In other military respects Dionysius looked to the future; his was essentially a military monarchy based on loyal mercenary power. War, which included large-scale munitions manufacture, was essential to his economy. In addition to taking on the Carthaginians in Sicily, he fought Greeks in Italy, even destroying the city of Rhegium in 386. Dionysius wanted to unite Sicily and southern Italy under his personal rule, and one need look for no subtler motive than the prestige and booty accruing from it. The kind of military monarchy he established was a crucial precedent for later figures such as Jason of Thessalian Pherae or Philip II and Alexander III (the Great) of Macedon.
Dionysius is called archon (an ambiguous title that can mean ruler or magistrate) of Sicily in an Athenian inscription, but he was surely thought of as king or tyrant by his local subjects. In the use of titles he has been compared to the 4th-century “Spartocid” rulers of southern Russia, Leucon I and his son Satyrus II, who (as inscriptions show) called themselves archon when dealing with their Greek subjects but king when describing their authority over the native population.
The Syracuse that produced Dionysius was a late 5th-century polis both in the literal sense and in features, such as appointment to office by lot, that it had adopted from the Athenians whose invasion had just been so vigorously resisted. Dionysius himself was helped to power by Sparta, the polis that above all others remained uncompromisingly “classical” in its repeated refusal, in later times, to come to terms with the victorious Macedonians. It is a striking fact, and a further betrayal of the liberation propaganda with which Sparta had entered the Peloponnesian War, that it ended it by installing at Syracuse a tyrant who was to last for four decades; that fact was not missed by the Athenian writer Isocrates. The particular Spartans sent to help Dionysius are figures of secondary importance, but it is reasonable to see behind them the hand of Lysander, who is attested as having visited Dionysius. (There is no overwhelming reason to doubt that he did so.)
Spartan policy immediately after the Peloponnesian War looks imperialistic in the full sense: one hears of tribute and of “decarchies,” or juntas of 10, imposed by Lysander, as, for example, on Samos. The government of the Thirty Tyrants, actually a Spartan-supported oligarchy, imposed at Athens is characteristic of this short phase. The seizure, by the Athenian democrat Thrasybulus, of the frontier stronghold of Phyle in northern Attica, however, created a focus for refugees, who flocked to join him. The democrats marched south, and the extreme oligarch Critias was killed in fighting in the Piraeus. Opinion at Sparta softened, and Lysander’s tough policy was reversed at Athens and elsewhere (one of the Spartan kings, Pausanias, was instrumental in this, though he himself narrowly escaped condemnation at a trial held in Sparta). This episode perhaps deserves to rank as a rare instance in which moral scruple, or at least a qualm about what the rest of the Greek world might consider unacceptable, determined a foreign policy decision by Sparta. By the end of 403, democracy was restored at Athens.
Arguably, Athenian democracy was not merely restored but comprehensively rethought at this moment. As part of a general codification of the laws, now entering its second phase, it was made harder for the Assembly to legislate; instead the passing of laws (or nomoi), with the important exception of those pertaining to foreign policy, was entrusted to special panels of sworn jurors. The Assembly henceforth passed only decrees. Pay for attendance in the Assembly was introduced at this time, and the hillside meeting place, the Pnyx, was physically remodeled, making it easier to control admission. The Council of Five Hundred also may have been tampered with, if it is right that “bouleutic quotas”—that is, the total of councillors supplied by demes—were now altered to take account of changes in settlement patterns brought about by the Peloponnesian War. The case for discontinuity has, however, not been proved.
Other post-403 changes, some not strictly datable, may be mentioned here. The Assembly no longer heard treason trials after about 350; perhaps this was because jury trial was cheaper now that the Assembly was paid. (Juries also were paid, but Assembly attendances were larger.) For the same financial reason, and perhaps also in the mid-4th century, a limit was imposed on the hitherto unrestricted number of meetings of the Assembly per prytany, or council month lasting one-tenth of the year: the limit imposed was at first three meetings, though this was later increased to four. Generals received more specialist functions in the course of the century, and financial officials, especially those in charge of funds for disbursing state pay, acquired great elected power. The climax of this development was the financial control exercised in the third quarter of the 4th century by first Eubulus and then Lycurgus. All this tended toward efficiency and professionalism but away from democracy. There is no doubt that the Athens of the 4th century was less democratic than the Athens of the 5th. The Corinthian War
The restored Athenian democracy may have been less democratic in certain respects than that of the 5th century, but it was no less suspicious of, and hostile to, Sparta. Those feelings, along with the straightforward hankering at all social levels for the benefits of empire (a strong and well-attested motive that should be emphasized), were to be exploited by Thebans at Athens in 395 in their appeal to Athens to join in war against Sparta. This war, called the Corinthian War (395–386) because much of it took place on Corinthian territory, was fought against Sparta by a coalition of Athens (with help from Persia), Boeotia, Corinth, and Argos. Sparta eventually won the war, but only after the Persians had switched support from Athens to Sparta. In fact, the winning side was the old combination that had proved victorious in the Peloponnesian War.
Corinthian-style helmetCorinthian-style helmet, bronze, Greek, c. 600–575 bce; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.Photograph by Stephen Sandoval. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Dodge Fund, 1955 (55.11.10)
The causes of the Corinthian War lie in the policies pursued by Sparta after its victory in 404. Persian participation on Athens’s side needs a special explanation, which is to be found in two ultimately related sets of operations conducted by Sparta east of the Aegean. In 401 Lysander’s old friend Cyrus—the younger brother of the new Persian king, Artaxerxes II (reigned 404–359)—made an attempt on the throne with Spartan help. The expedition was a military failure; Cyrus was killed at the Battle of Cunaxa north of Babylon, and the Greek army had to be extricated and brought back to the Black Sea region. It became famous, however, because a participant, first as a soldier of fortune and after Cyrus’s death as a commander of the Greek force, was Xenophon, who made these exploits the basis of his Anabasis or “Upcountry March” of the Ten Thousand. Lysander’s support of Cyrus provided grounds for a change of attitude toward Sparta on the part of the new Persian king. The battle, though a short-term failure, had long-term propaganda importance because it fixed in Greek minds the possibility of a better-organized “march upcountry,” a project that was to be preached by the Athenian orator Isocrates, planned by Philip of Macedon and realized by Alexander the Great.
Cyrus had been given help in the early stages of his revolt by some Greek cities of Anatolia. When the Persian Tissaphernes, the victor of Cunaxa, threatened reprisals against them, they appealed to Sparta, which sent out Thibron (400). That was the beginning of the second Spartan operation in Anatolia, related to the first because the Ten Thousand were eventually able to attach themselves to Thibron, having meanwhile been harried by Tissaphernes.