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The King's Peace (387 ), also known as the
Peace of Antalcidas, was a peace treaty guaranteed by the Persian King
Artaxerxes II that
ended the Corinthian
War in ancient Greece. The treaty's alternate name comes from Antalcidas,
the Spartan diplomat who traveled to Susa to negotiate the terms of the treaty
with the king of Achaemenid Persia. The treaty was more commonly known in
antiquity, however, as the King's Peace, a name that reflects the depth of
Persian influence in the treaty, as Persian gold had driven the preceding war.
The treaty was a form of Common Peace, similar to the Thirty Years' Peace which
ended the First Peloponnesian War.
The end of the war:
By 387 , the central front of the Corinthian War had shifted from the Greek
mainland to the Aegean, where an Athenian fleet under
Thrasybulus had
successfully placed a number of cities across the Aegean under Athenian
control, and was acting in collaboration with Evagoras, the king of Cyprus.
Since Evagoras was an enemy of Persia, and many of the Athenian gains
threatened Persian interests, these developments prompted Artaxerxes to switch
his support from Athens and her allies to Sparta. Antalcidas, the commander of
a Spartan fleet, was summoned to Susa, along with the satrap, Tiribazus. There,
the Spartans and Persians worked out the form of an agreement to end the war.
Antalcidas traveled to Susa to negotiate the peace. To bring the Athenians to
the negotiating table, Antalcidas then moved his fleet of 90 ships to the
Hellespont, where he could threaten the trade routes along which the Athenians
imported grain from the Black Sea region. The Athenians, mindful of their
disastrous defeat in 404 , when the Spartans had gained control of the
Hellespont, agreed to negotiate, and Thebes, Corinth, and Argos, unwilling to
fight on without Athens, were also forced to negotiate. In a peace conference
at Sparta, all the belligerents agreed to the terms laid down by Artaxerxes.
Terms of the peace:
The Peace of Antalcidas was guaranteed by Achaemenid ruler Artaxerxes II. The
most notable feature of the King's Peace is the Persian influence it reflects.
The Persian decree that established the terms of the peace, as recorded by
Xenophon, clearly shows this: King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the cities in
Asia should belong to him, as well as Clazomenae and Cyprus among the islands,
and that the other Greek cities, both small and great, should be left
autonomous, except Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros; and these should belong, as of
old, to the Athenians. But whichever of the two parties does not accept this
peace, upon them I will make war, in company with those who desire this
arrangement, both by land and by sea, with ships and with money. Ionia and
Cyprus were abandoned to the Persians, and the Athenians were compelled to cede
their newly-won territories in the Aegean. Equally significantly, the
insistence on autonomy put an end to a novel political experiment that had
grown out of the war, the union of Argos and Corinth. In what the Greeks called
sympoliteia, the two cities had politically merged, granting all citizens joint
citizenship. They were forced to separate, and the Thebans were required to
disband their Boeotian league. Only Sparta's Peloponnesian League and helots
were overlooked, as the Spartans, who were responsible for administering the
peace, had no wish to see the principle of independence applied there.
Effects:
The Peace was negotiated by Satrap Tiribazos on the Achaemenid side. The single
greatest effect of the Peace was the return of firm Persian control over Ionia
and parts of the Aegean. Driven back from the Aegean shores by the Delian
League during the 5th century, the Persians had been recovering their position
since the later part of the Peloponnesian War, and were now strong enough to
dictate terms to Greece. They would maintain this position of strength until
the time of Alexander the Great. As Mikhail Gasparov states in his book Greece
for Entertainment "Artaxerxes had succeeded where Xerxes had failed; the
Persian King was giving orders in Greece like it was his, and without bringing
in a single soldier at that." In short, The treaty placed Greece under
Persian suzerainty.
A second effect of this "most disgraceful event in Greek history", as
Will Durant characterized it,was the establishment of Sparta in a formalized
position at the top of a Greek political system enforced by the Great King.
Using their mandate to protect and enforce the peace, the Spartans proceeded to
launch a number of campaigns against poleis that they perceived as political
threats. Near at hand, they forced the city of Mantinea in Arcadia, to disband
into its constituent villages. The largest intervention was a campaign in 382
to break up the federalist Chalcidian League in northeastern Greece, as
violating the autonomy principle of the Great King's decree. On the way there,
in 383 the Spartan commander Phoebidas, invited by a pro-Spartan faction,
seized the Theban Kadmeia (the Theban acropolis) and left a Laconophile
oligarchy supported by a Spartan garrison; even the pro-Spartan Xenophon could
only attribute the act to madness. The principle of autonomy proved to be a
flexible tool in the hand of a hegemonic power. The King's Peace was not
successful in bringing peace to Greece. Pelopidas and companions liberated
Thebes in 379 by assassinating the Laconizing tyrants. After the campaign
against Olynthus in 382, general fighting resumed with the revived Athenian
naval confederacy and continued, with intermittent attempts to restore the
peace, for much of the next two decades. The idea of a Common Peace proved to
be enduring, however, and numerous attempts would be made to establish one,
with little more success than the original. By granting powers to Sparta that
were sure to infuriate other states when used, the treaties sowed the seeds of
their own demise, and a state of near-constant warfare continued to be the norm
in Greece.
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