Plutarch, a Greek writer working around AD 100, wrote Parallel Lives: paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans. This is the life of Lysander, a Spartan admiral of the late fifth century BC, set next to the Roman general Sulla. Both men won long wars, then remade their states in their own image and could not stop.

With Persian gold and a fleet he took Athens’s empire apart. At Aegospotami, on the Dardanelles, the Athenian ships were caught unmanned on the beach. The city starved; its Long Walls came down to flute music; thirty tyrants sat in the place he had broken. He installed harmosts — Spartan governors — and boards of ten in the cities, and a cult of himself. He made and unmade Spartan kings and tried to change the succession so merit, not birth, could wear a crown. He died at Haliartus in central Greece, in a skirmish he should have scouted. He could not leave empire at the Eurotas, Sparta’s river.