…they ordered the women not to cry out, but to bear the calamity in silence. On the following day one could see those whose relatives had died going about in public with bright and cheerful faces. You would have seen few whose relatives had been reported as still alive, and these few walking about with gloomy and downcast faces.
Agesilaus held his nerve. Knowing that every soldier was needed, he suspended the law that removed citizenship from those who fled in the face of the enemy. In 370 he launched an incursion into Arcadia, for the sake of morale, but took care not to lose any men.
Epaminondas and Pelopidas were determined that Sparta should fall never to rise again. The simplest means of achieving this was to prize the Peloponnese from its grasp. This would mean freeing the helots and establishing Messenia as an independent state, and doing the same for the Arcadians in the north. In the winter of 370, Epaminondas led a large army into the Peloponnese. It was the first of four invasions in the coming years.
The Thebans and their allies set out for Sparta itself, sacking and burning the countryside as they went. For half a millennium no foreign enemy had ever penetrated the Peloponnese and the shock to Lacedaemonian pride was tremendous. Women who had never cast eyes on a foreigner before could not bear to see the smoke rising from fires in the suburbs. Perioeci broke free from their masters. A mere eight hundred or so Equals guarded the unwalled city. As a risky last resort, the aged Agesilaus recruited six thousand helots to join the defense. Some long-standing allies, such as Corinth, sent help. As they watched their countryside being laid waste, the Spartans, like the Athenians in 431, wanted to go on the attack, but the king refused to let them. A Theban crowed: “Where are the Spartans now?”
A fierce defense made the Thebans pull back. They bypassed Sparta and marched south to its port, Gythium, destroying everything they came across. Then they went west and liberated Messenia. At long last the helots were free. To secure their future Epaminondas decided to build them a well-fortified capital city, Messene, and for its location selected the slopes of Mount Ithome, focus of ancient revolts and symbol of resistance. The omens were auspicious, stone was ordered, and town planners and developers skilled in building houses, temples, and fortifications were hired. In solemn ceremonies, the ancient heroes, or demigods, of Messenia were begged to return to their native land. The loudest summons was for a historical personality, Aristomenes, rebel leader and elected king during the Second Messenian War in the seventh century. Exiles, who had retained their customs and still spoke a pure Doric dialect, were recalled after centuries of absence.
In eighty-five days the Thebans and their allies, guided by the experts, constructed a massive stone perimeter wall; five and a half miles long, with guard towers and two main gates, its remains can still be seen. They also built houses and temples. The men worked to the music of flutes. The bones of Aristomenes were retrieved from their resting place abroad and reburied; it was said that his ghost had been present at the battle of Leuctra and guided the Thebans to victory.
In 368 a fortified city, Megalopolis, was also founded to guard a newly independent confederation of Arcadia. So both to the north and in the west Sparta’s onetime subject peoples and compulsory allies were given their freedom as well as the means with which to defend themselves.
The Greeks were used to city-states temporarily losing their authority and influence, but after a while recovering them. But this time it was clear that Sparta could not recover from the decision of Leuctra. It dwindled into a local power in the Peloponnese and would never again bestride the Hellenic stage.
Eventually after three months, the Peloponnesian allies of Thebes began to leave, taking with them as much booty as they could carry. The Theban hoplites, too, began to think of home. Having altered the course of history, Epaminondas called it a day.
22
Chaeronea—“Fatal to Liberty”
Isocrates was a disappointed man.
He had argued for Greek unification and invasion of the Persian Empire. He had proposed in his Panegyric that Athens, his own city, and Sparta should join forces, as they had done during the long-ago invasion by Xerxes, and give the Great King his just deserts.
But the years had passed without anything being done. At last, writing in 346, he conceded that Athens had proved to be a disappointment.
I turned to Athens first of all and tried to win her over to this cause with all the earnestness of which my nature is capable, but when I realized that she cared less for what I said than for the ravings of speakers in the
ecclesia,
I gave her up, although I did not abandon my efforts.
At different points in his long career he identified other candidates for the leadership of Greece. They included the Spartan king, Agesilaus, who campaigned against the Persians in Asia Minor with some success. Then there was Jason, tyrant of Pherae, a town in Thessaly, in the 370s. He commanded an efficient and well-trained mercenary army with which he dominated Thessaly and even planned a war against the Persians. Xenophon has a fellow-Thessalian say that Jason
is so intelligent a general that whatever he sets out to achieve—whether by stealth, anticipation or brute force, he does not fail to get….Of all the men I know, he is the one most able to control the desires of the body, so that he is not hindered by such things from achieving what needs to be done.
However, any hopes for Jason were dashed when he was assassinated in 370.
The gaze of the eighty-year-old sage turned to Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, whom he petitioned as the “foremost of our race and possessor of the greatest power,” but he too disappointingly died; and then to Archidamus, son and successor of Agesilaus. He sounded him out in an open letter:
Men of good counsel should not wage war against the king of Persia until someone shall have first reconciled the Greeks with each other and have made us cease from our madness and contentiousness.
But it was obvious that Sparta was a broken reed and was obliged to spend most of its energies trying, and failing, to recover its position in the Peloponnese.
At last, Isocrates found a leader who might indeed call a halt to Greece’s quarrels and attack the evil empire. He was Philip, ruler of Macedon in the north, to whom he wrote yet another of his open letters:
I have chosen to challenge you to the task of leading the expedition against the barbarians and of taking Hellas under your care, while I have passed over my own city.
This time Isocrates hit the mark, for Philip did indeed dream of dominating Greece and was seriously tempted by the Great King’s fabulous wealth.
—
So who was Philip? Was he truly Greek? And would he last? In 359 at the age of twenty-two he was acclaimed king of Macedon by his army, the traditional method of confirming the succession. His inheritance was, to put it mildly, insecure.
The kingdom lay northeast of the Greek mainland above the three-pronged peninsula of Chalcidice. Populated by hardy peasants and horsey squires, it was divided into two distinct parts—lowlands and highlands. Lower Macedonia consisted of a flat, fertile plain through which two rivers flowed into the Thermaic Gulf. The land was predominantly pastoral. The climate was warm, timber and minerals were plentiful, and Herodotus praises the “gardens of Midas [named after the mythical king of Phrygia whose touch turned everything to gold] where roses grow wild, each with sixty blossoms and more fragrant than any others in the world.”