Any ‘victory’ was, however, short-lived, as a result of Sparta’s inability to act with any kind of sensitivity. She was quick to reassert her leadership of the Peloponnese, crushing the city of Mantineia, for instance. Her greatest blunder came in 382 when her troops were sent to intervene in civil unrest in her old enemy, Thebes. The city was simply seized, to the universal condemnation of the Greek world. Even the historian Xenophon, an Athenian aristocrat, who had moved to Sparta after being exiled from Athens and developed pro-Spartan sympathies, could not defend Sparta’s actions. The Spartan garrison was eventually thrown out in 379, and the Spartans did not improve their standing by launching an ill-judged attack on Athens that failed miserably.
Sparta’s short-sightedness even stimulated a new Athenian ‘empire’, the one outcome that any intelligent strategic planning should have been designed to avoid. Athens declared that her motive was ‘to make the Spartans leave the Greeks to enjoy peace in freedom and autonomy’ and called on allies to join her. Memories of the former Athenian empire remained strong, however, and there was some reluctance to do so. Athens had to promise not to impose settlements on member states, interfere with their internal politics, or impose tribute. (When, inevitably, contributions had to be called for from members, they were termed ‘assessments’ rather than ‘tribute’.) Seventy states, including Thebes, eventually joined what is known as the Second Athenian League (378-377).
It was clear by now, however, that Athens was very much weaker than she had been in the fifth century and that any significant military action would put immense strain on the city’s resources. It was to be Thebes, not Athens, who would humble Sparta. After regaining her independence in 379, Thebes had been rebuilding her position in Boeotia, and in 371 she insisted, in a treaty with Sparta, on signing on behalf of all the Boeotian cities. Sparta evoked the King’s Peace to justify attacking Thebes. At the ensuing Battle of Leuctra the Thebans smashed the Spartan army, leaving a thousand Spartan dead on the battlefield. It was a decisive battle that left the Greek world in shock. Spartan rule in the Peloponnese collapsed. From now on Sparta was no more than a second-rate power. The rigidity of her society, her insensitivity towards fellow Greeks, and a declining citizen base meant that at some point her weakness would be exposed. Once her army had been humiliated as comprehensively as it had been at Leuctra there was no way back.
For ten years Thebes remained the dominant city of Greece, although this was due not so much to her own strength as to the weakness of others. Her success depended on the inspired political and military leadership of Epami-nondas, an austere and incorruptible man profoundly influenced by the works of Pythagoras. Cicero was to regard him as one of the greatest of the Greeks, and if the biography of him by Plutarch had survived so might later generations. He and his fellow general Pelopidas were supported by a core of 300 highly trained troops, the Sacred Band, who were pair-bonded in homosexual relationships. Thebes’s influence spread south to the Peloponnese, where she continued to restrain any possible revival of Sparta, and as far north as Thessaly. Cities such as Corinth and Megara became what were in effect client states. When Athens became hostile (going so far as to make an alliance with Sparta to oppose Theban expansionism), the Thebans even began building a fleet. Within Boeotia itself, they finally captured the other leading city of the plain, Orchomenus, in 364, and killed all its male inhabitants, sending the surviving women and children into slavery. Theban dominance was as brutal as that of any other state.
One of the most fruitful results of the Spartan collapse was the restoration of the people of Messenia. Despite suppression and exile a Messenian identity had survived and the exiles were called home by the Theban general Epaminondas. The new settlement of Messene, founded in 369, is beautifully situated on the slopes of Mount Ithome and surrounded by impressive walls. The city flourished and effectively acted as a bulwark against any future Spartan resurgence in the western Pelo-ponnese. Recent excavations and the conservation of the site have been a model of their kind and the city is earning plaudits and awards for the successful presentation of the ruins of the central agora. The stadium is now being used again for cultural events.
In 362 Epaminondas was killed at Mantineia when fighting a Spartan and Athenian army in the Peloponnese. Pelopidas had died two years before. Perhaps inspired leadership was the key to Theban success, because from that moment Theban power ebbed away. A peace was made on the basis that every state should keep what it had, but Theban control of her ‘empire’ was gradually eroded as continual warfare wore down her resources. Xenophon, bringing his History to a close, remarked that ‘there was even more uncertainty and confusion in Greece after the battle [of Mantineia] than there had been before’.
The Vulnerability of the City-State in the Fourth Century
The fifth century had seen a comparativety stable Greek world with Athens and Sparta maintaining hegemony over large areas of the Aegean and Greek mainland. This age was now over. Sparta was humbled, the short-lived supremacy of Thebes had faded, and Athens was unable to maintain an imperial role. Reports of the 350s show slackness and corruption in the Athenian shipyards, equipment borrowed and never returned and major shortages of sailcloth, hemp, and rope. With Sparta eclipsed, the Second Athenian League had also lost its purpose. Athens’s response, as it had been a hundred years before, was to impose her control more ruthlessly. This time she was met with widespread revolt. In 357 in the so-called Social War, many of the League members broke free and others gradually drifted out of her control. In the same period Philip of Macedon was encroaching on Athenian interests in the northern Aegean.
As W G. Runciman has argued (in an essay ‘Doomed to Extinction: The Polis as an Evolutionary Dead-End’), there had never evolved in any Greek city a wealthy elite capable of focusing the state on the kind of ruthless economic imperialism needed to sustain hegemony over a large area. In this sense, democracy, by refusing to allow the wealthy to emerge as an uncontrolled elite, acted as a brake on ambition. Plato indeed, in his critique of democracy, The Republic, accused Pericles of encouraging the Athenians to sink into sloth and greed as a result of the handouts that he had granted them although one can hardly count this as an argument against the other benefits of democracy. At the same time, the Greek cities never broke out of their constitutional conservatism. Citizenship was a jealously guarded privilege. Rome offers a contrast. There, even slaves could be freed and incorporated into the citizen body. More significantly, perhaps, a defeated rival could be transformed into an ally with rights of citizenship and demands of military service. (See Chapters 21 and 22.) As Polybius, the Greek historian who tried to explain the defeat of the Greeks by Rome in the second century, understood, this gave Rome an almost unlimited supply of men. No Greek city ever adopted a similar approach, and in many cases the protected citizen body simply contracted with time. Sparta had been able to raise 8,000 citizen hoplites at the time of the Persian Wars, only 1,200 a century later.
The collapse of Athenian and Spartan hegemony left a world of small and scattered Greek communities. One response was Panhellenism, the feeling that the Greeks should somehow sink their differences and unite in a shared enterprise. The roots of Panhellenism lay back in the previous century in the resistance to Xerxes and they were kept alive by the continuing resilience of the Persian empire. The most fervent exponent of Panhellenism was the Athenian orator Isocrates (436-338 Bc), who extolled the virtues of Greek culture as a civilizing force (although by ‘Greek’ it is often assumed that he meant ‘Athenian’). The chances of any such common movement were always remote. The cities had developed new sensitivities to outside control from either Greek or foreigner, as Athens’s experience with the Second Athenian League showed. Furthermore, the years of continual warfare had sapped their resources, and there are universal reports in the fourth century of land hunger and debt. Many cities experienced stasis, civil unrest between rival factions. There was a new shifting population of poor, refugees or landless individuals, wandering the Greek world in search of sustenance.
There was one occupation which was able to take in the more able-bodied and that was service as a mercenary. The rise in the use of mercenary troops was one of the most significant developments of the fourth century. The Persians had come increasingly to rely on them, for the suppression of a major revolt in Egypt from 404 onwards, for instance. The Egyptians used mercenaries in return, and in 343 there were an estimated 35,000 in the country. The mercenary could be trained, by those who could afford to pay him, as a professional soldier able to fight all the year round. At the same time, outside influences, probably from Thrace, led to the development of the peltast, who wore lighter armour and boots and who carried a longer spear. (The name comes from the small leather shield he carried.) The peltast was more than a match for the heavy and slow-moving hoplite (peltasts employed by Corinth defeated a Spartan army in 390), although the hoplites continued to form the core of any city army.
The rise of the mercenary army coincided with other military developments. The Athenian orator Demosthenes describes them well:
In the old days the Spartans, like everyone else, would spend the four or five months of the summer ‘season’ in invading and laying waste the enemy’s territory with heavy infantry and levies of citizens, and would then retire again; and they were so old-fashioned, or rather such good citizens, that they never used money to buy an advantage from anyone, but their fighting was of the fair and open kind. But now you must surely see that most disasters are due to traitors, and none are the result of a regular pitched battle. On the other hand you hear of Philip [of Macedon] marching unchecked, not because he leads a phalanx of heavy infantry, but because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries and similar troops. . . I need hardly tell you that he makes no difference between summer and winter and has no season set apart for inaction. (Translation: J. H. Vince, Loeb Classical Library edition)
This, therefore, was the world of the new professional army, able to fight all the year round without being inhibited by the traditional conventions of warfare. One significant development was the art of siege warfare. Traditionally, battles had been fought over land and normally cities had been left untouched. From the fourth century a more ruthless approach to warfare led to the direct targeting of cities. It was perhaps as much the desire to gain booty with which to pay the mercenaries as to crush an enemy completely that lay behind the change. All over the Greek world cities now became fortified. As we have seen Messene in the Peloponnese was equipped with walls from the beginning. At Gyphotokastro in northern Attica (ancient Eleutherae) there are magnificent fourth-century walls overlooking the pass from Boeotia.
World History
