sy of Sparta caused and Persian gold promoted,
proved so formidable, that Agesilaus had to be summoned home: and
after his departure, Conon, in alliance with Pharnabazus, recovered the
supremacy of the sea for Athens, and greatly weakened Spartan influence
in Asia. Not content with this result, the two friends, in the year B.C.
393, sailed across the Egean, and the portentous spectacle of a Persian
fleet in Greek waters was once more seen--this time in alliance with
Athens! Descents were made upon the coasts of the Peloponnese, and the
island of Cythera was seized and occupied. The long walls of Athens were
rebuilt with Persian money, and all the enemies of Sparta were richly
subsidized. Sparta was made to feel that if she had been able at one
time to make the Great King tremble for his provinces, or even for
his throne, the King could at another reach her across the Egean, and
approach Sparta as nearly as she had, with the Cyreians, approached
Babylon.

The lesson of the year B.C. 393 was not thrown away on the Spartan
government. The leading men became convinced that unless they could
secure the neutrality of the Persians, Sparta must succumb to the
hostility of her Hellenic enemies. Under these circumstances they
devised, with much skill, a scheme likely to be acceptable to the
Persians, which would weaken their chief rivals in Greece--Athens and
Thebes--while it would leave untouched their own power. They proposed
a general peace, the conditions of which should be the entire
relinquishment of Asia to the Persians, and the complete autonomy of all
the Greek States in Europe. The first attempt to procure the acceptance
of these terms failed (B.C. 393); but six years later, after Antalcidas
had explained them at the Persian Court, Artaxerxes sent down an
ultimatum to the disputants, modifying the terms slightly as regarded
Athens, extending them as regarded himself so as to include the islands
of Clazomenae and Cyprus, and requiring their acceptance by all the
belligerents, on pain of their incurring his hostility. To this threat
all yielded. A Persian king may be excused if he felt it a proud
achievement thus to dictate a peace to the Greeks--a peace, moreover,
which annulled the treaty of Callias, and gave back absolutely into
his hands a province which had ceased to belong to his Empire more than
sixty years previously.

It was the more important to Artaxerxes that his relations with the
European Greeks should be