EPILOGUE Although the Eve of the Fourth Century Began with a General

EPILOGUE Although the eve of the fourth century began with a general longing for peace, the years ahead held little of it. The victors threw down the walls of Athens only to see them soon re-erected. In return for Persian help against Athens the Spartans had sworn away the free- dom of the Greeks of Asia immediately to find that all Greeks felt that they had betrayed Hellenism. If the Athenians of the fifth century had exploited their Greek cousins in Anatolia, they had at least kept them in the realm of greater Greek politics. The Spartans after the Peloponnesian War finally came to grips with the stark reality that neither they nor any other Greek state could realistically ignore the vast power of Persia. Their response echoed down the century. They soon renounced their bargain with their Persian paymasters and sent a succession of commanders to maintain control of the Ionian littoral. They thus set a pattern for the following years, while adding their own ingredient. Men like Agesilaos strove not so much to liberate the Greeks as to include them in a new Spartan empire, one for which neither Spartan institutions nor mentality could adequately deal. Spartan alienation of their own war-time allies gave the first alarm of trouble. Within ten years of peace the Spartan failure of leadership led to a broad war along new lines. Instead of the fifth-century bipolarity of Sparta and Athens, states that had served as their allies built new alignments that would change kalei- doscopically for the rest of the century. The remainder of the fourth century saw the various Greek states failing to reach any semblance of a balance of power and even worse any political principle upon which to base that concept. Although the Spartans, having reneged on their treaty with Persia, tried from 399 to liberate the Greeks of Asia, Antalkidas finally real- ized Sparta’s inability to maintain control of the eastern Aegean. As the price of renewed Persian support, which at least offered the pos- sibility of a Spartan empire on the mainland, the Spartans and the rest of the Greeks bowed to the King’s Peace of 386. No one now disputed the King’s right to Anatolia, but at the same time he dis- avowed any designs on Greece. Artaxerxes with this treaty officially ended the Persian Wars. His treaty formally introduced several new 526 factors into Greek politics. First and above all he decreed that all states in Greece, with some few exceptions, would enjoy autonomy and their own possessions. This command applied to all Greek states, even those that had not warred against him. Should any defy his will, he reserved the right to intervene, which he actually did only once against Philip. In effect, he treated Greece like a frontier area in the sense that the Greeks could do as they pleased so long as they did not annoy him. He himself kept Asia Minor. The King’s Peace made resonating echoes throughout the century because it added new factors to the political scene. The clause demanding the autonomy of all cities meant that no Greek state had the right to create an empire. That declaring a general peace led immediately to the concept that a Common Peace shared by all should be the ordinary manner of Greek political life. Autonomy and peace rep- resented noble ideals, but the King failed by not providing any mech- anism or organization to enforce them. In 386 everyone knew that the Spartans would assume the task, but no one knew whether the King would control the Spartans. Subsequent events proved that he remained content to allow the Greeks to wear themselves down with their interminable bickering. His very renewal of his peace so fre- quently testifies to its failure. Yet it served him well by keeping the Greeks of the west from his door. During these same years the Greeks witnessed the revived stirrings of the pursuit of hegemony, the bane of the fourth century. Its appearance could hardly be called a new phenomenon, but that of the fourth century differed from its fifth-century predecessor by not being limited to the two imperial states of Sparta and Athens. The defeat of the latter in the Peloponnesian War opened the way for the Spartans to make themselves the supreme and unchallenged leaders of the Greeks. The victors immediately began to deal with recalcitrant or seemingly unruly states, even those that had recently served as their allies. They quickly alienated Corinth and Thebes and gave Athens little reason to trust their good intentions. Agesilaos exemplified this imperial trend by his debasement of the King’s Peace to nothing more than an instrument for the extension of Spartan power. Against the spirit and letter of the treaty he used the pact to settle old scores that the peace had meant to resolve. In the process he created new animosities. Mantineia, Phleious, and Thebes felt his sting. Nor could the Athenians plead innocence of hegemo- nial desire. Although they at first acted in proper accord with the.

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