Sparta: The Fall of the Empire

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Cleombrotus [king of Sparta] . . . did not enter Boeotia . . . at the point where the Thebans expected him and where they were guarding a narrow pass . . . but marching up from the seacoast, he encamped at Leuctra . . . and the Thebans encamped on the opposite hill not very far away. . . . His friends then went to Cleombrotus and said: ‘If you let the Thebans escape without a battle, you will be in danger of suffering the gravest penalty at the hands of your state.’ . . . Cleombrotus, when he heard these words, was spurred on to join battle. . . .

The space between [the two armies] was a plain, so the Spartans posted their cavalry in front of their phalanx, and the Thebans did likewise. But the Theban cavalry was in excellent training . . . while the Spartan cavalry was exceedingly poor. . . . When Cleombrotus began to lead toward the enemy, in the first place he did so before his own army even perceived that he was leading. Then the cavalry engaged and those of the Spartans were quickly beaten. In their flight the horsemen fell foul of their own hoplites, and then the Theban regiments were upon them. The men around Cleombrotus were at first victorious . . . but when Deion the war-chief was killed, and Sphodrias the King’s companion, and Cleonymus his son, and the King’s bodyguard, and the aides of the war-chief were slain, the remainder of the army, pushed back by the dense mass of opponents, fell back. And those of the Spartans who were on the left wing, when they saw the right pushed back, gave way too. . . . (Xenophon, Hellenica).

The decisive defeat of the Spartan hoplite army by the armed forces of Thebes at the battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. ended an epoch in Greek military history and permanently altered the Greek balance of power. One by one, the old certainties of the ‘Golden Age’ of the fifth century had been challenged and overthrown, but the image of Spartan military invincibility had, until this moment, remained a secure bastion.

Once, the very sight and sound of an advancing line of Spartan soldiers had been enough to break the nerve of opponents, even before the shock of arms. In their signature scarlet capes, nodding horsehair helmet plumes, and close-ordered shields, each emblazoned with L (lambda, for ‘Lacedaemon’ or ‘Laconia,’ two names for the Spartan home territory), the Spartans appeared as a series of rippling horizontal lightning bolts, the unbroken lines of warriors striding forward in measured lock-step to the shrill music of military pipers. Their capacity to move quickly over difficult terrain, concentrate their forces suddenly, and execute complex pre-battle tactical maneuvers was legendary. The shock of their final charge was as sure and deadly as the sky-god Zeus’s thunder weapon.

Just a short generation before Leuctra, in 404 B.C., the Spartans had decisively beaten Athens, long their most dangerous enemy. In so doing Sparta had seized the hegemony of the Greek world. Leuctra must have seemed to many observers of the contemporary scene like rain from a clear blue sky. Yet, in hindsight, when we look more closely at the history of Sparta as a military society, the collapse at Leuctra starts to make sense. By the time they met the Thebans there, Sparta had long been in serious trouble; it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to exploit Sparta’s profound inner weaknesses. The story of Sparta’s decline and fall is an object lesson in the intimate relationship between social organization and military power.

The city-state of Sparta, occupying the central finger of the southern Greek peninsula of the Peloponnesus, dominated the fertile valley of the Eurotas River and was overlooked by the craggy Taegetus Range. Controlling a territory of some 3,500 square miles, Sparta was unquestionably the greatest military power of the Greek classical era. On close inspection it is a remarkable study in contradictions: long-famed among the Greeks for its constitutional stability and regarded by many ancient writers as the embodiment of traditional Greek values of civic responsibility, personal bravery, and bluntly honest speech, Sparta proved to be a devious, self-deluded, brittle, and hopelessly confused society at the very moment of its most notable success. The epitome of the Greek ‘hoplite republic,’ Sparta was in the end unable to field enough hoplite-warriors to stave off military disaster. At the heart of those apparent contradictions was a society whose strength lay in a profoundly conservative social order, an order predicated on maintaining a bewildering array of mutually hostile social castes. Each Spartan caste was intended to be composed of precisely similar human units, and each caste was to remain utterly distinct from all others. At the top of this strict hierarchy were the Spartans themselves–a warrior elite who proudly called themselves hoi homoioi, ‘the Similars.’

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Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Historical Conflicts

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