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Given its military pre-eminence, Sparta was recognized as the leading force of the unified Greek military during the Greco-Persian Wars, in rivalry with the rising naval power of Athens. [3] Sparta was the principal enemy of Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), [4] from which it emerged victorious after the Battle of Aegospotami.
Among all the city-states of Classical Greece, the most famous are certainly Athens and Sparta. Sometimes allies, often enemies, despite their shared language and culture, these two could not have ...
Sparta was later defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC. A few decades later, the rivalry between Athens and Sparta ended when Macedonia became the most powerful entity in Greece and Philip II of Macedon unified all of the Greek world except Sparta, which was later subjugated by Philip's son Alexander in 331 BC. [32]
Opposition to Sparta enabled Athens to establish a Second Athenian League. Finally Thebes defeated Sparta in 371 BC in the Battle of Leuctra. But then the Greek cities (including Athens and Sparta) turned against Thebes, whose dominance was stopped at the Battle of Mantinea (362 BC) with the death of its military-genius leader Epaminondas.
Early on, a botched attack on Piraeus by the Spartan commander Sphodrias undermined Sparta's position by driving Athens into the arms of Thebes. [84] Sparta then met defeat at sea (the Battle of Naxos) and on land (the Battle of Tegyra) and failed to prevent the re-establishment of the Boeotian League and creation of the Second Athenian League ...
Athens' parallel rise as a significant power in Greece led to friction between herself with Sparta and two large-scale conflicts (the First and Second Peloponnesian Wars), which devastated Greece. Sparta suffered several defeats during these wars, including, for the first time, the surrender of an entire Spartan unit at Sphacteria in 425 BC ...
The long Peloponnesian War drained Sparta of so many of its citizens that by the time of the conspiracy of Cinadon, the beginning of the 4th century BC, only forty Peers, or citizens, could be counted in a crowd of 4,000 at the agora (Xenophon, Hellenica, III, 3, 5). The total population of helots at that time, including women, is estimated as ...
The defeat of the pro-Athens forces and the triumph of Sparta in the preceding Corinthian War (394–386 BC) was especially disastrous to Thebes, as the general settlement of 387 BC, called the Peace of Antalcidas or "King's Peace", stipulated the complete autonomy of all Greek towns and so withdrew the other Boeotians from the political control of Thebes.