Introduction: through the Lycurgan Looking Glass

The Peloponnesian War concluded in the spring of 404 bc when an Athens overcome by siege and hunger at last surrendered to Sparta. Not long afterwards, the Spartan general Lysander undertook to replace the Athenian democracy with the oligarchic regime that would come to be known as the Thirty Tyrants. The Athenians initially resisted this devastating reversal of their constitution, but Lysander responded with the grave warning that the city had already been caught in violation of the terms of peace by failing to tear down its walls. He promised to take the case to the Peloponnesian League and, according to Plutarch, the ensuing assembly of those allies saw proposals to sell the Athenians into slavery, raze the city to the ground and give over the Attic countryside to the grazing of sheep.1 Xenophon, in his narrative of the end of the war, reports that no Athenians had slept the night after the news of the previous summer’s defeat at Aegospotami: instead they passed its dark hours mourning the dead, but also lamenting ‘much more for themselves, thinking that they would suffer the same things as they hadwrought upon theMelians, colonists of the Lacedaemonians, when they conquered them by siege, and upon theHistiaeans and the Scionaeans and the Tornaeans and Aeginetans and somany otherGreeks’.2 When thewar did conclude the next spring it seemed that this was precisely the fate that Lysander and the rest of his League had planned. What could have changed their minds? According to Plutarch’s account, the allies had their second thoughts at the banquet after the assembly. There a