Yet, as the Athenian-general-turned-historian Thucydides notes, all doubts were laid to rest at the battle of Mantinea. It was, for the Spartans, a must-win engagement in their own Peloponnesian backyard. Faced by a dangerous coalition of disgruntled former allies and traditional enemies, the Spartans and their remaining loyal allies fielded a hoplite army of perhaps 10,000 men, including perhaps 4,000 of the elite Similars.

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The battle got off to a very bad start for the Spartan side: King Agis, as the commanding general, attempted a last-minute tactical redeployment to avoid being outflanked. He withdrew two units of sub-Similars–neither manned by full Spartiates–from the line and deployed them on his left flank, then commanded two regiments of Similars to withdraw from the right flank and fill the gap. But, putting the safety of their unit-mates before the good of the army as a whole, the two Similar regimental commanders refused to obey the order. This left a dangerous gap in the Spartan left wing. Their opponents poured through the gap, forcing back the Spartan left and inflicting numerous casualties.

A lesser army would have collapsed. But King Agis led the Spartan center in a confident advance and quickly put the troops facing them to flight. Indeed, says Thucydides, ‘most of [Agis's opponents] did not even stand up to the first shock, but gave way immediately when the Spartans charged, some actually being trampled underfoot in their anxiety to get away before the enemy reached them.’ Agis then wheeled his troops to the left and put the enemy’s momentarily successful right flank to flight. The victorious Spartan soldiers marched home, just in time to celebrate an important festival on their busy religious calendar. They also banished the two regimental commanders who had refused the order, charging them with cowardice.

This was the Spartan war machine as the Greeks imagined it in their dreams and nightmares.

The defeat of the Athenians and their allies at Mantinea proved a propitious sign for the rest of the war. Although it dragged on for another fourteen years, Sparta eventually got the upper hand; Athens surrendered in 404 B.C. Sparta and Persia, the great territorial empire of the East, which eventually entered the war on the Spartan side, divided the spoils: Persia regained control of the culturally Greek western littoral of Anatolia. Sparta, now unquestionably the dominant mainland Greek state, established friendly governments and garrisons in island and northern Greek states formerly subject to Athens. It seemed the dawn of a new Spartan century.

Yet only thirty-four years later, at Leuctra, Sparta was permanently removed from the ranks of great Aegean powers. Leuctra was not just a setback–it marked the end of Spartan power and influence. By contrast, Athens, Sparta’s defeated rival in the Peloponnesian War, survived the seemingly cataclysmic events of the late fifth century and went on to flourish until the rise of Macedon in the later fourth century put an end to the era of truly independent mainland city-states. Just as Athenian devotion to democracy helps to explain Athens’ remarkable post-war resilience, so too Sparta’s rapid collapse is explicable in light of a highly distinctive approach to government and social organization.

It is the caste system that is the key to Sparta’s military successes, to the original development of the ‘armed-camp’ structure of Spartan Similar society, and to Sparta’s eventual collapse. There were three primary castes: beneath the superior Similars was an intermediate caste of ‘Fringe Dwellers’ (Perioikoi): free persons who engaged in trade and agriculture and served in the armed forces but had no right to vote or to participate in the government. Many of the Fringe Dwellers seem not to have been particularly hostile to the Spartan regime, but neither did they have any reason to be particularly loyal to the Similars when it came to a crunch. Beneath the Fringe-Dwellers was the enormous serf caste of Helots. The Helot was bound to the soil; he could not be bought and sold, as could a chattel slave, but neither could he move from the farm to which he was assigned, and he owed a significant part of the annual harvest to the Spartan Similar who was assigned by the state to be his master.

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