in turning the Persian king against his Greek allies. In 387/6, Sparta imposed upon
the Greek world the King’s Peace, which she had devised and which had been
approved and dictated by the Persian king. The cities in Asia Minor were to be the
King’s; in return he agreed to let the rest of the Greek states be autonomous.
The King has indeed achieved something, which is beyond the achievements of
all his ancestors. He has secured the admission from both Athens and Sparta that
Asia belongs to him, and has assumed such authoritative control of the Greek
cities there as either to raze them to the ground, or build fortifications in them.
And all this is due to our folly, not to his power.So wrote the rhetorician and teacher Isocrates in his Panegyricus of 380 (137), in which
he advocated a Pan-Hellenic response to the Persians and put forward Athenian
claims to the joint leadership of Greece.
Sparta’s position as a leading Greek power, however, was increasingly under
threat. In 378, with Theban support, Athens established a second league. Seventy
states joined this league in what was represented as an anti-Spartan alliance. Thebes,
asserting her power in central Greece, gained a famous victory against the Spartans
at the battle of Leuctra in Boeotia in 371 under the generalship of Epaminondas. For
this battle the Spartans fielded only 700 Spartiate hoplites of which 400 were killed.
At the battle of Plataea the Spartiates had numbered 5,000. There had been a gradual
and ultimately catastrophic decline in the population of the ruling elite. Aristotle puts
this down to inadequate property laws and large dowries that had caused two fifths
of Spartan land to be owned by women resulting in Spartiate men losing their kleros
which was a prerequisite of their citizen status (Politics 1270). So depleted were they
that the 300 who had surrendered did not lose their citizenship, the usual penalty
following Spartan surrender as in the case of the 120 taken prisoner by the Athenians
at Pylos. Xenophon reports the reaction when news reached Sparta:
The man sent to report the calamity to Lacedaemon arrived there on the final day
of the Gymnopaedia, when the men’s chorus was in the theatre. On hearing of
the disaster, the ephors were distressed, as I suppose they were bound to be; but
rather than dismiss the chorus, they allowed it to continue to the end.
Furthermore, while they gave the names of the fallen to the various relatives, they
ordered the women not to shriek in lamentation but to bear their suffering in
silence. The following day one saw those whose kinsmen had fallen appear in
public with bright, beaming faces, but you could have seen only a few of those
whose relatives had been reported alive, and these were going about sullen and
dejected.
(Hellenica, 6, 4, 16)HISTORY 71