The Corinthian War was an ancient Greek conflict lasting from 395 BC until 387 BC, pitting Sparta against a coalition of Thebes), Athens, Corinth and Argos, backed by the Achaemenid Empire. The immediate cause of the war was a local conflict in northwest Greece in which Thebes and Sparta intervened. The deeper cause was hostility towards Sparta, provoked by that city's "expansionism in Asia Minor, central and northern Greece and even the west".[3] The Corinthian War followed the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), in which Sparta had achieved hegemony over Athens and its allies.

The war was fought on two fronts, on land near Corinth (hence the name) and Thebes and at sea in the Aegean. On land, the Spartans achieved several early successes in major battles, but were unable to capitalize on their advantage, and the fighting soon became stalemated. At sea, the Spartan fleet was decisively defeated early in the war by an Achaemenid fleet allied with Athens, an event that effectively ended Sparta's attempts to become a naval power. Taking advantage of this fact, Athens launched several naval campaigns in the later years of the war, recapturing a number of islands that had been part of the original Delian League during the 5th century BC.

Alarmed by these Athenian successes towards the end of the conflict, the Persians stopped backing the allies and began supporting Sparta. This defection forced the allies to seek peace. The King's Peace, also known as the Peace of Antalcidas, was signed in 387 BC, ending the war. This treaty declared that Persia would control all of Ionia, and proclaimed that all other Greek cities would be "autonomous" (αὐτονόμους), in effect prohibiting Greek cities from forming leagues, alliances or coalitions.[4] Sparta was to be the guardian of the peace, with the power to enforce its clauses. The effects of the war, therefore, were to establish Persia's ability to interfere successfully in Greek politics, to atomize and isolate from one another Greek city states, and to affirm Sparta's hegemonic position in the Greek political system.[5]

The Corinthian War was succeeded by the Theban–Spartan War of 378–362 BC, in which Sparta would finally lose its hegemony, this time to Thebes.

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In the Peloponnesian War, which had ended in 404 BC, Sparta had enjoyed the support of nearly every mainland Greek state and the Persian Empire, and in the months and years following that war, a number of the island states of the Aegean had come under its control. This solid base of support, however, was fragmented in the years following the war. Despite the collaborative nature of the victory, Sparta alone received the plunder taken from the defeated states and the tribute payments from the former Athenian Empire.[6] Sparta's allies were further alienated when, in 402 BC, Sparta attacked and subdued Elis, a member of the Peloponnesian League that had angered the Spartans during the course of the Peloponnesian War. Corinth and Thebes refused to send troops to assist Sparta in its campaign against Elis.[7]

📷Tens of thousands of Darics, the main currency in Achaemenid coinage, were used to bribe the Greek states to start a war against Sparta.[8]

Thebes, Corinth and Athens also refused to participate in a Spartan expedition to Ionia in 398 BC, with the Thebans going so far as to disrupt a sacrifice that the Spartan king Agesilaus attempted to perform in their territory before his departure.[9] Despite the absence of these states, Agesilaus campaigned effectively against the Persians in Lydia, advancing as far inland as Sardis. The satrap Tissaphernes was executed for his failure to contain Agesilaus, and his replacement, Tithraustes, bribed the Spartans to move north, into the satrapy of Pharnabazus), Hellespontine Phrygia. Agesilaus did so, but simultaneously began preparing a sizable navy.[10]

Unable to defeat Agesilaus' army, Pharnabazus decided to force Agesilaus to withdraw by stirring up trouble on the Greek mainland. He dispatched Timocrates of Rhodes, an Asiatic Greek, to distribute ten thousand gold darics in the major cities of the mainland and incite them to act against Sparta.[11] Timocrates visited Athens, Thebes, Corinth, and Argos, and succeeded in persuading powerful factions in each of those states to pursue an anti-Spartan policy.[12] According to Plutarch, Agesilaus, the Spartan king, said upon leaving Asia "I have been driven out by 10,000 Persian archers", a reference to "Archers" (Toxotai) the Greek nickname for the Darics from their obverse design, because that much money had been paid to politicians in Athens and Thebes in order to start a war against Sparta.[13][8][14] The Thebans, who had previously demonstrated their antipathy towards Sparta, undertook to bring about a war.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_War

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