L’impero del mare come egemonia subalterna nel IV secolo (Diodoro, libri XIV-XV)

Abstract

In two passages of book XIV Diodorus emphasizes the recognized hegemony exercised by Sparta both on land and sea after the Peloponnesian War (XIV 10 and 13). We have to put these places side to side with others: XIV 84 and 97, XV 23, XV 60, XV 78-79, from which comes out a judgment of failure of the maritime hegemony as such: it takes its full value only if it is combined with that on earth. Unlike Xenophon, who still believed in the dual hegemony and in the division of spheres of influence between Sparta and Athens, Diodorus reflects a perspective which is not Athenian and which reopens the debate on the conditions for the exercise of Panhellenic hegemony. Diodorus probably draws this topic from an historiographical tradition interested in Boeotian hegemony.