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Corinthian War

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Pre 1900 Military

   Corinthian War
   Part of the Spartan hegemony
   Hoplites in combat

     Date   395- 387 BC
   Location Mainland Greece
    Result  Inconclusive; Peace of Antalcidas dictated by Persia
   Combatants
   Sparta,
   Peloponnesian League Athens,
   Argos,
   Corinth,
   Thebes,
   and other allies
   Commanders
   Agesilaus and others Numerous
            Greek conflicts of the 4th century BC
   Corinthian War
   Haliartus – Nemea – Cnidus – Coronea – Lechaeum
   Other
   Naxos – Tegyra – Leuctra – Mantinea

   The Corinthian War was an ancient Greek conflict lasting from 395 BC
   until 387 BC, pitting Sparta against a coalition of four allied states;
   Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos; which were initially backed by
   Persia. The immediate cause of the war was a local conflict in
   northwest Greece in which both Thebes and Sparta intervened. The deeper
   cause was hostility towards Sparta provoked by that city's unilateral
   domination of Greek politics in the nine years after the end of the
   Peloponnesian War.

   The war was fought on two fronts, on land near Corinth and Thebes and
   at sea in the Aegean. On land, the Spartans achieved several early
   successes in major battles, but were unable to capitalize on their
   advantage, and the fighting soon became stalemated. At sea, the Spartan
   fleet was decisively defeated by a Persian fleet early in the war, an
   event that effectively ended Sparta's attempts to become a naval power.
   Taking advantage of this fact, Athens launched several naval campaigns
   in the later years of the war, recapturing a number of islands that had
   been part of the original Athenian Empire during the 5th century BC.

   Alarmed by these Athenian successes, the Persians stopped backing the
   allies and began supporting Sparta. This defection forced the allies to
   seek peace. The Peace of Antalcidas, commonly known as the King's
   Peace, was signed in 387 BC, ending the war. This treaty declared that
   Persia would control all of Ionia, and that all other Greek cities
   would be independent. Sparta was to be the guardian of the peace, with
   the power to enforce its clauses. The effects of the war, therefore,
   were to establish Persia's ability to interfere successfully in Greek
   politics and to affirm Sparta's hegemonic position in the Greek
   political system.

Events leading to the war

   Mainland Ancient Greece
   Enlarge
   Mainland Ancient Greece

   In the Peloponnesian War, which had ended in 404 BC, Sparta had enjoyed
   the support of nearly every mainland Greek state and the Persian
   Empire, and in the months and years following that war, a number of the
   island states of the Aegean had come under its control. This solid base
   of support, however, was soon fragmented in the years following the
   war. Despite the collaborative nature of the victory, Sparta alone
   received the plunder taken from the defeated states and the tribute
   payments from the former Athenian Empire. Sparta's allies were further
   alienated when, in 402 BC, Sparta attacked and subdued Elis, a member
   of the Peloponnesian League that had angered the Spartans during the
   course of the Peloponnesian War. Corinth and Thebes refused to send
   troops to assist Sparta in its campaign against Elis.

   Thebes, Corinth, and Athens also refused to participate in a Spartan
   expedition to Ionia in 398 BC, with the Thebans going so far as to
   disrupt a sacrifice that the Spartan king Agesilaus attempted to
   perform in their territory before his departure. Despite the absence of
   these states, Agesilaus campaigned effectively against the Persians in
   Lydia, advancing as far inland as Sardis. The satrap Tissaphernes was
   executed for his failure to contain Agesilaus, and his replacement,
   Tithraustes, bribed the Spartans to move north, into the satrapy of
   Pharnabazus. Agesilaus did so, but simultaneously began preparing a
   sizable navy.

   Unable to defeat Agesilaus's army, Pharnabazus decided to force
   Agesilaus to withdraw by stirring up trouble on the Greek mainland. He
   dispatched Timocrates of Rhodes, an Asiatic Greek, to distribute money
   to the major cities of the mainland and incite them to act against
   Sparta. Timocrates visited Athens, Thebes, Corinth, and Argos, and
   succeeded in persuading powerful factions in each of those states to
   pursue an anti-Spartan policy. The Thebans, who had previously
   demonstrated their antipathy towards Sparta, undertook to bring about a
   war.

Early events (395 BC)

Initial fighting

   Unwilling to challenge Sparta directly, the Thebans instead chose to
   precipitate a war by encouraging their allies, the Locrians, to collect
   taxes from territory claimed by both Locris and Phocis. In response,
   the Phocians invaded Locris, and ransacked Locrian territory. The
   Locrians appealed to Thebes for assistance, and the Thebans invaded
   Phocian territory; the Phocians, in turn, appealed to their ally,
   Sparta, and the Spartans, pleased to have a pretext to discipline the
   Thebans, ordered general mobilization. A Theban embassy was dispatched
   to Athens to request support; the Athenians voted to assist Thebes, and
   a perpetual alliance was concluded between Athens and the Boeotian
   confederacy.

   The Spartan plan called for two armies, one under Lysander and the
   other under Pausanias, to rendezvous at and attack the Boeotian city of
   Haliartus. Lysander, arriving before Pausanias, successfully persuaded
   the city of Orchomenus to revolt from the Boeotian confederacy, and
   advanced to Haliartus with his troops and a force of Orchomenians.
   There, he was killed in the Battle of Haliartus after bringing his
   force too near the walls of the city; the battle ended inconclusively,
   with the Spartans suffering early losses but then defeating a group of
   Thebans who pursued the Spartans onto rough terrain where they were at
   a disadvantage. Pausanias, arriving a day later, took back the bodies
   of the Spartan dead under a truce, and returned to Sparta. There, he
   was put on trial for his life and fled to Tegea before he could be
   convicted.

The alliance against Sparta expands

   In the wake of these events, both the Spartans and their opponents
   prepared for more serious fighting to come. In late 395 BC, Corinth and
   Argos entered the war as co-belligerents with Athens and Thebes. A
   council was formed at Corinth to manage the affairs of this alliance.
   The allies then sent emissaries to a number of smaller states and
   received the support of many of them.

   Alarmed by these developments, the Spartans prepared to send out an
   army against this new alliance, and sent a messenger to Agesilaus
   ordering him to return to Greece. The orders were a disappointment to
   Agesilaus, who had looked forward to further successful campaigning in
   Asia, but he set out for home with his troops, crossing the Hellespont
   and marching west through Thrace.

War on land and sea (394 BC)

Nemea

   After a brief engagement between Thebes and Phocis, in which Thebes was
   victorious, the allies gathered a large army at Corinth. A sizable
   force was sent out from Sparta to challenge this force. The forces met
   at the dry bed of the Nemea River, in Corinthian territory, where the
   Spartans won a decisive victory. As often happened in hoplite battles,
   the right flank of each army was victorious, with the Spartans
   defeating the Athenians while the Thebans, Argives, and Corinthians
   defeated the various Peloponnesians opposite them; the Spartans then
   attacked and killed a number of Argives, Corinthians, and Thebans as
   these troops returned from pursuing the defeated Peloponnesians. The
   coalition army lost 2,800 men, while the Spartans and their allies lost
   only 1,100.

Cnidus

   Ancient Greece and Asia Minor, separated by the Aegean Sea. Map
   courtesy of the United States Military Academy Department of History
   Enlarge
   Ancient Greece and Asia Minor, separated by the Aegean Sea. Map
   courtesy of the United States Military Academy Department of History

   The next major action of the war took place at sea, where both the
   Persians and the Spartans had assembled large fleets during Agesilaus's
   campaign in Asia. By levying ships from the Aegean states under his
   control, Agesilaus had raised a force of 120 triremes, which he placed
   under the command of his brother-in-law Peisander, who had never held a
   command of this nature before. The Persians, meanwhile, had already
   assembled a joint Phoenician, Cilician, and Cypriot fleet, under the
   command of the experienced Athenian admiral Conon, which had seized
   Rhodes in 396 BC. These two fleets met off the point of Cnidus in 394
   BC. The Spartans fought determinedly, particularly in the vicinity of
   Peisander's ship, but were eventually overwhelmed; large numbers of
   ships were sunk or captured, and the Spartan fleet was essentially
   wiped from the sea. Following this victory, Conon and Pharnabazus
   sailed along the coast of Ionia, expelling Spartan governors and
   garrisons from the cities, although they failed to reduce the Spartan
   bases at Abydos and Sestos.

Coronea

   By this time, Agesilaus's army, after brushing off attacks from the
   Thessalians during its march through that country, had arrived in
   Boeotia, where it was met by an army gathered from the various states
   of the anti-Spartan alliance. Agesilaus's force from Asia, composed
   largely of emancipated helots and mercenary veterans of the Ten
   Thousand, was augmented by half a Spartan regiment from Orchomenus, and
   another half a regiment that had been transported across the Gulf of
   Corinth. These armies met each other at Coronea, in Theban territory;
   as at Nemea, both left wings were victorious, with the Thebans breaking
   through while the rest of the allies were defeated. Seeing that the
   rest of their force had been defeated, the Thebans formed up to break
   back through to their camp. Agesilaus met their force head on, and in
   the struggle that followed a number of Thebans were killed before the
   remainder were able to force their way through and rejoin their allies.
   After this victory, Agesilaus sailed with his army across the Gulf of
   Corinth and returned to Sparta.

Later events (393 BC to 388 BC)

   The events of 394 BC left the Spartans with the upper hand on land, but
   weak at sea. The coalition states had been unable to defeat the Spartan
   phalanx in the field, but had kept their alliance strong and prevented
   the Spartans from moving at will through central Greece. The Spartans
   would continue to attempt, over the next several years, to knock either
   Corinth or Argos out of the war; the anti-Spartan allies, meanwhile,
   sought to preserve their united front against Sparta, while Athens and
   Thebes took advantage of Sparta's preoccupation to enhance their own
   power in areas they had traditionally dominated.

Persian assistance, rebuilding at Athens, civil strife at Corinth

   In 393 BC, Conon and Pharnabazus sailed to mainland Greece, where they
   raided the coast of Laconia and seized the island of Cythera, where
   they left a garrison and an Athenian governor. They then sailed to
   Corinth, where they distributed money and urged the members of the
   council to show the Persian king that they were trustworthy.
   Pharnabazus then dispatched Conon with substantial funds and a large
   part of the fleet to Attica, where he joined in the rebuilding of the
   long walls from Athens to Piraeus, a project that had been initiated by
   Thrasybulus in 394 BC. With the assistance of the rowers of the fleet,
   and the workers paid for by the Persian money, the construction was
   soon completed. Athens quickly took advantage of its possession of
   walls and a fleet to seize the islands of Scyros, Imbros, and Lemnos,
   on which it established cleruchies (citizen colonies).

   At about this time, civil strife broke out in Corinth between the
   democratic party and the oligarchic party. The democrats, supported by
   the Argives, launched an attack on their opponents, and the oligarchs
   were driven from the city. These exiles went to the Spartans, based at
   this time at Sicyon, for support, while the Athenians and Boeotians
   came up to support the democrats. In a night attack, the Spartans and
   exiles succeeded in seizing Lechaeum, Corinth's port on the Gulf of
   Corinth, and defeated the army that came out to challenge them the next
   day. The anti-Spartan allies then attempted to invest Lechaeum, but the
   Spartans launched an attack and drove them off.

Peace conferences fail

   In 392 BC, the Spartans dispatched an ambassador, Antalcidas, to the
   satrap Tiribazus, hoping to turn the Persians against the allies by
   informing them of Conon's use of the Persian fleet to begin rebuilding
   the Athenian empire. The Athenians learned of this, and sent Conon and
   several others to present their case to the Persians; they also
   notified their allies, and Argos, Corinth, and Thebes dispatched
   embassies to Tiribazus. At the conference that resulted, the Spartans
   proposed a peace based on the independence of all states; this was
   rejected by the allies, as Athens wished to hold the gains it had made
   in the Aegean, Thebes wished to keep its control over the Boeotian
   league, and Argos already had designs on assimilating Corinth into its
   state. The conference thus failed, but Tiribazus, alarmed by Conon's
   actions, arrested him, and secretly provided the Spartans with money to
   equip a fleet. Although Conon quickly escaped, he died soon afterward.
   A second peace conference was held at Sparta in the same year, but the
   proposals made there were again rejected by the allies, both because of
   the implications of the autonomy principle and because the Athenians
   were outraged that the terms proposed would have involved abandoning
   the Ionian Greeks to Persia.

   In the wake of the unsuccessful conference in Persia, Tiribazus
   returned to Susa to report on events, and a new general, Struthas, was
   sent out to take command. Struthas pursued an anti-Spartan policy,
   prompting the Spartans to order their commander in the region, Thibron,
   to attack him. Thibron successfully ravaged Persian territory for a
   time, but was killed along with a number of his men when Struthas
   ambushed one of his poorly organized raiding parties. Thibron was later
   replaced by Diphridas, who raided more successfully, securing a number
   of small successes and even capturing Struthas's son-in-law, but never
   achieved any dramatic results.

Lechaeum and the seizure of Corinth

   Corinth and the surrounding territory
   Enlarge
   Corinth and the surrounding territory

   At Corinth, the democratic party continued to hold the city proper,
   while the exiles and their Spartan supporters held Lechaeum, from where
   they raided the Corinthian countryside. In 391 BC, Agesilaus campaigned
   in the area, successfully seizing several fortified points, along with
   a large amount of prisoners and booty. While Agesilaus was in camp
   preparing to sell off his spoils, the Athenian general Iphicrates, with
   a force composed almost entirely of light troops and peltasts (javelin
   throwers), won a decisive victory against the Spartan regiment that had
   been stationed at Lechaeum in the Battle of Lechaeum. During the
   battle, Iphicrates took advantage of the Spartans' lack of peltasts to
   repeatedly harass the regiment with hit-and-run attacks, wearing the
   Spartans down until they broke and ran, at which point a number of them
   were slaughtered. Agesilaus returned home shortly after these events,
   but Iphicrates continued to campaign around Corinth, recapturing many
   of the strong points which the Spartans had previously taken, although
   he was unable to retake Lechaeum. He also campaigned against Phlius and
   Arcadia, decisively defeating the Phliasians and plundering the
   territory of the Arcadians when they refused to engage his troops.

   After this victory, an Argive army came to Corinth, and, seizing the
   acropolis, effected the merger of Argos and Corinth. The border stones
   between Argos and Corinth were torn down, and the citizen bodies of the
   two cities were merged.

Later land campaigns

   After Iphicrates's victories near Corinth, no more major land campaigns
   were conducted in that region. Campaigning continued in the Peloponnese
   and the northwest. Agesilaus had campaigned successfully in Argive
   territory in 391 BC, and he launched two more major expeditions before
   the end of the war. In the first of these, in 389 BC, a Spartan
   expeditionary force crossed the Gulf of Corinth to attack Acarnania, an
   ally of the anti-Spartan coalition. After initial difficulties in
   coming to grips with the Acarnanians, who kept to the mountains and
   avoided engaging him directly, Agesilaus was eventually able to draw
   them into a pitched battle, in which the Acarnanians were routed and
   lost a number of men. He then sailed home across the Gulf. The next
   year, the Acarnanians made peace with the Spartans to avoid further
   invasions.

   In 388 BC, Agesipolis led a Spartan army against Argos. Since no Argive
   army challenged him, he plundered the countryside for a time, and then,
   after receiving several unfavorable omens, returned home.

Later campaigns in the Aegean

   After their defeat at Cnidus, the Spartans began to rebuild a fleet,
   and, in fighting with Corinth, had regained control of the Gulf of
   Corinth by 392 BC. Following the failure of the peace conferences of
   392 BC, the Spartans sent a small fleet, under the commander Ecdicus,
   to the Aegean with orders to assist oligarchs exiled from Rhodes.
   Ecdicus arrived at Rhodes to find the democrats fully in control, and
   in possession of more ships than him, and thus waited at Cnidus. The
   Spartans then dispatched their fleet from the Gulf of Corinth, under
   Teleutias, to assist. After picking up more ships at Samos, Teleutias
   took command at Cnidus and commenced operations against Rhodes.
   A Greek trireme
   Enlarge
   A Greek trireme

   Alarmed by this Spartan naval resurgence, the Athenians sent out a
   fleet of 40 triremes under Thrasybulus. He, judging that he could
   accomplish more by campaigning where the Spartan fleet was not than by
   challenging it directly, sailed to the Hellespont. Once there, he won
   over several major states to the Athenian side and placed a duty on
   ships sailing past Byzantium, restoring a source of revenue that the
   Athenians had relied on in the late Peloponnesian War. He then sailed
   to Lesbos, where, with the support of the Mytileneans, he defeated the
   Spartan forces on the island and won over a number of cities. While
   still on Lesbos, however, Thrasybulus was killed by raiders from the
   city of Aspendus.

   After this, the Spartans sent out a new commander, Anaxibius, to
   Abydos. For a time, he enjoyed a number of successes against
   Pharnabazus, and seized a number of Athenian merchant ships. Worried
   that Thrasybulus's accomplishments were being undermined, the Athenians
   sent Iphicrates to the region to confront Anaxibius. For a time, the
   two forces merely raided each other's territory, but eventually
   Iphicrates succeeded in guessing where Anaxibius would bring his troops
   on a return march from a campaign against Antandrus, and ambushed the
   Spartan force. When Anaxibius and his men, who were strung out in the
   line of march, had entered the rough, mountainous terrain in which
   Iphicrates and his men were waiting, the Athenians emerged and ambushed
   them, killing Anaxibius and many others.

Aegina and Piraeus

   At this point, in 389 BC, the Athenians launched an attack on the
   island of Aegina, off the coast of Attica. The Spartans soon drove off
   the Athenian fleet, but the Athenians continued to invest the city of
   Aegina on land. The Spartan fleet sailed east to Rhodes under the
   command of Antalcidas, but was eventually blockaded at Abydos by the
   Athenian commanders in the region. The Athenians on Aegina, meanwhile,
   soon found themselves under attack, and were withdrawn after several
   months.

   Shortly after the withdrawal of the Athenians from Aegina, the Spartan
   fleet under Gorgopas ambushed the Athenian fleet near Athens, capturing
   several ships. The Athenians responded with an ambush of their own;
   Chabrias, on his way to Cyprus, landed his troops on Aegina and laid an
   ambush for the Aeginetans and their Spartan allies, killing a number of
   them.

   The Spartans then sent Teleutias to Aegina to command the fleet there.
   Noticing that the Athenians had relaxed their guard after Chabrias's
   victory, he launched a raid on Piraeus, seizing numerous merchant
   ships.

Peace of Antalcidas (387 BC)

   Antalcidas, meanwhile, had entered into negotiations with Tiribazus,
   and reached an agreement under which the Persians would enter into the
   war on the Spartan side if the allies refused to make peace. It appears
   that the Persians, unnerved by certain of Athens' actions, including
   supporting king Evagoras of Cyprus and Akoris of Egypt, both of whom
   were at war with Persia, had decided that their policy of weakening
   Sparta by supporting its enemies was no longer useful. After escaping
   from the blockade at Abydos, he attacked and defeated a small Athenian
   force, then united his fleet with a supporting fleet sent from
   Syracuse. With this force, which was soon further augmented with ships
   supplied by the satraps of the region, he sailed to the Hellespont,
   where he could cut off the trade routes that brought grain to Athens.
   The Athenians, mindful of their similar defeat in the Peloponnesian War
   less than two decades before, were ready to make peace.

   In this climate, when Tiribazus called a peace conference in late 387
   BC, the major parties of the war were ready to discuss terms. The basic
   outline of the treaty was laid out by a decree from the Persian king
   Artaxerxes:

     King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the cities in Asia should belong
     to him, as well as Clazomenae and Cyprus among the islands, and that
     the other Greek cities, both small and great, should be left
     independent, except Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros; and these should
     belong, as of old, to the Athenians. But whichever of the two
     parties does not accept this peace, upon them I will make war, in
     company with those who desire this arrangement, both by land and by
     sea, with ships and with money.

   In a general peace conference at Sparta, the Spartans, with their
   authority enhanced by the threat of Persian intervention, secured the
   acquiescence of all the major states of Greece to these terms. The
   agreement eventually produced was commonly known as the King's Peace,
   reflecting the Persian influence the treaty showed. This treaty marked
   the first attempt at a Common Peace in Greek history; under the treaty,
   all cities were to be independent, a clause that would be enforced by
   the Spartans as guardians of the peace. Under threat of Spartan
   intervention, Thebes disbanded its league, and Argos and Corinth ended
   their experiment in shared government; Corinth, deprived of its strong
   ally, was incorporated back into Sparta's Peloponnesian League. After 8
   years of fighting, the Corinthian war was at an end.

Aftermath

   In the years following the signing of the peace, the two states
   responsible for its structure, Persia and Sparta, took full advantage
   of the gains they had made. Persia, freed of both Athenian and Spartan
   interference in its Asian provinces, consolidated its hold over the
   eastern Aegean and captured both Egypt and Cyprus by 380 BC. Sparta,
   meanwhile, in its newly formalized position atop the Greek political
   system, took advantage of the autonomy clause of the peace to break up
   any coalition that it perceived as a threat. Disloyal allies were
   sharply punished— Mantinea, for instance, was broken up into five
   component villages. With Agesilaus at the head of the state, advocating
   for an aggressive policy, the Spartans campaigned from the Peloponnese
   to the distant Chalcidic peninsula. Their dominance over mainland
   Greece would last another sixteen years before being shattered at
   Leuctra.

   The war also marked the beginning of Athens' resurgence as a power in
   the Greek world. With their walls and their fleet restored, the
   Athenians were in position to turn their eyes overseas. By the middle
   of the 4th century, they had assembled an organization of Aegean states
   commonly known as the Second Athenian Confederacy, regaining at least
   parts of what they had lost with their defeat in 404 BC.

   The freedom of the Ionian Greeks had been a rallying cry since the
   beginning of the 5th century, but after the Corinthian War, the
   mainland states made no further attempts to interfere with Persia's
   control of the region. After over a century of disruption and struggle,
   Persia at last ruled Ionia without disruption or intervention for over
   50 years, until the time of Alexander the Great.
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