Spartan Mora regiments at Battle of Plataea

[Paralus]

Agesilaos II could possibly be the closest thing Sparta ever produced approaching a pan-Hellenic uber-leader

Enter Paralus- stage left....

"Heavens to Betsy!" Enter, Snaggle-Parala-puss, stage right....

“Pan-Hellenic uber-leader” my left foot: much too-ing and fro-ing and alliance making to boot. A grand Hellenic invasion of Asia is not a description that fits Agesilaos' Asian Contiki Tour of conquest. Much Spartan flag waving gone wrong and stoic acceptance by Ionian Greeks of the inevitable result of Spartan power politics: meet the new boss same as the old boss.

Xenophon makes much of Timocrates’ Persian Darics and the effect this had in “bribing” states to go to war against Sparta. To Xenophon this is the ugly root that sprouts as the “Corinthian War”. He singularly fails to understand that money is a useless commodity in the hands of those unwilling to spend it. The fact was that Sparta’s erstwhile allies were already “in revolt” and the readies simply paid for a war that was, if not “declared’, already underway. As always one needs to read beyond the Laconophile (Hell. Oxyr. 10.2):

It is asserted by some that Timocrates’ bribes were responsible for the formation of the war party at Athens and among the Boeotians and in the other states which I have mentioned, owing to the ignorance of the circumstance that all of them had long adopted a hostile attitude toward the Lacedaemonians, and had been on the watch for an opportunity to involve the states in war. For the Lacedaemonians were hated by the Argive and Boeotian factions for being on friendly terms with the opposing party of citizens, and by the faction at Athens because it desired to put an end to the existing tranquillity and peace, and to lead the Athenians onto a policy of war and interference in order that it might be enabled to make a profit from the state funds. At Corinth, of the partisans of a change of policy the majority were hostile to the Lacedaemonians from reasons similar to those of the Argives and Boeotians , while Timolaus alone had become opposed to them on account of private grounds for complaint, although he was formerly on the best terms with them and a strong phil-Laconian, as can be ascertained from the events of the Decelean War. (Grenfell / Hunt translation)

Some things are rather plainer than the “phil-Laconian” Xenophon would have it. The discontent with Sparta amongst allies such as Thebes and Corinth is marked. This because of Sparta’s meddling in their internal politics. This is unremarked in Xenophon outside of matters he could not “hide” such as the seizing of the Cadmeia ( and Athens’ immediate reaction). Clearly Sparta’s imperial hubris and her “managing” of her allies grated.

In the end it was an attitude that Xenophon, try as he might, could not fail to remark upon – if only in his excusatory excursus that is his description of Leuktra. He cannot but help claim that the allies are not in any way enthusiastic and, in fact, were not at all displeased at the destruction of the Spartan right.