Xenophon, an Athenian soldier who turned to history, wrote the Hellenica as the story of Greece after Athens lost the great war. This is Book 3. Book 2 ended that war: Sparta took the Athenian fleet at the Dardanelles, starved the city, pulled down its walls, and installed a short reign of terror before an amnesty let a thinner democracy breathe again.

Sparta now inherits the Aegean and spends it at once. Cinadon, not a full Spartan citizen, conspires and is strangled in the bud. Agesilaus, lame and newly king, carries the war into Asia against Persian governors of the coast, and tries to sacrifice at Aulis as Agamemnon did on the way to Troy; the Thebans scatter his victims. Other Spartan commanders nibble at Tissaphernes, the satrap of that shore. In Greece, Lysander’s garrisons make enemies faster than friends. Thebes, Corinth, Argos, and a recovering Athens find one another, and the Corinthian War is lit. Lysander dies at Haliartus, still collecting cities. Agesilaus is winning in Phrygia, in western Turkey, when the recall comes. Asia was the war he wanted; Greece is the war he gets.