Sparta had won the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC and immediately set about losing the peace. Spartan harmosts garrisoned former Athenian allies with the same heavy hand that had once made Athens unpopular; Spartan generals like Lysander installed friendly oligarchies and bullied old allies. By 396 BC, Sparta's neighbors were ready for change. The Persian satrap Pharnabazus, sick of Spartan King Agesilaus campaigning on Persian soil in Asia Minor, sent an ambassador named Timocrates of Rhodes around Greece with chests of gold. Thebes took the money, and so did Athens, Argos, and Corinth - a coalition of Sparta's tired neighbors plus the city Sparta had spent thirty years trying to crush. Thebes engineered a small border raid by Locris against Phocis to provoke a Spartan response. Sparta took the bait. Two Spartan armies marched on Thebes from different directions, intending to meet at the small Boeotian town of Haliartus.

Haliartus sat on a low hill on the southern edge of Lake Copais, walled with stone, defended by a Theban garrison and a force of citizen soldiers from neighboring towns. Lysander had Phocians and northwestern allies; he marched up to the walls and tried first to talk the city into surrender. When that failed, he attacked. What he did not know - or chose to ignore - was that a Theban field army was camped nearby, hidden by the folds of the hills. They came down on his flank as his troops were pressing the wall. The fighting was sudden and ugly. Lysander himself, the man who had defeated Athens at Aegospotami and ended the Peloponnesian War, was struck down at the foot of a wall he could not climb. His men broke and ran. The Thebans, exuberant, chased the survivors too far up the rough slopes south of the town - and the Spartan rearguard, cornered, turned and fought back, driving the Thebans down with serious losses of their own. Both sides claimed they had not lost. Both sides had taken a wound.

Pausanias arrived at Haliartus several days later with the main Spartan army and found the war already settled in his absence. He asked for a truce so that he could collect the bodies of Lysander and the other Spartan dead. The Thebans, holding the moral high ground for the first time in living memory, agreed only on condition that the Spartan army leave Boeotia immediately. Pausanias agreed. He buried Lysander somewhere in Phocian territory and led his men home. Back in Sparta, Lysander's political faction - many of whom had loathed Pausanias for years - prosecuted the king for cowardice and slowness. The verdict would have been death. Pausanias understood the math, did not wait for it, and went into exile in Tegea. With Lysander dead in battle and Pausanias gone in disgrace, only the surviving king Agesilaus II was left to define Spartan policy. He would do so for the next thirty years, with consequences for the rest of Greek history.

Haliartus today is a quiet town of a few thousand people, sitting on the same low ridge above what was once Lake Copais. The Greeks drained the lake in the late nineteenth century and turned the bed into the most fertile cropland in Boeotia - wheat, cotton, and tomatoes now grow where reed beds and lake fish once stretched for miles. The acropolis ruins of ancient Haliartus are still visible above the modern town, scattered courses of cyclopean masonry on a scrubby hilltop. Mount Helicon rises to the south, the same mountain Hesiod once climbed to meet the Muses. The Battle of Haliartus opened the Corinthian War, which would grind on for eight more years across Boeotia, the Aegean, and the Isthmus, and produced little except mountains of dead men and a peace eventually dictated by Persia - the only power that had really wanted the war in the first place. The road past Haliartus today carries traffic between Athens and Delphi, and most drivers do not stop.