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Start your adventure at mused.org today. Today. The The Hello, I'm Ryan Stitt, and welcome back to the history of ancient Greece.

Episode 111, The Spartan hegemony

The Spartans allegedly went to war to free the Greeks and the irony of that is really quite extraordinary

Xenophon ends his account of the Peloponnesian war, with the Spartans zealously tearing down the walls of Athens to the music of flute girls, and everybody believing that this represented the beginning of freedom for the Greeks. But Xenophon, who was writing about this many

years later, knew perfectly well that this was an illusion because Spartan power,

which had grown to an unprecedented degree in the course of the war and was now seemingly almost unchecked.

Would present the Spartans with new found internal and external problems and opportunities over

how they were to conduct themselves within their city state and how they were to rearrange the structure of power in the Greek world, including their relations to Persia.

In terms of foreign policy, the Spartans were presented with three possibilities in the aftermath of the Pelopnesian War.

First, they could have done what they knew best, which was to confine themselves to the Peloponnesis and to continue maintaining their control of the Peloponnesian League.

This was traditional Spartan foreign policy over the last two centuries, primarily due to the

fear of a hellet uprising.

However, changes had taken place in Sparta during the course of the Peloponnesian War,

of which the most important was the appearance of a lot of money in the hands of Spartans, something that was supposedly forbidden in Spartan society.

This had been made available both by the Persians for wartime purposes and by booty seized from some very prosperous cities held by the Athenians.

In fact, upon Lysander's return to Sparta, he brought back 470 talons of silver that he received from Cyrus to conduct the war and handed it out to the people.

The presence of that kind of wealth caused many conservatives to fear that Spartan involvement

outside the Peloponnesis would undermine those traditions, which they valued so much, and which were part of their identity, that caused them to feel superior to other peoples.

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