time (400-390) Sparta was fighting in Asia against Persia. Alcibiades had been right: liberation of mainland Greece by Sparta did lead to her
attempted liberation from Persia of the Greeks of Asia Minor.
How had this warfare come about? Spartan expansionism in this period is the answer, an unqualified expansionism to all points of the
compass, which has to be connected with the personality of Lysander. But in some respects Lysander -was only resuming in a more single-
minded way Sparta's traditional, but intermittently pursued, policies, just as the Spartans who planned Heraclea in 426 •were resuming the
central-Greek policies of Leotychidas and Cleomenes I.
We may start with Heraclea and central Greece, for the renewal of Spartan aims here posed grave threats to Boeotia and Corinth - the risk of
encirclement. Shortly after the end of the war Sparta reasserted her authority in Heraclea, which in the years since its foundation had oscillated
between Spartan and Boeotian control. Moreover Sparta seems, on the evidence of an intriguing speech delivered by a Thessalian politician in
404, to have interfered in the politics of Thessaly proper, and she certainly threw a garrison into the Thessalian city of Pharsalus. This
interference threatened to bring her into collision with the dynamic Macedonian king Archelaus (413-399), who also had Thessalian
ambitions. The presence of Lysander in north and central Greece at the appropriate times is securely enough attested for us to associate him
with these policies.
So much for the north. Then there is the west: in Sicilian Syracuse, at about the time that the Peloponnesian War was ending in Greece, the
tyrant Dionysius I established himself in power - with Spartan help. Again we may suspect the hand of Lysander, who, according to an early
chapter of his biography by Plutarch, paid a visit as ambassador to Dionysius. Here were grounds for unease in Syracuse's mother city of
Corinth, especially since the help given by Sparta to the tyrant included the assassination of a Corinthian mysteriously described as a 'leader'
of the Syracusans.
Then there is the south. Another of Lysander's attested visits was to the Egyptian oracle of Ammon at Siwah; and since Lysander's brother was
called Libys ('the Libyan') this may indicate family links. Now Egypt, since 404, had been in revolt from Persia under a rebel native Pharaoh,
and it is possible that Lysander was playing the same game in Egypt as at Syracuse - backing, and thus placing under obligation, a newly
emergent power. Certainly both Dionysius and the new Pharaoh repaid the debt with concrete naval help to Sparta in the Corinthian War.
Finally and most important - since it concerned Persia directly - the east. Spartan involvement in Asia Minor after 404 begins surreptitiously,
with the help to Cyrus, now in revolt against his brother the new King, given by Xenophon's 10,000 (above, p. 142): this force had official
backing from the Spartan state, but that is an aspect which the pro-Spartan Xenophon is at pains to suppress in his account of the expedition,
his Anabasis. Sparta acted more openly in Asia against Persia when appealed to directly by some Ionian cities: a series of expeditions sent
between 400 and 396, the last of them actually led by a Spartan king, the newly acceded Agesilaus, crossed to Anatolia and campaigned there
till recalled by the outbreak of the Corinthian War (395). But even a defeat (Cnidus, 394) at sea by a Persian fleet commanded by the Athenian
admiral Conon was not enough to cause Sparta to renounce her Asiatic ambitions. That was only achieved (in 392) by the ravaging of the
Spartan coast-line by Conon and a Persian satrap, for this raised the old possibility of revolt by helots who would be encouraged to see
Spartan enemies so close. The result, after a few years more of desultory fighting, was the King's Peace (387/6), which finally settled that Asia
Minor should be Persian and that the Greeks should be 'autonomous'. The delay between 392 and 387/6 was due partly to the need to starve
Athens into submissiveness, but largely to the Persian King's hostility towards Sparta because of her help to Cyrus in 400.
Impression From An Engraved Chalcedony Gemstone Found At Bolsena In Italy. A Persian horseman attacks a Greek soldier. The style is