Xenophon picks up where Thucydides left off — mid-sentence, mid-war — and carries the history of Greece from the last years of the Peloponnesian War through Spartan hegemony to the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC. It is the story of how Athens fell, how Sparta proved that winning the war was easier than running Greece, and how Thebes rose to shatter Spartan power in a single afternoon at Leuctra. Xenophon was there for much of it. His biases are obvious. His eyewitness detail is irreplaceable.
Start ReadingThe Peloponnesian War staggers toward its end. Athens wins a stunning naval victory at Arginusae — then executes the generals who won it, for failing to rescue drowning sailors in a storm. It is one of the most self-destructive acts in the history of democracy. Xenophon watched the trial. His account is the most detailed we have of the day Athens threw away its best commanders.
Lysander destroys the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami. Athens starves. The Long Walls come down to the sound of flute-girls, and Sparta installs a puppet government: the Thirty Tyrants. Their reign of terror lasts eight months. Thrasybulus and seventy exiles seize a hill fort, gather an army, and march on Athens. Democracy is restored — and the amnesty that follows is arguably more remarkable than the revolution.
Sparta won the war. Now it has to run Greece, and it does so badly. Agesilaus campaigns brilliantly in Asia Minor, smashing Persian forces and dreaming of conquest. But at home, Sparta's arrogance is creating a coalition of enemies. Corinth, Thebes, Argos, and a rebuilt Athens are about to demonstrate that hegemony requires more than military excellence.
The Corinthian War: Sparta fights on two fronts. Agesilaus marches home from Asia to find Greece in revolt. Conon, an Athenian admiral commanding a Persian fleet, destroys Spartan naval power at Cnidus. The walls of Athens rise again. Persia funds both sides and intervenes whenever one Greek state grows too powerful — the King's Peace of 387 BC makes the Great King the arbiter of Greek affairs.
Spartan overreach: Phoebidas seizes the Cadmea — the citadel of Thebes — in peacetime, a flagrant violation of the treaty Sparta itself imposed. Sparta keeps it anyway. Three years later, a group of Theban exiles assassinates the pro-Spartan governors at a dinner party and liberates the city in a single night. Among the liberators: Epaminondas and Pelopidas.
Thebes rises. At Leuctra in 371 BC, Epaminondas shatters Spartan military supremacy with a revolutionary oblique formation — his deep left wing crushes the Spartan right before the rest of the line can engage. King Cleombrotus dies on the field. The myth of Spartan invincibility, which has shaped Greek politics for two centuries, ends in an afternoon.
The aftermath: Epaminondas invades the Peloponnese and frees the Messenian helots whom Sparta has enslaved for three hundred years. Sparta shrinks to a minor power. But Theban hegemony is built on one man's genius, and at Mantinea in 362, Epaminondas wins his final battle and dies of his wounds. Xenophon's verdict: after this battle, there was more confusion and disorder in Greece than before.