Stalemate after the Battle of Mantinea
The alliances of the various city-states shifted often in the repeated conflicts that
took place in Greece during these early decades of the fourth century B.C. The threat
from Thessaly faded with
Jason's murder1 in 370 B.C., and the former enemies Sparta and Athens momentarily allied against
the Thebans in the battle of Mantinea in the Peloponnese in 362 B.C. Thebes won the
battle but lost the war when its great leader
Epaminondas2 fell at
Mantinea3
and no credible replacement for him could be found. The Theban quest for dominance in
Greece was over. Xenophon adroitly summed up the situation after 362 B.C. with these
closing remarks4 from the history that he wrote of the Greeks in his time
(
Hellenica ): “Everyone had supposed that the winners of this
battle would be Greece's rulers and its losers their subjects; but there was only more
confusion and disturbance in Greece after it than before.” The truth of his
analysis was confirmed when the
naval alliance led by Athens dissolved5 in the mid-350s B.C. in a war among the leader and the allies.
All the efforts of the various major Greek states to extend their hegemony over
mainland Greece in this period therefore ended in failure. By the mid 350s B.C., no
Greek city-state had the power to rule more than itself on a consistent basis. The
struggle for supremacy in Greece that had begun eighty years earlier with the outbreak
of the Peloponnesian War had finally ended in a stalemate of exhaustion that opened the
way for a new power— the kingdom of Macedonia.
