The Mausoleum itself, a creation of Greek artists and sculptors but with some barbarian features, has long been known from surviving sculptural fragments and from Greek and Latin literary descriptions. It was constructed at Halicarnassus, which, after a move from inland Mylasa, became the Hecatomnid capital, with palace and harbour built on monarchical lines that surely owed some inspiration to Dionysius of Sicily. The importance of other sites associated with the Hecatomnid dynasty, above all that of Labranda in the hills not far from the family seat of Mylasa, would not have been guessed from the literary sources.
Inscriptions placed in aggressive prominence on fine temples and templelike buildings at Labranda (and published in 1972) attest the wealth and the Hellenizing intentions of the rulers (the dedicants include Mausolus’s brother and eventual successor Idrieus). They also illustrate the range of the family’s diplomatic contacts (for instance with faraway Crete) and their relations with the local communities, both Greek and native Carian. For example, in a text from Labranda, a semi-Greek community called the Plataseis confers tax privileges and citizenship on a man from Cos; the grant is ratified by yet another Hecatomnid brother and satrap, Pixodarus. And a remarkable trilingual inscription in Lycian, Greek, and Aramaic (a Semitic script used for convenience in many parts of the Persian empire), found in 1973, proves the family’s interests to have spread eastward into Lycia; the text illustrates the cultural, social, and religious heterogeneity of southwestern Anatolia in the period before Alexander’s arrival. Hellenization was well under way before he came.
The same conclusion is compelled by such dynastic (rather than strictly satrapal) edifices as the Nereid monument from Lycia (early 4th century) or the caryatids (roof-carrying female sculpted statues) from Lycian Limyra, a place ruled by a Hellenizing prince significantly named Pericles.
Hellenization at the cultural level and tolerance of the social structures of small local places with no military muscle did not necessarily entail favouring the political interests of the Greek states to the west. In fact, Mausolus, despite a brief and cautious insurrectionary moment in the late 360s when he joined the great Revolt of the Satraps (a movement in which there was also tentative Athenian and Spartan participation), is found actively damaging Athenian interest in the Aegean in the 350s.
In 386, however, the political dividing line between Greek and Persian interests looked relatively clean, although it was usually with the help of Greek mercenaries that over the next decades Persia made its series of attempts on the recovery of Egypt, the immediate task in the sequel to the King’s Peace. Unsuccessful there, Persia had better fortune in Cyprus. In Greece, Sparta’s supremacy looked as militarily imposing as in 404, though with the abandonment of Asia its moral authority was much weakened. From 386 bce to the decline of Sparta Spartan adventures
The autonomy guaranteed to the Greek cities by the King’s Peace in 386 represented in principle an advance in interstate diplomacy; but then as now the word autonomy was elastic, and Sparta by its behaviour soon made clear its intention to interpret it in the way most favourable to itself. That is, it applied the old criterion of “what is best for Sparta.” Its first move, in 385, was to break up the polis of Mantinea into its four constituent villages. This move was intended to dismantle the physical polis of Mantinea as well as its democracy; in the particular Mantinean context the return to the villages strengthened the political influence of the wealthy and oligarchic landowners, whose estates adjoined the villages. The “troublesome demagogues,” as Xenophon calls them, were expelled. Sparta could perhaps have represented the original 5th- or possibly 6th-century Mantinean synoecism, whereby the villages had been joined into a polis, as a breach of local autonomy (that is, of the right of the separate villages to exist as political units), but it is doubtful that Sparta even bothered to formulate any such justification. It would have been too hollow a reply to the more-obvious interpretation that it was simply exploiting its supremacy to infringe on the autonomy of the Mantinean polis.
Soon after, Sparta responded to an invitation, surely welcome in view of its previous northern and central Greek involvements, to interfere against the rising power of Olynthus in northern Greece. Grown populous and powerful since its synoecism in 432 at the instance of Perdiccas II of Macedon, the city had survived the military reorganization of Macedonia by Perdiccas’s successor Archelaus (413–399). Now another Macedonian king, Amyntas III, who had succeeded to the Macedonian throne about 393 after a series of short, weak reigns, joined two Greek cities, Acanthus and Apollonia, in an appeal to Sparta against Olynthus. The Spartans sent Phoebidas north, but in a momentous development he was asked into Thebes en route by a pro-Spartan faction there. Without reference (naturally) to the authorities at home, Phoebidas installed a garrison on the Cadmea, the Theban acropolis (382).
The occupation of the Cadmea was a famous instance of Spartan high-handedness; indeed, it produced such a revulsion of feeling that Sparta lost its leadership of Greece. Had Phoebidas’s act been promptly disowned by Sparta, the damage could have been contained. King Agesilaus, however, approached the matter solely from the point of view of Spartan advantage; he once again posed the question of whether the action had been good or bad for Sparta, with the result that Phoebidas was punished with a fine but then reemployed elsewhere, and the garrison in Thebes was retained. Meanwhile (380), Olynthus was reduced. The Second Athenian Confederacy
Agesilaus, however, gave the wrong answer to his own question; the Cadmea episode meant that Sparta would no longer have things its way. When a group of Theban exiles liberated the Cadmea in 379, they were helped by Athens, though at first unofficially. Athens, whose foreign policy in the years 386–380 had been cautious in the extreme, evidently felt it could not risk Spartan reprisals for its help to Thebes without seeking moral and military support from other Greek states. It now made a series of alliances, with Chios, Byzantium, and Methymna on Lesbos, which prefigure the formation of the Second Athenian Confederacy, formally inaugurated in 378. The charter of the new confederacy was issued at the beginning of 377. Athens was right to suspect Spartan anger; an attempted raid on the Piraeus by the Spartan Sphodrias at this time is best seen as a response to the new mood in Athens. The raid failed in its object, whatever exactly that was. Once again Sparta did not pursue the offender.
The aims of the new confederacy are set out on an inscription of cardinal importance, the “charter” document. The enemy singled out is Sparta, while the main ally is Thebes. Hostility toward Sparta, however, though it was certainly the motive shared by Athens and Thebes, does not adequately explain the participation of islanders such as the Rhodians and Chians. In these islands the main fear must have been of encroachment by such Persian satraps as the energetic Mausolus. In this respect the new alliance recalls the early 470s, when alarm felt in eastern Aegean waters about Persia’s intentions had led to the formation of the old Delian League. Yet the charter says nothing about Persia or the satraps in so many words; that would have been too provocative given Athens’s naval weakness at the time. On the contrary, it is likely that a clause actually spelled out an intention to remain within the structure of the King’s Peace. But this is not quite certain because the relevant lines were subsequently erased, probably in a moment of Panhellenist ardour.