A - Mainland Greece in Alexander's reign

Summary

Alexander and the Corinthian League

The battle of Chaeronea marked an epoch for all ages. With the dead was buried the freedom of Greece. So Lycurgus was to lament in 330 B.C., and for all the rhetoric it is not too great an exaggeration (Leocr. 50). The crushing military defeat was compounded by a political settlement which gave Philip carte blanche to intervene wherever and whenever he pleased. The states of southern Greece, most of them under sympathetic governments, had formed individual alliances with him, and the constitutive meeting at Corinth had welded them together in a common peace. All the parties agreed to remain at peace with each other, to maintain the constitutions in force at the time the peace was established and to campaign against violations of the peace when called upon by the council and its hegemon. All this was deceptively bland. As all Greeks knew, the history of multilateral agreements over the last century had been a history of exploitation by the dominant power, whether Sparta or Thebes. A peace treaty might guarantee autonomy for all Greeks, but the most powerful state would impose its own concept of autonomy while ignoring the most blatant violations in its own sphere of interest. The Spartans, spurred on by Agesilaus, had insisted that the autonomy of the cities of Boeotia involved the dissolution of their federal government, but they had totally ignored their own subjection of Messenia.