Corinthian War

The Battle of Haliartus marked the opening engagement of the Corinthian War, which continued until 387 BC. Coming after Athens's defeat in the Peloponnesian War, the battle reflected Athens's efforts to recover and its cultivation of Boeotian support — an alignment that directly alarmed Sparta and prompted a Spartan military response. The Spartan force was defeated by the combined Athenian and Boeotian opposition. Most consequentially, the battle cost Sparta the life of Lysander, one of its most successful generals, a loss that carried significant weight at the outset of a prolonged conflict.

The Battle of Coronea in 394 BC was fought during the Corinthian War when a Theban and Argive force attempted to block the return march of the Spartan army under King Agesilaus II into the Peloponnese. The Spartans and their allies defeated this blocking force, allowing Agesilaus to continue his march. Despite its comparative obscurity relative to more famous hoplite engagements such as the Battle of Delium in 424 BC and the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC, the battle is noted as ranking among the deadliest hoplite encounters, indicating that the fighting was intense and the human cost substantial even if casualty figures were not preserved. The engagement reflects the broader strategic pattern of the Corinthian War, in which Thebes and Argive forces actively contested Spartan movement and sought to deny Sparta free passage through central Greece, underscoring the degree to which Spartan dominance over land routes was being challenged by a coalition of Greek states during this conflict.

The Battle of Nemea, fought in Corinthian territory at the dry bed of the Nemea River, was a decisive Spartan victory over the coalition of Argos, Athens, Corinth, and Thebes. Despite being outnumbered — Spartan forces numbered between 18,000 and 19,000 against a coalition force of roughly 24,000 — Sparta inflicted heavier aggregate losses, with coalition casualties at Thebes alone reaching 2,800 against Spartan losses of 1,100. Taken together with the Battle of Coronea later in the same year, Nemea gave Sparta the dominant position in the early phase of the ground war on the Greek mainland. The two victories stabilized Spartan strategic standing at a moment when the Corinthian War had drawn together a broad anti-Spartan coalition, checking the coalition's ability to translate numerical advantage into territorial or political gains in the conflict's opening campaigns.

The Battle of Lechaeum was an Athenian victory over Spartan forces during the Corinthian War and marked one of the first recorded instances in Greek military history in which a force of peltasts defeated hoplite heavy infantry. The engagement demonstrated a practical limit of the hoplite formation: when deprived of missile-armed support troops and caught in open terrain, a Spartan regiment proved vulnerable to sustained light-infantry harassment. The near-destruction of the Spartan force — with just under half killed — carried immediate operational weight during a war in which Sparta was contesting control of the Corinthian region against an Athenian-led coalition. Beyond the campaign context, Lechaeum established Iphicrates and the peltast arm as a serious tactical proposition, signaling that the dominance of heavy infantry on the Greek battlefield was not absolute.