Dr. Roel Konijnendijk
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
At the same time, the Spartans aren't necessarily going to put all of their weight behind the 30.
They're not sort of marching in to clear out this rebellion.
They do send an army and they do fight that rebellious army briefly.
But then they kind of force them to reconcile, which effectively means, and they must know that it means, the democracy will be restored.
And the Spartans kind of sit by and let that happen.
And it's a real question of why they're doing that, like why they think that that is the better move for them.
But it's likely that they think that it's just never going to stop otherwise.
It's just going to be this continuous civil war in Athens.
And also it might have something to do with internal factional strife between Pausanias, who is overseeing this, and Lysander, who we've already mentioned, the admiral, who is very much in favor of keeping all these regimes everywhere that are pro-Spartan, but who is getting a little bit too important and too influential in Sparta.
There are some concerns about Lysander, which Pausanias is trying to nip in the bud, in part by essentially sawing off the legs of the chair he's sitting on by taking away these regimes.
In fact, these regimes that we mentioned that are put in place by Lysander, so he puts in these so-called decarchies, these rules of the 10, which are even more narrow than the 30 at Athens.
and they're widely hated, and they get thrown out very quickly.
And so there's already this kind of low-key rebellion against what the Spartans have done, although that doesn't mean a rebellion against Spartan interest, just in the regime that they have put in place.
And it's clear from the sources that there is increasing just displeasure, discomfort with the fact that Sparta is now the undisputed hegemon.
And especially the larger powers, Corinth and Thebes and Argos are really unhappy with this.
And they're increasingly starting to think that something should be done.