ABSTRACT
Eight books of ucydides, not to mention two of Xenophon, is a lot for a war which was (by international standards) on a small scale and arguably settled very little. at judgement needs explaining. By the end of the war the Athenians were on their knees. Nobody in Athens slept the night after Aigospotamoi in 405 (Xen. Hell. 2. 2. 3). As an imperial power Athens was nished – apparently – and the Spartans had the undisputed leadership of Greece. e walls of the Piraeus and (in part at least) the Long Walls were pulled down to the sound of utes.2 But in the decade after 404 there was a remarkable turnaround as everybody realized just what the Spartans as victors would be like and what Spartan liberation actually meant. e result was the Corinthian War (below, Chapter 15), fought against Sparta by a coalition of Athens, Persia, Boiotia, Corinth, Argos, in fact a coalition both of the Spartans’ former enemies and of their former friends. In this war the Spartans were able to prevail only as a result of a change of mind by the Persian king who realized that Athenian dominance in Greece would be more dangerous to him than Spartan; that is, the King’s Peace of 386 was won with Persia’s help and because of Athenian revived imperialism. Xenophon (Hell. 3. 5. 10) has the ebans say at Athens in 395 ‘everybody knows you Athenians want to get back your empire’. is is not the place to give the details of the Athenian revival, but it should be remembered how very few years it was since those ute players had celebrated the end of Athenian naval dominance. From this tangled situation emerged eventually a second Athenian Naval Confederacy in 378, exactly a hundred years after the rst. e eventual political history of the Greek states was xed not by any of the above-mentioned powers but by one which was marginal in ucydides’ time, namely Macedon. ucydides did, however, recognize (2. 100) the importance of Macedonian resources and the achievement of King Archelaus (413-399), who in some respects pregured Philip and Alexander.
