Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

They're putting in these kind of moments of rebellion whenever they can to kind of show that they want to retain some or regain some level of autonomy.

It's easy to skip ahead to when there's an actual war, but what you see in the period before that already, I'm always pointing this out to my students, when you look at individual campaigns, when all the allies of Sparta are meant to march with them, they're meant to follow orders, but you keep seeing them just not doing it.

And that is itself a sign that they're just not willing to do Sparta's bidding and fight and die for Sparta's interests.

So when the Spartans are going to war against the rebels in Athens, the Thebans refuse to march with them.

When they go to war against Elis, the Thebans and the Corinthians refuse to march with them.

When they go across to Asia Minor to fight the Persians, Thebans and Corinthians refuse to march with them.

They just keep saying, yeah, you can tell us to go, but we just won't go.

Which is telling you so much about the extent to which Sparta is still able to tell people, to order people around.

Big question, actually.

Yeah, this is actually Alcibiades' influence, right?

So he is the one who seduces the other Spartan king's wife, which is where his offspring is of doubted parentage, which allows Agesilaus to become king.

So it's all Alcibiades' fault.

Let's move on that.

He's dead now.

We don't need to talk about him anymore.

So, Augustus Laeus takes over in Asia Minor, leads a large army.

This is obviously when the Persians realized they have to respond in force.

And there's different stories about how the eventual Corinthian war breaks out.

One of those stories is very prominent in the sources.

It's essentially that the Persians send a guy to the mainland Greeks with a big bag of money saying, would you like to fight the Spartans?