ABSTRACT
The immediate gainer from the Spartan defeat at Leuktra must have seemed at the time to be Jason of Pherai. He destroyed the fortifications of Herakleia, 'not so much' Xenophon says, 'to prevent anybody from approaching his domains by that route in future, but rather to remove any obstacle to his own passage to Greece' (Hell. vi.4.27). This meant the fmal elimination of Sparta from central Greece. Jason also annexed Perrhaebia to the north ofThessaly (Diod. xv.57): we saw (p. 186) that this frontier area had been in Archelaus' possession at the end of the filth century, and an inscription of the Roman period (BSA, 1910/11, pp. 195ff. = CW 321 B) shows that in the last years of his reign Amyntas had authority over part of it at least: 1 he ftxed the boundaries of Perrhaebia and Elymiotis. But Amyntas preferred to stay on the right side of Jason: Diodorus (op. cit.) says that Jason made an alliance with Amyntas; later writers were to represent this hyperbolically as Thessalian rule over Macedon, the tail wagging the dog (Isok. v.ZO; Arr. Anab. vii.9.4). How much ofall this activity by Jason should be ascribed to the period after Leuktra is actually doubtful (from Diodorus' description of him as unpopular at xv.57, surely from Ephorus, but as a 'kindly' ruler a very few chapters later at 60.5, it has been argued2 that Diodorus has compressed his material and that Jason must be allowed more time to make some friends; but though the conclusion is likely enough the particular argument will not do since xv.60.5 comes from a different source, the 'chronographic source', a hellenistic authority from whom Diodorus drew material such as the dates of the accessions or deaths of rulers).
