Spartan hegemony

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The period of Spartan hegemony is a moment in classical Greek history that extends from the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC to the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC.

Sparta, with its profitable farmland in the valley of the river Eurotas and its famously militaristic traditions, began to dominate the Peloponnese during the Archaic period (ca. 700 - 480 BC). In late Archaic and early Classical (480 - 323 BC) times, the Spartans became prominent in Greece as a whole by their military interventions in other Greek city-states to depose tyrants and restore oligarchy and by their leadership of the pan-Greek struggle against Persian expansionism in the war of 480 - 479 BC.

After that war, Athenian power grew, overtaking the Spartans. In 431, these two hegemonic city-states clashed. In the resulting war (431 - 404 BC), the Athenians were defeated, through rebellions by the subject peoples of their Aegean empire, their over-dependence on naval strength (as against Spartan strength on land) and, especially, massive Persian funding of the Spartan war effort.

In 404, the victorious Spartan commander, Lysander, re-made Greece and Greek Asia Minor (formerly under Athenian rule) in Sparta's image: he established Spartan garrisons around the Aegean, installed decarchies (ten-man oligarchical regimes) to administer the internal affairs of the Greek city-states and appointed harmosts (Spartan military governors) to oversee the decarchies.

The Spartans, however, lacked the internal strength to maintain their new empire. Their eugenic system of population control was reducing the citizen population dangerously (the so-called oliganthropia), the Messenian serfs were rebellious and the (relative) internal cohesion that had allowed the democracy of Athens to maintain its external hegemony was lacking in hierarchical Sparta. The very next year, an Athenian revolution deposed the pro-Spartan "Thirty Tyrants" (the expanded Athenian version of a decarchy) and re-established the democracy. Ominously for their empire, the Spartans did not feel confident enough to re-impose their control at Athens. The Argives, Corinthians and Thebans, sensing weakness, allied with the Athenians and rebelled against Spartan hegemony in the Corinthian War of 395-386 BC, with Persian assistance.

The Spartans induced the Persians to switch sides again by offering them Greek Asia Minor, in exchange for cutting off the financial support sustaining the Argive-Corinthian-Theban-Athenian war effort. The resulting Peace of Antalcidas (386 BC), therefore, preserved Spartan rule in European Greece only by ending it in Asian Greece. The Spartans struggled on as embattled leaders of the mainland Greeks until 371 BC, when the rising power of the Thebans, under Pelopidas and Epaminondas, finally destroyed it at Boeotia in the battle of Leuctra.