The Boeotia campaign was a Spartan military campaign in the Boeotia region of central Greece which occurred from 427 to 426 BC during the Peloponnesian War. The Spartan general Brasidas was sent by King Archidamus II to suppress a Boeotian uprising and evict the Athenian military from the region, and he had the mercenary Kassandra assassinate the Champions of Boeotia to destroy the rebels' morale before leading the Spartan army to victory in a battle fought just outside of Thebes. The Boeotian campaign led to the realignment of the Boeotian League towards Sparta once again.
Background[]
From 431 to 429 BC, the Spartan army besieged Athens, but the demagogue Cleon took power in Athens in 429 BC and forced the Spartans out. That same year, the Spartans initiated a siege of the Athenian-backed Boeotian city of Plataea, and King Archidamus II personally directed the siege efforts. At the same time, however, the Athenian army arrived in Thebes before the Spartans could, and the Athenians played on the Boeotians' history of distrusting their neighbors to convince Boeotia - now occupied by the Athenian military - to join forces with the Delian League against Sparta's Peloponnesian League. The Boeotians agreed, and the Athenians ruled the region through their proxy ruler Harpagos, Leader of the Lonely.
In 428 BC, King Archidamus responded to the Athenian expansion into Boeotia by dispatching the polemarch Stentor with an army to crush the Boeotian rebellion. Stentor's army initially encamped at Mount Helikon, but it later relocated to a cliffside camp not far from Thebes itself. The Spartans besieged Boeotia for a year, without achieving much success; the Boeotians were inspired (as well as intimidated into submission) by the famed "Champions of Boeotia" Deianeira, Aristaios, Nesaia, and Drakon, who led the Boeotian resistance to the Spartan invasion. To break the stalemate, King Archidamus ordered the mercenary Kassandra to travel to Boeotia and help reclaim the region for Sparta. Kassandra briefly ventured through Boeotia in 428 BC, assassinating the Boeotian king Harpagos, Leader of the Lonely at the besieged fortress of Plataea and killing several Athenian officers and soldiers during her infiltration of the fort. However, she traveled back south to compete in the Olympic Games in Elis at the behest of the other Spartan king, Pausanias, and, while she hunted the Cult of Kosmos in Elis and Arcadia, the Spartan war effort in Boeotia progressed. In 427 BC, Plataea surrendered to the Spartans, and its defenders were put to death and the city destroyed by the Thebans still fighting alongside Sparta.
Campaign[]
Stentor planning his campaign
The Athenians continued to occupy Thebes and the surrounding towns and forts such as Orchomenus and Gla, however, and, on finishing hunting the Cult in Arcadia in 427 BC, Kassandra travelled to Boeotia to aid the Spartan polemarch in breaking the stalemate. On her way to the Spartan camp, she assassinated the new Athenian puppet leader, Orkos the God Speaker. She arrived at the Spartan camp shortly after the fall of Plataea, and she was surprised to see that the Spartan commander was Stentor, the adoptive son of her estranged father, the missing Spartan general Nikolaos. Stentor treated her with hostility, punching her in the nose upon seeing her, and assigning her the task of killing the Champions of Boeotia, expecting that she would be killed in the process.
The aftermath of Kassandra's attack on the Athenian forest camp
However, Kassandra was able to hunt down the Champions one-by-one, first ambushing and killing Deianeira on a country road, witnessing her father Nikolaos kill Aristaios outside of the fortress of Gla (having arrived to redeem himself by aiding Stentor's first campaign), assassinating Nesaia at her hunting camp, and publicly killing Drakon as he practiced boxing at the Thebes gymnasium. During this time, she also eradicated the Athenian garrison on the island fortress of Gla (including several polemarchs and strategoi), as well as killing a camp full of Athenian soldiers who had bounties on their heads for failing to deal with the Daughters of Artemis cult.
The battle for Boeotia
By 426 BC, with the Champions of Boeotia dead, Stentor moved his camp closer to Thebes and readied his army for the final assault. Joined by Kassandra, his army attacked the Athenian camp on the Scorched Rolling Plains outside of Thebes. There, Kassandra decapitated the Athenian command by killing its captains, the Athenian mercenary champion Aretha the Dragon-Skinned, and the Athenian battle polemarch Mantios; the leaderless Athenians were soon compelled to break and flee.
Aftermath[]
The Spartan victory led to Boeotia siding with Sparta once again, and the Athenian army was forced to withdraw from the region and back into Attica. Spartan troops once again garrisoned Thebes, Orchomenus, Plataea, Gla, and the other strongpoints in the region in a major setback for Cleon and the Athenian cause, and Kassandra's success in helping the Spartans reconquer Boeotia led to her returning to Sparta with the good news. However, as her father Nikolaos warned her, "a shadow (grew) across Sparta", as one of the Spartan kings, a Cult of Kosmos leader, grew paranoid about Kassandra's successes against the Cult and her survival of the violence-marred Olympic Games and the Boeotian campaign alike.