And yet the Spartans soon found that they could not, in fact, do without Helot soldiers; a few years before Mantinea, the Spartan general Brasidas won notable victories against Athenian dependencies in northern Greece at the head of an army that included 700 Helots serving as hoplites–presumably they had been recruited by the same sort of promises once offered to their less lucky compatriots. But this time the Spartans evidently felt they could not afford to waste manpower resources: if the Helots died in battle, so much the better and good riddance to them while on campaign, but they were now regarded as too valuable to be wantonly slaughtered. And this time the Spartans proved true to their word: the survivors among Brasidas’s soldiers were freed by the Spartans and settled, along with some previously liberated Helots, at the town of Lepreon in the northwestern coastal borderlands of Sparta.

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As in the case of sub-Similars, the unitary Helot caste was starting to be subdivided. The apparent switch in policy, from butchering ambitious Helots to employing them as mercenaries, points to a problem that had become serious by the last decades of the fifth century B.C.: there simply were not enough Similars left to get the job done on their own.

The general cause of the seemingly precipitous drop in Similar population is clear enough. Battlefield casualties were relatively high, but even more importantly the harsh Spartan rules of duty and conformity made downward mobility from the ranks of Similars a relatively easy matter, and upward mobility into the Similars was well-nigh impossible. With the onset of the Peloponnesian War, Spartan society was no longer able to insulate itself effectively from the influences of the wider Greek and Mediterranean cultures: Spartans were necessarily sent far from home, away from the careful scrutiny of their fellows, and for long periods of time. As Sparta struggled to match imperial Athens’ capacity to hire mercenaries, maintain far-flung armies for an ever-longer campaigning season, and build a credible navy, the once-closed Spartan economy was increasingly implicated into wider networks of exchange. And as the Spartan economy became increasingly monetarized, landed wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Many a Similar consequently found himself incapable of keeping up his mess-unit contributions and was rendered an Inferior. The humiliation of being forced into the ranks of sub-Similars was too bitter for some Spartans to swallow. In the last years of the fifth century, Spartan exultation over their victory in the Peloponnesian War was tempered by the exposure of a bold revolutionary plot by a group of Inferiors, led by one Cinadon. The hatred of Cinadon and his fellows for the Spartan system was summed up in their expressed willingness to ‘devour the Similars raw.’ Like the boy and the fox, Spartan society was, almost literally, being consumed from the inside.

The demographic processes that had led to the social demotion of Cinadon and his fellows became even more pronounced in the decades after the Peloponnesian War. Having won the war, Sparta immediately began to reap the spoils of a dismantled Athenian empire. Spartans were sent out as governors to the former Athenian dependencies. Not surprisingly, in light of their youthful education in theft, their ingrained habit of despising all non-Similars, and their sudden exposure to the luxuries of the non-Spartan world, these governors were typically rapacious and heartily resented by those they ruled. In the decades after the victory of 404, Sparta made and broke alliances with casual disdain for the international consequences; well-connected Spartans who engaged in foolish, greedy, or opportunistic military operations, often in blatant contravention of treaty obligations and traditional Greek mores, found that their home government was more than willing to turn a blind eye on their peccadillos. After all, they were members of the insider club, and they had harmed only ‘outsiders.’ The other Greeks, whether traditional allies or enemies of Sparta, became increasingly unhappy with Spartan hegemony, and a new anti-Spartan coalition was soon organized. With an ever-declining store of diplomatic credibility, the Spartans were increasingly put in the position of trying to maintain their authority by raw demonstrations of military might. The bloody battle of Coronea in 394 B.C., which Xenophon described, was a case in point:

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