The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]

Greek Vases

CHAPTER XLIII. THE CORINTHIAN WAR

[394 B.C.]

Two cares principally engaged Agesilaus before his departure; to provide security for the Asian Greeks in his absence, and to have a numerous and well-appointed army to lead into Greece. For the former purpose, naming Euxenus to preside, with the title of harmost, he placed a body of four thousand men under his orders. With the latter view, he proposed prizes for the cities which should furnish the best troops; and for commanders of mercenaries, horse, heavy-armed, bowmen, and targeteers, whose bands should be the best chosen, best appointed, and best disciplined. The prizes were mostly arms, elegantly wrought; but, for higher merit, or the merit of those of higher rank, there were some golden crowns; and Xenophon mentions it, as a large sum for the occasion, that the expense amounted to four talents, less than a thousand pounds sterling. Three Lacedæmonians, with one officer from each Asiatic city, were named for judges; but the decision, or the declaration of it, was judiciously referred to the arrival of the army in the Thracian Chersonesus.

Unable as the leading men in the Lacedæmonian administration were, either to conduct a war against the powerful confederacy formed against them, or, upon any tolerable terms, to prevent it, the recall of Agesilaus seems to have been a necessary measure. The army assembled by their enemies was such as had not often been seen in wars within Greece. Argos furnished seven thousand heavy-armed; Athens had already recovered strength to send six thousand, and add six hundred horse; Bœotia, Corinth, Eubœa, and Locris made the whole of the army twenty-four thousand heavy-armed, with above fifteen hundred cavalry; to which was added a large body of the best light-armed of Greece, Acarnanians, Ozolian Locrians, and Malians. The fighting men of all descriptions must have amounted to fifty thousand. The avowed purpose was to invade Laconia. “The Lacedæmonian state,” said the Corinthian Timolaus, in a debate on the plan of operations, “resembles a river, which, near the source, is easily forded, but the farther it flows, other streams joining, the depth and power of the current increases. Thus the Lacedæmonians always march from home with their own troops only; but as they proceed, being reinforced from other cities, their army swells and grows formidable. I hold it therefore advisable to attack them, if possible, in Lacedæmon itself; otherwise, the nearer to Lacedæmon the better.”

Against so powerful a league, the allies, whom the Lacedæmonians could now command, were principally from the smaller Grecian cities, and none beyond Peloponnesus. Marching themselves six thousand foot and six hundred horse, and being joined by the Mantineans and Tegeans, whose numbers are not reported, they were farther reinforced by no more than seven thousand five hundred heavy-armed, from Epidaurus, Hermione, Trœzen, Sicyon, Achaia, and Elis. Aristodemus, of the blood royal, as regent, commanded for the king, Agesipolis, yet a boy.

Circumstances commonly occur to render confederate armies less efficacious, in proportion to their strength, than those under a single authority. A dispute about the command in chief, with some difference of opinion about their order of battle, some of the generals being for deeper, others for more extended phalanges, gave opportunity for the Lacedæmonians to collect their forces, and march far beyond their own frontier, so as to meet the enemy near Corinth. In the account of the preparatory sacrifices there drops from Xenophon a remarkable confession, that those ceremonies were sometimes engines of policy. While the Bœotians, he says, held the left of their army, they were in no haste to engage; but, as soon as they had prevailed to have their situation in the line changed, so that the Athenians would be opposed to the Lacedæmonians, and themselves to the Achæans, then they declared that the symptoms of the victims were favourable. They saved themselves perhaps some slaughter by this disingenuous artifice. In the battle which ensued the Achæans fled, and all the allies of Lacedæmon equally yielded to those opposed to them. But the Athenians were defeated with considerable slaughter; and the superior discipline of the Lacedæmonians so prevailed against superior numbers that, with the loss of only eight of their own body, they remained finally masters of the field; in which, if we may trust Xenophon’s panegyric of Agesilaus for what he has omitted to state in his general history, no less than ten thousand of the confederate army fell.[9] Probably however, though the Lacedæmonians themselves suffered little, their allies suffered much; for the victory seems to have been little farther decisive than to prevent the invasion of Peloponnesus.

Meanwhile Agesilaus was hastening his march from Asia. He crossed the Hellespont about the middle of July. At Amphipolis he met Dercyllidas, who had been sent to inform him of the victory obtained near Corinth. Immediately he forwarded that able and popular officer into Asia, to communicate the grateful news among the Grecian cities there, and to prepare them for his early return, of which there seemed now fair promise.

Through Thrace and Macedonia the country was friendly, or feared to avow hostility. Thessaly, inimically disposed, and powerful through population and wealth resulting from the natural productiveness of the soil, was however too ill-governed to give any systematical opposition. The defiles of the mountains against Macedonia, where a small force might efficaciously oppose a large one, seem to have been left open. But the influence of the principal towns, Larissa, Cranon, Scotussa, and Pharsalus, in close alliance with the Bœotians, decided the rest, and as the Lacedæmonian army crossed the plain a body of horse, raised from the whole province, infested the march. It was singularly gratifying to Agesilaus that, with his horse, promiscuously collected, and entirely formed by himself, supporting it judiciously with his infantry, he defeated and dispersed the Thessalian, the most celebrated cavalry of Greece.