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The Theban Prelude To Alexander’S Greatness, William J. Chriss

William J Chriss

The history of Greece during the early fourth century B.C.E. is often overlooked as a mere interlude between the end of the Peloponnesian War and the beginning of the Hellenistic era. It is as if Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and Macedon’s victory at the Battle of Chaironea almost seventy years later marked a single event: the fall of Athens and the rise of Alexander the Great. While movies and popular literature leave many casual students with the impression that Athens and Sparta comprised a uniformly bipolar classical Greece that was somehow “conquered” by Alexander the Great, this oversimplifies …