Quick questions on Greece 404 to 336 BC survey and sources: HSC Ancient History

The period runs from the fall of Athens in 404 BC to the assassination of Philip II in 336 BC, about seventy years, and its structure is a succession of leading powers.

Victory in the Peloponnesian War made Sparta the master of Greece. It installed narrow oligarchies in defeated cities, including the Thirty Tyrants at Athens in 404 BC (overthrown, and democracy restored, by 403 BC), and it soon alienated former allies. The Corinthian War (395 to 387 BC) saw Thebes, Athens, Corinth and Argos, backed by Persian money, fight Sparta to a standstill; the war was closed by the King's Peace (the Peace of Antalcidas) of 387/386 BC, a settlement dictated by the Persian king that handed the Ionian Greek cities to Persia and imposed "autonomy" on the mainland, a clause Sparta then used to break up rival alliances and police Greece in its own interest.

Thebes, its democracy restored in 379/378 BC and its power growing, shattered the myth of Spartan invincibility. At Leuctra in 371 BC the Theban general Epaminondas, using a massed and oblique attack, destroyed the Spartan army and killed a Spartan king. Epaminondas then invaded the Peloponnese and struck at the root of Spartan power: in 370/369 BC he liberated Messenia, whose helots had fed the Spartan system for centuries, founded the city of Messene, and planted Megalopolis as a fortress against Sparta.

Into this exhausted, leaderless Greece stepped Macedon. Philip II, king from 359 BC, rebuilt the Macedonian army around the long pike (sarissa) and combined it with strong cavalry and siege-craft, then expanded steadily, taking Amphipolis (357 BC), intervening in the Third Sacred War, and winning a seat on the Amphictyonic Council that controlled Delphi. Despite the warnings of Demosthenes, the Greek states failed to combine effectively, and at Chaeronea in 338 BC Philip crushed a Theban and Athenian army.

Xenophon of Athens (c. 430 to 354 BC) is our only continuous eyewitness. His Hellenica deliberately picks up where Thucydides breaks off (411 BC) and runs to the battle of Mantinea (362 BC).

Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian Greek writing in the first century BC, composed a universal history, the Bibliotheca Historica (Library of History). Its fourth-century books (14 to 16) matter because they supply a continuous narrative that fills many of Xenophon's gaps, including Messene, Megalopolis and the growth of Macedon. Diodorus is a compiler, and for this period he drew heavily on the fourth-century historian Ephorus of Cyme, whose universal history is now lost; behind Ephorus in turn lies the fragmentary but high-quality Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, an anonymous continuator of Thucydides preserved on papyrus.

The great political speeches of fourth-century Athens are contemporary evidence of a different kind. Demosthenes attacked Macedon in his Philippics and Olynthiacs (350s and 340s BC) and defended his career in On the Crown (330 BC); Isocrates, a teacher and pamphleteer, called for pan-Hellenic unity against Persia in his Panegyricus (380 BC) and later urged Philip himself to lead that crusade in To Philip (346 BC); Aeschines, Demosthenes' great rival, argued for accommodation with Macedon. These speeches are priceless for the debates, mood and factions of the age, but they are persuasion, not report: each is crafted to win a vote or a verdict, so they exaggerate, select and smear, and must be read as evidence of argument and attitude rather than of fact.

Aristotle (384 to 322 BC), himself connected to the Macedonian court, is contemporary and analytical: his Politics theorises constitutions and his Athenaion Politeia (Constitution of the Athenians) describes Athenian institutions, though neither is a narrative of events. Plutarch, writing biography in the second century AD, provides Lives of key figures of the period, Pelopidas, Agesilaus, Lysander, Demosthenes, and preserves much material from lost sources, but he wrote some five centuries later, and his aim is moral portraiture, not history. Finally, inscriptions, above all the surviving founding decree of the Second Athenian Confederacy (378/377 BC), give contemporary documentary evidence that can check the literary tradition at fixed points.

The core methodological problem is that the fourth century has no Thucydides. The one contemporary narrative is partisan and full of holes; the fullest continuous account is late and derivative; the richest contemporary voices are advocates; and the best-known biographies are centuries later. Whole strands, the Theban hegemony above all, have no friendly contemporary historian and must be reconstructed by triangulation.