The Spartans
An enemy of change
Delphi is one of the most significant religious sites in ancient Greece. To the Greeks, it was the 'navel of the world', an umbilical cord connecting them to their archaic past, when the distance between heaven and earth didn't seem so great. But as well as providing a link to the past, Delphi was also a window on the future – thanks to its famous oracle.
If you had a question to ask, on anything from love affairs to foreign affairs, you would go to the oracle at Delphi. There you would write your question on a sheet of lead: Will Phoebe love me? Should we invade Attika this summer?
The female medium – known as the pythia – would then enter a state of drug-induced frenzy by chewing bay leaves or inhaling the fumes of henbane. A male priest-poet would be on hand to interpret her usually incomprehensible but divinely inspired utterances and turn them into elegant hexameter verse. However, oracles were notoriously ambiguous, and the true meaning of their 'predictions' often only became clear after the event.
Embalmed in tradition
Perhaps that was why places like Delphi were, by the end of the 5th
century BC, seen as just a bit old-fashioned. A new spirit of scepticism
and rationality was abroad in Greece, and fundamental beliefs about men,
the gods and the universe were being called into question. Nowhere was
this more true than in Athens, where philosophers speculated that the
sun was just a red-hot rock about the size of the Peloponnese.
But elsewhere in Greece, notions like this were still simply unthinkable. In Sparta, safe and secure in the Eurotas valley, it was still possible to believe that the gods were in their heaven and all was right with the world.
Sparta had once been a revolutionary society – but that had been 250 years before. Now the revolution that had created its unique social system had become embalmed in tradition. The warrior élite at the top of Sparta's complex caste system were suspicious of change and hostile to anything new. Eighty years after the event, their role model was still Leonidas, the Spartan king who, with 300 followers, had sacrificed himself in the pass at Thermopylae resisting the Persian invasion.
Ideological conflict
For the previous 10 years, these conservative-minded warriors had
been at war with their former allies, Athens, the source of radical democracy,
atheism and rationalism. Naturally, the conflict had done nothing to change
Spartan attitudes. What had begun as a struggle for dominance had become
an ideological conflict as bitter as the one that would divide the world
during the Cold War.
The Athenians saw Sparta as a frightening and oppressive place that reduced its citizens to cogs in a threatening military machine. For the Spartans, Athens was the source of corruption that threatened the whole of Greece. As one Spartan put it: 'We are the only Greeks who have learned nothing wicked from you Athenians.'
So while many Athenians took a more sceptical view of the usefulness of oracles, it was an article of faith among Spartans that, when oracles spoke, you listened.
If, in 415 BC, Spartans had come to Delphi demanding to know what the future held for their city, and assuming the oracle was on form, they would have taken back some unsettling messages. Soon (the oracle would have said) they would see the walls of their bitterest enemy reduced to rubble, and they would gorge themselves on the fruits of victory. But before long, they would themselves taste the bitterness of total defeat.
The war between Sparta and Athens had been bloody and inconclusive. Ten years of fighting had produced plenty of killing, but no killer blow. Following devastating plague in Athens, and a military humiliation for the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria, the two sides had finally concluded an armistice and withdrawn to lick their wounds.
After six years of uneasy peace, the wounds were to be spectacularly reopened in Syracuse on the island of Sicily. Syracuse had been founded during the period of colonisation when Greek cities had been created all over the Mediterranean and beyond. In the war that had turned the whole of the Greek world into two armed camps, it had allied itself to Sparta.
In the year 415, war fever swept Athens, and its focus was Syracuse.
Enter Alcibiades
One of the leading campaigners for the conquest of Syracuse was the
young aristocrat Alcibiades. Good-looking and ambitious, he was in many
ways the quintessential Athenian. Popular with the people, he was also
a patron of the 'new learning' that had taken root in Athens. He was a
patron, friend and pupil of Socrates, and according to rumours circulated
by his enemies in the city, he was also an atheist who mocked the gods.
Alcibiades was a hard liver, given to wine and women – despite the scoldings of his wise friend Socrates. During the plague that had devastated Athens, it was said that his dissipation had tipped over into something worse. As the death toll had mounted and the city despaired, he was rumoured to have scorned the gods by profaning sacred rites.
And yet, despite this dubious reputation, when Alcibiades talked war, the Athenians listened. His arguments in favour of the conquest of Syracuse were those of a young man in a hurry: peace was all very well, but where was the glory in that? Taking Syracuse would make all those who took part rich and famous.
By promoting an attack on a Spartan ally, Alcibiades may also have been satisfying a personal grudge. During the armistice negotiations that had ended the first 10 years of war, he had become convinced that the Spartan delegates were snubbing him because of his youth. This was a double insult because his well-connected family had represented Spartan interests in Athens, in peace and in war, over several generations. Revenge in Syracuse would be a sweet.
An act of sacrilege
In wars between a city-state of warriors and a democracy, it is all
too easy to assume that the warriors are always the aggressors. In fact,
it was said to be easier to get 30,000 Athenians to agree to go to war
than it was to persuade a single Spartan. And on this occasion, Alcibiades'
gung-ho appeal swept all before it in Athens.
Although they had little real idea of how big a task they were undertaking, the Athenians began to assemble their invasion force. A few voices warned that it would be no pushover. Alcibiades simply used this as an argument to make the task force even bigger.
Eventually more than 130 triremes were moored in Piraeus harbour, ready to sail – an empire in arms. But before the fleet could get under way, an outrageous act of sacrilege rocked the city.
Over the course of a single night, an attack was made, by persons unknown, on the hermae, good luck statues found all over Athens. According to the more polite accounts, the statues were left without noses. In reality, the vandals probably targeted the hermae's prominent phalluses – a double blow against the city-state's virility and good fortune. The desecration of the hermae was so shocking that it was assumed to be the prelude to an attack on Athenian democracy itself.
Conspiracy theories were readily believed in a city full of disenchanted aristocrats fed up with seeing power in the hands of the demos – the people – for more than 60 years. And it was particularly easy to believe that a maverick such as Alcibiades could be behind the plot. This was exactly what his many enemies in the city began to insinuate.
Playing the Spartan
Despite the bad omens and the accusations flying about, the Athenian
expedition set sail, and Alcibiades went along, too. But his enemies made
the most of his absence, spreading rumours, further blackening his reputation,
accusing him, turning the full force of the democratic apparatus against
him. Finally, the city authorities recalled him to face charges of sacrilege
and conspiracy.
Alcibiades knew all about the fickleness of the Athenians. He was, after all, a master at manipulating them for his own ends. Reckoning that his chances of a fair hearing were slim, he went on the run. Where he ended up amazed everyone.
He went to Sparta.
There this crowd-pleaser set about winning for himself a new and highly unlikely following. He gave the performance of a lifetime. He adopted the Spartan lifestyle with a vengeance – his cloak was more ragged, his food poorer than those of even the most hard-line Spartan.
It all came perfectly naturally to him. Although he had been a sworn enemy of Sparta, like many aristocratic Athenians he was also a lakonophile – an admirer of the traditional values of the Spartan system. He had been given a Spartan name. He had been wet-nursed by a Spartan nanny. He could play the Spartan with real conviction, and the real Spartans were simply bowled over.
Alcibiades and Timea
It wasn't just the Spartan crowds who fell for Alcibiades' formidable
charms. The rumour was that he had also made a conquest of Timea, the
wife of the Spartan king Agis.
Sparta's sexual codes were notoriously at odds with those in the rest of Greece. Elsewhere, adultery could be punishable by death, but in Sparta, married women, with the consent of their husbands, enjoyed multiple sexual partners.
This wasn't mere wife-swapping. The reason for this seeming liberalism was acute anxiety among the Spartans about the decline in their population. Women bearing children of fathers selected for their strength and courage simply meant more soldiers for the future.
No one knows for sure if Agis was a cuckold or a willing accomplice, but the relationship between Timea and Alcibiades would have consequences long after Alcibiades had left the scene.
Revolutionary thinking
Alcibiades repaid Spartan hospitality by revolutionising their military
thinking.
He urged them to establish a permanent garrison in Athens' own backyard – a move that proved to be far more disruptive to supplies and communications than the traditional limited annual incursions that the Spartans had relied on.
He also advised them to come to the aid of their allies in Syracuse, something the Spartans had been reluctant to do. Alcibiades convinced them to send the Spartan general Gyllipus to help oversee the defences, a low-cost way of honouring their commitments. This advice would prove fatal to thousands of his fellow Athenians.
War against Syracuse
The expedition against Syracuse had started well for the Athenians,
but with the arrival of Gyllipus, things began to go wrong.
Gyllipus didn't bring much in the way of reinforcements. He wasn't a brilliant tactician. He had no secret weapon under his scarlet cloak. But the mere presence of a Spartan warrior raised the morale of the beleaguered Syracusans. They began to fight back.
After sending for reinforcements, the Athenians launched a massive night attack on a string of hill forts overlooking the city. Inch by inch, they fought their way to the top, and at one point, it looked as if they might succeed. But at dawn, the exhausted Athenian soldiers were pushed right back to their camp in the harbour. Now all they wanted was to get the hell out of Syracuse.
But on very eve of their departure, the gods – or nature – took a hand. Although the Athenians had a reputation for being the most godless and rational of the Greeks, none of them was bold enough to ignore an omen as emphatic as an eclipse of the moon. The priests of the army camp advised the soldiers to hold tight and promised that, by the time of the next full moon, the omens would be better.
It was a bad call. In the late summer of 413 BC, Gyllipus ordered a line of ships to be anchored across the narrow mouth of Syracuse's harbour. The Athenians were trapped. They tried to escape, but only a handful of ships were able to break out. The rest were forced back to the beach.
They then tried to march away overland, but the Syracusans cut them off. In the fighting that followed, thousands of Athenian troops died. They were perhaps the lucky ones. The survivors would pay the full price for Alcibiades' treachery.
Hell on earth
The survivors of Athens' military adventure against Syracuse –
some 7,000 of them – were taken to one of the stone quarries outside
town. Today this has been transformed into a beautiful park, but for the
Athenian prisoners, it was quite simply hell on earth: a narrow rocky
chasm with no shade, no water, nothing.
The prisoners, including the dying, were kept there for nearly three months. At first, they were baked by the sun during the day. Then, as summer turned to autumn, they froze at night. They were given little food or water. Disease soon broke out, but because the ground was so rocky, the dead were left unburied. As well as hardship, hunger and disease, there were summary executions and torture.
The Syracusans would bring their children to the cathedral-sized quarry's edge to mock their defeated enemy. And they spiced up the routine brutalities with a dash of high culture. The Athenian prisoners had only one chance to live: the Syracusans had a passion for the verses of the playwright Euripides, and prisoners who could recite them in a style that pleased their tormentors were allowed to leave the quarry to be sold as slaves. It isn't known if any of the Athenians were brave enough to quote Euripides' lines: 'Unhappy Greeks, barbarians to each other.'
Grief and discontent
It was said that, on the night that news of the military disaster
at Syracuse reached Athens, wails of grief could be heard passing along
the walls as the story was carried from the port to the city itself.
The years of war had taken its toll on Athens. In the law courts of the agora, a poignant exchange took place. A man complained that his mother now had to earn her living as a nurse and a ribbon seller: 'We do not live the way we would like,' he said with understatement.
The political discontents, who had for years been simmering, boiled over. Aristocrats finally staged their long-anticipated coup, taking over the city and throwing out the democratic system. But the Athenian fleet declared for democracy, and so Athens was split.
For the Spartans, Syracuse should have been a prelude to total victory. It says a lot about their lack of foresight that they failed to capitalise on the Athenian disarray. They may have produced the best hoplite warriors in the Greek world, but when it came to military and political strategy, they were novices.
After a year of turmoil, Athens finally pulled itself together, restoring a less radical version of its democratic system, and readying itself for the next phase of the seemingly endless struggle against Sparta.
Lysander
But defeat for Athens had only been deferred. The man who delivered
the final blow was Lysander, a Spartan but by no means a typical one.
His origins were humble. He was a mothakes, which translates as 'bastard' but actually meant that, while his father was a full Spartan citizen, his mother was a helot – possibly even one of the despised Messenians whose mass enslavement provided the economic foundation of the Spartan utopia.
Despite this mixed parentage, Lysander qualified for admission to the agoge – the brutal training system that turned Spartan boys into warriors. What he lacked in social standing, he made up for in very un-Spartan nous, and he soon emerged from the pack as both a military leader and a political operator.
The Spartan ideal was still represented by Leonidas, the lion-hearted hero of Thermopylae. Years after that heroic last stand, the dead king still cast a long shadow. Compared to him, Lysander was something new in Sparta – an operator, a politician, a self-styled fox. In fact, he once said, 'If the lion's skin doesn't reach, we must patch it out with the fox's.'
Wooing the Persians
Lysander's politicking included wooing the Persian empire, whose invasion
80 years before had briefly united the fractious Greeks under the leadership
of Sparta and Athens. Now that Greeks were killing Greeks, Persia's autocratic
kings were happy to stand on the sidelines handing out gold to whichever
side seemed likeliest to serve their own interests.
Most Spartans claimed to despise the Persians – their dissipation, the bowing and scraping at their court and their willing submission not to the rule of law, but to one man, a despot, the Persian emperor. But Lysander was happy to put traditional Spartan ideals behind him and suck up to their former enemy if that was what it took to open their coffers.
By forging a close personal friendship with Cyrus, the Persian king's son, Lysander was able at a stroke to increase the pay-rate of the Spartan navy.
Freelance oarsmen and mercenaries followed the money and deserted the Athenian fleet.
Athens is defeated
Ships were what counted now. To prevail, Sparta, the quintessential
land-power, needed to win at sea. Spartans made lousy sailors and worse
admirals. Lysander, as ever, was the exception. Fuelled by Persian gold,
his fleet was able to defeat Athens and her allies time and again. Eventually
he was able to impose a naval blockade, cutting Athens off from its grain
supplies.
The climax came in 405 BC when Lysander encountered a large Athenian fleet. As ever, he out-foxed them, refusing to come to battle, making them think he was scared, then striking when their guard was down.
The Athenians were routed – and their city was at Lysander's mercy. 'In the space of a single hour,' according to one account ...
he put an end to a war that, for its length and for the variety of its incidents and the uncertainty of its fortunes, eclipsed any that had gone before.
Sparta's terms
As soon as Athens capitulated, resentment and jealousy, simmering
for decades within the Greek world, boiled over into full-scale vengeance.
The Theban Erianthus said that the city should be razed to the ground
and the land turned over to sheep.
But the Spartans didn't get hysterical. Even after years of fighting and the loss of thousands of lives, they calmly set out their terms:
• the removal of democratic government and its replacement with
an oligarchic junta of 30
• the reduction of the Athenian fleet to three ships
• the total destruction of the city walls, which Sparta had always
scorned.
And as the walls were burnt down, and Sparta was recognised as the ruler of the Greek world, Lysander watched the 'flute girls' – prostitutes – switching sides and triumphantly serenading the death of an empire.
A committee of pro-Spartan quislings took over the city, and blood flowed in the streets as old scores were settled. Among the victims was Alcibiades. Despite his defection to Sparta and the terrible consequences that had followed, he had somehow managed to sweet-talk his way back into the Athenians' affections. In the wake of the defeat, he was seen as someone who might eventually lead an Athenian revolt – which was doubtless why the order came from Sparta to have him murdered.
Marking the victory
Lysander chose to the mark the victory over Athens at Delphi. As well
as being a religious site and home of the famous oracle, Delphi was recognised
as a place to make political statements.
The Sacred Way, along which all visitors passed on their way to the oracle, was lined with temples and treasuries belonging to the different city-states, each one an expression of that place's power and wealth. It was here that Lysander glorified his own achievements with a grandiose monument that made a mockery of the Spartan code of understatement and self-effacement.
Only the base is left now, but once it would have been crowded with about 30 more-than-life-size bronze statues representing the junior Spartan officers and allied commanders who had worked with Lysander to give him his victory. And in the middle was Lysander himself, accompanied by his steersmen and his priest, being crowned by none other than the god of the sea, Poseidon.
Even by the standards of Delphi, it was an extraordinary piece of self-advertisement. Lysander had realised that victory over Athens had changed everything. Sparta was now the most powerful city-state in the Greek world – an imperial power if it chose to go down that route.
And Lysander had big plans for his own place in the new Spartan world order.
Ominous oracle
In Sparta in 400 BC, four years after the defeat of Athens, things
were, on the surface, just as the Spartans liked them: unchanged. Their
Shangri-la was safe and secure, the river Eurotas flowed, the mountains
were full of game, the fields were fertile, the helot slaves were
quiet, and the unique social system designed to produce the best warriors
in the world had emerged intact from decades of war.
But within a generation, the Spartans – who boasted that their women had never beheld the camp fires of their enemies – would witness exactly that, as well as the dismantling of their utopia.
The collapse of Sparta didn't exactly come out of the blue. Some time in the year 400, an oracle – one of the messages from the gods to which the Spartans paid such strict attention – had started to circulate in the city:
Boasting Sparta, be careful not to sprout a crippled kingship ...
Unlooked-for ordeals and numberless trials shall oppress you
And the stormy billows of man-killing war shall roll down upon you.
Unlike most oracles – which were usually ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness – this one was quite explicit. It seemed to refer directly to a power struggle that even then was being played out in Sparta.
Contenders for the throne
Agis, one of Sparta's two kings, was dead. There were two contenders
for the vacant throne: Latychidas, Agis's son, and Agesilaus, the dead
king's half-brother.
The succession should have been straightforward. Latychidas was the heir apparent. The throne was his by right. And, besides, Agesilaus had been born lame.
Male Spartan children born with any kind of physical imperfection usually ended up as a small pile of bones in the euphemistically named 'Deposits' – unless, of course, they were of royal blood, when the normal rules didn't apply. So Agesilaus had been spared.
At the age of seven, he was enrolled in the agoge – the formidable Spartan training system. No member of the Spartan royal family had ever been subjected to the agoge, but despite his disability, Agesilaus thrived in the competitive atmosphere. He was said to be aggressive and hot-tempered, longing to be first in all things and, at the same time, 'so gentle and ready to obey authority that he did whatever was demanded of him'.
When King Agis died, Agesilaus was confident enough to bid for the throne. But it was just then that the troubling oracle began to circulate in Sparta. The reference to a 'crippled kingship' seemed unambiguously to point to his own disability – and the threatened consequences were dire.
Rumour and innuendo
But oracles are only as good as the interpretation that is placed
on them – and on this occasion, an alternative was supplied by none
other than Lysander.
Lysander had personal reasons to back Agesilaus's claim: they had once been lovers. On reaching puberty, all Spartan boys in the agoge were obliged to take an older man as a lover until they were of marriageable age. Lysander had courted and won Agesilaus, a typically canny choice by the ambitious admiral.
For an old fox like Lysander, twisting an oracle to serve political ends presented no problems. All he had to do was remind the Spartans of a little bit of recent history.
Did anyone recall, he wondered, the rumours that had gone around when that slippery Athenian poseur, Alcibiades, had been in town some years before, rumours concerning him and Timea, King Agis's wife? And wasn't it also said that, when she had been nursing her newborn son – and, by the way, hadn't he arrived about nine months after Alcibiades had left? – she had been heard to whisper over and over the name 'Alcibiades' rather than 'Latychidas'?
Lysander's innuendoes did the trick, allowing the Spartans to believe that 'crippled' could mean 'illegitimate'. The son was out – the uncle was in.
Money-mad
Agesilaus came to the throne as the most Spartan king that the city-state
had ever known. A product of the agoge, his belief in the rightness
of the Spartan system was absolute and uncompromising.
But while Agesilaus may have been an arch-conservative, Sparta itself was changing. The war had taken more Spartans further away from home and for longer periods than ever before. They had seen for themselves that there was more to life than 'black soup' – the Spartan staple dish made of pig's blood and vinegar. For centuries, they had successfully repressed their desire for material things, but in the post-war boom, they seemed suddenly to go money-mad.
No one was immune, not even Gyllipus, the general who had defeated the Athenians at Syracuse. He was exposed as a thief when gold meant for the Spartan treasury was found hidden in the roof of his house, a tawdry scandal that resulted in his exile from the city-state.
Agesilaus tried to put a stop to all this nonsense. He led by extreme frugal example, his ragged red cloak becoming his trademark. But there was a bigger problem: what should be done with Lysander?
Putting Lysander in his place
Lysander's astute management of the oracle had increased his power,
and the consummate politician was looking for his pay-back. But, for once,
he miscalculated.
During his successful naval campaign against Athens, Lysander had accumulated a crowd of cronies, clients and political climbers who treated him with far more respect than they treated the young lame king in the ragged cloak. However, Lysander's one-time protégé had very definite ideas about the dignity owed to a king of Sparta, and he decided to put Lysander in his place – very deliberately and very publicly.
Following that decision, whenever Lysander recommended a course of action, Agesilaus did the opposite. Whenever one of the older man's cronies sought a favour, it was refused. It soon became clear to everyone that association with Lysander was the kiss of death.
The final breach came when Agesilaus ordered Lysander to serve at his table. 'You know well how to humiliate your friends,' Lysander is supposed to have said. The king replied: 'Yes, I do, or at any rate those who set themselves up to be more powerful than myself.'
A constitutional revolution
Lysander left Sparta under a cloud. He went to Delphi and began to
plot against Agesilaus. He tried to bribe the oracle into issuing alarming
prophecies, knowing that these would destabilise the superstitious Spartans.
He was killed in battle before his plots could be realised. It was only after his death that it was discovered just how high he had been aiming.
Searching through his papers, Agesilaus discovered a speech written for Lysander. It made the case for a revolution in the Spartan constitution – the creation of a kind of meritocratic kingship, open to all-comers, and awarded to whoever was thought to be the best candidate. Lysander had obviously seen himself as the likeliest contender.
Agesilaus wanted immediately to publicise the letter and show just what a threat Lysander had been. But when one of the city elder's read the speech, he found the argument so persuasive that he urged Agesilaus 'not to bring Lysander back from the grave, but rather to bury the speech with him'.
The speech was hushed up, and Sparta continued seemingly just as before.
A sacrifice and a warning
However, the world around Sparta was changing fast. It wasn't long
before a series of disasters proved the truth of the Delphic oracle's
gloomiest predictions.
Agesilaus was a magnet for gloomy omens. It was as if the archaic powers of Greece, in retreat elsewhere, had found a way back through this spirit-haunted king. A year after his accession, the priest announced with great alarm during a routine sacrifice that, according to the signs, Sparta was even then surrounded by enemies.
This, in fact, was hardly a revelation.
For nearly three centuries, Sparta had flourished thanks to its system of social apartheid, with helot slaves at the bottom providing the sweat and toil, and the perioikoi – the free but disenfranchised traders and artisans – providing the commercial muscle and material goods. And at the top were the homoioi, the élite citizen-warriors, a tiny minority that protected its privileges by keeping a collective thumb firmly on the majority beneath them.
So, on this occasion, the priest's warning about Sparta being surrounded by enemies might have seemed to be merely stating the obvious. But, in fact, there was far more to it than that: a few days later, a conspiracy for the complete overthrow of the Spartan system was unmasked.
Cinadon's conspiracy
One of the conspiracy's leaders, Cinadon, was neither a helot
nor a perioikoi but what was known as a 'lower-grade Spartan'.
There were a number of ways you could be reduced to this limbo-like state.
Cowardice in battle made you a 'trembler'. Low or mixed birth made you
a mothakes, like Lysander. You could even be stripped of citizenship
for failure to pay your subs to the common mess.
The alarming thing about Cinadon's conspiracy was its reach. It appeared to involve everyone from helot through perioikoi to the 'lower-grade Spartans' – all of those who had been excluded from the full benefits of the Spartan utopia and who, according to Cinadon, wanted 'to eat the Spartans, raw'.
Once they had made their confessions, Cinadon and his fellow conspirators were driven through the city at spear-point, through a gauntlet of whips, to face their final punishment. They probably ended up at a crevasse a few miles outside Sparta called Keadhas, a place of execution.
Ever since, legends about this place have always been sinister, but it seems that, for once, the locals weren't exaggerating. An archaeological study has revealed that the floor of the crevasse is thick with human remains – it's literally a subterranean bone yard.
A small sample of bones removed for analysis were quickly identified as the remains of 17 human beings. They dated from the 6th-5th century BC, and were mostly from adult males; however, they also included the remains from two women and a child aged about 10. Several other adult skeletons were observed in positions suggesting that they had died while trying to climb out of the crevasse, suggesting that at least some of the victims had been alive when they were thrown into it.
Fewer Spartans
The Cinadon conspiracy had highlighted the major flaw in the Spartan
system: its almost pathological élitism.
Sparta may have been the first Greek city-state to define citizenship, but it had always been the privilege of a small minority. This minority was reduced still further by the Spartan instinct to exclude anyone who failed to measure up to their exacting standards. The consequence was that Sparta was running out of Spartans.
A hundred years before, at the time of Thermopylae, there had been perhaps 10,000 full Spartan citizens. Now there were as few as 1,000.
Anxieties about population produced a 'body-bag syndrome' in Sparta – a reluctance to commit large numbers of full citizens to battle. Now, when Sparta went to war, the homoioi formed only the officer élite. The men who did the actual fighting were helots – who had been promised their freedom – and allies who were increasingly reluctant and alienated from the Spartan cause.
Thebes
When, in 404, the walls of Athens had been pulled down to the sound
of flutes, one contemporary historian had thought that 'this day was the
beginning of freedom for Greece.' Over-bearing and arrogant, the Athenian
empire had had few friends. But the Spartan empire proved to be just as
oppressive.
Where Athens had demanded money from its allies to finance its fleet, Sparta demanded men to fight its wars. Athens had turned its allies into cash cows. The Spartans turned theirs into battle-fodder.
It was a bad time to fall out with your friends, because Sparta had a new enemy to deal with: Thebes.
Militarily speaking, Thebes had never really been in the big league, but in recent years, it had been getting more and more experience, thanks almost entirely to the irrational grudge held against the city-state by the Spartan king Agesilaus, who took any opportunity to march out against it. The result was that Thebes gradually got better at fighting back.
After one encounter, in which Agesilaus himself was wounded, a fellow Spartan said to the king: 'The Thebans are paying you well for teaching them to fight, when they had no desire for it in the first place and no skill either.'
Day of reckoning
Things came to a dramatic climax in Sparta in the spring of 371 BC.
A meeting of city-states had been called to try and sort out a whole range of bitter rivalries and turf wars that had flared up. Diplomacy and tact would obviously pay premiums, but these had never been Agesilaus's strong points.
Sparta was supposed to be top dog at the meeting, but Agesilaus noticed the respect with which the other Greeks treated the Theban delegate Epanimondas. A skilful general, he had been responsible for several bloody noses recently administered to Sparta. Agesilaus saw red and picked a fight with him. Epanimondas stood his ground, and even had the temerity to answer back. Agesilaus completely lost his temper and struck Thebes's name from the peace treaty.
Twenty days later, armies from the two city-states clashed at a place called Leuctra. Agesilaus wasn't there. Having caused the fight, he refused to lead the Spartan forces into battle. Apparently, he didn't want it said that he was too fond of fighting. It was left to Sparta's other king to take charge of a mixed bag of 700 Spartan warriors and about 1,300 helots and reluctant allies.
Against them were 6,000 Thebans – all highly motivated and led by the charismatic Epanimondas.
The disparity in numbers alone is enough to explain the Spartans' defeat. But added to that were some novel tactics adopted by the Thebans, including phalanxes 50 men deep rather than the usual eight – a staggering mass of bronze and muscle bearing down on their opponents.
Consequences of the defeat
Approximately 400 Spartans died at Leuctra. This may not sound like
much until you consider that these represented around 40% of Sparta's
warrior population. As a military force, Sparta was effectively out of
action.
The consequences of the defeat were profound.
Through centuries of war, no enemy army had ever entered the Spartan homeland in the Eurotas valley. The Thebans did it twice, and on the second occasion, there was fighting in the streets. They never succeeded in taking the city itself, but they did destroy forever Sparta's dominance of Greece and its aura of invincibility.
But for Sparta, there was something far worse – a sight that no Spartan ever wanted to see: the walls of the city of Messene, erected after the defeat at Leuctra by helots who for 300 years had been enslaved by their Spartan masters.
After Leuctra, the Thebans had stormed into Lakonia, the Spartan heartland, and liberated the helots. It was said that the walls of their city, in the shadow of Mount Ithome, went up in 74 days. They were built by people who had no intention of ever being slaves again.
The liberation of the Messenians was popular throughout Greece. There had always been something distasteful about their enslavement by the Spartans. Now the city-states eagerly signed a peace treaty recognising the existence of this brand new city-state and its liberated citizens. Only the Spartans refused to sign. They never gave up their ambition to retake Messenia, even though they lacked the military muscle to realise it.
As for Agesilaus, the last picture we have of him is in Egypt, hired out at the age of 80 as a mercenary general in an attempt to fill Sparta's empty coffers. When the Egyptians came to greet this legendary warrior king, they saw an old man in a ragged cloak sitting on a beach. According to one historian, they simply laughed.
Permanent relegation
Sparta never recovered from the defeat at Leuctra and the loss of
its Messenian helots. Relegation to the second division of city-states
was permanent.
In the decades that followed, when the Macedonian king Philip embarked on his daring and aggressive campaign to unify the whole of Greece, Sparta could only watch impotently from the sidelines. Philip had to defeat Thebes to achieve his aim, but Sparta he could ignore, dismissing it as an old, toothless dog skulking in its kennel
In the centuries that followed – as the Greeks ran up against the new regional powers of Carthage, Sicily and, ultimately, Rome – the city-state periodically tried to revive its fortunes by reinstating elements of the old Spartan system. But without their Messenian slaves, Sparta just wasn't Sparta. Utopia had been dismantled, and no one could put it back together again.
Instead, for Romans visiting their theatre, the Spartans put on displays of the competitive dances and religious ceremonies that they had once been famous for. Stronger fare was on offer at the nearby sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. Here young boys submitted themselves to brutal whippings, often with fatal consequences – a crude parody of the rite of passage that used to take place there.
To end up as a purveyor of sado-tourism to a bunch of Romans is a fate that not even the gloomiest oracle would have predicted. Even so, it does, in a perverse way, demonstrate the powerful spell that Spartan ideals continued to exert long after the city-state's power crumbled.
Sparta and Western civilisation
Centuries after Sparta passed into obscurity, these ideals have remained
hard-wired into the circuitry of Western civilisation.
It is a long way from the rugged landscape of Sparta to the artful artificiality of an English country estate. But at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, there's a testimony to the enduring appeal of Sparta.
Looking around the neo-classical wonderland built for the 18th-century Whig grandee Lord Cobham, you might assume that it was the culture of Athens that was being celebrated there. But in one of the follies in its grounds – the Temple of Ancient Virtues – you can see that it is not all Athens' show.
Lord Cobham obviously put a lot of thought into which Greek figures he wanted to honour in his temple, the people he wanted the England of his day to emulate. And so there was a statue of Socrates, described as 'the wisest of men' and an 'encourager of the good' – qualities his much-nagged friend Alcibiades could have testified to. Next to him, inevitably, was Homer, 'the first of poets ... the herald of virtue'.
But alongside them is a more interesting choice: Lycurgus, the semi-mythical inventor of the Spartan social system. The inscription under his statue reads:
A FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY WHO, HAVING INVENTED LAWS WITH THE GREATEST WISDOM AND FENCED THEM AGAINST ALL CORRUPTION, INSTITUTED FOR HIS COUNTRYMEN THE FIRMEST LIBERTY AND THE SOUNDEST MORALITY, BANISHING RICHES, AVARICE, LUXURY AND LUST.
It's a pretty fair summing up of the Spartan ideal, with its puritanical appeal to self-discipline and self-denial, and its promise of timeless perfection in a changing and imperfect world.
Of course, there's no mention here of the darker aspects of Sparta – the mass slavery, the brutal education system, the endless fighting. And no mention either that it was the very pursuit of perfection that, in the end, made Sparta unable to change, even while the world changed around it.
