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At the beginning of the 4th century BC, Sparta dominated Greece. The Athenian Empire had been destroyed. No other rival had yet emerged. As a new Spartan navy cruised the Aegean and Spartan armies campaigned in Asia Minor, few could have imagined that within a generation Spartan power would be crushed forever. Since at least the middle of the 6th century BC, Sparta had controlled most of the Peloponnese. The Spartans had headed the coalition that confronted Xerxes in the Great Persian War, leading the Greeks to victory at the Battle of Plataea.
The triumph over Athens in the Peloponnesian War seemed to cement Spartan preeminence. Throughout the Greek world and beyond, the Spartans were famous for their devotion to duty, epitomized by the stand of Leonidas and his 300 at Thermopylae, and for their seeming invincibility in battle. These qualities were, or were believed to be, instilled by a uniquely rigorous educational system, which sequestered the sons of citizens in barracks from the age of seven onward. Sparta was also hailed for the stability of its government, sometimes described as a mixed constitution that combined monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements.
It was headed by two kings from separate royal families. The kings ruled in concert with the 28-member Gerousia, Council of Elders, and with the five Ephors, who had wide-ranging supervisory powers. All measures were submitted to the Assembly of Citizens for approval. Male citizens, the Spartiates, who called one another homoioi, equals, stood at the pinnacle of Spartan society. Subordinate and deprived of most citizen rights were the perioikoi, the inhabitants of the free communities scattered around Sparta.
Helots, serfs owned by the warrior elite, made up the bulk of the population. The Helots, along with the large and fertile territory they worked, were the real source of Sparta's power. They were also a constant menace, especially in the region of Messenia, where most Helots lived. Spartan control was repeatedly threatened by revolt. The last uprising, which followed the great earthquake of 464 BC, took years to suppress. The Spartans knew that the Helots were indispensable. Thousands of them attended every Spartan army.
They also knew that the Helots resented their servitude. As part of the mysterious krypteia, Spartan youths systematically murdered Helots who seemed insubordinate or dangerously talented. But every time a significant number of warriors left Sparta, the specter of revolt loomed. In the early 4th century, there were fewer Spartan warriors than ever before. The problem of oligantropia, population decline, had begun decades earlier. At the time of the Persian Wars, 100 years earlier, there had been about 8,000 male Spartan citizens. By 371 BC, there would be only 1,000. Losses from wars and natural disasters accounted for part of the decline.
The earthquake that sparked the Helot revolt of 464 seems to have been especially deadly. Economic factors, however, were the real culprit for the collapse in Spartan numbers. Male Spartan citizens ate in communal dining halls, the meals being provided by each member in turn from the produce of his estate. Over the course of the 5th century, thanks to the growth of large estates, a small minority of Spartiates became wealthy at the expense of the rest.
More and more Spartans found themselves too poor to feed their messmates and were stripped of their citizen status. To the old problems of the Helots and population decline, the Spartans added another. Widespread resentment among the other Greeks for their heavy-handed hegemony in the wake of the Peloponnesian War. Most notoriously, a Spartan general seized the Acropolis of Thebes, an independent polis, in 382 BC. This act of hubris, fittingly, was the beginning of the Spartans' undoing. After 3 years of occupation, the Thebans evicted their Spartan garrison.
Under the leadership of the dynamic general Pelopidas and the philosopher statesman Epaminondas, Thebes rapidly became the most powerful city in Central Greece, willing and able to challenge Sparta. The inevitable clash came at Leuctra in 371 BC. The Spartans, led by their king Cleombrotus, had about 11,000 men, of whom 700 were full Spartan citizens. The Thebans, under Epaminondas, had only about 7,000 men. It was customary for Greek armies to station their best units on the right wing of their phalanx, and Cleombrotus duly placed himself and his Spartiates on the right.
Epaminondas, unusually, placed his best units on the Theban left, directly opposite Cleombrotus, and arranged them in an exceptionally deep formation. When the battle began, the Thebans charged straight for the Spartans. Almost immediately, King Cleombrotus was mortally wounded in the face of an attack led by Thebes' famous Sacred Band. The Spartan line collapsed. 400 Spartiates, nearly half of the citizen elite, were left dead on the field. Aristotle, writing a generation later, voiced an opinion that has been echoed by many modern historians. Leuctra was the blow that toppled Sparta.
Worse was to come. The following year, Epaminondas, invaded the Peloponnese with a large army. After menacing Sparta itself, he moved into Messenia, where he liberated most of the helots. To protect them from their former masters, he founded a new city, Messene, surrounded by imposing walls. Epaminondas helped the Arcadians, just northwest of Sparta, organize into a league centered on the new and powerfully fortified city of Megalopolis, along with Mantinea, reestablished and refortified by the Thebans. Megalopolis and Messene formed a defensive ring around Sparta's diminished territory. Spartan kings would spend the rest of the 4th century trying to undo what Epaminondas had done.
They never succeeded. The Theban hegemony over Greece was soon replaced by that of Philip II's Macedon. After his victory at the Battle of Chaeronea, in which the Spartans took no part, Philip stripped Sparta of its northern borderlands. A few years later, Antipater, regent in Europe for Philip's son Alexander the Great, crushed the Spartans in a battle outside Megalopolis. Sparta had only a bit part to play in the world created by Alexander's conquests. During the 3rd century BC, two kings, Agis IV and Cleomenes III, tried to revive Sparta's fortunes.
The most fundamental issue, as in the era of Leuctra, was demographic. There were only 700 Spartan citizens left, and fewer than 100 actually owned land. Cleomenes, the more effective reformer, enrolled perioikoi and foreigners as Spartans and redistributed land among the ranks of the newly enlarged citizen body. He also resurrected or reinvented the ancient Spartan education system. His new model Spartans, however, carried Macedonian-style sarissas in place of their traditional spears.
Cleomenes' revival was short-lived. Defeated by a Macedonian army, the king fled to Egypt. His reforms were overturned. The Spartan monarchy was abolished. Over the following decades, a few others proclaimed themselves kings of Sparta. The last, Nabis, built a wall around the city, the first permanent defenses of a place that had long proclaimed soldiers to be the only fortifications it needed. A generation later, Aemilius Paullus became the first prominent Roman to visit Sparta as a tourist. Like Nabis' wall, this was a turning point.
Roman Sparta would be a place where an annual festival was celebrated in honor of Leonidas, where Augustus sipped bean broth in a replica of a classical dining hall, and where boys were whipped in an endurance contest supposedly inspired by ancient custom. When Caracalla invaded Persia, he brought a regiment of Spartans, apparently equipped like classical hoplites. By then, however, even the mirage of Spartan power was half a millennium gone. You know what isn't yet gone? Your chance to join me on one of my spring group tours, the Roman ruins of Spain and following Alexander across Turkey.
There are also a few places still available on my November Pompeii, Naples, and Capri tour. You'll find links for all three in the description. There's a new Roman Review video on the Toldinstone page, and a whole series of videos on the classical sites of Greece ready for your viewing pleasure on my Scenic Routes to the Past channel. On Toldinstone Footnotes, you'll find exciting new podcast interviews. Everything's linked in the description. Thanks for watching.
