[King Agesilaus] immediately countermarched his phalanx and led it against [the Thebans]. And the Thebans, too, when they saw that their allies had fled toward Helicon, wishing to break through toward their men, closed their ranks and came stoutly on. For what happened next, Agesilaus can unquestionably be called brave, but he did not choose the safest course . . . he closed with the Thebans face to face. And striking shield against shield they pushed, fought, killed, and died. At last some of the Thebans broke through to Helicon, although many were killed as they retreated. And when he had won, Agesilaus, being wounded himself . . . ordered Gylis the war-chief to draw up the army in battle order and set up a victory trophy, and for all the men to crown themselves in honor of the god and for all the flute-players to play.

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The point was made: Spartan hop-lites were still without equal; but Agesilaus had lost some 350 men, and Sparta could not afford many of these costly victories. Every battlefield casualty meant one less Similar to stand against Sparta’s ever more numerous and determined internal and external enemies. Moreover, it was no longer clear that Sparta’s absolute domination of traditional hoplite tactics would last forever. In 390, the Spartans were stunned at the defeat of an isolated Spartan regiment, and a loss of some 250 men, at the hands of a mixed Athenian force of hoplites and lightly armed peltasts–highly mobile and highly skilled mercenary skirmishers who used javelins and light target shields, tactics and weapons adopted from mercenary Thracians from the Black Sea littoral. Meanwhile, Sparta’s enemies were learning more and more about Sparta’s military tactics. It had long been accepted wisdom among the Similars that Sparta should avoid fighting the same enemy too often; by 371 B.C. the Thebans had fought the Spartans more or less continuously for over two decades; the Theban generals learned Sparta’s battlefield strengths and weaknesses intimately–and proved more than capable of exploiting them.

The Spartans sent two-thirds of their standing army to Leuctra, but that proved to be only 700 Similars and perhaps 1,600 other Laconians. Too few to gain the victory by overawing their battle-hardened opponents; too few to withstand the massed ranks of Theban hoplites with their supporting cast of fine-tuned cavalry. And then too few to stop the damaging series of Theban invasions into Laconia that followed; Spartan women who had never seen an enemy soldier were forced to witness the sack and plunder of the rich outlying districts.

The Spartans were again too few to prevent the Thebans from building a new fortified capital city for the Messenians on the slopes of Mount Ithome. The great stone walls of Messene, which still stand as a monument to Greek military engineering, were the seal of Sparta’s doom. The Thebans liberated the Messenians, and Messene became an independent city-state–a state intransigently hostile toward its former master. Without the forced labor of the Helots of Messenia, Sparta could not maintain its military traditions and quickly became just another second-tier polis, capable of winning occasional border skirmishes with its neighbors, but never again a player on the larger Greek scene.

By the Roman era, Sparta had devolved to little more than an antiquarian theme-park; tourists flocked from around the Greek world to watch Spartan boys endure savage whippings in old-fashioned endurance contests–conveniently held in an outdoor theater to accommodate the jaded, bloodthirsty crowds. These spectacles stood as pathetic reminders of the devotion to discipline and public duty that had sustained a once-proud society of warrior-Similars. Today, the Greek town of Sparta is a bustling regional center; the Eurotas valley is still lovely, but there are few archaeological reminders of its glorious and terrible past: ironically the ruins of the former Helot city of Messene, which stand high above the Kalamata plain, are much more impressive.

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