 8600. They cross the tribal lands of the Mossynoeci, who they help to fight rival tribesmen, to Harmene the port of Sinope where Chirisophus arrives with one ship but no more; they cross the Paphlagonian coast to Heraclea; the army has no money for supplies apart from a little made by selling prisoners, and defies its new elected commander Chirisophus by proposing to blackmail the nearby city of Heraclea into handing over money for them so he resigns. The citizens refuse and lock their gates on the army, and the Achaeans and Arcadians defy the new commander Xenophon and march off on their own rather than, as Peloponnesians, obeying an Athenian. The army crosses in three separate forces into Thrace, and the Arcadians are surrounded on a hill near ‘Port Calpe’ (the mouth of the Bosphorus) by hostile local Thracians but Xenophon, arriving last of the groups, rescues them. Pharnabazus sends troops under Spithridates across the Bosphorus to attack them, but the reunited army drives the latter off. However, Cleander, the Spartan governor of Byzantium, has a poor reception from some defiant soldiers when he arrives with some ships to negotiate and sees mutinous men refusing to hand over sheep which they have looted, and threatens to report their behaviour to Sparta and have them declared public enemies. Xenophon calms Cleander down.
Late summer? – Pharnabazus tries to lure the Greeks into fighting for him rather than have them attacking his Bithynian province, and appeals to Anaxibius, commander of the Spartan fleet at Byzantium, to arrange this; the troops are received at Byzantium by governor Cleander who is now a friend of Xenophon, but the Thracian chieftain Seuthes also wants to hire the army; admiral Anaxibius, nervous of having the unreliable troops within Byzantium lest they take it over (in alliance with Sparta’s foes in the city?), orders the troops out of Byzantium and off by land along the Propontis to the Chersonese. Anaxibius’ replacement as fleet-commander, Pollis, is now en route (i.e. it is autumn as this is the usual time for Sparta to change commands) and so is the new governor of Byzantium, Aristarchus, who he tells to sell off left-behind soldiers from the ‘Ten Thousand’ as slaves. Anaxibius asks Xenophon to collect the army at Perinthus and ship it to Bithynia as Pharnabazus wants it quickly, i.e. during Anaxibius’ command so he not his successor will be the one to be rewarded for it by the satrap. Aristarchus does not want the troops to go to Pharnabazus and tells Xenophon not to do this when the latter goes to Byzantium, so Xenophon decides he is unreliable and concludes negotiations with Seuthes the Thracian instead. The ‘Ten Thousand’ move west into inland Thrace and join Seuthes to fight for him in a tribal war.
Tissaphernes takes over all the Persian satrapies and Greek cities of Ionia, as ordered by the Great King, and besieges Cyme; one of the refugees is local fleet-commander Tachos, father of the later Persian admiral Glos, who flees with his household and ships to Egypt where King Psammetichus kills him and takes over his ships.
The cities of Ionia appeal to Sparta for help; it sends out the general Thibron with 1000 troops to Ephesus.
Greece
Sparta attacks Elis again, having persuaded a congress of her allies meeting at Sparta to declare war too so they are obliged to send contingents; Boeotia and Corinth refuse to assist her, but Athens sends troops. Aetolia refuses to help Sparta, and sends aid to Elis instead. Agis invades via Aulon. The countryside of Elis is ravaged but the main city is not attacked apart from the suburbs where a gymnasium is wrecked probably due to Agis’ moderation and Spartan hopes of the oligarchic faction there. The latter under Xenias try to stage a coup while Agis is at Cyllene and start a massacre, but are unsuccessful in targeting the democratic leader Thrasydaeus as a ‘look-alike’ is killed by mistake and the real Thrasydaeus leads his friends to drive the oligarchs out. Agis installs them and a garrison at Epitalium to put pressure on the Eleans.
(or 401) Summer – Death of King Agis of Sparta, who falls ill at Heraeum on his way back from Delphi at the end of the summer’ s campaign in Elis after going to the sanctuary to dedicate his spoils. He dies a few days later reaching Sparta, aged probably in his forties. The ‘ephors’ listen to rumours that ‘his’ son Leotychidas, aged around fifteen, is not his but Alcibiades’ as the King avoided his wife, Timaea’s, bedchamber for weeks after an earthquake shook Sparta on his wedding night and seemed to be a bad omen and then refugee Alcibiades had an affair with his wife in the interim. Agis has recognized Leotychidas as his son recently after years of doubts, to no avail. The boy is set aside, and Agis’ lame younger brother Agesilaus (born around 440) is made king despite a prophecy that a lame king will bring bad luck to Sparta, which Diopeithes tries to use to block his selection; Lysander argues that the word ‘lameness’ means Leotychidas’ illegitimacy, not Agesilaus’ limp.
399
Spring – Thibron enlists the 6000 survivors of the ‘Ten Thousand’, led by Xenophon, as mercenaries for Sparta’s war with Persia and sends envoys to Seuthes to arrange this; he asks various Greek states for military aid, and Athens sends some pro-oligarchic cavalrymen who are under political suspicion. Thibron occupies some northern Ionian cities as others throw out their pro-Persian garrisons, and advances south to central Ionia. Xenophon and his men sail across the Hellespont to Lampsacus and march south to Pergamon, where they join Thibron as he arrives.
Thibron takes Magnesia easily, and marches on to attack Tralles; he has to retreat as Tissaphernes brings up a large army, and evacuates Magnesia as too lightly walled but fortifies a nearby hilltop.
Summer – The ruling democrats at Elis under Thrasydaeus send envoys to come to terms with Sparta to preserve their regime; they agree to enter the Spartan alliance, demolish two contentious fortresses at Cyllene and Phea, get rid of their fleet, and free eight towns of ‘periocoi’ (including Phrixa and Epitalium) from their control. Sparta forces them to give up Epeum too, although Elis claims that they bought it from the previous occupiers, and lets Elis keep control of the Olympia sanctuary.
Dercyllidas is appointed land commander of the Spartan army in the Chersonese to succeed Thibron; he fortifies its ‘neck’ to keep the Thracian tribes back and protect the cities.
Anytus and Melytus, the latter submitting the formal charges to the relevant ‘archon’, accuse Socrates of corrupting the city’s youth (i.e. by his encouraging them to question their elders and the established social customs/politics) and ‘impiety’ towards the city’s gods. He is supposed to have stopped believing in the established gods and introduced his own gods (possibly a muddled misinterpretation of his references to his personal ‘daemon’ or guardian spirit), and probably his criticisms of democracy and past associations with his controversial pupils Alcibiades and Critias have led to suspicion that his influence is behind their anti-democratic actions. If politics is involved, this probably violates the amnesty agreed in 403 for alleged backers of the ‘Thirty Tyrants’. The ‘archon’ decides that there is a case to answer, and Socrates defends himself against the charges with Melytus as prosecutor; he is found guilty. When asked to select his punishment, he ironically proposes a public pension and the right to attend daily dinners at a state building at public expense with other civic benefactors for the service he has done to the state; an alternative suggestion is a fine of 500 drachmas as he claims he is a poor man. Melytus advocates giving him the death penalty, and the majority of the jury agree; he is sentenced to drink poison (including hemlock). He refuses a suggestion by his pupils that he should flee the city, although his wealthy pupil Crito has offered to bribe the prison guards to let him escape and possibly most people expect him to do this. Famously, he holds a dinner party for his most trusted followers, led by his intellectual heir Plato, and continues his usual rigorous discussions as he drinks the poison and it takes effect.
Death of King Archelaus of Macedon, in a hunting-accident; he is succeeded by his under-age son Orestes, with the late king’s brother Aeropus as regent.
Sicily
Dionysius of Syracuse prepares for war with Carthage in order to strike before she is ready, and poses as the liberator of all Greeks in Sicily from them (and probably also due to a recent plague in Africa decimating their army and tax-base); he builds a large new fleet, has pioneering catapults and other siege-engines constructed, and hires mercenaries in Greece especially in Laconia. Around this time he makes a present of disputed territory to his usual enemies of Messina to win them over, and chooses a new noble bride, Doris, from the city of Rhegium across the Straits of Messina as part of a ‘charm offensive’; he also marries a well-connected Syracusan woman called Aristomache, and after the two weddings are celebrated at the same time he whips up the Syracusan assembly with a litany of all the crimes that Carthage has committed against the Greeks.
Persia/Egypt
?Nepherites succeeds Amyrtaeus as rebel pharoah, for a brief reign of around a year.
398
Greece
Dercyllidas attacks Aeolis, where the late satrap Zenis’ wife Mania has succeeded to his rule by agreement with their overlord Pharnabazus of Hellespontine Phrygia but has been murdered by her son-in-law Meidias; he quickly takes Larisa, Hamaxitus and Colonae and besieges Cebren while Ilium/Troy and other locals expel their pro-Persian garrisons at his request; Cebren surrenders as the citizens turn on its obstinate commander who gives in, and Dercyllidas heads for Scepsis where Meidias has to surrender too as the citizens mutiny. The tyrant’s garrison are removed, and Meidias becomes a Spartan ally and is taken along as a hostage to ensure that Gergis, his home-town, surrenders too; he is then deposed from his rule of the region.
Herippidas the Spartan comes to the aid of the locals in Trachis who are being plundered by the citizens of Heraclea; he takes the town, kills 500 of the inhabitants, and installs a Spartan garrison. He then ravages around Mount Oeta. This is probably designed as a warning to hostile local Aetolia after they aided Elis in 399.
Dercyllidas winters at the Hellespont (Asian side) in order to avoid burdening the Greeks of Aeolis with supplying his army, and plunders Bithynia; the Thracians under Seuthes send him troops.
Sicily
Dionysius picks a showdown with Carthage and sends a herald to her senate to order her to evacuate all of Greek western Sicily or face war.
Carthage refuses, and while she assembles an army Dionysius invades western Sicily, aided by his propaganda offensive about ‘liberation’, which causes cities to rise in his support. Assorted Carthaginian garrisons and allied regimes are expelled or killed. He arms the local volunteers, and marches on the Carthaginian base at Motya with up to 80,000 infantry and 3000 cavalry while his fleet under his brother Leptines, joined by rebel coastal towns’ ships, sails parallel at sea; Eryx surrenders to Dionysius but Entella, Segesta, Solus, and Panormus/Palermo remain loyal to Carthage.
Motya is on an island six ‘stades’ off the coast so Dionysius, like Alexander ‘the Great’ at Tyre in 333, has to construct a causeway out to his target while his ships blockade it at sea. But his communications are stretched, and the Carthaginian general Himilco arrives with a relief-fleet and sends a squadron of ten ships on a surprise night attack to Syracuse; the merchant marine on which Dionysius is relying to supply his besiegers by sea is mostly sunk so no supplies can get through quickly. Then Himilco and his main fleet of 100 ships attack the Syracusan fleet at the mainland bay at Motya, but can only destroy the merchant ships there as Dionysius’ catapults open fire from the beach to protect his warships. Himilco blockades the bay entrance, but Dionysius moves his ships on rollers across the headland to the next bay and launches them and his catapults keep Himilco back from overwhelming the first few to be launched; Himilco has to retire to Carthage.
Autumn? – The causeway is completed; the walls of Motya are undermined by battering rams and siege-towers transport more rams across to the level of the ramparts while the catapults fire missiles to drive the defenders back off the walls, and eventually the ramparts are breached. But the defenders have built emergency walls inside the city between tightly packed houses to block the streets, and the Greeks can only advance slowly; eventually the inner city too is overrun and the garrison and inhabitants are massacred in a conflagration. Dionysius sends his heralds to tell the survivors to flee to the temples, which his men will respect, and then rounds them up and sells them as slaves.
As winter is coming and he is short of supplies, Dionysius installs a garrison at Motya and withdraws his main army; he leaves his brother Leptines to take Segesta and Entella.
Winter? – Segesta drives off a Syracusan assault by bombarding their camp with flaming material and burning the tents.
Himilco lands with a huge new Carthaginian army of at least 100,000 infantry (Timaeus) at Panormus, though Leptines manages to sink around forty of his four hundred ships as he tries to intercept them at sea; the rising wind saves the others. Himilco retakes Eryx and Motya; he wins over the inland Siceliot tribes against the threat of Syracusan rule and advances by land along the north coast on Messina, while his fleet proceeds parallel at sea. As he camps at Peloris, the Messinans send a force out to attack him but the Carthaginian navy hastens to the city to get there before the inhabitants’ army can return; Messina is sacked and occupied although the women and children have mostly been evacuated already to Italy. Dionysius has to retreat from near Segesta on Syracuse, and moves his army to Catana to meet the advancing Himilco whose navy has taken Messina; he has around 30,000 infantry troops and 3000 cavalry.
Some 200 Carthaginian ships overwhelm the Syracusan navy under Leptines in battle opposite Mount Etna during an eruption, while Dionysius and the army watches from the shore and Himilco takes an inland route to avoid them and the eruption. Leptines loses around 100 ships; the Carthaginians sail on to the Great Harbour at Syracuse, and Dionysius has to retire to the city to avoid being outflanked by them. Himilco arrives to launch a siege and sends some of his navy to Sardinia and Africa for supplies; he builds a fortress at Plemmyrium at the Southern entrance to the harbour.
Greece
Spartan alliance with new king Psammetichus of Egypt; the latter supplies regular shiploads of grain to feed her Asia Minor expedition.
Early – Dercyllidas has his role as land-commander for another year confirmed as Spartan envoys meet him at Lampasacus; they investigate complaints of his looting Greek Ionian allies in 398, and the future historian Xenophon (as commander of the ‘Ten Thousand’ contingent) defends his own men’s actions. During an eight-month truce with Pharnabazus, Dercyllidas occupies the Chersonese and drives Thracian raiders off.
Spring–summer – Dercyllidas in the Troad; he besieges the city of Atarneus for eight months in reprisal for its attacks on its pro-Spartan neighbours.
Dercyllidas as land commander and Pharax as naval commander are ordered by the ‘ephors’ to attack Caria and its satrap Tissaphernes; the Persians have a small fleet based in Caria at Caunus. Dercyllidas launches a land attack, but as he marches south, Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus evade him and attack northwards to his rear. He retreats to confront them, but both sides avoid battle as the Persians are nervous of the disciplined Greek infantry and the Greeks fear the Persian cavalry. A truce is agreed and the two satraps suggest that a peace could follow – Persia will guarantee the independence of the Greek cities in Asia Minor and Sparta will evacuate all her garrisons there. This is agreed, and the satraps promise to put it to the Great King but he has appointed the Athenian mercenary commander Conon as his admiral and sent him to Caunus to muster a large fleet for a campaign in 396. Pharnabazus visits Cyprus to gather ships for Conon’s navy.
Conon’s Persian squadron is blockaded in the harbour of Caunus as the Spartan admiral Pharax arrives by sea with 120 ships from his base at Rhodes via Sasandra, but the Spartans cannot force an entry and Dercyllidas’ land-army has moved back north; the fleet has to retreat as Pharnabazus arrives on land with a relief-army.
?Conspiracy of the ambitious young ‘second-class’ citizen Cinadon in Sparta, aimed at rallying those excluded by strict rules from the full citizenship for a coup; he is betrayed, lured out of the city with a picked squadron of men to allegedly arrest some malefactors but then seized himself by his companions, interrogated, tried, and executed.
Winter – Sparta abandons her hope of imminent peace with Persia after a Syracusan, Herodas, reports to the city that when he was in Phoenicia recently he saw large numbers of ships mustering, apparently to go to Asia Minor for the use of Tissaphernes. Lysander leads the ‘war party’ and urges a bold attack on the Persian forces in southern Ionia to drive their fleet back to Phoenicia and a land-march emulating the ‘Ten Thousand’, who have shown up Persian vulnerability.
?Lysander, as Agesilaus’ friend and possibly ex-lover, writes around the friends he made in Greek cities in Asia Minor in the 400s and asks them to send appeals to Sparta to have Agesilaus appointed to command the expedition to aid them.
397/6
Death or deposition of the boy-king Orestes of Macedon; succeeded by his uncle and regent, Aeropus.
396
Sicily
Dionysius sends his brother-in-law Polyxenus for help to Sparta, and admiral Pharacidas arrives with thirty Peloponnesian triremes; many of the citizens are by now mutinous and have taken heart from their forces managing to intercept a Carthaginian supply-ship en route to the enemy camp while Dionysius was away at sea meeting a supply-squadron, but Pharacidas ignores appeals from them at a meeting of the assembly to help against the tyrant and backs up Dionysius and his mercenaries.
Plague ravages the Carthaginian camp on the unhealthy low ground by the Great Harbour, and is blamed by the locals for their pillaging the nearby temples of Demeter and Persephone; Dionysius leads a dawn attack on them by land while his fleet crosses the harbour for a simultaneous attack on the enemy fleet, and their forts at the south-west side of the harbour at Dason and Polichna are captured. Most of the Carthaginian fleet is destroyed, though they hold onto the southern promontory of Plemmyrium; Himilco sends to negotiate for a safe retreat.
A few days later, Himilco and his Carthaginian citizen soldiers escape by night on fourteen surviving ships leaving their mercenaries and the local Sicilian tribesmen to fend for themselves; Diodorus reports a story that he paid Dionysius to let him leave. The tribesmen manage to make off back to their inland hills, but the mercenaries are forced to surrender or are captured as they try to flee; some from Spain are enlisted in his army and the rest are enslaved.
Dionysius commences war to regain control of the inland Siceliote tribes.
Agesilaus is appointed the Spartan land-commander, with 2000 Spartans/‘helots’ and 6000 Peloponnesian allies being sent to Asia Minor to join the c.10,000 troops already there under Dercyllidas and local Ionian volunteers – but not many cavalry. Lysander is appointed to lead the annually replaced staff corps of thirty senior Spartan citizens who assist the King.
Spring – The army musters at Geraustus in southern Euboaea; Agesilaus sacrifices to the gods at Aulis as Agamemnon legendarily did before the attack on Troy, which this expedition is to emulate as ‘Greece versus Asia’. Allegedly, the sacrifice is disrupted by a group of Boeotian horsemen, sent by the Boeotian League’s ‘Boetarchs’ who are angry at the sacrifice not being done in the local Boeotian manner and who seize the offerings and throw them in the sea; this causes bad feeling between Sparta and Thebes. Athens and Corinth do not send troops to the expedition, either.
Agesilaus lands in Ionia, goes to Ephesus where he raises 4000 local troops, and agrees a truce with Tissaphernes to cover Caria at the latter’s request, urging the satrap to get the Great King to meet his terms of freedom for all of Greek Ionia; he sends Lysander, who has been throwing his weight around and is feted by the locals to Agesilaus’ annoyance, to the Hellespont to collect local reinforcements. Xenophon and his troops fight with Aegisilaus’ army into 395, and then in 394 accompany him back to Greece.
Tissaphernes ends the truce; Agesilaus pretends he is intending to attack Caria, and when his foe has taken the Persian army there he moves north instead to ravage Hellespontine Phrygia; he later retires to Ephesus in the autumn. He invades Lydia to head for Sardes and ravage the plain, and Tissaphernes (who expected this to be a bluff and Caria the real target) returns from his precautionary move into Caria to confront him; before all the Persian army has arrived, Agesilaus launches a surprise attack on the satrap, routs his army, and as they flee loots their camp.
395
Winter–?March – Agesilaus recruits troops from the Greek cities of Ionia and trains them in the latest mainland Greek fighting-tactics at Ephesus, holding Games so they can become fit and compete for prizes. Lysander returns home with the other senior officers whose turn of a year in office has expired, in a sulk after Agesilaus gives him no new role in the campaign following his successful recruitment of his old friend Spithridates to defect from Persia and aid Sparta.
Spring – Agesilaus defeats the Persian cavalry at the river Pactolus in Lydia, near the capital at Sardes, and takes seventy talents of loot at their camp. Satrap Tissaphernes, who was at Sardes and did not come to the rescue, is arrested and executed for incompetence by the Great King’s new appointment to replace him, Tithraustes, who arrives at Colossae with the King’s orders to kill him and gets the local satrap to invite Tissaphernes there then has him beheaded in the bath. Tithraustes pays Agesilaus thirty talents to attack Pharnabazus in Hellespontine Phrygia instead and give him a truce of six months. Agesilaus marches north, and near Cyme a Spartan envoy arrives to instruct him to appoint a naval commander of his choice and open a naval war too. He appoints his brother-in-law Peisander, and calls on his island and mainland allies to send ships to him. A navy of 120 triremes is created for the next campaign.
Agesilaus ravages Hellespontine Phrygia, but cannot force the Persians to a decisive battle.
Summer – Before the Spartan navy is ready, Conon arrives from the eastern Mediterranean with an enlarged Persian squadron (eighty ships), lands at Rhodes, and links up with the local democratic plotters who overthrow the pro-Spartan oligarchy in the eponymous capital and let his ships into the harbour. He sets up a base there, intercepts a convoy of supply-ships from Egypt to the Spartans who think that Sparta is still occupying the harbour, and summons more Persian ships (seventy from Phoenicia under the lord of Sidon, and ten from Cilicia). He has to go off to Tithraustes for more pay as his money runs out, and possibly goes on to Mesopotamia and the royal court too; in his absence a Cypriot squadron mutinies and sets up a rival command at Caunus.
Summer – Ismenias and Androcleides lead an anti-Spartan faction at Thebes, incite a war between Phocis and Locris, and get the latter to appeal for help to the Boeotian League; they then persuade the League to intervene. Phocis appeals to Sparta and the ‘ephors’ tell the Boeotians to let the Spartan alliance’s council arbitrate; Ismenias persuades the Boeotians to ignore this and to invade Phocis. Sparta and her allies prepare to attack Boeotia.
The Persian agent Timocrates of Rhodes tours central Greece distributing Persian money (fifty talents) to potential allies and announcing that the Persian fleet will be coming to attack the Spartan hegemony in 394; Athens ignores him but politicians at Thebes (Ismenias), Corinth (Timolaus and Polyanthes), and Argos (Cylon) accept his bribes.
Late summer – Athens forms a defensive alliance with the Boeotian League and another with Locris.
Lysander invades Boeotia, marching from Locris with the Spartan troops at Heraclea and with aid from anti-Theban Orchomenus in Boeotia; King Pausanias is en route from the Peloponnese across Mount Cithaerron, but Lysander over-confidently does not wait for him and after securing friendly Orchomenus and plundering Lebadea attacks Haliartus. He has told Pausanias (now at Plataea) to meet him at Haliartus at dawn next day, but his messenger is captured by Thebes and the latter sends to Athens to speed their help up so some Athenians arrive at the city that night. Next morning the unaware Lysander decides not to wait for Pausanias and attacks alone, but is repulsed from the town’s walls, and as a relieving Theban army arrives unexpectedly early he is killed and his men are routed. The survivors drive the Thebans back and withdraw to a defensible position outside, but that night disheartened allies desert and Pausanias arrives too late, next morning. The Athenians have now arrived too and are backing the Theban army to outnumber his cavalry, and the only way he can recover the bodies of the dead as his demoralized officers want is to agree to a truce and to promise to withdraw. Judging success in battle unlikely, he does so.
Back in Sparta Pausanias is prosecuted for cowardice and condemned to death; he flees to Tegea and is succeeded by his young son Agesipolis, who is under-age.
Autumn – The Persian defector Spithridates persuades the local Paphlagonians under king Cotys to supply 1000 cavalry and 2000 infantry to Agesilaus; Agesilaus occupies Pharnabazus’ abandoned headquarters and palace at Dascylium for the winter. Spithridates and the Spartan general Herippidas finally corner the retreating Pharnabazus four or five days later, and attack and loots his camp; however, the Spartan conducts what his co-commander considers an unfair and insulting distribution of loot, forcing the Paphlagonians to hand over all they have taken for redistribution, and he and the Paphlagonians leave the army and go off on their own raids.
Autumn? – Conon returns to Rhodes, puts down a revolt there, and suppresses the mutiny at Caunus; around a hundred rebels are executed and the fleet is reunited.
Corinth, Argos, Euboaea, Leucas in the Ionian Islands, Ambracia opposite the latter, and the Chalcidian League join Thebes and they set up a common council at Corinth to run the war; the Spartan garrison at Pharsalus, Thessaly, is overrun and its soldiers enslaved by Medius, lord of Larissa, who is at war with the pro-Spartan tyrant Lycophron of Pherae. The Boeotians, having assisted Medius, secure the Spartan garrison at Heraclea by treachery, kill them, and give the town to the local Trachis tribesmen.
Sicily
After Dionysius resettles his loyalists in and garrisons war-wrecked Messina, the alarmed Rhegians attack and seize it to drive the Syracusans out; Dionysius launches war on them, but first has to deal with the inland Siceliots who are occupying Tauromenium on the east coast; he takes the town of Tauromenium by a surprise assault on the slackly guarded acropolis around mid-December.
394
Greece
Early – Agesilaus meets Pharnabazus at a truce-meeting under the auspices of their mutual friend Apollophanes of Cyzicus.
Sparta sends orders to Agesilaus to return home once it is confirmed that Persia is funding its enemies; the offensive war in Asia Minor is abandoned and he leaves Euxenus as the local commander as he heads to the Hellespont.
May/June – Before Agesilaus can return from the Hellespont, the allies muster at Corinth to attack: there are around 7000 from Argos, 6000 from Athens, 5000 from Boeotia, 3000 from Corninth, 3000 from Euboea, and around 5000 cavalry plus light infantry; the Sparta ‘home army’ has around 6000 Spartans under Aristodemus (regent for boy-king Agesipolis, son of Pausanias) and 14,000 allies. The Spartans move quickly up to collect the contingents of Tegea and Mantinea, and assemble at Sicyon; the allies at Corinth head for Nemea, where the Spartans manoeuvre themselves onto rough ground that the allied cavalry cannot use easily.
June/July – Battle of Nemea, near Argos: the Boeotians on the allied right and Athenians on the allied left face the Spartans; the Boeotians lead the attack, moving their line to the right as they advance so the Athenians have to move right too to avoid leaving a gap between their contingents. The Spartans move out to their own right, thus outflanking the Athenians on the allied left wing, and the Spartan right wing marches round behind them to take them in the rear; the Spartan allies on their left wing are driven back by superior Theban numbers and the unusual depth of the Theban line, but the Spartan right wing defeats the Athenians in the meantime. The Spartan left wing (its allies) breaks and flees, and the allied right wing chases it off the battlefield and then returns in separate city contingents one after another to try to tackle the Spartans but is defeated as it attacks them piecemeal – first Argos, then Corinth, and finally the Boeotians. Sparta loses around 1000 allied troops but allegedly only eight of its own men, and the enemy loses around 3000 out of around 20,000.
Agesilaus leaves 4000 men at Sestos to control the Hellespont, and marches back overland through Thrace; en route he defeats the Trallians who try to demand a bribe to let him pass, and he is given free passage by the impressed king of Macedon who sends a similar demand and is ignored; he hears of the battle of Nemea from Dercyllidas at Amphipolis. He enters Theban-allied Thessaly while Dercyllidas goes to the Hellespont to take command, and sends envoys to hostile Larissa who are arrested so he stops to negotiate their release; Agesilaus defeats the Thessalian cavalry near Mount Narthacium, then marches on to Trachis and Locris to collect reinforcements from his allies before heading into Boeotia as the ‘ephor’ Diphridas tells him to attack now not later as he prefers; a Spartan regiment arrives by sea from Sicyon to join him, and he takes the Spartan garrison from local Orchomenus to assist him, too.
July – Death of king Aeropus of Macedon, after a two/three-year reign; the Macedonian citizens’ assembly ignores his son Pausanias and elects Amyntas II (‘the Little’), son of Menelaus son of Alexander I.
August – Naval battle of Cnidus: Conon and Pharabazus with ninety ships advance from the Chersonese; they defeat the Spartan fleet under Peisander, who is killed as his left wing (his allies) crumbles and who refuses to flee; Peisander loses fifty of his eighty-five ships sunk or captured. Sparta loses control of the eastern and northern Aegean to the Athens/Persia alliance.
News of the battle of Cnidus reaches mainland Greece; 14 August. As Agesilaus is heading into Boeotia the sun is eclipsed and he hears of the battle of Cnidus and loss of the Spartan fleet. He pretends that Peisander won to keep up his men’s morale, and marches on via the River Cephissus to Coronea.
Battle of Coronea: Agesilaus faces the combined forces of Thebes/Boeotia/Athens/Corinth/Argos/Euboea. The Thebans on the allied right wing rout their local enemies from rebellious Boeotian city Orchomenus, and chase them back to their camp; meanwhile, Agesilaus (on his right wing) has taken advantage of their absence to push back the rest of the allied army, led by the Argives, who break and flee for the slopes of Mount Helicon; as the Thebans return he clashes with and holds them, but cannot prevent most of them escaping past his troops to the allies’ camp on Mount Helicon and is wounded in the thick of the fighting. Agesilaus allows the enemy refugees in sanctuary in the nearby temple of Athene Itonia to leave unharmed, and puts up a trophy before heading back to Sparta via Delphi where he attends the Pythian Games and sets up a trophy. His subordinate Gylis stays on to harass Thebes and raids Locris but is killed. Back in Sparta, Agesilaus uncovers Lysander’s written plans to form a faction and force a reform of the Spartan constitution and covers them up for the good of public morale rather than prosecuting the late general’s allies.
Autumn – Pharnabazus and Conon expel the Spartan garrisons and oligarchies from the Ionian coastal islands of Cos, Teos, Chios, and Lesbos and the city of Erythrae, and assure the inhabitants of their autonomy from now on; Pharnabazus lands at Ephesus and marches his army to Sestos on the Hellespont by land to deal with Dercyllidas’ Spartan garrison there, while Conon and forty ships go by sea; they blockade Spartan-held Sestos and Abydos by land and sea but cannot take them.
As rumour has it that the pro-oligarchic faction in Corinth is using war-weariness at Spartan raiding from Sicyon to rally support for peace, the allies arrange a massacre of suspects in the city of Corinth and Iphicrates brings Athenian troops to the city to secure the harbour for the allies. Around five hundred people are exiled. Argos takes over control of the city with an effective ‘union’ with it under its democratic faction. Pasimelus and other surviving anti-Argives flee to seek help from the Spartans at Sicyon, and the Spartan commander Praxitas leads an attack on the city, which ends in an armed clash with the Argives there.
394/3
After a reign of under a year, Amyntas II of Macedon is murdered and replaced by his predecessor’s son Pausanias. (Diodorus does not mention Amyntas and has Pausanias succeed his father Aeropus directly.)
393
Pharnabazus abandons the attempt to drive Sparta from the Hellespont, and leads a Persian-funded but Greek-manned mercenary fleet across the Aegean in consort with Conon’s Athenian fleet; they raid the Cyclades and occupy Melos, and then Pharnabazus and Conon raid the Laconian coast and set up an Athenian base under Nicophemus at Cythera to harass Sparta’s trade and her fleets emerging from Gytheium. They then sail to the Isthmus of Corinth where Pharnabazus addresses and offers bribes to a congress of the anti-Spartan alliance, urging them to rally to the Great King. He then returns home, and Conon sails with some of his ships to the Piraeus to use the sailors as labourers (paid by the Persians) to speed up the rebuilding of the Long Walls and so make Athens protected from blockades again. Thebes lends masons to assist in the work.
Athens forms alliances with Dionysius of Syracuse, Evagoras king of Salamis on Cyprus, and Eretria in Euboea.
Sicily
Dionysius attacks but fails to take Rhegium and extend his power into Italy, and the Southern Italian Greeks form a league to oppose him.
The Carthaginians under Mago land in Sicily to enlist more tribal support with heavy subsidies, then advance into central Sicily; Mago tries to head for Messina but is forced back.
392
Mago and up to 80,000 soldiers fight Dionysius and his ally Agyris, tyrant of Agrium, in central Sicily but runs short of food; he agrees to a treaty, which abandons the Siceliote tribes and the rebel city of Tauromenium to Syracuse; Carthage leaves the war.
Greece
Thebes issues new Persian-funded coinage with Heracles and the Boeotian shield symbol on the coins, to subsidize the war-effort; Rhodes, Cnidus, Iasos, Samos, Ephesus and Byzantium adopt this coinage and join alliance. Lampsacus, Cyzicus, Zacynthus, and Croton in Italy later adopt these coins too.
Corinth builds and launches a Persian-funded fleet, commanded by Agathinus, and contests the Gulf of Corinth with the Spartan fleet under Podamenus. The latter is defeated and killed and his deputy Pollis is wounded; Herippidas takes over command.
Proaenus, the new Corinthian admiral, has to abandon Rhium to Sparta. Teleutias, Agesilaus’ brother, takes over the Spartan naval command.
Lemnos, Imbros and Scyros are occupied by Athens and colonies of ‘cleruchs’ established there.
Autumn – Sparta sends envoy Antalcidas to Caria to negotiate peace with satrap Tiribazus and via him the Great King, hoping the Persians will be alarmed at the revival of Athenian power; Athens hears of this and sends Conon with an embassy too, supported by Thebes, Corinth, and Argos. Antalcidas proposes that all mainland Asia Minor states be ceded to Persia and the rest of the Greek states be guaranteed autonomy as individuals – i.e. existing alliances are broken up, ending Athens’ new colonies, the Boeotian League, and the Argos/Corinth alliance, all to Sparta’s advantage. These are the basic terms on which peace will be agreed in 386 and Athens and Thebes are not in favour as they will lose their current dependencies; but although Tiribazus is agreeable, gives Antalcidas money to hire new allies, arrests Conon to hinder the Athens war-effort, and goes to see Artaxerxes the Great King does not proceed with the plan. Instead, Artaxerxes sends a new Persian representative, Strouthas, to take over Lydia from Tiribazus and to aid the anti-Spartan coalition with money to hire men and ships.
Conon is deported to Cyprus and interned by the Great King, probably suspected of double-dealing with his subsidies and not being a reliable conduit to Athens, and dies there later.
Winter – Sparta sends out envoys inviting the Greek states to a peace-congress and proposes Antalcidas’ terms of general autonomy for the Greek states, but now with Athens keeping her three new colonies, the Boeotian League remaining in being, and Orchomenus remaining independent of Thebes. This is designed to lure Athens and Thebes away from Argos/Corinth and so isolate the latter for Spartan pressure and/or attack. Athens refuses to participate on these terms, although the wealthier citizens are mostly in favour of peace and the ‘hard-liners’ including Thrasyboulus (a close Theban ally from their sponsorship of him in exile in 404/3) are criticized. He and his ally Epicrates now want to use the rebuilt fleet (manned by poorer citizens as oarsmen) to regain control of the Chersonese, but Dercyllidas and his Spartan army are standing in their way.
392/1
King Pausanias of Macedon is murdered and replaced by a cousin of his, Amyntas III, who after a brief deposition within months is soon restored and goes on to rule until 370 – Diodorus says twenty-four years but this is probably an error.
391
Early? – Teleutias drives the Corinthian fleet back from the western end of the Gulf of Corinth.
Spring – Agesipolis raids the Argolid, leading the Spartan campaign in the centre/East of the Peloponnese; Teleutias leads the Gulf of Corinth fleet to sack the Corinthian dockyards on the Gulf of Corinth shore at Lechaeum, while Agesilaus, commanding on land, is taking the city’s ‘Long Walls’ to the port.
Sparta sends a new expedition to Ionia to push Persia back and force Tiribazus and the Great King to moderate their stance; Thibron retakes Ephesus for Sparta and then raids into Lydia to attack the new satrap Strouthas, while Teleutias and the fleet occupies Samos, isolates pro-Athenian (democratic) Rhodes, and captures ten Athenian ships en route to Evagoras of Salamis on Cyprus.
Thibron is ambushed and killed by Strouthas in person in a cavalry charge during a raid; he is succeeded by Diphridas as Spartan commander in Ionia, and Sparta sends out the refugee Rhodian oligarchs to assist the latter.
Athens’ ally, king Evagoras of Salamis in Cyprus revolts against Persia in alliance with Egypt.
390
Spring – Thrasyboulus and forty ships avoids tackling Teleutias and his Rhodian allies, and overruns the northern Aegean, backed up by Eretria, Boeotia, and Thessaly, which supply him; he occupies Thasos and Samothrace, and kings Amadocus and Seuthes of Thrace ally with him.
June/July? – He approaches the Hellespont, avoids Dercyllidas at Abydos, and enters the Propontis to reach Byzantium where the pro-Athenian democrats open the gates to him. Chalcedon across the Bosphorus allies with him and Pharnabzus in Hellespontine Phrygia protects his eastern flank (and threatens Dercyllidas who cannot leave his bases to attack Thrasyboulus), but due to shortage of funds from Athens he re-imposes the taxes on shipping passing through the Hellespont, which Athens used to levy in the fifth century. The fleet remains in the Propontis for the rest of the year.
Sparta (led by Agesilaus) and Argos hold rival Isthmian Games at Corinth, one after another, by occupying their usual site at the time of the Games, as the civil war there continues; while Agesilaus is insulting some Theban ambassadors (by refusing to receive them) during his capture of the temple of Hera at Pechora on the Corinth expedition, Iphicrates’ Athenians storm the nearby Spartan base at Lechaeum and kill several hundred Spartan citizens, the worst loss they have suffered for years.
Persia/Egypt
Alliance between the rebel Pharoah Hakor and the anti-Persian rebel ruler Evagoras of Citium on Cyprus, providing Egyptian naval help for the Cypriot rebels.
389
Greece
Early? – Thrasyboulus sails south-west to Lesbos, and lands to occupy various pro-Spartan towns with the aid of pro-Athenian Mytilene. He defeats and kills Therimachus, Spartan commander of Methymna. He loots the enemy to pay his troops, and with men from Mytilene and Chios to reinforce his ships he sails on south along the Ionian coast levying blackmail money from the local communities. He goes on round Caria to Aspendus in southern Asia Minor.
Thrasyboulus is killed in a skirmish on the River Eurymedon in Pisidia when locals raid his camp at night, arising from his local plundering; his fleet moves back to the Aegean to oppose the Spartan one based at Abydos. Argyrrhius takes over command.
Agesilaus is able to cross the Gulf of Corinth into Acarnania, at the appeal of his ally Achaea which is in possession of Calydon (on the northern shore) but is under attack there by Acarnania and Athens; he attacks the allies of Corinth there and ravages the countryside but cannot take any towns and in the autumn leaves via Aetolia.
Eteonicus’ Spartan fleet bases itself at Aegina to harass Athenian shipping. Athens lands an army under Proxenus to blockade the eponymous capital of Aegina, but Teleutias (Spartan senior admiral for the year autumn 390-autumn 389) arrives with more ships to drive him off.
?Artaxerxes sacks Strouthas as satrap of Lydia and brings back his predecessor Tiribazus, logically out of unease at the success of the anti-Spartan alliance giving them confidence to reject Persia’s terms for a Greek general peace and its plans to regain Ionia.
Autumn – Hierax takes over command at Aegina from Teleutias as the new supreme Spartan admiral for the next year. Later he sails off to Rhodes to assist Antalcidas in the Spartan command in Ionia, leaving part of his fleet at Aegina under Gorgopas.
388
Low-level naval skirmishes between Athens and Sparta in Ionia, as Anaxibius brings out Spartan reinforcements to Sestos and raids into Persian-held Aeolis and Iphicrates is sent by Athens to oppose him; based on the Chersonese, Iphicrates ambushes and kills Anaxibius as he is returning by land to Abydos from a looting expedition.
A Spartan fleet based at Aegina, commanded by Eteonicus again, harasses trade to Athens. Antalcidas sends Nicolochus to the northern Aegean; he raids Tenedos and is blockaded by the Athenian fleet at Abydos.
Athens sends its commander Chabrias to act as mercenary general to rebel king Evagoras in Cyprus, with some Athenian troops and ships despatched to help him, which is seen as a hostile act by Persia. En route to Cyprus he puts in at Aegina to help the Athenians there, and ambushes and kills the Spartan commander Gorgopas.
King Agesipolis leads the Spartan invasion of Argos.
Autumn – Teleutias assumes the next annual Spartan supreme naval command, after Hierax, and returns to Aegina. He raids the Piraeus by night from Aegina and damages shipping there.
Winter – Antalcidas, now the year’s Spartan supreme naval commander, is sent to Persia to negotiate, utilizing irritation there at the Athens/Evagoras alliance; this time Great King Artaxerxes backs him.
Sicily
Dionysius besieges Rhegium for around a year (389–8 or 388–7?) for defying him; this takes place during the 388 Olympics, when he sends a magnificent embassy and racehorses to the Games. When the city falls he has the general Phyton flogged and drowned for leading opposition to him there. He also annexes and razes Caulonia at around this time, defeating an attempt to relieve it by the exile Heloris who has brought military aid from Croton, and moves its populace to Syracuse.
?(Traditional date, but only approximate) Plato visits the court of Dionysius of Syracuse at the tyrant’s invitation, as part of the latter’s cultural and intellectual pretensions as a patron. Possibly Plato’s growing hostility to the concept of democracy (due to the catastrophes in Athens in the 400s and the execution of Socrates?) and interest in the rule of a just but despotic ‘Philosopher King’ make Dionysius seem a potential convert to his ideas. Allegedly, he soon changes his mind over Dionysius’ viciousness and paranoia, and the angry despot has his ‘ungrateful’ protégé sold off as a slave; Plato’s friends have to rescue him and smuggle him back to Athens.
387
Greece
Spring – Antalcidas informs Sparta that Persia will back them militarily until Athens and her allies accept the terms he proposed earlier, i.e. autonomy and the dissolution of alliances for Greek states and the return of Ionia to Persia; he is sent overland with Persian troops under Tiribazus to the Spartan base at Abydos (where Nicolochus is being blockaded) and links up with the Spartan fleet plus Persian-hired local Asia Minor reinforcements and twenty ships sent from Sicily by Dionysius. He outmanoeuvres the Athenian fleet under Iphicrates and blocks the Hellespont to hostile shipping, while in a co-ordinated move the Spartan fleet at Aegina blockades the Piraeus.
Autumn – Tiribazus summons the Greek states to send envoys to him and hear Artaxerxes’ terms – autonomy for all Greek states, breaking up the alliances except Sparta’s, Athens to keep Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, and all of mainland Ionia plus Cyprus to return to Persia. The latter will attack or fund attackers of any states which do not sign up to this. The envoys take these terms home, and the Greeks except for Thebes agree to this ‘Peace of Antalcidas’.
386
Spring – As required, the Greek states take oaths to ratify and abide by the ‘Peace of Antalcidas’; Agesilaus collects an army of Sparta’s allies and marches into Boeotia, and Thebes gives way too; the Boeotian cities take oaths to the Peace separately to confirm that they are all now independent of Thebes’ leadership. Argos gives way and breaks up her alliance with Corinth, and the oligarchs return to the latter; Corinth then rejoins the Spartan alliance.
Persia
Tiribazus of Lydia and his fellow-satrap Orontes of western Armenia, Artaxerxes’ brother-in-law, collect a large fleet in Ionia, mostly crewed by Greek seamen, to launch the Great King’s planned invasion of rebel Cyprus; they have up to 300,000 men (Diodorus). On the island, Evagoras of Salamis has around seventy ships and 6000 Cypriots plus a mercenary army, paid for by his secret ally King Hecatomnus of Caria, and ships from allied Phoenician rebels and from Egypt. The Persian fleet sails east to Cilicia to collect the waiting land-army and cross to Cyprus.
385
Tiribazus goes from Cyprus to Susa to report on the war; Orontes takes full control of the attack on Evagoras. During the war in Cyprus, Evagoras and his fleet nearly destroy the Persian fleet under admiral Glos off Citium near Salamis, thus cutting off the Persian army on shore, but are defeated in a major battle; the siege of Salamis follows later this year or in 384 and at some time into it Evagoras manages to escape and goes to Egypt to ask for help.
?Tithraustes and Pharnabazus lead an unsuccessful Persian attack on rebel Egypt, possibly to prevent the latter aiding the rebels on Cyprus.
Greece
Sparta orders Mantinea to raze her walls on the excuse of her failure to provide all the support she was supposed to do to Sparta in the war with Corinth. Mantinea refuses, appeals to Argos and Athens for help to no avail, and is besieged by King Agesipolis; his coruler Agesilaus asks successfully to be excused from the campaign as Mantinea was a close ally of his father. Possibly the future Theban leaders Epaminondas and Pelopidas serve in a volunteer Theban regiment that is sent to assist Mantinea, where Pelopidas is nearly killed in a skirmish but saved by his friend (according to Plutarch), and so learn how to counter Spartan military tactics for future use.
?Dionysius of Syracuse sends a mercenary force by sea to restore the expelled king Alcetas of Epirus, maternal great-grandfather of Alexander ‘the Great’, to his throne. He also agrees an alliance with the Illyrians as he expands his naval power across the Adriatic, and sets up a base at Lissus (in modern North Albania).
384
After the Spartans divert the river flowing through Mantinea to undermine and wash away the mud-brick walls, the city has to surrender; Sparta pulls down its walls and reduces it from a city into five autonomous village communities. The leading democrats are exiled but are not molested by the angry but disciplined Spartan soldiers as they leave.
Treaty of alliance between Athens and its ex-league stalwart, Chios; implicit defiance of the curtailing of Athenian naval power by the Peace of Antalcidas.
Birth of the philosopher Aristotle, as son of Nicomachus of Stagira in the Chalcidice, court doctor to King Amyntas III of Macedon.
Persia
Evagorus returns to Cyprus and reaches an agreement with the returned Tiribazus that he will restrict himself to ruling only Salamis and become the Great King’s tributary vassal. The furious Orontes complains to the Great King at these lenient terms, and Artaxerxes recalls and arrests Tiribazus; Orontes takes over the war, but is unable to storm Salamis and with his men grumbling about the unfair treatment of Tiribazus he has to agree to peace on the terms that Tiribazus proposed. Back in Susa, Tiribazus is tried but acquitted and restored to favour; Orontes is sacked instead.
A campaign is led by Great King Artaxerxes against the Cadousian hillmen in the western Zagros mountains, which is unsuccessful despite his having up to 300,000 troops (Plutarch); his general Tiribazus saves the situation by sending envoys to each of the two rival chieftains of the rebels, saying that the other is negotiating with the Great King; they hasten to accept peace-terms. ?Artaxerxes’ eldest son, Darius, becomes titular co-ruler as army commander on his first campaign.
After the war, ex-satrap Tiribazus of Lydia is fully restored to favour.
After the Persian fleet withdraws from Cyprus, its admiral Glos (Tiribazus’ son-in-law) uses his control of the navy’s funds and his Ionian Greek mercenary sailors to revolt against Persia and seize control of the southern Asia Minor seaways, allied to Egypt. He is probably afraid of sharing in Tiribazus’ expected disgrace, though this does not happen.
Sicily/Italy
?Dionysius raids Pyrgi, the port of the Etruscan city of Caere, during his campaign in the Tyrrhenian Sea to suppress pirates and extend his influence.
383
Greece
Birth of the future king Philip II of Macedon, third son of the embattled King Amyntas III who is currently being hard-pressed by the Illyrians and has been forced to become an ally of the Olynthian League in Chalcidice.
382
An appeal from either King Amyntas III of Macedon (Diodorus) or from the threatened autonomous cities of Acanthus and Apollonia in the Chalcidice is made to Sparta against the Olynthian League, led by Olynthus, in the Chalcidice. (Possibly both appeal.) Amyntas has entrusted some of his lowland cities, including Pella, to the League to defend them while he was fighting off an Illyrian war recently and the League has now annexed them. The appeals are probably also that the League is threatening states guaranteed their autonomy by the Peace of Antalcidas (though Amyntas is not a signatory to that); possibly also Thebes is currently negotiating with Olynthus, which alarms Sparta, and Thebes refuses to let any of its citizens serve in the war against Olynthus.
Sparta declares war on the Olynthian League, which it feels is a local threat to Spartan power.
Summer – An expedition is sent there, led by Eudamidas; en route across Boeotia the latter’s brother Pheobidas, bringing reinforcements, accepts an invitation from the oligarchic party in nearby Thebes, led by Leontiades and Archias, to march on and seize the Cadmeia citadel by surprise to assist their coup against Ismenias’ faction. Some sources imply that Pheobidas did not just spontaneously accept a plan proposed by Leontiades, but that Agesilaus had already suggested the idea to him.
(During the feast of the ‘Thesmophoria’) A Spartan garrison is brought into the city of Thebes and installed in the Cadmeia by Leontiades, who announces it to the ruling city council as necessary to help avert a war with Sparta (over Olynthus?); a group of oligarchs occupy office as ‘polemarchs’, headed by Leontiades. Leading democrat Ismenias is executed and others are exiled, including the future leaders Epaminondas and Pelopidas; most of the exiled go to Athens, where Androcleides is assassinated by agents sent by the new Theban regime.
Sparta dismisses and fines (100,000 drachmas) Pheobidas for his unauthorized actions, but Agesilaus saves him from execution on the grounds that he only did what was best for their city; Sparta keeps the Cadmeia.
Teleutias, brother of Agesilaus, commands the attack on Olynthus and ravaging of its territory, based at Potidaea; Amyntas of Macedon assists him. The Thracian king Derdas aids the first Spartan attempt to assault Olynthus (autumn?) and saves the Spartans from a rout as they are driven back.
Sparta sends King Agesipolis to Olynthus with reinforcements as the city holds out. Agesilaus besieges the city of Phlius in the north Peloponnese for not restoring the rights of its exiles as demanded by Sparta.
Teleutias is killed in an attack on Olynthus.
381/0
The Athenian orator Isocrates’ first ‘Panegyric’, a call for another national Greek expedition against the Persians as in 396–5 but this time led by Athens due to Sparta forfeiting its moral right to do so by its recent misbehaviour.
380
Summer – King Agesipolis of Sparta, commanding their expedition against Olynthus, dies of a fever and is succeeded by his younger brother Cleombrotus.
(or 379) After a year’s siege, Agesilaus starves Phlius out and installs a garrison for six months while his new oligarchic regime conducts trials and executions of their enemies. Olynthus is forced to sign up to a treaty becoming a Spartan ally and dissolving its League.
Persia
?Rebel Persian admiral Glos, controlling the Asia Minor/Ionia seaways, is assassinated; he is succeeded by Tachos, who founds a new city near Clazomenae.
379
Greece
December – Twelve (according to Plutarch)/seven (Xenophon) Theban exiles, led by Melon and including Pelopidas and Damocleides, who are in league with the oligarchs’ secretary Phillidas (who met Melon on a recent trip to Athens) merge with and borrow clothes from the rural labourers walking back into Thebes for the night. They then hide at the house of a sympathizer, Charon, for twenty-four hours. Their main group waits some miles away on the Thriaisian plain for a signal to proceed. A rumour reaches chief oligarch Archias, who sends for Charon to question him but is lulled by him into a false sense of security. That evening some of the twelve infiltrate the ruling council’s feast at Archias’ house to mark the end of their year in office, disguised as dancing-girls, sit on their couches with them, and stab them to death; Pelopidas and another group kill leading oligarch Leontiades by overpowering his porter and storming his bedroom, and other leading oligarchs are hunted down and killed and Phillidas kills the porter at the prison’s door and leads an attack inside to release the prisoners. The attackers’ allies in the city are told of the success and help to loot the weapon-manufacturers’ workrooms and shops; Epaminondas and others arrive from the Attic frontier next morning to join them and the new regime elects Pelopidas as ‘Boetarch’ i.e. military commander; a rescue-mission of cavalry sent to the Spartans by Plataea is intercepted and destroyed.
An Athenian force under two generals follows the attackers to help the coup, not officially authorized. The Spartan garrison is blockaded in the Cadmeia, and its nervous commanders Herippidas, Arcippus, and Lysanoridas negotiate a safe evacuation – Xenophon implies after a short siege (which means that the garrison panicked and negotiated too soon so Sparta was correct to prosecute its commanders), Diodorus says after a longer blockade. They retire to Megara to join a relief-army sent out under King Cleombrotus, which is making full speed for Thebes; their decision to retreat is thus a blunder and they are accused over it. (Agesilaus has refused to take command, alleging that he has served the traditional forty years’ soldiering of a Spartan citizen but possibly disapproving of the occupation of Thebes anyway.) Chabrias’ Athenians hold Eleutherae to block one line of approach to Thebes, but Cleombrotus takes the pass above Plataea and makes for Thespiae to join the Spartan garrison there. They attack Thebes but are repulsed, and he soon retires with the main army to Aegosthena but leaves Sphodrias with a force at Thespiae to harass Thebes.
A relieved Athens sentences the two generals who helped the coup to death to appease Sparta; Herippidas and Arcippus are executed and Lysanoridas is fined and exiled by Sparta.
378
Sphodrias foolishly raids the plain between Athens and Eleusis in a night attack to intimidate the so far neutral Athens – and was heading for the Piraeus to take it when he was spotted. Apparently (Plutarch) he was conned into the attack by a Theban agent, sent by Pelopidas, who urged him to take the Piraeus and thus blackmail Athens into abandoning Thebes, which Sparta would reward him for. He thus arouses public opinion in Athens, though the visiting Spartan ambassadors are arrested and assure his action was not sanctioned by Cleombrotus or the government in Sparta and he will be executed. Sphodrias is summoned home, but refuses to go and is acquitted in his absence as Agesilaus speaks up for him. Athens votes in reprisal to send 200 cavalry and 5000 infantry under Chabrias to aid Thebes.
Agesilaus reforms the system whereby Sparta’s allies send troops to aid her wars in order to make greater demands and have the numbers to crush Thebes, granting them the right to pay money if they prefer so he can hire mercenaries and probably arousing discontent. (Early autumn?) He invades Boeotia with 18,000 infantry and 5000 cavalry, and confronts the Theban and Athenian armies holding a strong defensive position on a ridge near the city of Thebes, which he is too cautious to assault. His allied troops are unwilling to fight a risky battle. He raids the countryside, imposes new local garrisons to harass Thebes, and goes home.
Sicily
Carthage renews the war against Syracuse as Dionysius demands their complete withdrawal from Sicily; Dionysius’ brother Leptines is killed with many of his soldiers at the battle of Cronium in western Sicily.
(or 377) Peace between Dionysius and Carthage; Dionysius pays an indemnity of 1000 talents and the river Halycus is to be the frontier, thus extending Carthage’s power eastwards.
Winter 378/7
Greece
The Thebans defeat the Spartan garrison at Thespiae and kill its commander Pheobidas and many of his troops.
Athens commences re-forming her island League dissolved in 404, technically now of equal autonomous states not subjects; Thebes, Chios, and Byzantium are external allies of this alliance. The Piraeus is refortified.
A higher property-tax, at a lowered level of applicability to the citizens than before, is introduced in Athens to pay for its league and navy.
377
March – Athens announces the constitution of the League and invites all Greek states not subject to Persia to join, with equal status, autonomy, no interference in their constitutions or garrisons, and no tribute to be paid. It is aimed specifically at making Sparta accept the autonomy of all other Greek states, and thus breaking up its centralized and aggressive league/empire. The state of Athens and the, separate, ‘Council of the Allies’ will decide on policy between themselves and the allies’ council is to meet at Athens but have equal votes for all with majority votes binding and an annually-elected president. Athens acts as leader in implementing military policy and negotiations, but as directed by the votes of the allies’ council and its own government; usually it is Athens’ generals that command in wartime, but they are constrained by the alliance’s charter. Athens and the allies’ council assess and impose their own, separate financial contributions on their own polities to pay for the alliance’s actions, especially wars; both bodies have to approve admissions to the alliance and any treaties (or wars?) with states outside the alliance, and joint judicial bodies to rule on infringements of the terms are created. A religious headquarters is set up, at Delos as in the first Athenian alliance/empire; the first states to join are most of Euboea, the northern Aegean island of Sciathos, Maronea in Thrace, and Perinthus on the Propontis.
Spring–summer – Agesilaus invades Boeotia again, but cannot bring the Thebans to battle and ravages the countryside again. After two years without being able to cultivate a harvest the Thebans have to resort to buying in corn from Pagasae in Thessaly; their ships are, however, looted by the Spartan commander at Oreus, Alcetas.
On Agesilaus’ return journey to Sparta, he suffers violent cramps in his leg in Megara (?a burst blood-vessel) and is incapacitated for weeks.
Greece/Egypt
Chabrias assists King Nectanebo at the head of a Greek mercenary force against a Persian attack, but is recalled to Athens to take naval command.
377/6
Greece
A board of ten new naval commissioners is set up in Athens to run the navy.
376
The fighting in Boeotia continues inconclusively as with Agesilaus recuperating Cleombrotus tries to force the passes over Mount Cithaeron in order to enter and ravage Boeotia but is driven back. Sparta’s disgruntled allies request her to try a naval blockade of Athens to force her out of the war. Thebes starts to re-from the Boeotian League as more cities in the area throw off their Spartan garrisons and constitutions and become independent democracies; the League is now formed of more democratic regimes than earlier, and is again dominated by Thebes; a general assembly of all the cities elected by all male citizens meets regularly at Thebes to decide policy and elect magistrates, councils, and military commanders. Thebes represents three-sevenths of the electorate due to her size in population, and provides most of the seven annual ‘Boetarchs’ as the supreme leadership.
Sixty Spartan ships based at Aegina, commanded by Pollis, blockade the Saronic Gulf in a nautical challenge to Athens; September. The Athenian fleet under Chabrias defeats it off Naxos.
?Sparta sends to the Great King to ask him to mediate; a letter from him to the Greek states is subsequently sent but ignored.
Sicily
?Dionysius captures Croton in southern Italy to extend his power there, but fails to take Thurii.
375
Greece
The Spartan fleet is at Aegina again; one Athenian fleet under Chabrias moves along the Thracian coast signing up new members to the League, and a second under Timotheus goes to the Ionian Sea to win over Corcyra, Cephallonia, and Acarnania and later agrees to an alliance with King Alcetas of Epirus.
June? – Sparta sends a fleet of fifty ships under Nicolochus to the Ionian Sea to oppose Timotheus, but it is defeated at a battle off Alyra in Acarnania; Corcyra then sends ships to reinforce the Athenians.
The Theban ‘Sacred Band’, of 300 male lovers and led by Pelopidas, attacks the Spartan garrison at Orchomenus (two infantry squadrons) while most of the troops are away raiding Locris; he intends to take the city if it is feasible, but more Spartan troops have arrived so he retreats. As he passes the temple of Apollo at Tegyra the returning Spartan raiders under Gorgolyon and Theopompus spot him, and he attacks despite being outnumbered. The Thebans fight in an unusual compact square rather than the usual long line of infantry ‘hoplites’, and break though and rout the conventionally arrayed Spartans and kill both their commanders.
After this battle, the tide of pro-Theban risings in Boeotia soon leaves only Orchomenus in Spartan hands; the northern Spartan outpost at Heraclea guarding the approaches to Thermopylae is now a vital link through to Sparta’s ally in Thessaly, Polydamas of Pharsalus, who is being menaced by the expanding power of pro-Theban Jason of Pherae to his north.
Thebes invades pro-Spartan Phocis; its ally Jason of Pherae threatens Polydamas with attack, and he (in person) and Phocis ask Sparta for help. King Cleombrotus is sent across the Gulf of Corinth to aid Phocis, but not to assist Polydamas as this is too far a distance; Jason invades Pharsalus and forces Polydamas to accept him as his overlord and send him his children as hostages, and is then elected as leader (‘hegemon’) of Thessaly.
Athens, probably over-burdened financially by her new league’s expansion and annoyed at Thebes not paying its annual contribution to the alliance’s treasury, negotiates with Sparta.
July – Peace is agreed in a congress at Sparta, on the basis of the ‘status quo’ of the Greek states as in the Peace of Antalcidas in 386 and again with the Great King as guarantor, but now with Sparta recognizing the new Athenian alliance and allowing Thebes, as a member of it, to negotiate peace with Sparta.
The news is sent to the Athenian fleet in the Ionian, where Timotheus proceeds to land his democratic exile allies from Zacynthus on that island so they can overthrow the oligarchic regime there; the latter protest to Sparta, which sends an embassy to Athens demanding that the Zacynthus democrats be stopped; Athens refuses so Sparta withdraws from the treaty.
374
Two Spartan fleets are sent out to the Ionian Sea, the first (possibly late 375) of twenty-three ships under Aristocrates and the second commanded by Mnasippus, to regain control of Zacynthus and also help Corcyra where a pro-Spartan minority invites them. Sparta also sends to Dionysius of Syracuse to urge their mutual interest in keeping Athens out of the Ionian Sea. Mnasippus blockades the eponymous capital of Corcyra.
?Civil strife and unsuccessful plots to overthrow the incumbent regimes in Corinth, Megara, Sicyon and Phlius.
373
Early – Sparta sends fleet to Zacynthus and Corcyra. Short of funds for a naval campaign, Athens sends 500 mercenaries under Ctesicles by land to Epirus to cross to and assist Corcyra, with local king Alcetas assisting them. They sneak into the eponymous capital of Corcyra unobserved by the besiegers. Iphicrates follows by sea once the fleet can be funded, but in the interim Mnasippus has been killed in a sortie from the capital of Corcyra (possibly as late as early 372).
Iphicrates reduces Cephallonia, and takes a squadron sent by Dionysius to assist Sparta at Corcyra by surprise while the crews are ashore and captures most of it.
Timotheus takes the fleet round the Aegean – possibly originally intended to go to the Ionian too but he does not have enough ships to make this safe. He signs up new members for and thus pledges of money to the alliance, lands in Thessaly, and persuades Jason of Pherae to join – Athens will now guarantee his local power though this contradicts her supposed campaign for states to be autonomous. Amyntas III of Macedon also signs up as an ally.
September – The fleet is laid up at the southern end of Attica, opposite the Spartan base at Aegina to hinder its use, as there is no money for an expedition; Callistratus and Iphicrates prosecute Timotheus for incompetent generalship in his recent naval expeditions, but he is acquitted after Jason of Pherae and Alcetas of Epirus sends a supportive embassy. Iphicrates takes over the naval command from him; new taxes are imposed to pay for the fleet’s 372 campaign.
The Temple of Apollo at Delphi is destroyed in a fire. An earthquake sinks the seashore city of Helice in the Gulf of Corinth.
(or spring 372) Thebes destroys Plataea after its capture from Sparta by a sudden descent that catches most of the menfolk outside the walls in the fields, as a warning to those Boeotians who chose to support Sparta against her in recent years; the inhabitants are expelled. Thespiae is deprived of its autonomy and becomes a Theban garrison. Fears rise of Thebes dominating the Boeotian League as its subjects not its allies; the exiled Plataeans agitate for help in their refuge, Athens.
372
Iphicrates takes the fleet (seventy ships) to sea against Aegina, and the Spartan fleet withdraws. However, when he takes it on to the Ionian Sea he cannot fund his supplies for his men, and has to hire them out as labourers on the farms on Corcyra in return for food; a garrison is placed on Cephallonia.
Greece/Persia
Revolt of Datames, satrap of Cappadocia, against Great King Artaxerxes, probably due to his fearing arrest and execution as a result of a court conspiracy to discredit him.
371
(? or 372) Sparta takes over and razes Thespiae in Boeotia.
Encouraged by exiles from Plataea and Thespiae expelled by Thebes, the Athenians send a delegation led by Callias, torch-bearer of the ‘Mysteries’ of Eleusis and Calistratus, to Sparta to successfully propose that Sparta call a congress for peace which they will assist.
Summer – The Greek states send delegates to a congress held at Sparta, and Great King Artaxerxes II sends envoys to pressurize for peace so he can recruit mercenaries to use in his planned attack on Egypt. Sparta, backed by Athens and Persia, proposes an agreement that all states should be independent, all garrison withdrawn, and armies stood down; if any of the signatories are attacked the others are at liberty but not obliged to assist them in defence. This is approved, oaths are taken to it led by Sparta on behalf of her allies, and the congress’s participants agree to send envoys round to supervise the evacuation of garrisons. Athens and her allies, and Thebes and her allies, take the oaths separately from each other. The Chersonese and Amphipolis are recognized as Athenian, and King Amyntas of Macedon is at the congress and agrees to this.
Next day Thebes, led by Epaminondas, asks for the word ‘Thebes’ to be replaced with ‘Boeotia’ so her league can be recognized in the treaty along with those of Sparta and Athens; Agesilaus refuses on the grounds that the oaths have been taken so the terminology is already agreed. The Thebans ask for their names to be removed from the treaty and walk out.
The treaty and disarmament go ahead without Thebes, and Athens recalls Iphicrates and her fleet. Spartan king Cleombrotus, however, stays on with his army in Phocis, and the Spartan assembly debates whether or not to withdraw him too; Prothous proposes withdrawing the army and making a formal dedication at the temple of Apollo at Delphi to raise the treaty to ‘sacred’ status, so that any who break the peace by occupying another’s land can be proceeded against easily. The assembly, however, votes to order Cleombrotus to attack Thebes if she does not dissolve the Boeotian League immediately; and as Cleombrotus is close to Thebes the latter will not have time to raise a full-size Boeotian army or call in Jason of Pherae from Thessaly. Thebes defies Sparta.
Cleombrotus marches via Creusis on the Gulf of Corinth, evading a pass that the Theban army has blocked, to Boeotia, and reaches the plain of Leuctra near Thespiae, ten miles from Thebes; Thebes has an army of around 6000 infantry and 600 cavalry to 10,000 Spartan infantry and 1000 Spartan cavalry.
Battle of Leuctra – at midday Cleombrotus deploys his army on the plain after an emboldening midday drink with himself and around 2000 Spartans on their right wing, his allies in the centre and left wing, and the cavalry in front. The Thebans are persuaded to attack not await attack as usual by Epamonindas, possibly with reference to a prophecy that the Spartans will be defeated at a monument to some virgins once raped by Spartans that is nearby and is decorated with garlands to earn divine goodwill; the troops of Thespiae panic and withdraw and the Theban non-combatant food-suppliers are harassed by the Spartan light skirmishers as they leave and retreat to the Theban camp to rejoin the troops. The crack Theban regiment of the ‘Sacred Band’, famously made of pairs of lovers, under Pelopidas are on the Theban left wing, which is the ‘deepest’ part of the line and thus has the force to ‘punch’ through the enemy, and the centre and right are to let the left wing move ahead first with Epaminondas planning to deploy his right wing at an oblique angle to the main battle-line so they will engage first and can use their numbers and discipline to smash through the enemy left. The Boeotian cavalry attack and drive the smaller Spartan cavalry back; Pelopidas leads a Theban left wing charge against Cleombrotus’ wing, which is still deploying to its right to outflank the Theban right wing and is caught unprepared. The Thebans drive the Spartans in on themselves with the force of the charge, mortally wounding Cleombrotus, though his troops recover and manage to reclaim his body before a second Theban charge drives them back again. The weight of the Theban centre under Epaminondas then drives the Spartans back across their whole left wing, and about half the Spartan army including around 400 Spartan citizens are killed; the Spartans break and flee, leaving their allies in the centre and right wings exposed; the latter withdraw to the Spartan camp without engaging the Thebans, and persuade the Spartan survivors not to renew the battle. The Spartans send envoys for a truce to collect their dead and concede defeat.
Jason of Pherae arrives with his cavalry at the battlefield ?a day or two later, refuses to assist a Theban attack, and arranges an armistice for the Spartan survivors to evacuate their camp unhindered; they retreat overnight to Creusis and thence Aegosthena.
Sparta hears the news on the final day of the ‘Gymnopedae’ festival, and the officials keep the news to themselves and carry on the latter as normal, informing the relatives of the dead individually and the city later and banning mourning; next day all citizens under sixty are called up and the surviving King Agesilaus’s son Archidamus leads the relief army out to join up with their Peloponnesian allies; he meets the retreating survivors of Leuctra at Aegosthena, hears of the extent of the disaster, and decides to send his demoralized allies home as a sign that the campaign cannot be won, conceding control of Boeotia to Thebes. At Athens, a Theban envoy arrives to announce the victory and ask for alliance against Sparta but the ‘Boule’ does not respond.
Cleombrotus is succeeded as king in Sparta by his son Agesipolis II, who is probably only a youth.
Jason attacks the Hyampolitans and Heraclea in Phocis to enforce his local power, then returns home.
Winter – Athens calls a congress to uphold and implement the Great King’s proposed terms of earlier 371, in the hope of using majority opinion and the argument that this treaty has already been sworn to as a means of reducing the effect of Thebes’ victory. The Athenian naval alliance will now act as chief guarantor of the peace and the other Greek states can form defensive alliances with it to assist in peace-keeping and dealing with any who try to control other states. Most of the Peloponnese sends delegates and agrees to these terms, forming alliances with Athens, but not Sparta or Elis.
Persia
?Rebel satrap Datames of Cappadocia fights off a first attack on him by loyalist army under satrap Autophradates.
Greece
Winter 371/0
Agesilaus is authorized to reform the Spartan constitution; he refuses to extend the Spartan citizenship as some wish in order to increase the size of the citizen-army and merely refuses to implement the usual legal ruling on survivors of major defeats losing their citizenship.
Tegea, Mantinea, and probably Corinth, Megara, and Sicyon break away from the Spartan alliance and evict their oligarchic governments; in Tegea the minority anti-Spartan party of Callibius and Proxenus (who want to create an Arcadian League) secretly call in help from a Mantinean military force to aid them as they attack and evict their rivals under Stasippus.
370
Early spring? – Mantinea re-forms itself as one city and rebuilds its walls, snubbing Agesilaus who is sent there by Sparta to ask them to stop this unfriendly act; it joins Tegea to set up an Arcadian League, to which others join in defiance of Sparta; they ally to Elis and Argos.
Agesilaus leads a tentative Spartan attack into Arcadian territory to punish Mantinea, avoids a major battle near the city with the Arcadians and Mantineans who are in turn held back by the Eleans, and does some ravaging to restore his men’s morale.
Epamonindas leads and advises the Boeotian League as its annual ‘Boeotarch’ (general) with Pelopidas, and persuades its members to re-admit rather than punish Orchomenus; alliances with Phocis, Ozolian Locris, and Aetolia.
Uneasy alliance between Jason of Pherae, who now dominates Thessaly and overruns the Spartan garrison at Heraclea, which he gives to Malis and Oeta to build up his clients in Locris, and Thebes; Jason proposes to act as president of the forthcoming Pythian Games at Delphi.
July/August? – Jason of Pherae is assassinated before he can run the Pythian Games; Opuntian Locris, Malis, Heraclea, Euboaea, and Acarnania decide to seek Theban protection and join the Boeotian League after the death of their potential leader or oppressor Jason. His brothers Polydorus and Polyphron succeed him, but the former is soon killed by the latter.
Democratic revolution at Argos sees 1000 of the oligarchs’ party being massacred by the democrats; it joins Elis and the new Arcadian League in challenging Sparta.
Autumn – The pro-Spartan faction exiled from Tegea appeal to Agesilaus, and he leads a Spartan army there to restore them and so pull Tegea out of the Arcadian League; the Arcadians also fight Orchomenus and Heraea, which call on Corinth and Phlius for aid.
Arcadians call in the Boeotian League to help them against their rebels and Sparta, and alliance between the two Leagues is agreed.
Late – Death of King Amyntas III of Macedon, paternal grandfather of Alexander ‘the Great’; succeeded by the oldest of his three sons, Alexander II. Possibly Amyntas has also made an agreement with the family’s rival Ptolemy, son of his cousin Amyntas II, who marries Amyntas III’s daughter Euryone, that he will succeed Alexander.
?Death of Alexander ‘the Great’s’ maternal great-grandfather, King Alcetas of Epirus; succeeded as joint rulers by his sons, Neoptolemus and Arybbas.
370/69
Death of the new Agid king, Agesipolis of Sparta, after a reign of one or two years; succeeded by his brother Cleomenes (II).
369
Early? The Boeotians march into the Peloponnese, led by Epaminondas and Pelopidas, to assist the Arcadians in conquering Orchomenus and Heraea; they are then asked to stay on by Arcadia, Argos and Elis and the Arcadians seize a pass into Laconia; a joint Boeotian/Arcadian/Argive/Eleian army of around 40,000 invades Laconia and descend the east bank of the River Eurotas to Sparta.
The remaining 800 or so Spartan citizen-soldiers and 6000 (Xenophon)/1000 (Diodorus) armed ‘helots’ are blockaded in Sparta with their Orchomenus mercenaries; the fields and villages outside Sparta are burnt; Agesilaus refuses to march out against a vastly superior army. Agesilaus puts down a mutiny by a unit of plotters who have seized part of the defences, at the ‘Issorium’, by going up to them pretending ignorance of their plot and saying that they have mistaken their orders and are to be split up and assigned to different posts; they believe they are undetected and duly split up, and then he has them individually arrested and executed, illegally without trial; nevertheless large numbers of helots and ‘periocoi’ join the Thebans. Epaminondas marches on south, crosses the Eurotas at Amyclae to the west bank, and moves back up to the south side of Sparta; his cavalry enter the ‘city’ (actually four villages with remarkably little grand buildings or planning) but are driven out; he withdraws to besiege the naval base of Gytheium at the river-mouth but cannot take it. Corinth, Sicyon, Phlius, Epidaurus, Troezen, and other cities and districts in the north-east Peloponnese send help to Sparta and some of the Thebans’ allies leave for home with their loot.
Messenia has its independence restored by Thebes to block Sparta’s control of the southern Peloponnese, and Messene is rebuilt.
?Polyphron of Pherae, lord of Thessaly, is murdered at the instigation of his wife whose brothers do the deed – to the benefit of his nephew Alexander, son of his murdered brother Polydorus, who seizes power.
While Epaminondas is in Laconia, Pelopidas is sent to answer an appeal from Thessaly against Alexander of Pherae, who has take Pherae’s rival city Larissa; Pelopidas marches there and compels him to withdraw, but the two men quarrel as Alexander resists taking instructions on moderating his harsh treatment of his subjects/allies and the tyrant leaves for home in a rage.
April – Epaminondas withdraws from Laconia; Athens agrees to an appeal from Sparta for help, with its supporters arguing that if Thebes destroys Sparta they will be next, and sends troops under Iphicrates to aid its new ally Corinth in blocking the Isthmus; Epaminondas evades them by taking an unguarded route near Cenchrae and reaches Boeotia safely.
An alliance between Athens and Sparta is formalized.
368
?Civil war between King Alexander II of Macedon and his brother-in-law Ptolemy of Alorus, son of Amyntas II; assuming that Diodorus’ reference to a three-year reign by Ptolemy (to 365?) implies his time as sole ruler, Alexander is assassinated (by his rival?) later in this year.
During the civil war in Macedon between Alexander II and Ptolemy, their neighbour Alexander of Pherae attacks the Thessalian League. Thebes sends Pelopidas and Ismenias as envoys, but they have no troops; the Athenian admiral Iphicrates is backing Ptolemy, but Pelopidas goes to the Macedonian court and wins Ptolemy over to alliance and brokers a truce between him and Alexander. Ptolemy enters offensive and defensive alliance with the Boeotian League and sends Alexander’s youngest brother Philip, aged sixteen, as a hostage to Thebes with thirty other prominent young Macedonians. This will enable the future conqueror of Thebes, Philip II, to study her military tactics and learn from her greatest generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas; possibly Philip stays with Epaminondas’ father and learns from him personally. Some time later Alexander is assassinated and Ptolemy takes all Macedon, probably supported by the nobles as Alexander’s next brother, Perdiccas, is still only in his teens and Ptolemy acts as his guardian and makes him his heir.
Pelopidas raises a force of Thessalians opposed to Alexander of Pherae to aid him as he has no military power to coerce the latter.
Iphicrates’ Athenian fleet successfully intervenes in Macedon to assist Ptolemy against a pretender, Pausanias the son of the late king, Archelaus, who has invaded eastern Macedon with his brother-in-law Philip, Ptolemy’s brother.
Early summer? – Epaminondas’ second invasion of the Peloponnese, with 7000 infantry and 600 cavalry; he faces a joint Corinth/Athens/Sparta army of around 20,000 blocking the Isthmus around Oneum, but attacks the western end of their defence-line before dawn as the guards are changing their posts and the new rota are still half-asleep and storms it; he moves on into the north-east Peloponnese to link up with his Arcadian allies and force Sicyon and Pellene to join the Boeotian League to protect his approaches to Laconia and threaten Corinth.
He plunders the territory of Epidaurus and Corinth before going home, but an opportunistic attack on one of the gates of Corinth by the ‘Sacred Band’ is defeated by a sortie.
Assistance from Dionysius of Syracuse arrives in Sparta in twenty triremes with some Celtic allies from Italy; the Sicilian cavalry helps Sparta and Corinth to harass the Thebans as they leave the Isthmus, and then they attack Sicyon.
The Arcadian League builds a new federal centre at the new fortified city of Megalopolis (‘great city’), blocking the route north from Sparta towards Argos and Corinth; the aggressive Lycomedes of Mantinea emerges as the Arcadian leader and urges them to rely less on doing what the Thebans want.
Alexander of Pherae arrests Pelopidas and Ismenias when they visit him at Pharsalus despite a truce, and imprisons them at Pherae; their subsequent antagonism may imply that he uses physical violence or threatens this. He allies with Athens, though Iphicrates’ Aegean fleet (in the region each year to 365) is little practical help to him. Autocles and thirty ships are sent to Thessaly for the next few months by Athens to help Alexander.
Winter – The Persian envoy Philiscus of Abydos arrives in Greece and, backed by Athens which makes him a citizen, summons a peace-congress to Delphi to try to broker a treaty and end the war between Sparta and Thebes/Arcadia. Sparta refuses to give up its claim to Messenia and the congress fails, and Philiscus uses his money to hire 2000 mercenaries to supply to Sparta to aid its defence.
December? – Dionysius of Syracuse finally wins a prize for his theatrical works at a Greek festival, to his great delight – his ‘Ransoming of Hector’ wins first prize at the ‘Lenaia’ in Athens.
367
A second contingent of troops from Dionysius of Syracuse comes to the Spartan/Corinthian/Arcadian alliance’s meeting at Corinth to aid Sparta, and then proceeds to Laconia; with its help Archidamus raids Arcadia and fights off the Arcadians at the drawn ‘Tearless Battle’ where morale is helped as not one Spartan citizen is killed.
Sicily
Early spring – Death of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse who has ruled the city for thirty-eight years, allegedly after celebrating his victory in the annual theatrical competition at the ‘Lenaia’ in Athens with a drunken party. He is succeeded by his timorous and easily influenced son Dionysius II (born around 392?), who for the moment is politically reliant on his uncle and brother-in-law Dion. The latter persuades his friend the philosopher Plato to come to Syracuse again, to tutor Dionysius II and supposedly train him in the paths of virtuous rule; Plato and Dion see the tyrant as a potential ‘philosopher-king’ who can be turned into an ideal ruler, but the weak-willed young man is also subject to the efforts of the wily politician Philistus who Dionysius recalls (at Dion’s enemies request to counter his influence?) and who then tries to lure the tyrant into easy living and wild parties. Philistus starts to work on Dionysius with flattery to make him jealous of Dion.
Greece
Boeotia sends 8000 infantry and 600 cavalry to invade Thessaly and force the hostages’ release, and it arrives before the Athenians’ thirty ships and 1000 infantry does. The Boeotians cannot bring Alexander to battle on the plains of Thessaly, and are harassed by his cavalry until Epaminondas, currently only a junior officer instead of their commander, which may imply recent political criticism at home, is given command of the Boeotian force and drives them off.
Epaminondas commands a second expedition to Thessaly himself, and forces Alexander to release Pelopidas and Ismenias.
Athens allies to Dionysius II of Syracuse in her search for new allies, but gets no aid; her allies are restive at the cost of the Theban war, so she follows Sparta in sending an embassy to the Great King (Timagoras and Leon) to ask for his mediation. Antalcidas, negotiator of the 387 Sparta/Persia treaty, represents Sparta; the Boeotian League sends Pelopidas with a rival request, as do Arcadia (boxing champion Antiochus), Elis (Archidamus), and Argos.
Greece/Persia
Autumn – The Greek envoys arrive at Susa; Great King Artaxerxes II mediates, honours his old acquaintance Antalcidas but also the heroic victor of Leuctra Pelopidas, and decides in favour of the proposals made by Pelopidas on behalf of Thebes – all Greek states will be autonomous and keep the peace with each other, and no occupation of other states will be permitted; Athens will have to lay up her fleet and accept the loss of Amphipolis to Macedon, and Sparta will have to give up her claims to Messenia. The ‘Peace of Pelopidas’ is taken back to Greece to be put to the states, but the Spartan envoy Antalcidas, who had not expected this outcome given his earlier credit at the Persian court, kills himself. The Athenian envoy Timagoras is executed on his return home for receiving a large quantity of lavish gifts from Artaxerxes, with Leon saying that his fellow-envoy did what Pelopidas wanted.
?(or 366) Rebel satrap Datames of Cappadocia defeats a second Persian attack under Ariobarzanes of Hellespontine Phrygia; Ariobarzanes is then dismissed in favour of the late satrap Pharnabazus’ son Artabazus, the future rebel, exile in Macedon, and ally of Alexander ‘the Great’, refuses to retire, and revolts himself.
366
Greece
Early – Epaminondas is elected ‘Boetarch’.
Spring – Thebes summons a congress of the Greek city-states, and the Persian envoy unseals and reads out the Great King’s mediation decisions for autonomy and liberty for all states and the independence of Messene and Amphipolis. Thebes’ rivals refuse to accept it at this congress and insist that their own citizens must approve or reject it, led by Sparta and Athens, and Lycomedes of Arcadia backs them; Thebes has to send envoys round to argue their case to each city. Corinth is the first city to tell the Theban envoys who are sent round the various cities that she will not accept the terms and this emboldens others. Athens refuses to lay up her fleet and sends an army into Megara to oppose Thebes’ expected attack, and Sparta sends Agesilaus off to assist rebel satrap Ariobarzanes and receive money from him, which he can then use for war against Thebes.
Epaminondas marches into the Isthmus of Corinth with the year’s Boeotia expedition, and is helped by Argos to break through the enemy’s defence-lines; he joins up with the Argive/Arcadian/Sicyon/Elis/Messenian forces in the north Peloponnese and invades Achaea. The Achaean League agrees to join the Boeotian League in alliance.
Epaminondas issues orders for the Achaean League to keep its present city constitutions and not exile any of the oligarchic factions, to preserve it and its new Boeotian guarantors from any political backlash and build up support; however, some of the Boeotian democrats fear that this will mean that surviving oligarchic regimes will revert to Spartan alliance once they find it safe to do so, and link up with his foes in Thebes. The Thebes assembly votes to ignore Epaminondas’ decisions, install democratic regimes in all of Achaea, and exile the oligarchs with a series of Boeotian garrisons installed. This is resented, and the Achaean democrats are forced by local resistance to a Boeotian ‘dictat’ to recall their exiles within months. New alliances with Sparta follow.
Arcadia and Argos garrison Sicyon to help the oligarchs who Epaminondas has left in power, but are won over by the ambitious Euphron, one of the latter, to assist him in proclaiming a democracy as a means to saving the city from its oligarchs allying with Sparta; he is elected as one of the annual generals (with Hippodamus, Acrisius, Cleander and Lysander) and his son Adeas as the commander of the city’s mercenaries in place of Lycomedes by the new regime, and he seizes temple treasures and the confiscated property of victimized wealthy citizens to pay for more mercenaries with whom he deposes his fellow-generals and makes himself tyrant. Boeotia accepts this but sends a garrison to watch him.
Summer – Oropus, Athens’ anti-Theban ally in Boeotia, is seized by its pro-Theban exiles aided by their host Themison, tyrant of Eretria; it is handed over to the Boeotian League, while Chares is away with troops assisting Phlius in the north Peloponnese against Argos and Arcadia. Athens sends an expedition, but the Thebans have occupied the town before they arrive so they go home. Callistratus and Chabrais are prosecuted for treason in Athens in discontent at their military failures, but are acquitted.
Athens forms an anti-Theban alliance with Arcadia, following an overture from Lycomedes of Mantinea; the latter visits Athens to conclude the treaty, but is assassinated on his way home by vengeful exiles. Athens is alarmed at her current ally Corinth expelling her troops from their strongpoints in the city’s territory after Demotion carried a motion at the Athenian assembly in favour of forcing Corinth to keep in line with her; Chares is sent to occupy Corinth in case its oligarchic government turns to Thebes, and to install a pro-Athenian democracy. The plot is betrayed and as he lands his troops at Cenchrae he is met by armed Corinthians and told to leave; Corinth and her allies Phlius and Epidaurus agree to peace with Thebes instead, but Sparta refuses to negotiate as the Corinthians advise her to do as she will have to accept the loss of Messenia.
Euphron, his 2000 or so mercenaries, and the Boeotian garrison raid Phlius in alliance with an Argos/Arcadian attack, but the suspicious Arcadians under their annual general Stymphalius try to expel him and take over the city of Sicyon. He retreats to and seizes the harbour and sends Pasimelus of Cornth as his envoy to the Spartans, to whom he hands the harbour; Athens sends him mercenaries and he overruns the town, but the Boeotian garrison holds out in the citadel; he then goes to Thebes to try to restore relations, but is assassinated by his opponents from Sicyon while addressing the council of the Boeotian League in the Cadmea citadel. The murderers are tried, but are acquitted after one of them points out that they only committed tyrannicide without trial like the Thebans did to their oppressors.
The Arcadians defeat the men of Elis as the latter try to force defector town Lasion back into Elena suzerainty and out of the Arcadian League; they advance via Olympia on Elis itself but are defeated and driven out of the city; however, the Elis democrats under Charopus take heart from the military power of pro-democracy Arcadia in the region and seize the acropolis of Elis. The ruling oligarchs’ cavalry drives them out, and they seize Pylos on the coast and ally to Arcadia; civil war in Elis (into 365?), and Sparta assists the oligarchs by seizing the frontier town of Cromnus; King Agesilaus’ son Archidamus has to rescue his garrison in Cromnus from an Arcadian siege, and is defeated and wounded in the process though part of the Spartan garrison escapes successfully.
Athens recalls Timotheus and sends him with thirty ships and 8000 mercenaries to assist Ariobarzanes and earn his money and goodwill; Timotheus expels the pro-Persian ruler of Samos, Cyprothemis, after a six-month blockade (late 366 or early 365) and installs Athenian colonists, ‘cleruchs’, to keep the island loyal.
Sicily
Dion is exiled from Syracuse by Dionysius after his plans for conducting the forthcoming negotiations with Carthage personally and unsupervised are revealed to his paranoid nephew by the mischief-making Philistus; a friendly letter that Dion has written to Carthage asking their leaders to ask Dionysius to use him as negotiator is given to Dionysius by Philistus, and he is accused of wanting Carthaginian help for a coup; Plato fails to mediate and he is bundled out of Syracuse secretly on a ship (autumn?) and dumped in Italy. He is allowed to keep his revenues from his estates, as he retires to Athens to stay with his friend and later military lieutenant (and murderer) Callippus. Later the spiteful Dionysius insists that Dion’s wife Arete, his sister, divorce Dion and marry a crony of his.
?Plato returns to Athens after giving up on attempts to influence the erratic Dionysius II, having been detained in the Ortygia citadel as a ‘guest’ for some weeks after Dion was exiled so he would not return home angry and blacken the tyrant’s name; Dionysius promises to recall him after an imminent military campaign but does not do so.
366/5
Greece
Death of King Ptolemy of Macedon, according to the chronology of Diodorus who gives him a three-year reign and Perdiccas III a six-year reign to 360/59. Accession of his brother-in-law Perdiccas III, now probably around or over twenty? Return of Perdiccas’ younger brother Philip, later King Philip II, from Thebes to Macedon.
365
Uneasy unofficial truce between the Theban and Spartan alliances in the Peloponnese, following the recapture of Selassia on the Arcadian border by Sparta and its Sicilian mercenaries sent by Dionysius II.
(Possibly the Cromnus incident between Arcadia and Sparta occurs in this year.)
?Timoleon of Corinth, future ruler of Syracuse, kills his would-be tyrant brother Timophanes to halt his plot, thus earning a reputation for strict democratic probity.
364
Thebes/Boeotia agrees to an appeal to send an army of c.7000 to assist the Thessalian League against Athens’ local ally Alexander of Pherae, who has garrisoned towns in Phthiotis and Magnesia.
13 July – An eclipse of the sun delays the army setting out, and is declared a bad omen so the plan is abandoned; Pelopidas insists on going to fulfil Thebes’ promise and collects some 300 Boeotian citizen cavalry volunteers. They join the Thessalian army, and fight Alexander at Cynoscephalae (‘Dog’s Head’, near Pagasae; later site of 197 battle between Macedon and Rome). The Pherae infantry, outnumbering the Thessalians’ infantry, is positioned in the foothills above the plain; Pelopidas sends his infantry to attack them and his cavalry then routs the Pherae cavalry in the plain, but as he prepares a cavalry attack on the Pherae infantry in the flanks they push his Thessalian infantry back down the hill. He takes an infantry force to attack Alexander’s right wing of mercenaries and win the battle by destroying the enemy leader and is successful, but he runs ahead of his men in the charge and is killed unsupported in combat as the enemy break; his cavalry routs the enemy and c.3000 are killed, but the loss of Pelopidas ruins the victory and Alexander continues the war.
Epaminondas cruises the Aegean with the new Theban fleet, which he has persuaded his city to construct, but achieves little.
July – The Arcadian army, aided by its allies Athens and Argos, occupies the sanctuary and Games precincts at Olympia and sets up a fortified position on the ‘Hill of Chronus’ so that its allies the Pisatans, not the Eleans, will run the Olympic Games; Elis appeals to its ally Achaea, and they attack the sanctuary during the Games (second half of August?) but are unable to storm it as the Arcadians, aided by Argos and Athenian cavalry, defend a line along the River Cladeus and have to give up after a day of fighting in the precincts with defenders pelting the attackers with tiles from the Olympia temples’ roofs. Seeing the stockade that the defenders have erected with pieces of temples overnight, the attacking Eleans retreat on the second day.
The Arcadians, led by Tegea, then sacrilegiously loot some temple treasury money from Olympia to pay their troops (the regular League army of 5000, the ‘Eparitoi’), and Mantinea leads complaints at this in their League council; the Tegeans secure a majority in their favour, aided by their city’s democratic credentials, which attracts Theban support, and accuse the Mantineans of damaging the League’s interests; the League council votes to summon the leaders of Mantinea, who refuse to come, and when troops are sent to arrest them Mantinea shuts its gates. The oligarchic regime in Mantinea turns to Sparta for help.
Autumn – Thebes is shamed into avenging Pelopidas; 7000 Boeotian infantry and 700 cavalry under Malcitas and Diogeiton attack Pherae, besiege Alexander, and force him to accept terms as an ally of the Boeotian League supplying troops when required.
?Athens installs colonists (‘cleruchs’) in Potidaea on the Macedonian coast.
Persia
Mithridates, son of rebel satrap Ariobarzanes, seizes the port of Heraclea in Paphlagonia.
363
Greece
The Arcadian League council votes in Mantinea’s favour, condemning the looting of the treasuries at Olympia and forbidding more use of them, and abolishes pay for their League troops to save money and asks Thebes not to send any troops in future unless asked. Part of the unpaid Arcadian army deserts. A truce with Elis is negotiated, though the Arcadian leaders who agreed to loot the treasure fear they will be prosecuted and ask Thebes to help them militarily; at Tegea, as oaths are being taken by the League’s various military contingents to the armistice with Elis a disgruntled Theban officer commanding the Theban contingent there talks the Tegean city leaders into rounding up their opponents, implying Theban backing for this. He then loses his nerve and persuades the city to release the accused, alleging that it was only a defensive measure in case they admitted an approaching Spartan force, and flees to Thebes; the anti-Thebans in Tegea complain about his conduct to the League, which complains to Thebes; Epaminondas says that the Arcadians have broken the terms of their alliance with Thebes by a unilateral truce with Elis, and he threatens invasion; Tegea and Megalopolis support Thebes but Mantinea and a rival faction defies it and asks Sparta for help. Arcadia asks Athens and other allies for help against the threat of Theban conquest.
Summer – The Theban navy, reinforced by new ships built with Thessalian/Macedonian timber, sets out (100 ships) under Epaminondas for the Hellespont with envoys sent secretly to Byzantium, Rhodes and Chios to encourage them to abandon Athens. The Athenians avoid an engagement, and Epaminondas reaches Byzantium and attacks Athenian corn-ships; Ceos and possibly various Propontis cities join Thebes. The expedition returns safely but has not achieved any major victory.
Plot to betray the Theban democracy while the fleet is away, led by various Theban exiles and their allies in the Boeotian city of Orchomenus who want Thebes humbled; the plot is discovered and the Thebans call a meeting of the Boeotian League, which has Orchomenus razed to the ground for treachery and its males executed and women and children sold as slaves; Epaminondas protests at this on his return.
Persia
Aroandas/Orontes, ex-satrap of Armenia, joins the rebel Asia Minor satraps’ coalition.
Clearchus, a Greek mercenary captain, seizes the Paphlagonian coastal town of Heraclea while its governor Mithridates is absent and sets up a tyranny.
362
Greece
Epaminondas invades the Peloponnese again with a mixture of Boeotians and his Thessalian allies, including a contingent sent by Alexander of Pherae but not Phocis, which complains that they should only defend Thebes, not assist aggression; he sets a trap for the Athenian army expected to be hurrying to help Sparta, but they go by sea. He joins the Arcadians and Messenians at Tegea and heads into Laconia, leaving an Arcadian/Spartan army at Mantinea behind him; when he hears that Agesilaus is marching north via Pellene and Sparta is undefended he marches on Sparta; after an overnight march through the hills avoiding Pallene he reaches and assaults the city of Sparta itself, but Agesilaus has been warned in time by a deserter and has sent some troops back. The Thebans enter the city but are held back at barricades, Agesilaus arrives with the main army (nine of the twelve infantry battalions), and the attackers are driven out in street-fighting with Agesilaus’ son Archidamus distinguishing himself in driving Thebans back; that afternoon the Thebans retire towards Epaminondas’ base at Tegea; they camp for the night in open country.
Epaminondas reckons that the enemy at Mantinea will have sent many of their troops back via Pellene to defend Sparta, and leaves his camp-fires burning while he leads the army off to try to surprise Mantinea; he reaches Tegea and sends his cavalry ahead, but a squadron of Athenian cavalry has just arrived from the Isthmus at Mantinea unaware of the Thebans’ approach that evening and the citizens, seeing the Thebans advancing, ask them to help; they drive the Theban cavalry back in time; among the casualties is the historian Xenophon’s son Gryllus. Sparta and its allies Athens, Elis, Messenia, and Achaea assemble their armies of c. 20,000 men at Mantinea; Epaminondas has to fight or leave as the time-limit for his allies’ service is expiring shortly.
4 July – Battle of Mantinea: the Messenians are on the allied right, then the Spartans in the centre guarding the main road, then the Athenians on the right, all facing south. The allied cavalry are on the wings in front. Epamonindas and c. 30,000 infantry (the solid phalanx, thickest on their left wing) and 3000 cavalry, on the wings, face them with the Thebans on the left and the Argives on the right. He plans to attack the enemy right wing with his phalanx on his left, which will be reinforced on its left wing with more ‘depth’ than usual to smash the opposition easier but this will be hidden behind the front ranks’ helmets, and drive the enemy back onto their left. He manoeuvres around the western side of the plain in the morning to lull the enemy into a false sense of security that he will not attack that day. While the Mantineans and Spartans are taking their midday meal in a wood back from their position he attacks suddenly on the enemy right, and they have to hurry back into position; the Theban phalanx in a ‘bow’ form attacks the enemy right and the Theban cavalry, backed up by light infantry, drives into the enemy cavalry like a wedge; the Mantineans and Spartans break and flee, and the Thebans move right onto the allied left wing from behind them, but Epaminondas is mortally wounded by a spear in his hour of victory and allegedly suggests to his officers as he dies that Thebes join a common Greek peace/league to preserve its strength; his co-commanders Iolaidas and Diophantus are also killed. As the news spreads the Thebans halt, and the retreating Athenians on the allied left break through the Theban right wing to escape; the battle is thus a political stalemate but the Thebans have the better of it militarily.
Athens compels Ceos to rejoin their League as a subject ally and enforces a democratic regime on Iulis, exiling its anti-Athenian leadership – signs that the League is becoming as one-sided as the Delian League in the fifth century.
Winter – After the death of Epaminondas halts Theban aggression, the main Greek states hold a meeting and agree a ‘common peace’ and mutual defensive alliance to preserve the peace, with a regular system of conferences and a joint League council probably formed. Sparta refuses to ratify the agreement as its claim to Messenia is not recognized.
362/1
Callistratus, founding political leader of the second Athenian Confederacy, is tried and sentenced to death ‘in absentia’ in political dispute; Aristophon is tried but wins his case by two votes.
Persia
?Orontes of Armenia invades Mesopotamia but is bought off by Artaxerxes; Datames of Cappadocia continues in rebellion but is later killed in battle.
At around this time, Artaxerxes II executes his eldest son Darius for a conspiracy to overthrow him; his second son Ariaspes becomes his heir.
Greece/Macedon
Timotheus fails to take Amphipolis from Macedon and retreats, burning his ships.
Alliance between Athens, Arcadia, Achaea, and Elis, and another with the Thessalian League; both are implicitly aimed against local Theban influence and so undermine the new 362/1 common alliance of mainland Greece. Thebes sends troops to protect Megalopolis against an Arcadian attack.
360
Plato returns to Athens from Syracuse after a second stay at Dionysius’ court where he could not get Dion recalled and the erratic tyrant veered between affection and threats; his Pythagorean friends in southern Italy who asked him to go to Dionysius have to send a galley to Syracuse to evacuate him after he appears to be in danger.
King Cotys of Thrace takes Sestos from Athens in a war in the Chersonese.
Persia/Egypt
King Agesilaus of Sparta and the Athenian general Chares go to Egypt with a mercenary force to aid the new Pharoah Tachos in a campaign against Artaxerxes II by invading Phoenicia. Agesilaus commands the infantry mercenaries and Chares the fleet, disappointing the former. The high taxes imposed on Egypt cause a rebellion, in which Tachos’ nephew Nectanebo (II) becomes involved; Tachos reportedly asks Agesilaus for help in crushing the rebellion and is told that he came to help the Egyptians, not kill them; Nectanebo also asks the two Greek generals for help, and Agesilaus sends messengers home asking Sparta to abandon its worthless ally Tachos; they send him orders to defect if he judges it best for Sparta’s interests, which he does. The Phoenician campaign is called off and Chares goes home; Tachos is overthrown and flees to Sidon en route to Prince Ochus’ army in Syria to get Persian help but later dies in exile. After the successful coup by Nectanebo, Agesilaus has to help him against a pretender who revolts in the province of Mendes, and when Nectanebo shirks battle and retreats to a walled city Agesilaus organizes the defence and helps him to trap and rout the attackers. After victory he sets out back for Sparta, but dies en route aged over eighty and possibly eighty-four; he is succeeded by his son Archidamus, who was a young man (late teens?) in his father’s Asia Minor campaigns in the mid-390s so he is probably already well over fifty.