Battle of Leuktra 371 BC

[Paralus]

I have no problem with that narrow definition. Spartan realpolitik is something we both seem to understand- as long as we don't single them out for it. This was my point in bringing up Conon and the Athenians perfectly reasonable support of Persia...

Correct: they should not be singled out for it; it was a most Greek thing. It's just that Sparta's lingering "most noble of the Greeks" thingy seems to linger: the legacy of Thermopylae and their rhetoric of "liberty for the Hellenes". Why even the monument at Thermpolylae was a Spartan one until the nineties when the poor old Thespians were added. Still no mention of the helots who likely died with their masters either.

Athens - rightly - gets a good going over for its imperial hubris (so eloquently summed up in Thucydides' narration of the Sicilian expedition and the Melian Dialogue for example). Yet in all these centuries the slavery that dare not be mentioned - that of the Lakonian towns and Messenia - is looked away from or explained away. Not as much nowadays I'd admit.

All had a go at in turn: Athens, Sparta and then Thebes. Thebes' moment in the sun may, in fact, be the most romanticised. Epaminondas (wouldn't it be nice to have Plutarch's biography?) is idealised as the "greatest of Greek statesmen" in some quarters. A man who would lead Thebes and, one suspects, Greece into some new age of Hellenic rationality.

Right. No mention of the fleet that Thebes was busy trying to construct so as to relieve itself of its "ally" Athens. Have fleet will conquer - especially a major rival whose throat - literally and figuratively - resided in the narrows of the Hellespont. Nor of its king-making in Macedonia (via Pelopidas) which came back to bite it hard.

The real genius in Epaminondas' work was the insight that enabled him to not only emasculate Sparta but to set up power blocks in the Peloponnese that would keep its bellicosity busy with something bite on. All the while Thebes was free to move elsewhere. Philip II learned well. In 338/7 he built upon Epaminondas’ existing structures.

I'd differ on any Greek polis supporting Persia. Persia switched its support from Sparta to, initially, Athens to curb Spartan activity in Asia Minor. It then suported Sparta, via Antalcidas, to curb Athens' growing interference in its affairs.

Poor Ionians should have remembered to "beware Greeks bearing treaties."

He, he. To which I’d only add “mainlandâ€