Posted on 06/28/2026 5:44:31 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
How Sparta, the most powerful Greek city-state, collapsed in only 20 years.
The Decline and Fall of Sparta | 11:02
toldinstone | 627K subscribers | 82,207 views | Febuary 25, 2026
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:38 Classical Sparta
1:29 Spartan politics
2:22 Helots
3:24 Population decline
4:37 Hubris
5:25 The Battle of Leuctra
6:42 Messenia liberated
7:35 Enter Macedon
8:08 Attempts at reform
9:08 Irrelevance
9:37 Roman Sparta
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.
The weekly digest list of topics is down below.
'Battle of Leuctra - the defeat the broke Sparta's power', replies: Iphikrates 1/3 | RedditThis interpretation has remained dominant until very recently. The revolt began quietly with Devine, who pointed out that Xenophon, as a contemporary source, probably should be taken seriously.4 But his own reconstruction of the battle is completely mad. The case was made much more forcefully by V.D. Hanson a few years later.5 Hanson showed how the accounts of Diodoros and Plutarch were themselves based on unreliable sources already discredited in antiquity, and stressed that we should trust Xenophon, the veteran mercenary general, to know what he was talking about. Indeed, for all its simplicity, Xenophon's version perfectly explains how the battle was won and lost. Hanson then makes the crucial point that modern authors are probably hesitant to rely on Xenophon precisely because he suggests the Spartans were beaten by very crude tactics and Epameinondas did nothing new. Modern scholars have been guided by their assumption that the Spartan defeat could only be accounted for by spectacular tactical innovations. This led them to favour the less reliable accounts of Plutarch and Diodoros over the actually quite blunt and honest picture sketched by Xenophon. Now, I said "very recently" because it took a long time for Hanson's view to catch on.
In this episode of the Toldinstone Podcast, Stephen Hodkinson and I discuss the latest developments in research about classical Sparta.The Spartan Mirage | 1:42:42
Toldinstone Footnotes | 47.3K subscribers | 6,252 views | Febuary 27, 2026
Chapters
0:00 Sources on Spartan history
9:23 Spartan government
16:24 Sparta's emergence
22:18 Education in Sparta
31:05 Helots
43:45 Perioikoi
49:50 Spartan women
59:01 Property ownership
1:06:45 A leisure class
1:14:00 Spartan military superiority
1:19:36 Decline and fall
1:24:53 Athens vs. Sparta
1:33:38 Remembering Sparta
1:41:42 Wrapping up
Transcript [of the topic title video]
Sparta: A Historical Overview
Introduction
At the beginning of the fourth 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.
Classical Sparta
Since at least the middle of the sixth 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 Sparta’s 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 at 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.
Spartan Politics
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.
Population Decline
In the early fourth century, there were fewer Spartan warriors than ever before. The problem of oliganthropia — population decline — had begun decades earlier. At the time of the Persian Wars, a hundred years earlier, there had been about 8,000 male Spartan citizens. By 371 BC, there would be only a thousand. 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 fifth 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 three 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 Battle of Leuctra
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. Four hundred 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.
Messenia Liberated
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, re-established 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 fourth century trying to undo what Epaminondas had done. They never succeeded.
Enter Macedon
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.
Attempts at Reform
During the third 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 a hundred 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 Paulus became the first prominent Roman to visit Sparta as a tourist. Like Nabis’ wall, this was a turning point.
Roman Sparta
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 Rome in Review video on the toldinstone Patreon, 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, including one on the Spartan mirage with professor Stephen Hodkinson. Everything’s linked in the description. Thanks for watching.
I wish history would’ve fascinated me as much in high school as it does now. I read the transcript, I’ll have to watch the video later. Thanks…
It’s remarkable how interest history (or pseudohistory) goes back to the very beginning of history.😁
There’s a VDH topic in the FRchives about the book referred to in Reddit quote.🧾
Whoops! “interest IN history”.
The other GGG topics added since the previous digest ping, alpha:
The 300! GREAT movie. (If you like killing/beheading/and blood) GREAT special effects.
Weren't the helots the descendants of the Homeric Spartans?
I didn’t much care for that one.
There were two royal houses in Sparta, each purported descended from one of a pair of brothers who defeated the descendants of Menelaus and took over. Spartan rule consisted of a relatively small, brutal elite which went to war to destroy neighboring cities and reduce their populations to slavery.
Thanks, Civ!
Transcript [see msg #4 above for link]
Sources on Spartan History
Welcome to the Told in Stone podcast. I’m Garrett Ryan, and my guest today is Steven Hodkinson, emeritus professor of ancient history at the University of Nottingham. Steven has published widely on ancient Greek history with a special emphasis on the society and legacies of classical Sparta, our topic today. Um, so Steve, thanks so much for joining us.
I’m very glad to join you, and it’s good to be part of the show.
Oh, my pleasure too. So, to start with the beginning, um how much do we know about ancient Sparta and why are sources so problematic?
Well, we have a large scattering of evidence about Sparta, but it’s very unsystematic. Um, it’s perhaps best to classify under three heads. Um, there’s the epigraphic evidence, that is, inscriptions. We have a scatter of surviving inscriptions which illustrate diverse aspects of Spartan life. But there were many more that are now lost because of the lime burning of the stone inscriptions and melting of inscriptions that were written on bronzes.
Um, and these cover all sorts of interesting things. There’s public inscriptions that cover dedications celebrating military victories. There’s some treaties and alliances, but there aren’t any laws of Sparta, unlike in Athens where we have plenty of inscribed laws. Uh, there are private inscriptions that are much more numerous, and most of those are religious inscriptions, either dedications to the gods or heroes by men and by women. Uh, some inscriptions celebrate sporting victories, and then there are some epitaphs for fallen soldiers.
Um, the second class of evidence is the archaeological evidence, which is limited to a large extent. Um, Sparta, of course, originally only had a modest number of public buildings as the city decayed after antiquity and was looted, and then much of the ancient city lies under the modern city. So that’s limited to the archaeology. Um, most of the archaeological evidence comes from sanctuaries, and there’s been quite a number of sanctuaries that have been excavated. There have been some recent finds of cemeteries, which are not yet fully analyzed, so we can’t get their results fully at the moment. There’s very little Spartan housing that’s been found.
There are quite a number of small finds, but they’re mainly from the archaic period, so we say the 8th, 7th, and 6th centuries BC. A large amount of pottery and a sizable number of bronze works too, many of them exported abroad. Um, and then for the classical period, the fifth and fourth centuries, these small finds decline in number, and there’s a big controversy about whether they’re evidence for growing austerity in Spartan society or whether they’re part of a more general decline across Greece in local production in the face of competition from Attic pottery, for example. And finally, there are two archaeological surveys: the Laconia survey of an area very close to Sparta, and then there’s a survey of the extreme west of Spartan territory in Messenia, um, the area around the Bay of Pylos. Um, but most of Spartan territory has not yet been surveyed. So, um, the archaeology is in many ways limited.
Now, most people will be familiar with the literary sources. Um, and there the situation is very problematic. Um, one issue is that we have very few native Spartan sources, and there’s a limited number of external contemporary sources. So for the archaic period, we have two native Spartan poets, Tyrtaeus and Alcman, who are both writing in the mid to late 7th century BC.
Um, but then the native sources die away after them, and there’s also a big gap in our evidence of almost 200 years from the end of the seventh century until we get Herodotus writing his Histories in the second half of the fifth century.
Um, so for the classical period, the fifth and fourth centuries, we have three main narrative sources. Um, Herodotus, who, although writing in the late fifth century, looks back to Sparta’s participation in the Persian Wars and the half-century before that, we have scattered information he gives us about Spartan history. Um, then we have Thucydides, who covers in detail the Peloponnesian War from 431 down, but he only covers the first 20 years. So his work breaks off in 411. Um, and that leaves a gap between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian Wars, which historians tend to label as the Pentacontetia, the 50-year period, which he sketches very briefly, but there are many gaps.
Then after these breaks off in 411, Xenophon’s Hellenica takes up the picture and takes us down to 362 BC, the period of Sparta’s victory in the Corinthian War and Sparta’s brief period of empire. But Xenophon is more episodic than Thucydides. However, Xenophon is in many ways our best source of Sparta because he, although not a native Spartan, lived in Sparta for a time, he knew many Spartans. Um, and he was in many ways one of the clients of the Spartan King Agesilaus. And besides his Hellenica, he wrote a couple of works that deal more with Spartan internal society. There’s his work called the Lacedaemonion Politeia, the constitution of Sparta, as you might want to translate it, which gives us some specific evidence about various institutions in Sparta in his day in the early 4th century BC. Um, and then he wrote an encomium for his deceased patron, King Agesilaus, which also gives us information about how Spartan society worked. Um, Xenophon is not in any sense comprehensive, and he focuses above all on what’s different and largely what’s positive about Sparta. Um, for a more critical account, we have to wait until Aristotle and his Politics, written in the second half of the 4th century BC, and writing after Sparta’s decline and looking back and in part explaining that decline. Aristotle mostly focuses upon the weaknesses in Spartan society.
Now, our final problem with literary sources is that the largest bulk of evidence for Sparta comes from the writings of Plutarch, writing in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD. Um, particularly his Parallel Lives. Uh, he wrote a life of the mythical lawgiver Lycurgus. Um, but also two historical lives of Lysander and Agesilaus in the late fifth and early fourth centuries. And then he wrote a biography of two kings in the mid-3rd century, kings Agis and Cleomenes, and the revolution that they tried to put into effect. Um, Plutarch also records a number of Spartan sayings, both by men and women, um, which are of uncertain reliability. Um, many of them are later inventions. There may be a few that are authentic, but many of them were invented in the Hellenistic period. So, um, the fact that the bulk of evidence comes from Plutarch is a big issue, um, particularly because in the past, um, Plutarch was often seen as the best evidence for Spartan society simply because of the sheer bulk of information that he provided.
Well, thank you. That’s a very helpful survey and conveys how much of our knowledge about Sparta is oblique. Um, either as a partial observer at the time, um, or as someone writing like Plutarch centuries after Sparta’s apogee when Sparta’s become just this minor Roman provincial town. Um, and the archaeology and epigraphy also, which you mentioned, um, that’s very helpful because often we overlook this stuff, um, is equally in its way patchy and inconclusive and difficult to correlate with anything else we know.
Spartan Government
Um, so I guess with all of these caveats now in mind, we can march into our more survey-style questions. Um, the first of which is um classical authors often ascribe or sometimes ascribe uh a unique uh mixed constitution uh to Sparta. Um, was the Spartan government as far as we know it from our sources? Um, really so unusual by classical Greek standards?
Well, the answer to your second question is yes or no. Um, but let me talk first of all about the mixed constitution. Um, it’s only mentioned by a few authors. Most writers, particularly in the fifth century, describe Sparta as an oligarchy. Um, the idea that Sparta had a mixed constitution only really appears in the fourth century in works of political theory. Um, Aristotle in his Politics mentions previous writers whom he doesn’t name, who he says described Sparta’s constitution as a mixture, but we can’t pin down who precisely he means.
The most obvious candidate is Plato’s Laws, um, where Plato does um uh mention the different elements in the Spartan constitution, but Plato’s view in the Laws is more closer to what we might call checks and balances, um, whereby different institutions moderate the power of others rather than it being a genuine kind of harmonious mixture. Um, but what underlies this is that I think that Sparta has a typical Greek system of divided power. Divided power divided between different sets of officials. Um, and this is quite common uh throughout Greek political systems. Um, the Spartan combination, however, is unusual uh in its precise nature. Um, I’ll just briefly run through it. You have the five FORS who are appointed annually. Um, and they are unusual. I mean, all cities, Greek cities have executive officials. The Spartans are unusual in that they’re quite small in number, only five of them. And also in that they have untrammeled executive powers. Uh, Zenithan even compares their powers to those of tyrants, but they’re only in office for one year. So it’s on power, but for a very, very brief period.
Then there’s a council, and councils are again quite typical in the Greek world. But the Spartan Council is unusual in that it’s a what we call the Geruza. In other words, a um, a council of old men. Um, the Geruza comprises 20 men who are over age 60 plus the two kings, and I’ll come on to the kings in a moment, and that’s a council of 30. And the other unusual aspect of this council is that once appointed to the council, you’re there for life. So in Athens, for example, there’s a rotating boule council that sort of changes every year. Um, but uh, the Spartan Geruza, the kings are there for life by definition, and the third 28 men, um, over 60 again are there until they die.
And then the third unusual element is the kings. Um, kings by the classical period had mostly been abolished in other Greek cities. Um, but not only in Sparta had they not been abolished, but there’s two of them. Um, and each of them has the right of military command. Um, and they, along with the Geruza and the FORS, um, they seem to control the right of speaking to the Spartan assembly. Um, the assembly again is a common institution in Greek cities. Um, and um, as in other Greek cities, anyone who’s a full citizen can take part in the assembly, but it seems that um, unlike say in Athens, not anyone can speak. Uh, in the Athenian Assembly, the herald starts off by saying who wishes to speak. The evidence suggests that in Sparta, unless you’re specifically invited to speak, um, you have to be one of the officials, one of the five FORS, a member of the Geruza, or one of the two kings. M, so in some broadly sharing the divided power of you find other cities but with particularly unusual elements making up those divided powers.
Oh, I see. And so this idea of the mixed constitution, which is sort of imposed on Sparta by Aristotle and Polybius, for example, um, is sort of you think an idealization or attempt to categorize this very complex and unique uh brand of oligarchy. Yes, I think that external commentators found it difficult to categorize Sparta. Um, and because the Spartan system seemed to work quite harmoniously for a long period. Um, there arose the idea, um, and you’re right to mention Polybius, whom I left out of it because he’s a later source from the early 2nd century um, BC. Um, they try to explain the harmony with the Spartan system, the fact that it exists for quite a long period um, in terms of it having a mixture that has a good balance of different elements. Um, but it’s clear from both what Aristotle says and what Polybius says that different authors view the balance in different terms. Some view it purely in political terms. So they say the kings represent monarchy, the Geruza represent aristocracy, and the FORS, well, they’re elected from the people. So they represent the people in some ways a bit like the Roman tribunes. Um, other authors it seems sort of uh, um, extended their element beyond pure politics to think about the whole nature of the Spartan way of life onto which we will move in due course. And they say, for example, that the democratic element is in the Spartan way of life. The fact that all Spartans live a common lifestyle. Um, and that they, that that’s the democratic element that all the people sort of, although they may not have political rights, they participate in the politia, the constitution in this broader sense. Well, thank you.
Sparta’s Emergence
So moving from this idea of external observers, uh, imposing or kind of interpreting Spartan through their own lenses to how the Spartans themselves may have reinterpreted their own society, um, at various opportune moments. Um, the Spartans attributed their famously harmonious or at least famously stratified society, um, to this mythical lawgiver. Like, um, when and why do we think the Spartan familiar from our classical literary sources, um, actually emerged?
Well, as you say, Lyus is a mythical, not a historical figure. Um, older historians, you know, when I was starting my career in the 1970s, there were, you know, some very respected historians who still believed that Lyus was a historical figure, but that’s not believed by current scholarship. Um, and the whole idea that Sparta’s classical system was created in a single stroke by a single person is historically implausible. Now scholars used to believe that the system emerged as early as the 7th century BC, which is the supposed date of, um, a very famous law called the Great Retra that sets out the Spartan political system with its kings, guarantees, and the people. Um, and the argument goes that, um, in the 7th century BC, um, the Spartans had a particular need for solidarity in the context of the Second Messenian War. Now this is a revolt of the conquered Messenians. The Spartans had conquered Messenia. We’re not sure exactly when, but perhaps in the late 8th century BC. Um, and in the time of Tatius, and he refers to it in his poetry, um, Sparta is involved in, in, uh, um, combating a Messenian revolt, um, which we can loosely date to the middle of the 7th century BC, contemporary with Tatus.
Um, and so the argument goes that in this context, um, Sparta needed, uh, enhanced solidarity and therefore that they created a militarized social system in order to control the Messenian who had been reduced to the status of helots. Um, and this theory was very prominent for much of my career. Um, it’s now been challenged on a variety of fronts and seen as less plausible, partly because of questions as to whether the helots were really as major a problem as to force the Spartans to totally reorganize their way of life. Um, Spartans were not the only city-state to control a large slave population. Um, and recent research suggests that war and military training were not as dominant in Spartan life as older views suggested. So more recent scholarship has moved away from the idea that the system as we see it in the classical period was created in the 7th century BC.
Um, and here we hit this 200-year gap in the evidence that I mentioned earlier, um, between Tatus and Akman, and then the Herodotus, and that makes it impossible to say exactly when the classical system emerged. It probably emerged, I think, bit by bit over in various pieces of what you might call piecemeal social engineering over the course of the sixth and perhaps even the early fifth century BC. And we know that some Spartan institutions, the army for example, were being modified and changed even as late as the late fifth and the early fourth centuries. So we shouldn’t think that Sparta’s classical system was static and never changed, even in the classical period. Um, and as for what led the system to be created, um, my own personal view is that yes, the helot problem is an issue. Spartans have to be aware of it. But that an equally prominent problem, and perhaps even more important, is social conflict among the Spartans themselves.
Um, sources, the few sources we have from the late archaic and early classical period suggest that there was conflict between rich and poor. Um, Tatus mentions the demand by poor Spartans for a redistribution of land. Um, and Thucydides, when he’s summing up the nature of the Spartan sort of system and he’s looking at how Sparta developed, uh, up to its present time in his day, he says that the Spartans were the first to address simply with the rich leading a life that was as much as possible like that of the many. So for these, it’s about equalizing things among the citizens, and this would be a way of addressing the social conflicts that are mentioned by earlier sources.
One of the threads in your scholarship is about how Sparta is less unlike many other Greek cities, um, than was previously believed. It is, of course, unique in all kinds of ways, but the same, uh, conflicts, the same controversies are animating Spartan politics. We see even in Athens in sort of a different tenor. And I think that that’s a nice way to put it, that you were saying that this might not be about they have a huge slave population, that they have the same inter-citizen dynamics that Athens does in a slightly different way. Um, mentioning also how it’s not a static system, how it is evolving throughout the historical period, even though our sources in their snapshot way aren’t illuminating that all that helpfully sometimes.
Education in Sparta
Um and and so moving on to another system that almost certainly evolved gradually. Um the the so-called ago, the Spartan education. Um so how different do we think this really was from the educational systems of other Greek cities? Well, Sparta is different in having a public education system which is unknown elsewhere in the classical Greek world. Uh elsewhere public systems don’t develop until the helistic period. Um as a matter of um technicality there’s no evidence that it was called the ago gay in the classical period. Um Zelan for example who gives us the best description of it um simply calls it the podia which is the standard term for for the education of of of young uh of young um citizens.
Um and our best evidence comes from his work the uh the constitution of the Spartans and he says it was divided into three stages. Um there’s the paid, the paid discoy and the hibontes. Um the paid are boys from age seven up to we’re not quite sure but perhaps until kind of early teens. Um, and their upbringing is marked by physical deprivation. They have to go around barefoot. They’re given a single cloak to wear whether it’s summer or winter. They wear the same cloak, so they have to withstand both heat and cold. Um, and they’re given limited food and they’re encouraged to engage in thieving to promote initiative and they’re punished if they’re caught. Uh, not punished for thieving, but punished for doing it badly. Um and their life seems to be marked at least according to Zenithm by close supervision and by regular beatings if they sort of misbehave.
Then the second phase, the pidiscocoy, seems to be early teens through to age 20. Um, and Zelan is rather vague about their precise style of life, but he focuses upon the control of their teenage passions. Um, and the testing of their social behavior. So, for example, he says that when they walk around the streets, they must walk around with their heads down, not looking up. And that if they’re in the common messes with the adults, um, you can barely get them to even respond to a question. So just the controlling of that, you know, teenage typical rowdy behavior seems to be a key element of that upbringing.
Um, and then when they become hibontes, and that covers the period from age 20 through to when they become fully adults at age 30, um, they’re let off the leash. Um, at this period, they’re semi-adults in that they’ve joined one of the common messes, the cicitia, uh, in which Spartans die every evening of their lives, and they’ve also joined the army too. They’re the sort of youngest element in the army. So they’re already incorporated into two key adult institutions. Um, and Zenithan focuses again; he doesn’t give a close description of their daily lives, but he focuses upon the competition between them. Um, and in particular focusing upon an institution of the 300 group called the hippace.
The hippace means cavalry men, but by this period, they’re no longer cavalry men. Simply a term for an elite group. And how, um, each year 300 of these 20-somethings are selected for this elite group, and reasons are given for why they’re selected or why the others are overlooked. And Zenithan says that the Spartans encourage competition, um, and even scuffling between members of the hippace and those who’ve been rejected. They’re meant to be ultra-competitive in order to, uh, each try to make of their best. But this competition is controlled; if it gets out of hand, any adult has the right to intervene and to tell them to stop, and if they fail to do so, they can be taken before the fles and punished.
So, um, it’s very unusual in that it’s sort of, um, very closely geared according to age groups. Um, it’s a public education. Um, it has similar elements to that elsewhere. So, for example, there’s lots of coral singing and dancing. Um, one poet says that the Spartans are like a cicada, always keen for the dance, and that’s an important element in, uh, in Spartan life as in life in other Greek cities.
Private Education in Spartan Society
Um, now the sources only talk about this public education, but, uh, recent research and in particular a book by, uh, the French scholar Jean Duka, uh, called a book written in English called Spartan Education. Um, he argues very strongly that alongside this public education, there was also a private education which would be similar to that of the leisured elite in other Greek cities. So, with private tutors, young Spartans would learn the basics of reading, writing, you know, figures, you know, what we call the three Rs nowadays.
Um, and this will be a focus particularly in their early years. Um, and then another private element in the teenage years is that from age 12 onwards, every Spartan boy, um, is courted by a mature male in a pederastic relationship between the mature male and the teenage boy, and aromamas. This is an arrangement that’s made privately and no doubt with the input of the families of the two young men in particular. Um, and it seems to be that the teenage boy would attend the mess that his, um, his 20-year-old, uh, older lover is already part of. Um, and that there may or may not have been a sexual role to it. Zedan’s, uh, rather koi about that.
Um, but whether or not there was, there’s a very important social role that the role of the older partner is to acculturate the teenager into what it is to be a Spartan adult citizen. Um, and this has a strong private element. Um, and we have a couple of historical incidents where, um, where we have pairs of, uh, lovers, and they, they, they in these two instances, they’re mentioned because they’re both from the elite level of Spartan society and they have an important influence upon contemporary politics. So, it’s, it’s obviously, um, an important relationship with a lot of private influences in it.
Um, and the social element can last beyond the immediate period when the older one is in his 20s and the younger one is in his sort of his teens. So, um, the sexual element would have died off after that period if there was one, but it could be the basis of a long-lasting friendship and therefore no mutual collaboration.
So the a rather Oh no ahead. Sorry. No go on. No, I’m just just going to sum up by saying that the smart education is a mixture of usual and unusual elements and a mixture of public and private. No, that’s great. Um, I was to say so the same thing really that the ago gay or rather the pidea is sort of just it’s not as totalizing as we used to think. It’s not it is state sponsored and therefore unusual. It doesn’t a lot of control over young people’s lives, young boys’ lives rather. Um, but it is not the entire education they’re receiving. And I suppose in Athens maybe it’s the fees that they real equivalent to being a state sponsored system that has them incorporated into the state’s I don’t know ideology in some sort of way but it is very different um without getting much too. Yes. Yeah. Yes. A much briefer right just a couple years.
Helots
Um, now anyway, so moving on to the people at the bottom of the social pyramid in Sparta, the Helots. Um, how much do we know about their lives and experience? And how did the Spartans keep such a large subordinate population in check as far as we know?
Well, we know far too little about the Helots. Uh, you know, far we’d like to know much, much more. Um, there’s no direct literary or epigraphic evidence coming from the Helots themselves. There are no writings by Helots, not even any inscriptions, um, by Helots, at least when they’re Helots. And in the resources, they appear only in relation to the Spartans. Um, we never get anything about the Helots for their own sake. Um, what we can say from the evidence we do have is that most Helots were farmers working the Spartans’ private estates, which are scattered across the more fertile areas of both Laconia, Sparta’s home territory, and Messenia, the territory of the west that they conquered in the archaic period.
Um, farming, of course, involves a diverse range of activities. There’s, you know, arable culture working the fields, but there’s also animal husbandry. Uh, there’s also, in coastal areas, fishing. And we have evidence that, um, certain Helots, um, had boats which, you know, they could deploy on their own. So this implies that, um, life even in the countryside is going to be quite diverse according to exactly what, um, which of these agricultural occupations that they’re involved in and also because the Spartan estates are scattered across Sparta’s quite large territory. Spartan territory is 8 and a half thousand square kilometers. Um, some estates were very close to Sparta itself; you just walk out of the urban center of Sparta and straight into the Euro Valley where the Spartan estates are. But other estates will be some 70 km away from Sparta, right over in western Messenia. Um, so the levels of supervision of the Helots is going to vary quite widely.
Um, those close to Sparta, like it be far more heavily supervised by their Spartan masters than the more distant estates. Um, and this may be reflected in the two archaeological surveys that I mentioned earlier. The Laconia survey, which was of an area just to the north and east of Sparta, including the edge of the plane of Sparta in the Euroes Valley. Um, the settlement pattern shown there in the classical period is one of very small dispersed settlements, small settlements, you know, individual farms, small hamlets. Um, whereas the other survey, the Pyos regional archaeological project, was conducted right on the western extreme of Sparta, 70 km or so away from Sparta itself, and there the settlements are of nucleated villages. Uh, um, not many settlements, but some of them quite large would have been one in particular must have housed at least several thousand persons.
Now, there is a slight controversy about whether these areas were settled by the Helots as opposed to by the other population that we know of, to which we’ll come later, the Perioikoi, who are free non-citizens. Um, my own view is that at least some of these areas were Helot areas. Um, and therefore the settlement patterns there point to different levels of organization of Helot life. And it would, you know, fit well that if the Helots close to Sparta might all be dispersed, uh, more widely to avoid concentrations of Helots close to the city. Um, whereas further away, the Spartans may rely more upon the Helots themselves to organize their, uh, their own farming and therefore makes sense for them to live in more nucleated communities. So, um, so those are the rural Helots.
Now, there are also Helots in Sparta itself. There’s personal servants of Spartan households, both male and female. Of course, the presence of female Helots, as in most systems, means that there’s almost certainly sexual exploitation of these female Helots by their Spartan masters. And although it isn’t directly attested, um, that such exploitation, we do know of a body of young men in Sparta called the Nothoy, which means the bastards. And Zeran tells us that they’re men who are not unacquainted with the good things in Spartan life. So that implies that they’re sons of, as bastards, of sons of Spartans, and the obvious, uh, mothers would be these Helot women working in the households. Um, so it’s plausible evidence for this sexual exploitation.
There’s also, um, male Helots who serve as personal attendants to Spartans in warfare. They carry their shields, for example. Um, if the Spartan is wounded, it may well be the Helot who comes and carries him out of the battle line. And towards the late fifth and early fourth centuries, there are some Helots who are actually recruited into Sparta’s armies, um, either while they’re still Helots, and the most famous group is a group of 700 Helots who fought with Brasidas in northern Greece. Um, and then there’s a group called the Nemo, which literally means new members of the Demos, which is probably a euphemism. Um, but at all events, they seem to be freed Helots, uh, who are given their freedom in order to serve Sparta. Um, and they normally fight in overseas expeditions in Sparta’s empire, uh, to save the Spartans themselves having to go abroad en masse, um, overseas.
So, um, this then partly brings us to the question you asked about how the Spartans managed to control such a large population. And here historians are divided about how great a threat the Helots were. Now, we know of one major Helot revolt in the 460s BC, which was a very serious threat to the Spartans. It happened shortly after a massive earthquake had devastated Sparta itself. And so it may be that in such moments of Spartan weakness that the Helots might well rise into revolt. And there’s also a strong Messenian element in this revolt too. So there may be some feeling among the Messenian Helots further away that they have more capacity to revolt. But after that revolt, the evidence for revolts dies away.
During the Peloponnesian War, there were desertions of Helots, but no general uprising, even when the Athenians, um, placed, um, garrisons on the edge of Spartan territory. And bear in mind that in Athens too, the Athenians saw desertion during the Peloponnesian War. This says that, you know, 20,000 slaves deserted when the Spartans occupied part of Athenian territory.
Um, another thing that is often not realized about the Spartans is they went about their everyday lives unarmed. Um, most popular representations of Spartans show them always walking around with their shields and their spears. But, um, the sources are very clear that, like other civilized Greeks, the Spartans didn’t carry their arms in everyday life. And in one episode recounted by Xenophon, um, a conspiracy by a man called Kennedon, uh, he depicts, um, the Spartan Agora in which there are only 70 Spartans or so, and they’re surrounded by 4,000 non-Spartans. Now, we don’t know how many of these non-Spartans were Helots, but quite a number must have been. And yet the Spartans are outnumbered, but they’re unarmed. And the Helots seem to have access to agricultural implements that could be used as bladed weapons if need be.
Um, so this leaves us even more poses the question, you know, how did the Spartans cope with this unbalance? Um, in part, there must be fear that they impose upon the Helots. Uh, there’s the institution of the Krypteia, and Aristotle says that, um, or rather Plutarch reporting Aristotle says that, uh, one purpose of the Krypteia was to hunt Helots. This has become disputed by many historians because Plato, who also mentions it, says nothing about hunting Helots. There’s divided opinion as to whether that was a function of the Krypteia. But even if Helot hunting was part of its duties, the Krypteia was only an occasional institution. But even an occasional institution can be enough to instill fear into Helots.
And then in addition, the Ephors declared war annually upon the Helots, and that would have given any Spartan impunity for killing a Helot. So again, the threat of what the Spartans might do could be part of the answer as to why the Helots, for the most part, remained quiet. Um, but then there’s also incentives, and I’ve mentioned one incentive already, the incentive of recruitment into Sparta’s armies and even liberation in order to fight in Sparta’s armies. And it’s noticeable that in the year 70, when Sparta is about to be invaded for the first time, 6,000 Helots volunteered to defend Sparta in return for their freedom. So there’s obviously Helots can see a, um, a certain incentive looks better than an uncertain situation if the enemy takes control of Sparta.
There’s also some evidence for social differentiation among the Helots, and if you think about Helot life, particularly out in Messenia, where there’s more self-organization, um, the sheer demographic differences among Helot families, you know, number of children they have or don’t have, um, plus, you know, cultivating different land holdings. And I should have said earlier, the Helots, um, probably take half of the harvest and deliver the other half to the Spartans. So the scope for some Helots to get richer and others to get poorer. So there may well be social differentiation among the Helots.
One source, a very late source, Ezekos, mentions a group called the leaders of the Helots. And this might point to the fact that there are some Helots who are better off than others and who have reason for collaborating with the Spartans in order to maintain their own hierarchy as against their fellow Helots. So there may be a whole variety of reasons as to how the Spartans managed to stay on top of this much, much larger, um, slave population. Oh, well, that’s fascinating and so much more complex, I think, than we tend to imagine as this population of serfs being dominated by, you know, armed men at all times, that it was that this vast range of both social outcomes, uh, means for achieving agency as a Helot even, um, analogous, I think, in a lot of ways to Athenian slavery at the same time or even to Roman slavery in some less obvious parallels, um, a little later on, um, but very interesting.
Perioikoi
Uh, so thinking about the other subordinate population, other major sort of population in Sparta, uh, the perioikoi, the free non-Spartans. Um, how are they integrated into Spartan society?
Well, the key thing to be aware of the perioikoi is that they, like the Spartans themselves, are Laconian, Laconian. Um, when we, I mean the term Laconian is the official term for the Spartan, what we call now Spartan state, and it embraces both the Spartiates and the perioikoi. Only the Spartiates are full citizens, um, you know, who belong to all the Spartan institutions and can vote in the assembly and so on, but they seem to share this ethnic identity with the perioikoi, um, and this is reflected, um, in a common culture. It’s notable that many artifacts that are found in Sparta are also found in the territory of the perioikoi too. Um, for example, the, um, the stelae for fallen warriors, the so-called empolos stelae, are found both in Sparta itself and in the territory in other parts of, uh, Laconia inhabited by the perioikoi. Likewise, there’s a group of, um, stone monuments called the hero reliefs that are found both in Sparta and in perioikoi territory.
Um, a bit of basic fact about the perioikoi. They inhabit, um, areas scattered around Spartan territory, both the Laconian and Sparta’s home territory and also certain coastal areas, in particular, of Messenia.
Um, we are woefully uninformed about their full lifestyle. There’s only been one perioikoi city excavated, the city of Garanth, modern Garaki, which is, um, about 25 km sort of southeast of Sparta itself. Um, and even then, the excavation has been limited by the fact the modern village is on top of the ancient city. Um, and there’s no direct literary evidence from the perioikoi themselves. So again, we’d like to know a lot more than we do, but in terms of their integration, um, we can see it most clearly in the army. Um, that what we often call the Spartan army is actually a Laconian army comprising both Spartiates and perioikoi, and the perioikoi supply at least 50%, sometimes more, of the Laconian troops, and the portion increases as Spartan citizen numbers decline over the course of the fifth and fourth centuries BC.
So, for example, at the Battle of Plataea, the last battle of the Persian Wars in 479, there are 5,000 Spartiates and there are 5,000 perioikoi. Um, and we likewise find the perioikoi, um, supplying large numbers in later battles too. Another form of integration relates particularly to the elite among the perioikoi. Um, most perioikoi are probably working farmers. The perioikoi would probably have a hierarchical, um, divide among themselves in the same way that other cities had. You know, where there would be an elite of leisured, uh, men, families, then there were many working farmers, and there’d be other people in trades and so on. And the elite were very likely similar to that. Um, but there was an elite that is mentioned by Xenophon once by the term kaloi kagathoi, the those who were kaloi noble and those who were agathoi, those who were good, and the typical term for a Greek elite.
And we’re told that they volunteer to take part in one Spartan expedition, and these are probably men who know are in good terms with Spartiates. They may have, you know, special friendships with them. They may even have been integrated into some of the Spartan institutions. Their sons may have taken part in the, uh, state education system. They may have attended the masses at some point, and they certainly fought in the army. Um, and then there’s a further element of integration in that the perioikoi communities are largely internally self-governing. As far as we know, the Spartans don’t impose garrisons on them. Um, the communities have to follow Sparta’s lead in foreign policy, but Sparta doesn’t have the bureaucracy or the internal police force to, uh, directly control its large territory. And they must have relied upon, uh, the perioikoi communities to organize their own affairs.
Um, and because of the shared culture, their participation in the army, and so on, for much of the time, the perioikoi are very much in tune with the Spartiates. Um, we only see some cracks at certain points, um, when there’s, in 370 BC, when Sparta’s enemies invade for the first time. Some of the perioikoi, particularly in the more marginal areas, uh, on the borders of Spartan territory, um, seem to sort of, uh, be divided as to whether to, uh, stick with the Spartans or not. But for the most part, you know, the perioikoi are really very strongly integrated within the whole system of Laconia. As a Roman historian, I tend to think, I suppose, of the Romans and their allies in the early republican era. It’s a very different sort of dynamic because they’re both Laconian, as you said, they share this ethnic bond as well as some institutions. Um, but more than just the shopkeepers of popular imagination of the perioikoi, obviously.
Spartan Women
Um, so moving on to another group that’s very prominent in the popular imagination. Um, how different are the roles and statuses of Spartan women from those of their Athenian counterparts as far as we know them? Well, Spartan women have the image in modern popular thought as being liberated women, women who are free from the constraints that affect women elsewhere in the Greek world and especially in Athens. Uh, even like modern women in the West. Um, now I think some of these images are anachronistic and they need to be modified. Um, the recent research suggests that the lives of Spartan women were in some respects not significantly different from those of, say, Athenian women in terms of their basic roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. Um, but there are some unusual elements in how those feminine and maternal roles are expressed in Sparta.
And one of those unusual elements is that, unlike in Athens, Spartan girls are given a public physical education. Um, and which scandalizes Greeks from other cities, particularly Athens, because they are um very underclad as far as the um Athenian observers are concerned. Um, and this is u uh testified also in some of the uh figurines of Spartan girls showing them with very short skirts and with one breast exposed as they’re running or dancing. So this is unusual um, but it also gives um Spartan girls and women an important role in cults and festivals where they’re extremely prominent. But it has the same underlying eugenic aim of preparing these girls for marriage, for procreation, and their lives as um respectable mothers who supervise their households.
And um, the evidence, particularly some figurines, suggests that when they’re mature, Spartan married women then they would don the veil like Greek women in other cities. Um, now even as wives there are certain unusual marriage practices that are mentioned by Zenith and by Plutarch. We don’t know how widely practiced they were, but they’re certainly prominent enough to be mentioned. Um, Zelan in particular says that um if a particular Spartan wants children but doesn’t want to live with a wife, he can approach a married friend and ask to borrow that friend’s wife for the purposes of procreating children.
And Zelan says that, you know, the married man uh is, you know, keen on such an arrangement because he’ll get um many um kind of uh stepsons or half-sons um for his existing sons who will add to their sort of the power of the kin group. And he says that the women are keen on this arrangement too in that they will have control of two households: that of their original husband and that of their second partner. Um, it’s very difficult to know, as I say, how widespread this institution was. Um, but it does seem to be, you know, definitely a historical authentic institution. Um, but again, although it’s unusual and shows an unusual degree of sort of uh uh of sexual relations, um is linked again to the primary role of women as childbearers. The reason why the second man wants the uh uh the woman is because, you know, she’s shown that she is of good childbearing quality.
Um, and likewise, um there’s also an institution mentioned by Palibius which suggests that um sometimes the Spartans practice polyandry whereby several brothers would be married to a single woman. And this links into another unusual element about Spartan women in that they’re quite large or they’re property holders including landholders and some of them are quite large landholders. Um, Aristotle says that u women own almost two-fifths of the land in Sparta. Um, and this comes about partly um, this is part of my own research that um it seems that in Sparta, unlike in Athens, uh that daughters had the right to inherit part of the landed property of their parents probably at a ratio of 1:2. So in other words, if uh a couple has a son and a daughter, um the daughter will get one-third of the parental property and the son will get two-thirds. And we find a similar system operating in classical Gorton in cits their daughter or daughters would inherit the entire estate. Um, and one can calculate that this sort of combination uh combined would lead to women owning in the high 30s% of the landholding.
So um, and this links into the polyandry I mentioned earlier in that uh this would be a good mechanism if there’s a um a family that’s had too many sons and they’re already poor and the property may be divided among them and they may become a way of consolidating the property would be to marry those sons off to a single woman who would bring her own landholding with them and then with the combined landholding of the five sons or whatever number it uh they might be able to retain their citizen status uh and have a reasonable amount of property.
The other implication is that some women are very wealthy um, and they therefore have opportunities not open to Athenian women who are not allowed to officially own more than a modest amount of property. And the most prominent example is a woman called Kinesiska who is the daughter of uh a Spartan king and she’s the sister of the king Agesawis that who reigns for 40 years from about 400 down to around 360 BC and she is the first Greek woman to enter and to win the four-horse chariot race at the Olympic Games um as the owner of a chariot team.
Um, the chariot races are unlike the other competitions at Olympia where people enter in their own right and compete in their own right as runners or wrestlers or whatever it might be. Um, the person who enters the car races is the owner uh, and they get a chariot here to ride the horse for them, ride the team for them. But um, it’s the owner who gets all the prestige. And because she’s wealthy, Kinesiska is able to enter a chariot team. She twice wins the Olympic Games in the four-horse chariot race. And then she celebrates her victory by putting up the most magnificent monument involving seven life-sized bronze statues um, commissioned off a foreign sculptor, a very famous foreign sculptor called Aelis from the city of Mega. Um, and it’s been calculated that, you know, a life-sized bronze statue would be 10 years’ wages for a skilled workman in Athens. So it’s an enormous expenditure and most of this monument has been melted down but part of the base of Kinesiska’s own statue, which is one of the seven statues, survives and it’s in the Olympia Museum and it bears the inscription in which Kinesiska boasts about her victory and says that, you know, she was the first woman in the whole of Greece to have gained this crown.
So this does give you certain very wealthy Spartan women the chance to do things that women in other Greek cities are not able to do.
Property Ownership
You mentioned the remarkable fact that Spartan women own more than a third of all land, it seems, in Sparta at least by the 4th century BC. That’s a nice segue into our next question, um, which is all about um property ownership. Uh, how much do we know about property ownership in classical Sparta and when did the myth, as it seems to be a myth, of Spartan egalitarianism emerge?
Yes, this is another controversial area, although less so now than it was when I was starting my studies. Um, when I was, you know, starting off working on Sparta back in the 1970s, it was quite standard for modern historians to believe that Spartans had equal amounts of property. Um, this was what Plutarch says both in the life of Lyus and also in the life of Agis, although there’s some contradictions between his descriptions of this equal property and those two works. Um, but this myth of etherism, as I said, does basically rely mostly upon the evidence of Plutarch, a very late source. Recent research suggests, in contrast, the authentic Spartan property system was a normal Greek system of private property in which land was privately owned. You could pass it down to your heirs.
The difference, of course, from Athens is that the heirs are both sons and daughters, whereas in Athens only sons can inherit. Now here it may be that Athens is unusual because in Gorton in Crete too, women could also inherit land. And it may be that female inheritance is more common across the Greek world than not. But we don’t have evidence for the vast range of Greek cities. Um, and it’s private property in the sense that landowners have the normal right to alienate their land by giving it away or by bequeathing it, you know, to their heirs or even making a will be it to someone who’s not the obvious heir, but they seem not to have been able to sell it, and there seems to be one restriction on how to whether you can alienate land.
Um, now in terms of the distribution of landholding, because it’s private property, there’s always differences between rich and poor. Rich and poor are attested in Sparta in the archaic period and again in the classical period. Um, now you might ask, how does this character, how does this square this inequality with the fact that all Spartan citizens have to own a certain amount of land in order to be men of leisure, um, so they don’t have to work the land themselves and above all so that they can produce the contributions for their common messes as a citia? Um, to be a member of the mess is a requirement of citizenship, and also to be a member of the mess means you have to make your standard contribution every month of various foodstuffs. So in principle, all Spartans must have a certain amount of land to produce the basic foodstuffs, perhaps as much as say 15 hectares.
And bear in mind that the helots take half the produce. Um, so at some point in the — we don’t know exactly when — every Spartan must have had the state make sure that every Spartan had this basic modum of land to enable them to be men of leisure and make their mess contributions, but we don’t know when this took place. It could have been when Sparta conquered Messenia, um, that poor Spartans were given landholdings from the newly acquired land. And this would tie in with the fragment of Thucydides that I mentioned earlier where he talks about poor Spartans demanding a redistribution of land at the time of the second Messenian war. It could be that when the Messenians revolted, poor Spartans lost their mass landholdings and therefore were demanding a redistribution. Um, but in any case, however things developed and whenever the system was set up, um, every Spartan had enough land at least initially, but it was never equal holdings and the basic private property system was never disturbed.
Now over the course of the fifth and fourth centuries, the evidence suggests that Spartans — the inequalities in landholding became more pronounced, that richer Spartans got richer and poorer Spartans got poorer. Um, and over the course of that period, the holdings of many Spartans, many poor Spartans declined such that they no longer were able to make their mess contributions and they dropped out of their messes and therefore also lost their citizen rights. And we can see this in the decline of the numbers of Spartan citizens. Um, Herodotus says that at the time of the battle of the Persian wars in 480, there were no fewer than 8,000 Spartans. Zenith implies, well, actually, Aristotle says that in the mid-4th century, there were only less than 1,000. And Zenfan implies that even before the battle of Leuctra in 371, we’ll come on to Leuctra shortly, I’m sure, um, that he implies that there were not many more than a thousand, perhaps between 1,000 and 500, and the most plausible explanation is simply this growing inequality of property which means that many poor Spartans simply drop out of the citizen body because they can’t afford their contributions to the common messes.
Um, when this myth of the equality arose is hard to pin down. Um, it was certainly present in the late 1st century BC. Um, I mentioned earlier Plutarch’s lives of Agis and Cleomenes, two kings who tried to revive Spartan members by making an equal redistribution of land. And they, in order to make their proposals plausible, they claimed that they were returning to the old Lycurgan system. This was a myth, but this idea was picked up by contemporary sources and then passed on to Plutarch. The myth may have developed a little earlier than the 3rd century BC. Um, after Spartan power declines in the 4th century, various schools of philosophy turned the Spartan way of life into a moral ideal and egalitarianism may have been part of that myth. And it may have been an extension of the fact that all Spartans had lived a common lifestyle which minimized the significance of differences of wealth. They’re wearing the same cloaks, having the same food in the messes, uh, restricting display of wealth and so on. And they call themselves the homoioi, the similars, or the not quite equals but similars. And the egalitarian myth may have been an exaggeration of those practices of a common lifestyle.
A Leisure Class
So when the system was working at least, um, these Spartiates, the citizens, um, all had enough land to support themselves. They were men of leisure, as you said, and that I think, um, contrasts strongly with the popular imagination of how the Spartans spent their time, which makes them almost professional soldiers. Um, so how do the Spartiates, we think, really spend their time? We can tell from the sources? Well, as you say, they are men of leisure. They’re rantier landowners living off the produce of the estates farmed by their helots. Now, how do they use all that leisure time? Um, my view and the evidence is increasingly suggesting that they engage in a wide range of citizen activities that would have been typical of the wealthy elite in other cities too. Many who likewise didn’t have to work for their own living. They spent some time on training for war, but in my view, not that much.
So, for example, there’s no evidence for Spartans engaging in weapons practice or mock combat. They did practice drill. In other words, how to maneuver in formation without getting into disorder. Um, but Zenov suggests that this drill was very simple, that each file in the Spartan army, um, of perhaps about eight deep, um, operated independently as a unit. And when there was a complex maneuver, they were turning to the right or left or even having to reverse, uh, if the enemy appeared in the rear, each file leader would lead the way. He had to coordinate with other file leaders. But the rank and file, the other seven or so men behind him in the file, simply had to follow his lead. Zathan says anyone who could recognize another man, in other words, the back of another man, um, can’t go wrong. You simply have to follow the man in front. Um, and it’s a simple mechanism which has to be simple because remember the army is not just the Spartiates but also the Perioikoi, and if you’re a working farmer, you haven’t got much time to spend training on this drill or many opportunities for congregating, particularly of the periodic spread around Spartan territory. So, the drill could be learned part-time. And so, there’s no reason to believe that Spartans had to, uh, spend all their time training for war.
Um, in fact, what training for war they did seems to have been mainly about keeping fit. So, they took part in activities in the gymnasium. Uh, they took part in other sporting activities, uh, wrestling, throwing the javelin, etc., running. Obviously, they also went hunting, and Zelan says that this is the way that men over 30 kept as fit as the younger men by going hunting. And hunting is on foot, not on horseback. So, it’s good fitness training for running across terrain and so on. And they also do coral dancing too, which is, you know, good fitness training, coordination, and so on. Um, and in doing all these activities, they’re doing what the elite in other city-states would do, spending time on, you know, physical activities, gymnasium, hunting, dancing, and so on. Um, and then there’s socialization.
Um, Zelan’s Helica provides a couple of very interesting vignettes of Spartan life, uh, Spartan daily life. And one is this episode of Kinadone that I mentioned earlier where this Kinadone, who is inferior, is trying to get together a conspiracy and he’s trying to recruit a certain potential recruit into the conspiracy and takes him on a guided tour of Sparta. And first, they go into the Agora and they see some Spartans doing business with these 70 Spartans doing business surrounded by all these non-Spartans. Then they go into the streets of Sparta where they see Spartans walking about in ones and twos. And then they go into the countryside and on each estate, they find a single Spartan supervising the laborers on that estate, obviously the helots working the estate. And this last point is particularly important. The Spartans have to spend time on estate management because they need their estates to be productive to produce the mess contributions that are required to maintain their citizenship. So, Spartans have to spend time on estate management. They’re not working in the fields themselves, but they have to supervise, uh, the labor.
And then the other episode, um, concerning the trial of a man, an errant Spartan general called Sodrias, dates to 378 BC. Um, it’s basically a story of how, um, Sodrias’ son manages to persuade King Agelaris and his cronies not to convict this errant general, his father. And as part of the, uh, episode, Zeran depicts in the early morning citizens going down to meet with the King of Gizlaws while he’s taking his morning bath in the river Yurotas. So, they’re socializing with the king early in the morning. Later on, he shows these friends of Sadras gathering together in friendship groups and even watching over his teenage son. Uh, Sadius has fled Sparta because he thinks he’s going to be convicted. Um, and in his absence, his friends, uh, check on, uh, what’s happening to his senior son. And they’re obviously doing this as a group.
So, there’s a lot of socialization that’s going on in Spartan life. And then, of course, in the evening, Spartans socialize in their common mass, a group of 15 or so men of different ages. Um, and this socialization is very important because another key to maintaining your wealth and your status is to get a good marriage, an advantageous marriage. And this socialization is sort of preparing the ground, you know, for getting your sons and your daughters accepted by your friends as being the sort of family that they’ll want to marry into. Um, and that takes up a lot of time in Spartan life. And then, of course, we haven’t mentioned the whole sphere of religion and all the cults and festivals that Spartans take part in, in the same way that other Greeks do. So, there’s a lot more to Spartan citizen life than simply training for war. It is quite diverse. Huh. Yeah. It’s not quite the comic 300, is it? Um, certainly not. No.
Spartan Military Superiority
So, in light of these rudimentary drills they’re doing and the fact that their lifestyles are quite similar to those of leisure gentlemen elsewhere in Greece, to what extent was Spartan military superiority based on not myth per se, but on reputation as opposed to reality? Well, I think the myth, sorry, the idea of military superiority is partly true, but it’s partly exaggerated. Um, it’s true that in pitch battles, Spartan armies often had the edge and one reason was this ability to make maneuvers in formation both before and during battle in a better way than other armies can do. Um, I’ll give you a couple of examples.
At the battle of Manta in 418, the Spartan left wing is defeated, but King Agus is able to wheel round mid-battle all his remaining troops um in order to come to the aid of that defeated left wing. And that’s what achieves the victory. And then at the battle of Namir in 394, the Spartans loop round the left wing of the enemy and are able to maneuver such that they can then attack the rest of the enemy army from the side where they’re less well protected. And so the Spartans, through these maneuvers, you know, often have the edge.
The other edge is that they have a very stratified command structure and um most Greek armies have a very flat command structure, one or two layers of officers at most. But the Spartans have five layers of officers if you include the king and the describes it in his account of the battle of Mena in 418. And he marvels at how efficiently orders pass down from king right down to the lowest unit, the enomatia, um which is some 30 odd strong. Um, and so the ability of the king to pass orders down mid-battle um must be a key in giving the Spartan army much more adaptability and being able to react to, as the famous saying goes, that you know no plan survives the shock of the first shock of battle. The Spartans have a means by where they can make they can adapt in a way in the way that King Ais was able to adapt and get his army to wheel round mid-battle.
And the Spartans do win several major battles. You know, they win the battle of Plateier against the Persians in 479. They beat the Athenians at Tanagra in 457. Uh, they defeat their enemies at Mentine in 418 and then also at Na in 394. But they’re not invincible. Um, their big defeat comes, of course, at Lutra in 371, which marks the end of Spartan hegemony. But that’s not the first defeat. There are smaller defeats in previous battles in the early 4th century.
And part of the reason Spartan tactics tend to be predictable. When they hit upon a winning maneuver such as this, overlapping the enemy’s left wing, they stick to it for too long. And that’s partly how the Theans counter it at Lutra. Um, the Theans um they line up in greater depth um and they head straight for the Spartan king and they allow the Spartans to loop round. But by attacking the Spartan king straight on and killing the king, um they, as it were, chop off the head of the serpent and they could do that because they knew in advance what maneuver the Spartans would adopt.
Sparta’s other weakness is that they’re strong in the hoplites but weak in other areas too. So they have a very weak cavalry and that’s part of why they’re defeated at Lutra. Uh, the initial cavalry battle is won by the Boeotians. The Spartan hoplites are also vulnerable to light-armed troops such as the peltasts who can throw javelins and then run away. And one major Spartan defeat in 390 is because the Spartan contingent. They throw their weapons, they run away, the Spartans can’t effectively pursue them, and then they come back again, throw more javelins, and run away again. And the Spartans are gradually diminished in their numbers. They’re also poor in siege warfare, too.
Um, they were never able to subdue the major Helot revolt of the 460s. The revolting helots hold up on Mount Itham, a kind of maroon community. The Spartans besiege them for several years but eventually have to come to an agreement whereby the helots will leave the Peloponnese with their wives and children. So it’s a stalemate and the lack of budget warfare means the Spartans can’t subdue them. So there’s those respects in which Spartan spirit is mythical.
Decline and Fall
Um right. So obviously they’re very formidable, if not invincible, for quite a long time. Um but you’ve mentioned how at the battle of Lutra in 371, um the whole system really falls apart. It’s a catastrophic defeat and it’s part of this long, well, this catastrophic descent of Sparta from hegemonic power in the early 4th century to the rate of a second-rate power for almost the rest of antiquity after the mid-Vth century. Um why did Sparta decline so rapidly in this period, um aside from this defeat at Lutra?
Um well yes, um the military element is important. Uh that’s the kind, as it were, the trigger, but I think underneath that there’s, um, there’s at least two other elements. One is that Spartan power relies upon its allies. Sparta has this alliance system known as the Peloponnesian League, um which is most of the other states of the Peloponnesus plus a few outside, and at one time in the fifth century, including the Thebans themselves. Um in the early 4th century, when Sparta defeats the Athenians at the end of the Peloponnesian War and acquires its empire, it starts to behave very high-handedly towards its allies. It alienates many of its traditional allies.
Um, and I should have said, um, a moment ago that Spartans rarely fight wars when they haven’t got their allies in tow. Um, there’s a number of occasions when the Spartan proposal campaign, the allies demur, and the Spartans give up. Um, and so without their allies, the Spartans are much weakened. And over the course of the early 4th century, Spartan high-handed behavior, um, means that the allies get increasingly disenchanted, um, and they fight only half-heartedly, and some go into revolt. And when the defeat at Lutra happens, um, a number of the allies take it as the opportunity to free themselves permanently from Spartan power, and in particular the cities in Arcadia, which is just to the north of Sparta, the central area of the Peloponnesus. They form a new league, um, whereby they combine against Sparta. The Spartans are not able to defeat them militarily and stop the league from forming. Um, and it’s the Arcadians who invite in the Thebans into the Peloponnesus and combine with the Thebans and some other, uh, cities to invade Sparta. Um, and, uh, it’s that invasion in 370 that brings about the collapse of Spartan power.
Now that poses the further problem: why was one major defeat at Lutra, um, sufficient to make the Spartans so feeble that they can’t resist this invasion? And here I think we go to internal problems, the ones I’ve mentioned earlier, that, um, Spartan numbers have declined so significantly from 8,000 down to barely more than a thousand that, um, they don’t have the manpower to form an effective core to resist an external invasion.
Um, Aristotle says that Sparta was destroyed by oliganthropia, a shortage of men, and this is due to the land inequalities that I mentioned earlier and the many poor Spartans dropping out of the citizen body. So the Spartans are over-reliant. They become over-reliant in the 4th century on non-Spartans, their allies, the perioikoi, and of course the free helots. Um, but these are not powerful enough to resist an external invasion, particularly when the perioikoi on the borders are beginning to get a bit shaky. Um, so the Thebans and the Arcadians and their allies invade Laconia. They can’t capture Sparta, but they devastate much of Laconia, and then they go into Messenia and they liberate the Messenians from Spartan control. So Sparta has lost half of its territory and the most fertile half with the most number of helots. So from this point onwards, Sparta is much reduced in its landed control, its control of, uh, slave population, and therefore certainly its resources and its ability to, um, to restore its former first-rate power.
Um, I visited Messenia once and remember kind of marveling at those gigantic walls they built around the new helot former capital. Yes. They’re so impressive, aren’t they? Yes. Yes. Um, and I’m reminded through this whole process of sort of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Different dynamic, of course, but again external pressures revealing all kinds of internal weaknesses and bringing about, you know, this kind of cascading collapse.
Athens vs. Sparta
Uh, so often in our sources and even as we teach Greek history, we tend to oppose Athens to Sparta because we know the most about them. In some ways, they’re the most discussed. Um, to what extent is this familiar antithesis misleading? Um, and why, if it’s not misleading, were so many prominent Athenians impressed by Sparta, at least impressed by the idea of Sparta?
Well, there are respects in which Spartan life and society is similar to Athens, but also it’s different. Um, the obvious contrasts are that, you know, Athens is a democracy. Um, Sparta is an oligarchy. Um, Athens’ power is largely naval, whereas Sparta’s power is largely on the land. Now, one can exaggerate that the Spartans do develop a navy in the late fifth century. The Athenians, of course, have, you know, a hoplite force too. Um, but these contrasts are exaggerated by, uh, sources, which are a very high number, are Athenian, um, and Athenian democratic ideology exaggerates the contrast of Sparta partly as part of their imperial rivalry.
Um, a phenomenon that one of my colleagues has called the barbarization of Sparta, whereby, um, after the Persians have been defeated, the Spartans are treated as the new barbarians with customs that are, you know, very strange and unusual. And one of the most striking, uh, ways in which the Spartans are barbarized, uh, portrayed like the Persians, is that Athenian democratic ideology portrays Spartan males as dominated by their women. Um, and this comes across particularly in the works of Euripides and especially in his play, the Andromeda.
Um, where, um, Andromeda is sort of, uh, uh, the wife of Pelas in central Greece. Um, and she, um, is sort of, um, is sort of, uh, no, sorry. Let me start again. I’m getting mixed up. No worries. Um, let me cut to the chase. The key point is that, um, there are certain key figures in, uh, uh, uh, certain key Spartan figures in, um, in the play. There’s, uh, there’s Hermione, who is the wife of Pelas, u, and, um, she comes into conflict with Andromeda, who’s brought back from Troy, and, um, she’s shown to be very, um, the Spartan princess is shown to be very overbearing her, and at one point she brings in, u, her father Menelaus. She’s the daughter of Menelaus and Helen, um, and she more or less browbeats Menelaus into, into sort of defending her position, and Menelaus is portrayed as very much enthralled with his daughter.
So this is very much the image of Spartan males who are sort of being dominated by their women, and of course the whole lifestyle of Spartan young women, um, taking part in sport, not being very, well, not wearing many clothes, and so on. It’s easy to portray Spartan men as being dominated by their women.
Now, as against that idea that Sparta is very different, the reality is that the lives of Athenian and Spartan elites are not that different. As I said earlier, they have very similar leisured lifestyles. They also have much in common. Um, there are many personal friendships, what the Greeks called philia, between leading Athenians and leading Spartans.
Um, in the mid-fifth century, the leading Athenian, Kimone, he calls one of his sons Lacadammonius, you know, the Lacadammonian, and he’s very much of the opinion that, you know, this old alliance of Sparta and Athens that defeated the Persians should be maintained. Um, and then even later in the century, during the time of the Peloponnesian War, it tells us that the Athenian leader Pericles is a guest friend, philos, of the Spartan king Archidamus. Um, and later in the war too, it says that the Athenian Alcibiades has a guest friend called Endios in Sparta. And he goes on to say that, in fact, the name Alcibiades was originally a Spartan name, and it, it, it, it transmigrated into the Athenian family because of their family friendships.
And we know that the earliest known Alcibiades in Athens is in the mid-sixth century, mid-sixth century. So almost 150 years before the famous Alcibiades in the late fifth century. So this is obviously a long-standing friendship between this Spartan and this Athenian family. And there are other examples one could give. So a lot of personal connections between, uh, leading Athenians and leading Spartans.
And then to certain elites, Athenians, those who don’t like the democracy, Spartan way of life is a way of life that they had once had and then had lost. A life in which the poor knew their place and were deferential towards the elite. And likewise, Sparta, in which slaves knew their place. Um, there’s a work by the old oligarch, the so-called Constitution of Athens, where one of his objections is to how uppity the slaves are in Athens. Um, and how, you know, you can’t tell them from poor citizens. Therefore, you can’t strike a slave because you might be striking a citizen by mistake. Um, and how you have to pander to these well-off slaves.
And the reality behind this is probably that in Athens, um, many slaves, well, not many, but quite a number of slaves are working semi-independently. They’re set up by their masters in trades or some sort of business, and they live away from their master, but they pay their master a rent, uh, in return for having been set up. Um, but they operate because they operate independently, they’re much more prominent. They go about Athens, um, on their own account. Um, and this is anathema to, uh, certain segments of the Athenian elite who think the slaves must always be under their master’s control. And if these slaves, you know, are doing quite well in business, they can dress as well as poor Athenian citizens and therefore be indistinguishable.
And the old oligarch says very briefly, now if I were in Sparta, my slave would fear you. So Sparta clearly is where the slaves fear their masters, unlike in Athens. So there are many ways in which prominent Athenians can be impressed by the Spartans.
Of course, the culmination of this comes with Sparta’s defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and after the war, the Spartans temporarily impose a very narrow oligarchic regime, the what became known as the tyranny of the 30. Um, and in many ways, they ape Spartan customs in, uh, during their, um, and they behave towards the Athenian poor and to the non-Athenians, the metics, uh, in a very, um, very brutal way, in the way that they imagine the Spartans would behave towards their subject helots. It can be easy, I think, looking at Athens and Sparta from a non-expert’s point of view to sort of take Thucydides’s, uh, dichotomy of the two as almost different principles and impose that upon these societies, which is misleading in all kinds of ways, but it’s easy, and so it’s been done very often in the Cold War. For example, people reading in the US, at least, um, this is sort of a US-USSR kind of conflict: democracy, tyranny, whatever else.
Remembering Sparta
Misleading, but it’s easy, and so it’s done. Thinking about, uh, wild misappropriations of Sparta, uh, in the modern world, um, of which there are, of course, so many. Uh, the most notorious, um, is of course the Nazis.
Use the Spartan mythos, um, and, uh, if you could talk a bit about this, um, why and how the Nazis do identify themselves or their idea of the Aryan youth with the Spartans. How do you think this is in, say, the 20th-century context of a certain kind of person, authoritarian, whatever else, um, idealizing Sparta as the ideal society?
Well, before I come on to the Nazis, I’ll just say a few words about the parallel that you mentioned. You know, the Cold War situation, um, and it’s true that under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, um, Sparta was seen as an ancient analog for the Soviet Union. Um, before that, um, the Cold War was often compared with the Peloponnesian War, but it wasn’t always, um, the USA as Athens and part of the Soviet Union. Um, for some commentators, um, the, uh, the comparison was that, um, the Athenians, uh, that the USA was more like the Spartans, the, uh, the traditional power, um, that was being challenged by the, uh, uh, newer sort of Soviet system. Um, but anyway, back to the Nazis.
Your, your, um, the Nazi use of Sparta is politically intensive, but it builds upon earlier German ideas. Um, back in the 19th century, um, the newly emerging, you know, um, Prussian state and, um, and then the German state that followed on, um, in the late 19th century, there were often, they often saw parallels between the Aryans, modern Aryans, and the ancient Dorian, with the Germans as the main representative of the modern Aryan race and the Spartans as the main representatives of the Dorian. Um, and in more concrete terms too, um, within certain circles, particularly the Prussian cadet corps, um, much of that education of, you know, future sort of military leaders was based upon Spartan ideals or Spartan principles, or at least what they thought were Spartan principles, um, as enunciated in Plutarch and in the sayings of Spartans. Um, and so, um, there’s within German thought, there’s, you know, a longstanding, um, uh, parallel between Sparta and Germany.
Uh, and then during World War I, um, one particular battle, the defeat of the German contingent at Langmark, was compared quite strongly to the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae. Um, so there’s a background even before the Nazis take power. But the Nazis intensify this. They continue the educational use. They set up the, um, uh, the so-called Napol schools, um, in which again Spartan values are very much instilled. Um, you may have come across a marvelous book by, um, Helen Rash called Sparta’s German Children. Um, the first half is about the Prussian cadet corps in the 19th century, and then the second half is about the Napols under the Nazis. Um, and, and, and how the, um, she was able to interview, um, a number of former pupils of these Napol schools who, um, by the time she was doing her research in the first decade of the current century, they were, they’re old men in their 70s or 80s, um, but were able to, he was able to interview these, or either by correspondence or in person, and it was very clear how Sparta still meant a lot to them from their memories of the education they’d been given as boys.
Um, and underpinning all this was that the Nazis went to the extent of even seeing themselves, the modern Germans, and the Spartans as even related by blood. Um, going even beyond this, the more generic um, Aryan Dorian affinity that had been in the 19th century. Um, and this penetrates therefore a whole range of um, Nazi policies. Um, I’ve mentioned education already. Um, it even affected the, um, their Nazis’ approach to the landed property. Uh, in 1934, they introduced a, a, a landed law called the Reich Airoff Gazettes, the state law of hereditary entailment. And as part of this, they, um, tried to tie certain Prussian farmers down to the same kind of land tenure as is described of the Spartans in Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus.
Um, and then, of course, there’s the whole use of the helots, where the Spartans’ imagined brutality towards the helots, with the krypteia and so on, becomes a kind of precedent for the brutal oppression of a subhuman species as far as the Nazis are concerned. The Jews, most obviously, and the Holocaust, but also, um, the Slavic populations of the east. You know, the idea of, uh, the German invasion of Russia was to subdue, uh, the Slavs to render them helots, as, as one, uh, German general plan, uh, the so-called General Plan Ost, uh, proposed. So this, you know, is just some of a variety of ways in which the Nazis intensify to an extreme degree the previous German, uh, affinity between Sparta and Germany.
Now, in the wider European context, this is quite unusual because by this time, um, in most Western European countries, the UK, France, and elsewhere, Sparta has gone out of fashion. You know, Sparta had been the model polis up until the American and French revolutions and the rise of liberalism in the early 19th century. But by the early 20th century, in most Western European countries, Sparta is regarded as backward, agrarian, uh, totalitarian or authoritarian, um, as opposed to a modern industrialized, uh, commercial state marked by growing liberal democracy and the like. Um, and so the German and then the Nazi appropriation stands out very much as the opposite of that. And of course, this opens the way during World War II, um, for British propagandists to portray the war as Athens versus Sparta, repeated. The Spartans, Germans of the Spartans who sacrificed their earlier culture to military efficiency. The British, in particular, are sort of freedom-loving democrats with a naval empire. Um, and, uh, they have, they have, they’ve retained their culture and so on and so forth. And, um, particularly in left-wing and liberal circles, this identification of Germany and Sparta is very pronounced.
Wrapping Up
Well, that’s fascinating how flexible Sparta has been as an idea and how pervasive, you know, across, you know, century after century of European thought. Uh, really, really remarkable stuff. Um, and again, I thank you so much, Steve, uh, for this interview. I’ve learned so much about Sparta, and I’m sure my listeners have, too. I’m really appreciate you coming on and sharing what you know, um, about this fascinating and still perplexing, uh, ancient society, and it still has lots of room for research.
If anyone out there is, you know, interested in, you know, any young people who want to sort of uh uh study ancient history and get into researching Sparta. Uh, there’s lots of young scholars coming into the field and we’re learning new things every day.
Yeah. Well, that’s great to hear. So, New Horizon’s opening up, but uh, but again, thanks so much, Steve, and to everyone listening. Uh, thanks for tuning in. It’s been my pleasure.
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