The King’s Peace (387/386 BC): Artaxerxes II, the Peace of Antalcidas, and the Twilight of Greek Autonomy
King’s Peace (387/386 BC): Artaxerxes II lays down the law, returns Ionia to Persia, proclaims “autonomy,” and makes Sparta its guarantor. Twilight tale.
Table of contents
When silence falls over Greece
At the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the fourth century BC, there is a weariness that needs no words. You can read it in sparsely peopled harbors, in fields where people count the missing arms, in temples where offerings grow rarer, in assemblies where voices still ring out loudly but sometimes crack. Greece once defeated the Persians—she likes to tell herself so again and again, as one fingers a glorious scar—but since then she has turned on herself with an obstinacy that feels like a curse. The generation reaching manhood then has known almost nothing but war: first the clash with Sparta, then occupation, then reprisals. In many cities the trauma is social as well: exiles, confiscations, returns of exiles, score-settling that leaves families divided. Piracy and raids multiply in the Aegean, because a war economy survives even when armies come home. Mercenaries become more visible, a sign that people would rather pay for arms than risk those of citizens. The Panhellenic sanctuaries continue to receive offerings, but the dedications change their tone: fewer triumphs, more appeals for safety and concord. Coin circulates differently, as pay and military contributions weigh on civic treasuries. And when the orators invoke Marathon, it is often as one brandishes a talisman against a reality that no longer obeys memory.
Athens has lost its maritime empire, then risen again, the way you rise after taking a blow to the gut: upright, yes, but out of breath. Sparta won the Peloponnesian War and, with victory, the harsh taste of command; she holds garrisons, imposes regimes, judges in the name of “order.” Thebes seethes. Corinth tears itself apart. Argos watches. And beyond the Aegean Sea, Ionia—Miletus, Ephesus, Samos, the Greek cities of Asia Minor—listens to the surf the way you listen to a threat: the coast is Greek in language, gods, and memory, but the hinterland belongs to an empire that has never stopped waiting. The memory of the Thirty Tyrants, imposed after 404, makes Athenian freedom more vigilant, but also more nervous. The city has found allies again, yet it knows that any overly visible hegemony would awaken the fear of its former “tributaries.” In the shipyards of the Piraeus, every trireme relaunched is a reminder that a fleet is built slowly, but can be lost in a single campaign. Athens learns to speak of “alliances” rather than “empire,” as if words could ward off history.
In this twilight atmosphere, a peace will appear not as reconciliation, but as a decision. A peace written far from the agoras, imposed in the name of a king whose palace lies at the other end of the known world: Artaxerxes II. The Greeks will call it the King’s Peace—as if the name alone were enough to express humiliation. For the Corinthian War is no simple war: it mixes land operations, naval clashes, and above all a war of influence in which each city tries to tilt the balance to its own advantage. On land, Sparta is not invincible: Spartan hoplites suffer reverses, and their allies grow weary of an authoritarian leadership. At sea, the decisive shock comes early, with the battle of Cnidus (394 BC), where a fleet backed by Persia shatters Spartan naval power and returns instability to the Aegean. That reversal allows Athens a moment of breathing space, as she sees a maritime horizon reappear—but a horizon now conditioned by Persian funding. The Persians then understand that they hold the key: they can open or close the sea according to their momentary interests. The Greek cities, for their part, discover that the external enemy can become a lender, then an arbiter, then a master of the agenda. The peace taking shape is therefore not the outcome of a victorious camp: it is the outcome of an exhausted system. It will freeze Greek fractures instead of healing them. And that is precisely what makes it so effective in Artaxerxes’ eyes.
From the ashes of the Peloponnesian War to the Corinthian storm
Athens rising again, Sparta commanding
In Athens, people have rebuilt, stone by stone, more than a wall: an illusion of security. The Long Walls, raised again with difficulty, stitch the city back to the Piraeus like a repaired tendon. The marketplace hums again, triremes are refitted, alliances are whispered. But the shadow of 404 has not vanished: the lost empire is a ghost that returns at night, when you look at the empty quays and remember the tributes. The restored democracy no longer has the conquering confidence of before; it has a survivor’s caution. Rebuilding the Long Walls is not only a construction project: it is a political program, a declaration of survival addressed to all of Greece. The Athenians focus on securing island relay points, but they proceed carefully, aware that the trauma of the old empire still breeds mistrust. They also repair the naval administration, reorganize finances, and renew ties with cities that no longer accept being commanded. In the Ekklesia, the memory of the Sicilian Expedition serves as a warning, as if the past had become a school of prudence. The restored democracy must also face a harsher reality: war costs money, and the direct tax on citizens (eisphora) becomes a more frequent instrument. Liturgies weigh on the wealthy, and the social balance grows fragile at the slightest maritime shock. Athens, in short, rebuilds without being able to tell herself the same story as before, and you can feel that difference in every decision.
Sparta, for her part, moves differently. Along the Eurotas, discipline is not a word: it is a way of being. Since victory, the Spartans speak in the name of Greek “freedom,” but their freedom takes the shape of a Lacedaemonian order: forced alliances, “harmosts” (governors), garrisons, and that cold certainty of being the center around which everything must turn. Greece no longer has an external enemy: she has an internal hegemony. That hegemony runs into a paradox: Sparta calls herself a liberator, yet rules through oligarchies installed or supported against the wishes of the populations. This policy feeds diffuse resistance, sometimes silent, sometimes violent, which makes the Lacedaemonian empire costly to maintain. Spartan “peace” becomes a permanent state of tension, because interventions are constantly needed to keep a city from slipping out of the system. And the more Sparta intervenes, the more she turns political antagonism into lasting resentment.
It is in this climate that the Corinthian War (395–387/386 BC) erupts—a shifting, violent coalition against Sparta, bringing together Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Argos—and, at first, Persia herself, suddenly realizing it is more effective to buy Greek discord than to fight it. The trigger also lies in Asia Minor, where relations between Spartan commanders and Persian satraps deteriorate, making the clash almost inevitable. The anti-Spartan coalition, as it forms, does not erase rivalries among allies: Athens dreams of the sea, Thebes dreams of Boeotia, Corinth wants security, Argos seeks influence. On the ground, the fighting reflects this plurality of aims: at Nemea (394), then at Coronea (394), Sparta can still hold her own, but the war is not reducible to hoplite collisions. At Lechaeum, the innovative use of peltasts by Iphicrates inflicts humiliating losses on Spartan hoplites, revealing that Lacedaemonian “superiority” is not a law of nature. Fronts multiply, resources run down, and each city learns to count its dead the way it counts drachmas. In this context, Persian aid is not a mere supplement: it becomes a driver, because it finances fleets, buys alliances, and sustains the effort. But that aid carries an implicit price: accepting that the King has legitimate interests in the Aegean. Little by little, the conflict slides from a Greek war against Sparta to a Greek war arbitrated by Persia. And when exhaustion sets in, the idea of a royal decree suddenly seems less unbearable than the continuation of the hemorrhage.
The Persian Empire, meanwhile, has not forgotten. It absorbed Marathon, Salamis, Plataea—and it learned. Artaxerxes II has reigned since 404 BC over a vast monarchy, structured, able to wait and strike without haste. His power is not only military; it is administrative, financial, diplomatic. Persian gold circulates like a silent army. Artaxerxes II comes to power in a period of internal tensions, and his reign has been marked by the need to secure the empire as much as its borders. The episode of the revolt of Cyrus the Younger (401) and the battle of Cunaxa reminds the court that Achaemenid stability depends on the discipline of satraps and control of the peripheries. This experience reinforces a lesson: avoid risky expeditions; prefer solutions that cost less Persian blood. The empire has a formidable weapon in Greece: its ability to provide or withdraw subsidies at the decisive moment. It can finance allied fleets, as it can bribe factions, and each payment of gold becomes a silent vote. The satrapies of western Asia, in direct contact with the Greek world, serve as relays and filters for the royal will. And above everything, the figure of the King concentrates an authority that the Greeks, by definition, do not have in their fragmented political system.
On the coast of Asia Minor, the satraps—those royal governors—wield carrot and stick. They promise subsidies, arm fleets, undo alliances. At certain moments, Persia supports Sparta’s enemies; at others, she changes sides as one turns a seal: the goal is not that the Greeks win, but that none become too strong. The Ionian cities, caught between Greek sea and Persian land, live this diplomacy every day: they negotiate, temporize, pay, and sometimes revolt without ever being certain they will be rescued. The satraps play on local rivalries, backing one party against another, as one moves stones on a board. Opposite them, Greek commanders learn that a “Persian alliance” is rarely friendship: it is a revocable contract. This programmed instability prepares the ground for a peace that, for Persia, looks like administrative stabilization.
The Aegean Sea, once the route of Athenian triremes, becomes a stage where money and fear decide as much as oars. And when Athens thinks she glimpses a rebirth, she discovers that walls do not protect against diplomacy. The Aegean becomes a space where every island matters, not for its beauty, but for its position and harbors, like knots in a rope that can be tightened or loosened. Grain routes, watering points, shipyards: everything regains a strategic importance the Athenians know all too well. Persian money, struck into coins, makes it possible to equip rowers, hire pilots, maintain squadrons without depending on a weary citizen body. This monetization of war transforms the nature of the conflict: you can prolong the effort without popular enthusiasm, so long as the pay arrives. Cities then hesitate not only for ideological reasons, but because the treasury dictates what is possible. Ambassadors become as important as generals, and promises sometimes count for more than a landing. Athens, in recovering a naval breath, does not recover strategic autonomy, because that breath depends on external funding. Sparta, for her part, understands she must prevent Athens from rebuilding a durable maritime network. And Persia, watching this duel, sees the solution: fix by decree what battles do not stabilize.
Susa, Sardis, pen and seal
Artaxerxes II, King of Kings and arbiter
Imagine Susa: not a Greek city where people debate, but an imperial center where people command. Courtyards, columns, halls where one walks in silence. Power there is not shouted; it is set down, like a weight. Artaxerxes II is not a conqueror charging on horseback; he is a long-reigning monarch who has watched revolts, family ambitions, crises go by—and who knows what stability is worth. He does not seek to “become Greek” or to persuade Greece: he wants the Aegean Sea to stop being a fire that could spread into Anatolia. Distance itself is part of power: for a Greek, reaching the gates of an imperial center already means acknowledging a higher rank. Achaemenid ceremonial, regulated and hierarchical, turns the embassy into a staging of dependence. Greeks, used to speaking upright before their equals, find themselves in a world where access to the sovereign must be earned, paid for, negotiated. This political architecture is a weapon: it imposes psychological asymmetry even before discussion begins. Artaxerxes II does not need to persuade through debate, because his authority is designed as a fact. For him, Ionia is an imperial territory disturbed by Greek turbulence, not an autonomous “Greek world.” Stabilizing western Asia therefore means bringing the coastal cities back into the administrative fold and preventing any Greek coalition from reviving the old dream of an Ionian “liberation.” Thus the coming peace fits less a logic of compromise than a logic of bringing to heel.
What will be imposed in 387/386 BC is not a peace negotiated between equals. It is a royal rescript: a decision of the Great King addressed to the Greeks. The gesture is immense, almost symbolic: Xerxes tried to subdue Greece by invasion; Artaxerxes II will obtain, by ink, what an army could not seal durably. The very term “King’s Peace” states the hierarchy: it is not the Greeks’ peace, but that of a sovereign who presents himself as the source of law. The novelty also lies in the language: a text meant to apply to all Greek cities, like a general framework, almost constitutional. In that sense it is a masked political revolution: Greek plurality accepts a universal principle imposed from outside. And when peace becomes a decree, war ceases to be the only way to decide: royal diplomacy becomes a weapon of coercion.
Tiribazus, Pharnabazus, and the diplomacy of satraps
But between Suse and the cities lies Asia Minor: its provincial palaces, its ports, its Persian governors. Persian diplomacy is not a single face: it is a network. The satraps, especially in the region of Sardis, receive Greek embassies, listen to them, set them against one another, test them. A peace conference does take place in 392 BC at Sardis, under the Persian eye: the idea itself says everything. The Greeks come to discuss at the King’s—at his representative’s—like cities seeking a higher arbitration. Sardis, with its satrapal residences, is not only a place: it is a crossroads where Asia and the Aegean touch. Greek representatives arrive laden with promises and accusations, each trying to portray his rival as the warmonger. The satrape listens, weighs, lets them speak, and often draws things out: slowness is a technique, because time wears down coalitions. The conference of 392 BC is already a lesson in muted humiliation: to negotiate “at the King’s” is to admit that the ultimate decision is no longer Greek. The cities, used to invoking freedom, find themselves calculating what a refusal would cost. Opposite them, the Persians test the breaking point: how long can the Greeks endure war without imploding? They also observe internal factions, because an embassy is never unanimity: it is a fragile compromise exported abroad. In this theater, the words “peace” and “justice” become diplomatic currencies you spend to obtain guarantees. And it is precisely in this intermediate space, between satrapal palace and distant agora, that the idea of a royal rescript gains its force: it appears to be the only “reasonable” way out.
In this game, Sparta understands something before the others: if Persia is the arbiter, it is better to be the arbiter’s tool than his target. And the man who embodies that calculation is Antalcidas. Sparta has always known how to recognize the balance of power, even when it contradicted her pride. She remembers that her power rests on a delicate equilibrium: a minority of citizen-soldiers, indispensable allies, and below them a servile population that must be watched. Prolonging an exhausting war increases internal risks as much as external ones. Moreover, Spartan domination at sea has already been cracked: without a reliable fleet, hegemony becomes vulnerable to indirect blows. Antalcidas then appears as a man of the “possible,” someone who accepts paying an external price to consolidate an internal order. He also understands that the notion of “autonomy” can serve Sparta: by dispersing the others, you prevent the emergence of a unifying rival. His diplomacy has nothing heroic about it in the Greek sense, and that is precisely why it is formidable: it targets political architecture, not glory.
Antalcidas and the blockade of the grain routes
A closed sea, an open empire
Antalcidas is not only a Spartan: he is a strategy. Where others seek glory in battle, he understands the machinery of interests. He knows what Persia wants: to reclaim without dispute the Greek cities of Asia Minor and neutralize the Greeks’ ability to intervene there. He knows what Sparta wants: to exit the Corinthian War while keeping her dominant role in Greece. The bargain is terrible, but clear. His name will remain attached to the treaty, as if the peace had a Greek face to mask the Persian hand. He operates in a world where the boundary between ambassador and general is porous, because a negotiation is already a military operation. He bets that the Greeks will accept almost anything to avoid economic suffocation. And he knows that, in the Aegean, controlling passages can sometimes be better than winning a pitched battle.
So Antalcidas turns east. He secures Persian support for decisive pressure, especially at sea. And suddenly Athens feels the rope tighten: her supply routes, especially grain coming through the straits, become vulnerable. A city can endure fiery speeches; it endures poorly the prospect of hunger. It is not a battle that crushes Athens: it is the idea that a battle is no longer even necessary. The fleet, the gold, diplomatic isolation: so many hands on the throat, without seeing the face that squeezes. The most effective pressure against Athens is not an invasion of Attica: it is the threat to the straits, where grain deliveries are decided. Athens has lived the nightmare of blockade, and the idea alone is enough to awaken the panic of siege years and famine. Antalcidas, by seeking Persian support, gains a form of maritime legitimacy: a fleet backed by the empire can afford to be durable, paid, supplied. Persia does not need to love Sparta; it is enough to use her as a temporary instrument of stabilization. For their part, the Athenians understand that their naval rebirth remains fragile, because it depends on a network of allies hesitant to expose themselves. Diplomacy then becomes coercion: you don’t beat someone, you isolate them, and isolation is an anticipated defeat. Even democratic rhetoric changes its tone: it is no longer about “expansion,” but “preservation.” This situation favors imposed legal solutions, because they offer an exit without a final confrontation. And the royal rescript becomes the narrow gate through which one can leave the war without declaring oneself defeated—while being so, in depth.
Athens’ choice: yield without capitulating
In Athens, people debate. They flare up, accuse Sparta of betraying the Greek cause, rage against the “barbarian” dictating his law. But behind the anger, a silent question: what, concretely, to do if Sparta—backed by Persia—threatens total war, and if the sea closes? The advocates of resistance invoke dignity, but they must answer a relentless question: who will pay for the next campaign, who will outfit the next fleet, who will guarantee the grain? Memories of 404 are there: collapse can be swift, and democracy knows it is not invulnerable. Athenians also see that the anti-Spartan coalition is not a unified machine: each counts its losses and interests. Thebes does not want to die for Athens’ seas, any more than Athens wants to burn up for the Boeotian plains. Weariness makes “reasonable” arguments more seductive, even when they taste like renunciation. Rumors are watched, internal divisions feared, because a city in political crisis becomes easy to constrain. In this atmosphere, accepting an imposed peace sometimes seems the lesser evil—and that is what hurts most: consenting by calculation to what one judges shameful.
Thebes, Corinth, Argos also feel the pressure. Greek coalitions are brilliant on the first day, less solid in the fiftieth month. The Corinthian War has exhausted forces, fractured alliances, left Greece in a kind of moral attrition. And Persia, patient, waits for the instant when refusal becomes impossible. Corinth is a strategic knot, but also a city split, and its internal division reduces its ability to hold a stable political line. Argos, seeking to increase its influence, alarms as much as it reassures its allies, because ambition is frightening even among partners. Thebes, for her part, perceives that the “autonomy” peace is aimed precisely at depriving her of regional cohesion in Boeotia. Thus, what Persia sells as pacification appears, to the cities, as a forced reshaping of their internal balances.
The clauses of the King’s Peace, 387/386 BC
A double date: 387/386, the winter of calendars
The peace is generally dated to 387/386 BC, because the sources and Greek chronologies place the agreement at the hinge of the years, according to civic calendars that do not always coincide. Historians often place it in 387 BC, but the usage “387/386” precisely reflects that in-between: a winter peace, concluded and proclaimed when the cities are already tired and military campaigns slow down. This apparent uncertainty about the exact year is a reminder of a reality: Greeks do not live by a single calendar, and the historian must piece together different civic systems. This blur is not an erudite detail, because it also says something about the nature of the event: a decision proclaimed, circulated, sworn to, that is implemented in stages. Peace is not a theatrical instant; it is a process of ratification, oaths, readjustments, in which each city tries to save something. Embassies return with a text and, sometimes, with a shame no one dares name. Oaths are sworn to the gods, and that oath becomes a chain, because it then legitimizes interventions “in the name of peace.” Moreover, winter is a favorable moment for diplomacy: the season slows military operations and makes negotiation more credible. In cold weather, cities think more about feeding and preserving than conquering. This timing explains the feeling of a silent tipping point: the war goes out without clamor, replaced by the weight of a formula. And acceptance, because it is collective and sworn, turns constraint into norm.
The essential clauses: the ink that reshapes the Aegean
The core of the text—transmitted notably by Xenophon—has the chill of a royal act. Artaxerxes II declares that:
The phrasing attributed to the royal will is designed to be unassailable: it does not discuss, it decrees. It creates a clean division between Asia, the King’s domain, and the rest, theoretically autonomous, as if an invisible line cut across the Aegean. The mention of Clazomenae and Cyprus is not accidental: it reminds us that Persia also thinks in terms of islands and maritime footholds. The exception granted to Athens for Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros is a calculation: leave a symbol to avoid desperate resistance. The threat of war against holdouts gives the text its true face, that of an ultimatum dressed in legal language. And when Sparta proclaims herself guarantor, she receives an implicit mandate: intervene wherever a city oversteps the “autonomy” defined by the King. In short, peace is not only a cessation of fighting; it is a mechanism of political control.
- The Greek cities of Asia (that is, Asia Minor) “belong” to the King, along with Clazomenae and Cyprus.
- All other Greek cities, “small and great,” must be autonomous.
- Notable exception: Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros are recognized as belonging to Athens (a meager bone tossed to a starving pride).
- And above all: those who do not accept will have war, waged with the King’s support—which gives the formula a violence without a sword.
Sparta then sets herself up as guarantor and executor of this “peace”: she has military force on the ground and the legitimacy of Persian ink behind her.
You can then measure Persian skill: a brief text, but structured like a trap, where every term opens a possibility of intervention. Asia is “settled” in one block to the King’s benefit, while Greece is fragmented in the name of an abstract principle. This asymmetry is fundamental: the empire unifies, the cities disperse. And the guarantor, Sparta, becomes the tool that turns a distant proclamation into daily constraints.
“Autonomy”: the promise that cages
The word is magnificent: autonomy. It sounds Greek, it smells like freedom, it resembles an ideal. But in the King’s Peace, it becomes an instrument. In the Greek ideal, autonomy is the ability to give oneself one’s own laws, to choose alliances, to decide war and peace. Here, however, autonomy is conditional: you are autonomous as long as you remain alone. The peace therefore turns an ideal into a ban on political solidarity. It hits especially hard in regions where federal unity is a geographic and military necessity, like Boeotia around Thebes. It also strikes places where cities had learned to coordinate in order to survive, because coordination becomes suspect. This mechanism breeds a bitter irony: freedom is proclaimed at the very moment the free are prevented from organizing. Sparta can then present herself as the mere executor of a universal principle, which masks her own interests. And when Spartans “liberate” a city from a league, they often liberate it only to place it in a more manageable dependence. Autonomy is no longer a natural right: it is a technique of rule by division. The reader should feel here a shift of era: Greece is entering a fourth century in which political words become weapons.
For what autonomy are we talking about, when a city no longer has the right to unite with another? When leagues, federations, durable alliances become suspect? The proclaimed autonomy serves to dissolve groupings that might resist: Thebes can no longer hold Boeotia as a bloc; Corinth can no longer merge politically with Argos without contestation; regroupings become crimes against “peace.”
Sparta, as a zealous guarantor, brandishes autonomy like a legal sword: she intervenes, “liberates” here, breaks apart there, imposes elsewhere—and always in the name of a principle that sounds noble. Greece discovers a domination that does not say its name. This guarantee provides Sparta with an ideal justification to intervene without declaring a new hegemony. She can dissolve unions, impose arrangements, demand oaths, all while claiming to obey a higher order. In practice, that deepens resentment: a city humiliated by a forced “liberation” does not forget. Legal argument sometimes replaces brutality, but constraint is felt the same way in local institutions. Internal factions seize the vocabulary: oligarchies invoke peace to stay in power; democrats denounce it as a mask. Every civic crisis becomes an “international” affair, because Sparta can be called in for help in the name of autonomy. And the more the system jams, the more peace begins to look like war pursued by other means.
Ionia returned to the Great King: shame without cries
And then there is Ionia.
For the Greek cities of Asia Minor, peace is not a parenthesis: it is a return. They pass back under Persian sovereignty, officially, in black and white, as if the history of the Persian Wars were erased with a stroke. One can imagine the quays of Ephesus, the hills near Miletus, the sanctuaries where Greek was spoken: perhaps nothing changes on the first day, and that is what is most humiliating. Domination does not need to destroy in order to be total; it only needs to be recognized. For the Ionian cities, the Persian clause is not an abstraction: it touches taxation, justice, the presence of a satrapal power capable of arbitrating and punishing. Domination may remain flexible, but it is now legal, and it is that legality that cuts off hope of Greek rescue. Local elites must choose between accommodation and risk, and those choices create internal fractures. The sea, once the promise of support, becomes a border that isolates.
Mainland Greeks can look away, convince themselves these are “Asian affairs.” But the rescript’s formula is relentless: the Greeks of Asia are handed over to the King—and with them, a share of Greek pride. This looking-away is a psychological strategy: you tell yourself Ionia is far away, that it has always been “disputed,” that there was no other choice. Yet Ionia is not peripheral in the Greek imagination: it is a cradle of ancient cities, sanctuaries, poets, shared traditions. Handing it to the King is admitting that Greek identity is not enough to found a political right. It is also acknowledging the failure of a century of rhetoric about the “freedom of the Greeks” in the face of Asia. The peace cruelly reveals that Panhellenic solidarity often stops where costs begin. It foreshadows a world in which Greeks are sacrificed to save mainland balances. It finally gives Persia a moral advantage: she can present herself as a power of order, able to “stabilize” what Greeks destroy. The humiliation is all the deeper because it does not manifest in ruins, but in normalization. And in Ionian ports, people go on speaking Greek—with, above it, the administrative shadow of the King.
A twilight turning point
Persian victory without a battle
What the King’s Peace consecrates is a new obviousness: the Persian Empire is no longer only an external adversary; it is an arbiter of the Greek world. Greece, which had imagined itself as a set of free cities facing Asian despotism, now accepts—constrained, exhausted, divided—that an Achaemenid monarch decides the legality of Greek alliances. The change is not only geopolitical; it is mental: Greece must integrate that a foreign monarchic power can set the rules of the game. Cities continue to think themselves sovereign, but they now live within a framework they did not author. This dependence is worsened by the lack of Greek unity: no common organ can effectively contest the rescript. Persia, by contrast, speaks with one voice, even when her satraps maneuver, and that coherence stands out. The empire also gains a relative maritime security by reducing the risks of Greek expeditions into Asia. The peace finally serves as a diplomatic precedent: a text can be brandished, cited, sworn to, as a higher authority. And one understands that Persian victory is also a victory of the imperial model over Greek civic fragmentation.
It is a diplomatic victory in the strong sense: Persia achieves her strategic objectives (control of Greek Asia Minor, neutralization of Greek interventions, western stability) by a proclamation, not by conquest.
Sparta, “guarantor”: hegemony behind a legal mask
Sparta emerges, in the short term, a winner: she becomes the executor of the peace, the one who “enforces” autonomy. But this position is poisoned. For by making herself the armed arm of a Persian rescript, Sparta exposes her domination: she is no longer only the strongest of Greek cities; she appears as the city that draws its legitimacy from a foreign king. But this immediate gain has an image cost: many Greeks now see Sparta as the agent of a Persian order, even if Sparta denies it. Lacedaemonian hegemony becomes an unstable balance, because it must be maintained through repeated interventions. Each intervention creates a new potential enemy, which forces intervention again: a closed circle. Thus the “guarantee” turns Sparta into the police power of a peace she did not write.
Spartan hegemony grows harsher, more interventionist—and therefore more fragile. For what autonomy are we talking about, when it serves first to prevent others from gathering? This position feeds rancor, and rancor organizes. This harshness is also an admission: a domination that is accepted does not need to be hammered home. When Sparta dissolves federal structures, she strikes at the Greeks’ capacity to produce an alternative power. Yet this strategy, by breaking and breaking, ends up forging wills for revenge. Thebes, in particular, learns the lesson: if autonomy is a weapon against her, one day she will have to flip the table. Medium-sized cities also understand they are pawns, and that their “freedom” depends on the guarantor’s goodwill. In assemblies, political opposition finds a powerful theme: denouncing masked servitude. Even Sparta’s allies can feel threatened, because a guarantor who is too strong always ends up resembling a master. This tension makes the peace fragile: it does not extinguish causes; it represses them. And that repression prepares future explosions when a military window opens. The Peace of Antalcidas, paradoxically, pacifies the surface while heating the political subsoil. It feels like a calm night before a new season of storms.
The taut thread into Greece’s future
The King’s Peace is also a precedent: the idea of a “common peace” (koine eirene) proclaimed for all Greeks, with a general principle (autonomy), will haunt the fourth century. It will be renewed, sworn again, used as a diplomatic weapon. The idea of a “common peace” has an alluring face: who would refuse a general principle supposed to protect the weak? But the experience of 387/386 teaches that common peace can be captured by the strongest, then imposed on the others. It becomes a shared diplomatic language, a kind of political grammar of the fourth century, invoked to legitimize interventions. It is no accident that congresses, oaths, proclamations multiply: law becomes a battlefield. Cities learn to wield words like shields—or like spears. This evolution favors powers able to present themselves as arbiters: yesterday Persia, tomorrow others. And the more Greeks get used to swearing general peaces, the more they implicitly acknowledge that they need a framework above them.
But the essential point is elsewhere: in 387/386, a threshold is crossed. The Greeks do not lose a battle; they lose, for a moment, control of the frame. They discover themselves subjects of an order decided beyond their walls. Independence tips not in the dust of a battlefield, but in the calm of a text read aloud, accepted because there is no longer any other way. The threshold crossed is that of symbolic sovereignty: Greece no longer decides alone what is “legal” in its alliances. The King, by becoming a source of norms, takes from the cities part of their founding narrative. Greek freedom continues to exist, but it ceases to be an unquestioned horizon. And when you lose an horizon, even without losing a fight, you have already entered another era.
And, in retrospect, one understands the twilight tone of this event: it is not the end of Greece, but it is the end of a political innocence. The victors of the Persian Wars have just learned that history can take revenge without raising an army. The word “twilight” does not mean disappearance, but a change of light: old forms remain, yet they cast a different shadow. Greeks can still win battles, found leagues, invent tactics, but they now know that imperial diplomacy can neutralize their successes. This awareness cracks Panhellenic pride, because it shows that yesterday’s enemy learned and adapted. The Persian Wars remain a mobilizing myth, but they cease to be a political guarantee. The imposed peace also reveals the structural selfishness of the cities: each saves what it can, even if it abandons another. You leave a world where you believed yourself protected by memory and honor, and enter a world where geopolitics weighs more heavily. Victory without battle is a particular violence: it leaves no heroic tombs, only a text you must accept. This absence of spectacle makes defeat harder to narrate, therefore easier to repress—until it reappears as revenge. And that may be the last tragic trait: peace installs a lasting humiliation, but also an energy of repair that will work the century from within.
Sources and further reading
- Book (English): Paul Cartledge, Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
- Web source (English): Encyclopaedia Britannica, “King’s Peace (Peace of Antalcidas)”.
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