The query in my title indicates a doubt about the reality of Spartan imperialism, as distinct from the ambitions of individual Spartans and their followers. Lysander tried to create something that we can fairly call an empire; twenty years earlier we have the foundation of Herakleia Trachinia, and we must at least consider whether the thinking behind that grandiose project could be called imperialistic; earlier still the regent Pausanias after the Persian War harboured ambitions which might have tended the same way. Both these men ended badly, and the colony too failed. The question is both about the nature of the ambitions and about the opposition to them: to some extent it was personal, but I conclude that there were general factors in the Spartan system which inhibited imperialism.

PAUSANIAS AND THE HEGEMONY

It would be possible to extend the enquiry backwards and include King Kleomenes I, an active king, and a good case can be made for regarding him as an expansionist eager to increase Sparta's power and his own. I doubt if this would be profitable: the evidence is in effect all from Herodotus, mainly hostile to him, and the narrative is fragmented in such a way that it is hard to be sure how his various activities hang together, and harder still to be sure about his own and his opponents' motives.