Both Conon and Xenophon, in their different ways, turned their gaze to Persia, which was eager to make use of Greek military skills and men. The former had been an admiral at Aegospotami, and was the only man to have kept his nerve on that dark day. His trireme, seven others, and the state warship, the Paralus, quickly boarded all their rowers and sailed across the narrow sea to Lampsacus, the Spartan base. Here, with great presence of mind, they captured the main sails of Lysander’s fleet (sails were usually left in camp before a battle to save space). This meant that his flotilla could not be pursued.
Fearing the rage of the demos, not without cause, Conon fled to Cyprus where he placed himself under the protection of King Evagoras of Salamis, a city-state on the island. Evagoras, who belonged to a long-ruling dynasty, was a competent leader. He took over all of Cyprus and broke away from Persian rule. The local Greek culture flourished. There Conon, who was in his forties, lived quietly, letting time pass, but awaiting opportunity.
Power fills a vacuum. Sparta inherited the hegemony of Athens in the Aegean. It cynically presented itself as the liberator of Greece, but quickly became even more repressive than its predecessor. Lysander threw out democracies and appointed military governors, called harmosts, wherever he went. Like most Spartans when they were let off the leash and allowed to travel abroad, he behaved with a nauseous mixture of self-righteousness, corruption, and high-handedness.
Worse, in order to defeat Athens, Sparta had felt compelled to seek Persian assistance, and above all Persian money. The unprincipled price for that was the sacrifice of Hellenic independence on the Ionian coastline. Both powers recognized the presentational difficulty this created for the “liberator” and the Great King was content to allow the Ionians a show of autonomy in return for paying tribute to the Great King. But the fact remains that Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea had been for nothing.
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However, relations with Sparta were soon to be transformed. In 405 the Great King Darius II died and the Persian court plunged into one of its regular phases of murderous palace intrigue. He had had four sons by his half sister, Parysatis. One of them succeeded to the throne as Artaxerxes II, but the queen mother had other ideas. Her favorite child was Lysander’s friend and ally Cyrus the Younger. It was through her influence that in 408 he had been appointed commander of Persian forces in the west although he was only in his late teens. She tried and failed to persuade her ailing husband to make Cyrus his heir.
Tissaphernes detected the prince in a plot to murder the new Great King. Artaxerxes, who was as emollient as his brother was headstrong, forgave him on his mother’s plea. This clemency was unwise.
The unrepentant Cyrus began to raise an army secretly, or at least discreetly, which he intended to lead against Artaxerxes and replace him on the throne. He called in his debts with the Spartans and demanded their support. His message to them was simple—I helped you win your war; now you help me win mine. They agreed, placed their fleet at his disposal, and appointed a Spartan general to lead a regiment of more than ten thousand Greek mercenaries, whom Cyrus had recruited to his army.
Xenophon, in his late twenties, had been a cavalryman for the Thirty, but was disgusted by their cruelty and especially by the bloodbath at Eleusis, which he had witnessed. However, he was a natural pro-Spartan oligarch and, to escape the restored democracy at Athens, joined up under Cyrus, of whom he became a great admirer.
He has left a vivid eyewitness account of his great adventure. One spring morning in 401 the armies of Cyrus and the Great King met near a village on the Euphrates called Cunaxa.
And now it was midday, and the enemy were not yet in sight; but when afternoon was coming on, there was seen a rising dust, which appeared at first like a white cloud, but sometime later like a kind of blackness in the plain, extending over a great distance. As the enemy came nearer and nearer, there were presently flashes of bronze here and there, and spears and the hostile ranks began to come into sight. There were horsemen in white cuirasses on the left wing of the enemy, under the command, it was reported, of Tissaphernes; next to them were troops with wicker shields and, farther on, hoplites with wooden shields which reached to their feet, these latter being Egyptians, people said; and then more horsemen and more bowmen.
The exact number of participants in the battle eludes us, but Artaxerxes’ host was so large that the center of his battle line, where the Great King was placed by tradition, extended beyond the edge of Cyrus’s left wing. The Greek mercenaries were on the pretender’s right wing and their flank abutted against a river. They were by far the best troops in the field and Artaxerxes’ left wing knew the treatment they could expect. They turned and fled before the Greeks even came within arrowshot. Encouraged by this rout and shouting again and again “Get out of the way,” Cyrus charged obliquely from the central position in his army at the Great King. In the melee Artaxerxes was wounded and unhorsed. He withdrew on foot to a nearby hill, but Cyrus was killed, and with him gone there was no point in anyone fighting on. The battle ended.
The Greeks had done well and were still a coherent fighting force. Their commanders unwisely accepted an invitation to dinner with the wily Tissaphernes. They were promptly arrested and executed. The mercenaries elected new generals, one of whom was Xenophon, and made their escape as best they could. They marched hundreds of miles through deserts and snow-filled mountain passes and came under frequent attack from Persian troops and angry locals. Finally, they reached the Black Sea, where they took ship to the Aegean and safety.
Sparta’s support for Cyrus brought unpleasant consequences. Artaxerxes pulled back from the autonomy-for-tribute understanding and Tissaphernes began to act aggressively towards the Ionian cities. The Spartans had a new, ambitious king, Agesilaus, lame from birth, who as a boy had been Lysander’s eromenos. He had a typically laconic wit. He was once invited to listen to a man who could imitate the nightingale’s song. “No thank you,” he replied. “I have heard the bird itself.”
Now about forty years old, the king decided to recover Sparta’s good name and from 399 to 395 led a successful campaign against the Persians in Asia Minor. Bearing Xenophon’s experience in mind, he aimed at winning
the person of the Great King and the wealth of Ecbatana and Susa, and above all things to rob the king of the power to sit at leisure on his throne, playing umpire for the Greeks in their wars, and corrupting their popular leaders.
Agesilaus was so successful that his opponent Tissaphernes lost favor in Susa. The queen mother, who seems to have led a charmed life, had not forgiven him for his hostility to her favorite son and persuaded Artaxerxes to have him beheaded for his failure to repel the invader. His fate was a reminder that it is possible to be too clever.
Back in mainland Greece Sparta’s allies were losing patience. They had received none of the spoils of war after the fall of Athens and were irritated by Spartan meddling in the north of Greece. Pharnabazus stirred the pot by laying out fifty talents in bribes. In 395 Argos, Thebes, Corinth, and a rather nervous Athens launched a war against Sparta (the so-called Corinthian War). Their fortunes ebbed and flowed. The two most important outcomes were, first, the death of Lysander in battle in Boeotia and, second, the recall of Agesilaus, much to his fury and just as the Great King had calculated.
Meanwhile the Persians had spent some years building a large fleet in the Aegean. Conon was appointed as its commander and, with the Great King’s gold, he contributed a squadron of his own crewed by Hellenic émigrés and mercenaries. In August 394 Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet off the island of Cnidus.