The Fall of the Spartan Empire essay

The Fall of the Spartan Empire

The decisive defeat of the Spartan hoplite army by the armed forces of Thebes at the battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. ended an epoch in Greek military history and permanently altered the Greek balance of power. One by one, the old certainties of the ‘Golden Age’ of the fifth century had been challenged and overthrown, but the image of Spartan military invincibility had, until this moment, remained a secure bastion.

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Once, the very sight and sound of an advancing line of Spartan soldiers had been enough to break the nerve of opponents, even before the shock of arms. In their signature scarlet capes, nodding horsehair helmet plumes, and close-ordered shields, each emblazoned with L (lambda, for ‘Lacedaemon’ or ‘Laconia,’ two names for the Spartan home territory), the Spartans appeared as a series of rippling horizontal lightning bolts, the unbroken lines of warriors striding forward in measured lock-step to the shrill music of military pipers.

Their capacity to move quickly over difficult terrain, concentrate their forces suddenly, and execute complex pre-battle tactical maneuvers was legendary. The shock of their final charge was as sure and deadly as the sky-god Zeus’s thunder weapon.

Just a short generation before Leuctra, in 404 B.C., the Spartans had decisively beaten Athens, long their most dangerous enemy. In so doing Sparta had seized the hegemony of the Greek world. Leuctra must have seemed to many observers of the contemporary scene like rain from a clear blue sky. Yet, in hindsight, when we look more closely at the history of Sparta as a military society, the collapse at Leuctra starts to make sense. By the time they met the Thebans there, Sparta had long been in serious trouble; it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to exploit Sparta’s profound inner weaknesses. The story of Sparta’s decline and fall is an object lesson in the intimate relationship between social organization and military power.

The city-state of Sparta, occupying the central finger of the southern Greek peninsula of the Peloponnesus, dominated the fertile valley of the Eurotas River and was overlooked by the craggy Taegetus Range. Controlling a territory of some 3,500 square miles, Sparta was unquestionably the greatest military power of the Greek classical era.

On close inspection it is a remarkable study in contradictions: long-famed among the Greeks for its constitutional stability and regarded by many ancient writers as the embodiment of traditional Greek values of civic responsibility, personal bravery, and bluntly honest speech, Sparta proved to be a devious, self-deluded, brittle, and hopelessly confused society at the very moment of its most notable success. The epitome of the Greek ‘hoplite republic,’ Sparta was in the end unable to field enough hoplite-warriors to stave off military disaster.

At the heart of those apparent contradictions was a society whose strength lay in a profoundly conservative social order, an order predicated on maintaining a bewildering array of mutually hostile social castes. Each Spart…………………………..