A nation of fighters
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When we think of ancient Greece, we almost invariably think of Athens. This is where the
blueprint for Western civilisation received its first draft. Philosophy and science, art and
architecture, democracy itself – all these have their roots there. But there's more to the story of
ancient Greece than Athens.
Unlike Athens, Sparta can't boast of its philosophers and politicians and artists. It became
famous for two things: its frugality – which is where we get our word 'spartan' from – and its
fighters. In everyday Sparta, these two were intimately linked.
The whole of Spartan society conformed to a strict code of extreme discipline and self-sacrifice.
Their aim was to create the perfect state protected by the perfect. Although Spartan hard-line
ideals don't have the charisma of Athenian culture, they have meant as much to Western
civilisation as the ideals represented by the Parthenon. Down the centuries, the Spartans have
inspired a diverse range of people. Anyone with a plan for a utopia has cherry-picked their ideas
– Plato, Sir Thomas More, the French revolutionaries, American pioneers, Adolf Hitler, even the
founders of the English public school system. They all turned directly to the Spartans for ideas
and inspiration.
So the story of the Spartans is also, in a way, the story of ourselves. It's the story of how many of
the values that we hold dear were first found in a warrior state on the mainland of Greece 2,500
years ago.
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Early history
The Spartans' history is highly dramatic – and it has a setting to match: the Peloponnese, a huge
peninsula crowned by rugged mountains and scored by deep gorges, which forms the southernmost part of the Greek mainland.
The ancient Greeks thought of it as an island – and seen from the northern side of the Gulf of
Corinth, it does have a brooding, closed-in feel, cold-shouldering the outside world.
Long before the Spartans of our story arrived on the scene, this part of the world was making
history. Many of the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War more than 3,000 years ago came from
here. King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, came from Mycenae, in the eastern
Peloponnese. And to the south, in the city-state of Sparta in the region known as Lakonia, was
the palace of Menelaus and his wife Helen – for Helen of Troy, whose beauty caused the Trojan
War, had once been Helen of Sparta.
The heroes of the Trojan War, their lavish palaces and possessions, the beauty of Helen – all
offered a standard against which the later Spartans would measure their own actions and
aspirations.
At some point in about 1200 BC, all this disappeared.
No one knows for sure what happened – earthquakes, tidal waves, slave revolts have all been
blamed. But all over the eastern Mediterranean, the world of Helen of Troy disappeared in a
cataclysm of fire and destruction. A remnant clung on for a few hundred years, but finally the
Dark Ages came to Greece and the thread of history snapped.
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The new Spartans
At some point in those centuries of darkness, new people came out of the north, seeking more
hospitable lands. They were called the Dorians, and they brought with them a new Greek dialect,
their sheep and goats and a few simple possessions. They settled all over the Peloponnese, and
some found their way to Lakonia and the lands that had once belonged to King Menelaus.
It had been a journey worth making. The people who came to Lakonia must have thought they
had found a Shangri-la. The plain of the Eurotas river was, north to south, 50 miles of precious,
flat, fertile farmland. And the river ran through it all year round. In land-hungry Greece, where
70% of the land couldn't be farmed and what was left was squeezed between the mountains
and the sea, that was a lot of elbow room.
To the west were the spectacular Taygetos mountains, rising to more than 8,000 feet (2,440
metres) in places. Patches of snow still lingered while down on the plain spring was turning into
summer. The slopes once teemed with game – deer, hare and wild boar, rich pickings for the
new arrivals.
But statistics don't convey the most striking quality of this place: the sense of security.
Everywhere you look, you're bounded by hills. The feeling is one of enclosure – not
claustrophobia, but safety. You feel that everything you could possibly want is here – if you can
just lay claim to it and keep the rest of the world at bay.
And so the herdsmen traded in their sheep for olive trees, and settled down. A new Sparta came
into being, and the new Spartans built a temple, the Menelaion, to honour the legendary king
and his wayward wife.
In the period of renewal following the Dark Ages, new city-states like Sparta appeared all over
Greece. They varied in size and power, but had one thing in common: they were all communities
governed according to a set of mutually agreed laws and customs. The rules by which people
agreed to live varied, but their aim was broadly the same: to create good order and justice and
to protect against chaos and lawlessness.
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Few clues
In Sparta today, archaeologists are still piecing together the story of the people who first came
here some 3,000 years ago and created an ideal city – a utopia. It's not an easy task because
they left relatively few clues behind.
Unlike the Athenians, the Spartans were famous for not building, not making things and, in
particular, not writing about themselves. Nearly every account we have of the Spartan way of
life was written by an outsider.
Some of these writers resented Sparta's power, some were in awe of its traditions and
achievements, and some were given to exaggeration – and there was much about Sparta that
lent itself to exaggeration. So of all the cities and civilisations in the ancient world, the Spartans
remain the most intriguing and the most mysterious.
Take, for example, Sparta's kings. Since time immemorial, Sparta had been ruled by not one but
two kings – two royal houses, two royal lines, twice the potential for the rows and wrangles to
which all monarchies are prone. The Spartans explained this unique arrangement by claiming
that their kings were direct descendants of the great-great grandsons of Heracles (Hercules), the
strongman of Greek myth. According to the legend, it was this pair of twins who wrested control
of the Peloponnese from the descendants of King Agamemnon.
The stories that people tell about themselves are always revealing. This tale of a land-grab by a
pair of aggressive usurpers, themselves descended from the most macho man in mythology,
sent out a worrying message to Sparta's neighbours.
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Aggressive expansionism
And it wasn't long before the Spartans started throwing their weight around, seizing control of
the whole of the Eurotas valley, enslaving non-Spartan inhabitants or categorising them as
perioikoi – 'those who live around' or 'neighbours'. In the rigid apartheid-like system that came
into being there, the perioikoi would become a disenfranchised caste of craftsmen and traders,
the economic muscle of the Spartan utopia.
But sorting out their immediate neighbours was just the first phase of Sparta's aggressive
expansionism. Despite the generous acres of the Eurotas valley, Sparta, like the rest of Greece,
always suffered from land hunger. Other city-states dealt with the problem by establishing
colonies throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. This Greek diaspora would eventually
spread as far west as the Strait of Gibraltar, and as far east as the Crimea in the Black Sea.
Sparta came up with its own take on colonisation: it looked west and began to wonder what
opportunities lay on the other side of the Taygetos mountains. It was there that they would go
to satisfy their hunger for land. It was there that their Shangri-la would reveal its dark underside.
For it was there that a slave-nation would be created to serve the Spartan master-race.
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Slavery
The journey through the gorges of the Taygetos mountains is as spectacular now as it must have
been some 2,800 years ago when the armies of Sparta headed west in search of conquest.
Several days' hard march would have brought them to the territory of the Messenians on the
other side of the mountains. The Spartans weren't coming just to take their land – they wanted
to take away their freedom, too. They intended to turn all the Messenians into helots. This word
translates as 'captives', but it came to mean, more bluntly, 'slaves'.
Slavery in ancient Greece was an accepted fact of life. But slaves were supposed to be foreigners
– barbarians who spoke no Greek and so were obviously suited by nature to be slaves. The
enslavement of fellow Greeks and on a massive scale was something else. The crushing of
Messenia set Sparta apart from the rest of Greece.
It also shaped the kind of place Sparta became – wary of unrest, paranoid about revolt.
Enslaving the Messenians was no easy task. It took two full-scale wars, each lasting 20 years or
more. We know something about the second one because we have an eye-witness to the events
– one of the first identifiable eye-witnesses known to history. He was called Tyrtaeus:
It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he has fallen among the front ranks while fighting
for his homeland.
Let us fight with spirit for this land and let us die for our children, no longer sparing our lives.
Make the spirit in your heart strong and valiant, and do not be in love with life when you are a
fighting man.
Tyrtaeus was a Spartan soldier and a war poet. His poems were battle cries, delivered with the
directness of a sergeant major putting some backbone into shirkers and faint-hearts.
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The hoplites
The kind of fighter that Tyrtaeus addresses in his poems was the hoplite – an infantryman armed
with an 8ft (2.4m) spear and a round shield. By the end of the 7th century, practically all Greek
cities had their own contingents of hoplites. They were not full-time professional soldiers. They
were generally farmers, who swapped ploughs and spades for spears and shields in defence of
their communities. By standing side by side with their neighbours and taking part in the fight,
these militia-men demonstrated not just their courage but their status as citizens.
Like the Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War who forged a republic on the ends of
their rifles, hoplites were more than just fighters: they were agents of profound social change.
Olympia was home of the famous games. It was also the unofficial shrine of the hoplite fighter –
for this was where he would come to dedicate his arms to the gods in thanks for a victory. The
'House of Bronze' must have been thick with the stuff, judging from the number of shields,
helmets and breastplates found here, and now on display in the museum.
The round shield – hoplon – was the cardinal item of equipment, and it was from this that the
hoplite probably derived his name. He held it by thrusting his left arm through the central
armband – the porpax – and gripping the antilabe, a leather thong attached to the rim, in his fist.
It was made mainly of wood, and weighed around 20lb (9 kilograms), which was quite a weight
to carry through a day's fighting. But to let your shield drop or fall in battle was the ultimate
disgrace.
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The phalanx
Hoplite fighting was a team effort: half your shield was for you, the other half for the man to
your left. The hoplites would form into densely packed ranks, collectively called a phalanx, seven
or eight deep and perhaps 50 shields across. Co-ordination and discipline were important, but
most important of all was trust: if your neighbour broke and ran, you would be left exposed to
the spear- points of the enemy.
When two phalanxes met, there was a natural
tendency for each line to edge to the right as the men tucked themselves behind their
neighbours' shields. It was at moments like this that the discipline of the phalanx threatened to
collapse. To be effective, you had to hold your ground.
Tyrtaeus had some helpful advice for Sparta's nerve-wracked hoplites:
Those who dare to stand fast at one another's side and to advance towards the front ranks in
hand-to-hand conflict, they die in smaller numbers and they keep the troops behind safe.
There wasn't much in the way of tactics once the shield walls came together. The battlefield all
but disappeared in a dust cloud as the two opposing masses of bronze and muscle heaved
against each other. The rear ranks provided the traction, pushing forward like rugby players in a
scrum.
It was in the front three ranks, within range of the enemy's spear points, that things got deadly.
It was there that a hoplite would come face to face with the snake-haired gorgon, emblazoned
on the shield of the enemy just inches away. The goddess's stare was said to have the power to
petrify people, and in the stabbing frenzy of battle, many must have felt as if their limbs were
turning to stone.
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Acts of citizenship
Crude it may have been, but hoplite fighting had far-reaching consequences. In the heaving
sweaty, noisy mêlée, neighbours chose to stand together in support of the common good. It was
an act of citizenship, and to take part in it was as much a privilege as an obligation.
To fight as a hoplite, you had to have the kit, and while few could manage a magnificent outfit,
the basic panoply – shield, spear and helmet – was within reach of around a third of the citystate's able-bodied male population. Being able to afford to fight was terribly important.
Aristotle said: 'Those who do the fighting wield absolute power.' In other words, if you didn't
fight for your community, you couldn't expect to have a stake in it.
So, on the day of battle, while well-to-do land-owners paraded in the front rank in their bespoke
armour, a dirt farmer's eldest boy, taking his place somewhere in the back with his grandfather's
dented helmet and his uncle's battered shield, would be determined at all costs to maintain his
family's standing as citizens.
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Keeping paradise safe
The Spartans finally defeated and enslaved the Messenians in about 650 BC. For the next 300
years, the latter would be forced to slave in the fields of their Spartan masters 'like asses, worn
out by heavy burdens', according to Tyrtaeus.
But now that Messenia had been won, the critical question for the Spartans became, then and
for centuries to come: how would they keep it?
Elsewhere in Greece, city-states were being torn apart by civil war between rich and poor. With
the spoils of Messene up for grabs, the chances of that happening in Sparta were greatly
increased.
To keep their paradise safe, the Spartans chose to act in a totally radical way. From now on, they
would dedicate themselves to the creation of a perfect society, and it would be modelled on the
hoplite phalanx – disciplined, collective and unselfish. There was going to be a revolution in
Shangri-la.
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Lycurgus
Every revolution needs a great leader. Sparta's was Lycurgus – the 'wolf worker'. He may or may
not have existed. In fact, so vague are his outlines that most historians now dismiss him as a
myth. But for the ancient Spartans, he was very real. He was a miracle worker who created a
unique social system on the advice of the gods themselves, a blueprint that would turn Spartan
society into one of the most extreme civilisations of the ancient world.
To keep the Messenian helots subdued and, just as importantly, to stop themselves from falling
out over the spoils of war, the Spartans decided to dedicate themselves to becoming the most
formidable, disciplined and professional warriors that Greece had ever seen. The whole of
Spartan society became, in effect, a military training camp.
Spartan men would neither farm nor fish, manufacture nor trade. They would simply fight. And
when they weren't fighting, they would train. And when they weren't training, they would
socialise with their fellow fighters rather than with their own families, to bolster the solidarity
and cohesion of the phalanx.
The single-mindedness and thoroughness with which they pursued this programme was
extreme, radical and typically Spartan. Being born Spartan was not enough. All male Spartans
had to earn their citizenship through long years of competitive struggle, and through surviving
one of the most gruelling training systems ever invented.
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Spartan eugenics
The first test came early. A ravine a few miles outside the centre of Sparta was known as the
Apothetae – the 'Deposits'. It was also called the 'place of rejection', because newly born
Spartan boys were thrown into the ravine if they were judged unfit to live.
Infanticide was common throughout ancient Greece. Unwanted babies – usually girls – were left
on hillsides. Sometimes they would be placed in a basket or protective pot so that there was at
least a chance of someone coming along and taking the child in.
In Sparta, things were, as ever, different. Boys rather than girls were the likeliest candidates for
infanticide. The decision about whether the child lived or died was not left to the parents but
was taken by the city elders. And there was no possibility of a kindly shepherd rescuing a
newborn child after it had been 'placed' down here. The decision of the city elders was final,
terminal and absolute.
Such state-sponsored eugenics has won Sparta many admirers over the years. Here's what one
20th-century leader had to say on the subject:
The abandonment of sick, puny and misshapen children by the Spartans was more humanitarian
and, in reality, a thousand times more humane than the pitiful madness of our present time
where the most sickly subjects are preserved at any price only to be followed by the breeding of a
race from degenerates burdened with disease.
No prizes for guessing that these are the words of Adolf Hitler.
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Education by ordeal
Surviving the Apothetae was just the start for the boys. At the age of seven, they were removed
from their families and placed in a training system called the agoge, which means, literally,
'rearing'. The children were treated little better than animals.
For Spartan boys, one of the classrooms of the agoge was the wild foothills of the Taygetos
mountains. They were organised into 'herds' under the command of an older 'boy herd', who
was responsible for discipline and punishment. Denied adequate clothing, they slept rough
throughout the year – and, in winter, temperatures could drop below freezing. Kept on short
rations, they were expected to steal to supplement their food. Anyone caught stealing was
flogged – not for the theft itself, but for being an unskilful thief.
It was more of a trial by ordeal than an education.
One of the more famous Spartan legends concerns a young boy who allows his intestines to be
gnawed away by a fox that he has stolen and concealed, rather than cry out or let the animal go.
In the retelling, the story usually becomes a straightforward tale of endurance and moral
toughness. Restored to its original context, however, it sounds more like a half-starved,
brutalised boy dying from an excess of bone-headed obedience.
The Taygetos also provided the backdrop for one of Sparta's most controversial and disputed
institutions: the krypteia or 'secret service brigade'. Membership of this was reserved for boys
who had shown particular promise. Hard cases would be sent out into the wilds with basic
rations and a knife. By day, they would lie low and, at night, would infiltrate the valley below,
murdering any helot they caught.
For some historians, this vision of adolescent lynch mobs roaming the countryside is simply too
lurid to accept. But a reign of terror – random, vicious and unprovoked – is precisely the kind of
tactic that might keep a large slave population quiet.
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Rite of passage
Although Sparta encouraged the collective spirit, it placed a higher value on individual
achievement. The boys were tested constantly – against each other and against their own
limitations.
The competitive nature of the Spartan system found its most extreme expression at the
sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. If a boy survived his first five years in the agoge, he would go there
at the age of 12 for a brutal rite of passage.
On the altar, cheeses were placed – the sort of homely nourishing foodstuff that young boys on
short rations would have found irresistible. The challenge was simple: to steal as many cheeses
as possible. But in front of the altar was a phalanx of ephebes – boys in their 20s – carrying
whips. Their instructions were to protect the altar, showing neither mercy nor restraint.
Indoctrinated with the tenets of endurance and perseverance, and determined to excel in this
public display, the 12-year-olds would brave the gauntlet again and again. Meeting the whips
face on, they would have suffered the most horrific injuries. The weakest never left alive.
The sheer brutality of a system seems alien. But it's not just modern audiences who find the
Spartans shocking. The philosopher Aristotle argued that they turned their children into animals,
while other contemporary Greeks pictured them as bees swarming round a hive, stripped of
their individuality.
It's been a popular conception of Sparta through the centuries, but one that misses an
important point.
Taking part in any mass activity can be fantastically unifying. We all recognise that feeling if
we're part of a Mexican wave in a football crowd, singing in a choir or joining a protest march.
As individuals, we are not diminished by the crowd. We become stronger; our reach is greater;
our sense of self is magnified.
That was the underlying appeal of the Spartan system as a whole: the possibility of transcending
your limitations as an individual and becoming part of something bigger and better.
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War music
From the age of 12, the boys' training became, if possible, even more exacting. Reading and
writing were taught 'no more than was necessary', but music and dancing were regarded as
essential.
The battlefields on which hoplites clashed were once memorably described as the 'dancing
floors of war'. A phalanx that was able to move together in a coordinated way made for a
formidable dancing partner.
So the Spartans spent many hours perfecting what was known as 'war music', a kind of rhythmic
drill in which changes in direction and pace were communicated musically. The Spartans earned
the reputation for being 'the most musical and the most war-like of people'.
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The common messes
At the age of 20, with their training nearing completion, Spartan males faced their most crucial
test: election to one of the common messes – dining clubs – where they would be expected to
spend most of their time when they weren't training or fighting.
But even if you had survived the brutal apprenticeship of the agoge, entry to these exclusive
gentlemen's clubs was not guaranteed. Election to a mess was by the vote of existing members.
You could be blackballed if it was felt that you didn't measure up – and that would be that. You
would become a failed Spartan, consigned to a living hell of exclusion and public humiliation.
If, on the other hand, you were elected, you would receive from the state a share of land and a
quota of helots. You were now one of the homoioi – one of the peers, the warrior élite at the
top of Sparta's hierarchy.
The common messes, which lay a mile or so from the centre of Sparta, were an essential part of
the city's social engineering, intended to keep discord and civil strife at bay. Old and young
mixed here, easing generational conflicts – a constant source of friction elsewhere in Greece.
More importantly, rich and poor met on an equal footing, the differences between them hidden
by a rigorously enforced code of 'conspicuous non-consumption'.
In egalitarian Sparta, the rule was: even if you've got it, don't flaunt it. This was applied to
everything from houses to clothes, even to food. In the common messes, the dish of the day,
every day, was a concoction made of boiled pigs' blood and vinegar, known as melas zomos,
'black soup'.
The joke goes that, on being told the recipe for black soup, a man from Sybaris – a city in
southern Italy infamous for its luxury and gluttony – said he now understood why the Spartans
were so willing to die.
Spartan frugality may have shocked their contemporaries, but to a modern audience, their diet
– leaving aside the black soup – sounds nutritious and healthy. Their land was very fertile,
producing figs and quinces among other fruits. It was also a rich hunting ground. Compared to
the diets of their neighbours – and enemies – the Spartans' comprised a much higher proportion
of meat.
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Defining citizenship
Free from the need to make a living (thanks to their helots), free from the anxieties of ill-health
(thanks to their healthy diet and rigorous keep-fit regime), free from the pressure to 'keep up
with the Joneses' (thanks to their egalitarian code), the Spartans could be said to be a people
who knew the 'good life'.
More importantly, they were entirely new kinds of human beings: citizens. The Spartan system
was one of the first in Western history to define what citizenship meant.
Sparta was the first society to offer a social contract based on duties and rights, and it was
introduced there 100 years or more before Athens – the so-called 'cradle of democracy' – had
even started thinking along similar lines.
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Radical to conservative
The myth of Lycurgus ends on a prophetic note. Having persuaded his fellow citizens to adopt
his radical rule book, he made them swear not to meddle with anything until he returned from a
consultation with the gods at the religious site at Delphi.
The oath was given, Lycurgus departed ... and never came back, sealing with his own, voluntary
death the Spartans' oath.
As explanations go, this is on a par with the rest of Lycurgus's mythical life, but at least it
attempts to explain one of the most puzzling facts about Sparta: that, having embarked on a
radical social experiment, this revolutionary city-state would soon become the most hide-bound
and conservative in the whole of ancient Greece.
Change was coming – but it was originating beyond Sparta's borders. In 480 BC, disturbing news
reached the Spartans: the Persian empire was on the move. A huge invasion force was heading
west by land and sea, bent on subduing the troublesome Greeks. The time had come to see
whether Sparta's celebrated warriors would live up to their fearsome reputation – and save the
Greek world from the threat from the east.
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Leonidas
Archaeology came relatively late to Sparta. It wasn't until 1906 that a British team began the
first systematic excavations. In 1925, they made a major discovery: a striking life-sized bust of a
Spartan warrior dating from the 5th century BC. When it was discovered, one of the Greek
workmen said unhesitatingly, 'This is Leonidas.'
Leonidas was Sparta's super-hero – the king who, with 300 warriors, made a doomed last stand
against the might of Persia in the pass at Thermopylae.
These days, the warrior presides magisterially over the museum in Sparta – they still call him
'Leonidas', though the name is safely within quote marks. The enigmatic smile is a convention of
sculpture from this period, but it definitely gives him a Mona Lisa-type quality. The eyes are
blank, but would probably have been inlaid with precious stone. The posture is puzzling – he
seems to lunging forward so much that he looks like he might topple over.
But, all in all, he conforms to the heroic Spartan ideal, right down to his facial hair – for one of
Lycurgus's more pernickety rules was that the upper lip should be clean-shaven and the beard
long.
We know very little about the real Leonidas. He was a member of the Agidai, one of the two
aristocratic families that supplied Sparta with her kings. He had been on the throne for 10 years
when the Persian juggernaut began to roll west.
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The Persians
Persia was the regional superpower of the eastern Mediterranean – a vast empire stretching
from present-day Afghanistan to the Aegean. The Greeks were an insignificant but increasingly
troublesome presence on the western limits of the empire, inciting rebellion among the king's
Greek subjects in Asia Minor.
In 499 BC, a major rebellion ended in the destruction of the royal city of Sardis. This was too
much for the Persians. They demanded oaths of loyalty from all the Greek city-states. Some
caved in, but others followed the defiant examples set by Sparta and Athens. When Persian
heralds went there demanding water and earth as tokens of submission, they were executed –
an act of sacrilege and a declaration of war.
King Darius made the first move. In 490 BC, he landed a punitive force on the Greek mainland at
Marathon, only to see it sent packing by Athens and her allies. When Darius died, it was left to
his son Xerxes to avenge the insult. Around the year 485, he began assembling a massive
invasion force to sort out the Greek problem once and for all.
The Persians set out, by land and sea, early in 480 BC. The land army was so vast that, according
to the Greek historian Herodotus (who lived during this time), it drank whole rivers dry.
Herodotus also reckoned that the combined Persian forces numbered more than 1.5 million
men. A more sober estimate would put the ceiling at 300,000 – far more than enough to crush
the minnow-like city-states of Greece.
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Thermopylae
When the Spartans learned that a Persian invasion was imminent, they asked the oracle at
Delphi for advice. The oracle was a kind of messaging service for the gods, delivered through the
mouth of a possessed priestess.
The Spartans were unswervingly pious, so what they were told now must have worried them
greatly:
Hear your fate, O dwellers in Sparta of the wide spaces.
Either your famed great town must be sacked by Perseus' sons [the Persians] – Or the whole land
of Lacedaemon
Shall mourn the death of a king of the house of Heracles.
Beneath the flowery language, the advice was straightforward: capitulate.
But despite the dire warning, Sparta decided to put itself at the head of the resistance to the
invasion. As the Persian army swung south towards the Greek heartland, a Greek force, under
the command of King Leonidas, headed north to stop their advance at Thermopylae – the 'gates
of fire'.
In 480 BC, Thermopylae was a natural bottleneck. The road south squeezed past the mountains
on one side and the sea on the other. Today, the mountains are still there, but the sea has
retreated a few miles. To this place came a force of 7,000-8,000 Greek hoplites from half-adozen city-states. They rebuilt a wall that ran across the narrowest part of the pass, and
hunkered down behind it, aiming to halt the Persian advance in its tracks.
Geography favoured the Greeks. Despite the overwhelming odds, the position was not hopeless.
If the Persian advance could be slowed here, it would give the Greeks a chance to organise more
formidable defences, on land and sea.
But for Leonidas in overall command, and for the 300 Spartan warriors who had accompanied
him, Thermopylae was more than a strategic strong point. It was the place where they intended
to show the world what it meant to be a Spartan.
For the first three days of the battle, the Greeks held off the Persian advance, sheltering behind
their wall and then counter-attacking in hoplite formation. Three times, the Persians attacked;
three times, they were beaten back.
Xerxes had almost given up hope when he was told of a secret path that crossed the mountains
and came out behind the Greek defences. When Leonidas discovered that the Persians were on
their way, he knew the game was up and, before long, the Greeks would be surrounded. While
there was still time for them to escape, Leonidas dismissed his allies, setting the stage for one of
history's most celebrated last stands.
In reality, the Spartans weren't entirely alone. Leonidas kept with him 400 troops from Thebes, a
city thought to be dangerously pro-Persian. There were also 700 fighters from Thespiae, as
determined as the Spartans to go down fighting. Finally, there were the Spartans' own helots,
who had no choice but to stay by their masters' sides. But this was Sparta's show, and the parts
played by others, willingly or unwillingly, were bound to be overshadowed.
On the final morning, the Spartans followed their usual pre-battle rituals. They stripped naked
and exercised. They oiled their bodies and combed out each other's long hair. They wrote their
names on small sticks and tied them to their arms – an ancient form of 'dog-tags' that would
allow their bodies to be identified later. Persian spies, observing these strange pre-battle rites,
reported back to Xerxes, who thought them laughable.
In the morning, the Persian king poured a libation to the rising sun and then ordered the
advance. The Greeks under Leonidas, knowing that the fight would be their last, pressed
forward into the widest part of the pass. They fought with reckless desperation – with swords if
they had them and, if not, with their hands and teeth – until the Persians, coming in from the
front and closing in from behind, overwhelmed them.
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The legacy of Thermopylae
Militarily, Thermopylae was insignificant. The Persian advance, delayed for less than a week,
was soon rolling south again. A far more important battle took place shortly afterwards in the
bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet, led by Athens, destroyed the Persian armada. It was a
scrappy, hit-and-miss affair, but Salamis marked the beginning of the end for the Persians'
invasion, and the following year, they were finally driven out of Greece.
But in the aftermath of victory, it was the doomed heroism of Thermopylae that captured the
imagination.
The 300 were buried at Thermopylae and honoured with an inscription that still echoes down
the centuries:
Go tell the Spartans,
Stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Thermopylae was a stage on which the Spartans performed the role for which they had spent
their lives training and preparing. They had shown the world the kind of place that Sparta was
and the kind of men it produced. They had fulfilled the ideals of their city and justified the claims
of their utopia.
And by doing that, according to Herodotus, they had 'laid up for the Spartans a treasure of fame
in which no other city could share'.
Leonidas's stage management certainly paid off. Today, in the Louvre in Paris, you can see the
Spartan king and the 300 at Thermopylae captured in all their nobility by the French
revolutionary painter David.
The Spartans certainly impressed Hitler. In February 1945, he told Martin Bormann:
And if, in spite of everything, the Fates have decreed that we should once more in the course of
our history be crushed by forces superior to our own, then let us go down with our heads high
and secure in the knowledge that the honour of the German people remains without blemish. A
desperate fight remains for all time a shining example. Let us remember Leonidas and his 300
Spartans! In any case, we are not of the stuff that goes tamely to the slaughter like sheep. They
may well exterminate us. But they will never lead us to the slaughter house!
The battle for supremacy
Although Sparta and Athens had fought as allies in the war against the Persians, they were very
different.
Athens, a fledgling democracy, could boast of being the commercial and cultural centre of
Greece – an outward-looking, civilised society where power supposedly lay with the demos – the
people.
Sparta was a militaristic state ruled by the homoioi, a warrior élite, and propped up by a
population of slaves. Its boys, if they survived a state programme of infanticide, were taken from
the arms of their mothers at the age of seven to be indoctrinated with the Spartan code of
death or glory. They lived mainly apart from their women who were a phenomenon in their own
right – independent, clever, physically and politically powerful.
These radically opposing systems were so incompatible that, with no common enemy to distract
them, cooperation between the two most powerful city-states in Greece was bound to give way
to fear and paranoia. And so the stage was set for an epic struggle – Sparta versus Athens, the
homoioi versus the demos. The result of that conflict would decide the fate of Greece.
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The Spartan status quo
For Sparta and Athens, the experience of the Persian invasion had been very different. Hundreds
of miles from the frontline, in the idyllic countryside of Lakonia, the Spartan homeland had been
untouched, whereas Athens had been invaded and its acropolis destroyed.
In the rugged, enclosed peninsula of the Peloponnese, the war had seemed a distant affair. With
peace restored, the Spartans quickly returned to their usual routine – the pursuit of physical and
military perfection. This was a society that was disciplined, obedient and, above all, willing to
sacrifice the needs of the family and the individual for the good of the state – and, if necessary,
to die for the cause.
The cause was simple – protection of the Spartan version of utopia. To do that, the Spartans
needed to produce more of its famed hoplite warriors. But beyond that, they had few other
ambitions. All they wanted was to maintain the status quo.
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Change in Athens
However, in post-war Athens, things were changing fast. The trauma of occupation, followed by
the euphoria of victory, had transformed the city. Before the war, the foundations for
democracy had been laid, but this was democracy in name only. In reality, only men with money
had governed. Now a massive power shift was taking place.
The true cradle of democracy could be said to be an Athenian trireme. Each powered by nearly
200 oarsmen, these sea-borne battering rams had annihilated the Persian fleet at Salamis. At a
time of crisis, it had been the poor of Athens who had squeezed down on to the cramped rowing
benches and sent the triremes smashing into the hulls of their enemies.
These had been the have-nots of the city, the bottom of the political pecking order. But after
Salamis, all that changed. The oarsmen who had endured the sweat, stench and terror of the
triremes had won a historic victory and now they wanted their say. Athenian democracy was
galvanised.
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Pericles
The champion of the Athenian oarsmen was Pericles. He was a wealthy aristocrat, exactly the
sort who had run the so-called 'democracy' in Athens for generations. But he was shrewd
enough to sense that things were no longer the same and ambitious enough to put himself at
the head of that change.
Pericles could see that, to secure power, he needed to distance himself from the nobles, play to
the gallery, ingratiate himself with the people. A formidable orator, his powers of argument and
speech won them over. But it wasn't just what he said that impressed the citizens of Athens. He
designed a massive civic building programme that, in effect, would be a job-creation scheme for
the city's poor. He said:
All kinds of enterprises and demands will be created, which will provide inspiration for every art,
find employment for every hand and transform the whole people into wage earners, so that the
city will decorate and maintain herself at the same time.
True to his word, Pericles opened the coffers of Athens to pay for public festivals and grandiose
monuments such as the Parthenon. But most significantly of all, he introduced state salaries for
jury duty and war service. Now the oarsmen could trade in their rowing benches for seats of
power in the city. For the first time in Athens, democracy was truly coming to mean government
by the people.
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New thinking
It was in the Athenian agora where the people's voice was heard. If the Acropolis was the soul
of Athens, the agora was its beating heart. It was there that the day-to-day life of the city took
place. Artisans and lawyers, shopkeepers and philosophers – men from all walks of life rubbed
shoulders there, creating the buzz and bustle of the most democratic city-state in Greece.
Official posts were open to every man, irrespective of wealth and status. Everyone was expected
to pull his weight and participate. On days when speeches and debates were heard, all the exits
to the agora were closed, apart from the one that led up to the pnyx, where the Athenian
assembly sat. Slaves with ropes dipped in red paint would chivvy citizens up the slope, marking
out for a fine any who dragged their feet or tried to slip away. In Athens, democracy was
enforced as rigorously as military discipline was in Sparta.
But it wasn't just Athenian political life that had been revolutionised after the defeat of Persia.
Everything from commerce to culture received an infusion of energy and new thinking.
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Athenian walls
Although the Greek alliance had emerged victorious from the war, Persia remained a constant
threat. The city-states of Greece needed a leader to carry on the fight against the enemy from
the east. Sparta had no desire for the job so, while it turned its attentions inwards, Athens took
the helm and set its course in a different direction.
Unlike Sparta, happily land-locked in the Peloponnese, Athens had always been half in love with
the sea. With the defeat of the Persians, that love affair was formalised when the city was
physically linked to the port of Piraeus by defensive walls. The Athenians devoured their own
city to build their walls, scavenging raw material from public monuments and even using
headstones from graveyards. The result was 12 miles of imposing fortifications erected in record
time.
The walls meant that Athens was now officially a sea power, with all that implied in terms of
trade, the movement of people and the potential for empire building. As a statement of intent,
it also packed quite a punch – a defensive shield designed to keep the wealth of Athens in and
unwanted busybodies from neighbouring states out.
Athens became the policeman of the eastern Mediterranean. Its allies were expected to toe the
line and foot the bill. If any objected, they would soon find an Athenian fleet in their harbour. It
was trireme diplomacy.
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Sparta unbound
This shift in the balance of power could hardly have been missed by Sparta. The burgeoning
Athenian fleet was evidence enough, but when Sparta discovered that Athens had been building
walls, there was even more cause for concern.
The Spartans disliked walls because walls defined cities. Cities, if you weren't careful,
encouraged other things ... like democracy. And if there was one thing Sparta distrusted more
than walls, it was democracy.
Sparta famously had no walls. The Spartans said that their city's walls were its young men and its
borders the tips of their spears. For the Spartans, it wasn't laws or walls or magnificent public
buildings that made a city – it was their own ideals. In essence, Sparta was a city of the head and
the heart, and it existed, in its purest form, in the disciplined march of a hoplite phalanx on its
way to war.
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Different ways of being
Athens and Sparta represented two radically different ways of being. Choosing between them
would seem to present no difficulties for the Greeks. Sparta was militaristic and xenophobic.
Athens was dynamic and open to the world.
But, of course, things are never that simple. Athens could be imperialist, arrogant and aggressive,
and its democracy excluded women, foreigners and slaves. Its politics were volatile and that
posed a threat to the Greeks' cherished value of eunomia, or good order.
The 5th-century poet Pindar called eunomia the 'secure foundation stone of cities'. The Greeks
knew from bitter experience what happened when this foundation was threatened: civil war
between the haves and the have-nots, fields left unharvested, blood in the streets.
The Spartan system, on the other hand, with its peculiar blend of equality and élitism, held
many attractions for some Greeks. Its emphasis on the common good, duty and cohesion
seemed to guarantee good order. But for others, good order in Sparta was compromised by its
extraordinary attitude to sexual politics – because, when it came to women, conservative Sparta
was positively radical.
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Women of Athens
If you were a woman in 5th-century Athens, life probably wasn't a lot of fun. The city may have
been at the cutting edge of all that was good in art, architecture and democracy – but these
were strictly for the consumption of men. In public and in private, the sexes were segregated.
In fact, in most of ancient Greece, women were expected not to be seen or heard. The historian
Xenophon recommended that they stay indoors, and for the orator Pericles, it was shameful if
they were even mentioned in public.
Athenian women led a very sheltered existence. Apart from training for domestic duties, they
were given as little education as possible. In a society where women had no say, education must
have seemed, at best, pointless and, at worst, dangerous. As one comic poet put it:
Teach women letters? A serious mistake!
Like giving extra venom to a terrifying snake.
An Athenian girl could be married off as young as 12, to a man chosen for her. She would be
taken away from her family and disappear into her husband's house. A woman's role was to
manage the family and do the chores – grinding corn, washing or baking bread. Rich women,
who had slaves to take care of this drudgery, would spin and sew. There would be the
occasional sortie outside – to attend to domestic matters, or go to a religious ceremony – but
life was basically confined within four walls.
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The land of beautiful women
In Sparta, by contrast, women were everywhere. For a start, there were more girls than boys,
because they weren't victims of the state programme of infanticide. And if men weren't away
fighting or training, they were relaxing with their male colleagues in the common messes.
Women would have dominated the day-to-day life of the city-state.
Homer called Sparta Kalligynaika – 'the land of beautiful women'. The beauty of Helen of Troy –
originally Helen of Sparta – was legendary. Of course, not every Spartan woman could have lived
up to Helen's standards, but they were uniquely fit.
Spartan girls had an upbringing unparalleled anywhere else in Greece. For starters, they were
fed the same rations as boys and allowed to drink wine. The state taught them how to sing and
dance, wrestle, throw the javelin and discus. And they were encouraged to be every bit as
competitive as the boys.
Girls and boys would exercise naked, but there was nothing immodest about it. Nudity was the
norm because it was thought to banish prudery and encourage fitness. It paid off. Physically, all
young Spartans were outstanding.
In the comedy Lysistrata by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, a group of Athenian women
crowd round a Spartan woman called Lampito. 'What a gorgeous creature,' they say. 'What
healthy skin, what firmness of physique.' And one of them adds, 'I've never seen a pair of
breasts like that.' To which Lampito proudly responds, 'I go to the gym. I make my buttocks
hard.'
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Spartan 'thigh-flashers'
The simple visibility of Spartan women made them objects of fear and fascination to nonSpartan men. When you see – in the Sparta museum today – the lead votive offerings depicting
dancers, you can understand why Spartan women were subject to such lurid speculation among
Athenian men. One of the most important virtues for Athenian women was soprhosyne – 'wise
restraint'. However, in these uninhibited dancers, even after thousands of years, you can sense
the energy and almost smell the sweat.
Spartan dances were famous for their vitality. In one particularly athletic version, women had to
jump up and drum their buttocks with their heels as many times as possible. It was incredibly
difficult, but most importantly for the ancients, it revealed a large amount of naked thigh. This is
probably where Spartan girls earned their nickname: 'thigh-flashers.'
As part of their state education, the thigh-flashers would go down to the banks of the Eurotas
river for what one poet described as the 'nichta di ambrosias' – the ambrosial nights. The poet
goes on to evoke scenes of ritual ecstatic dances and choral contests – the girls singing to each
other of limb-loosening desire, tossing their long hair, being ridden like horses and exhausted by
love.
It's no surprise that Sparta was one of the few ancient cities that had the reputation for
encouraging girl-on-girl sex. Women and men there were used to living separate lives.
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Marriage by capture
At the age of seven, boys would be sent away to the agoge – the tough, uncompromising
Spartan system where they would be schooled in the art of war. Male bonding wasn't just
encouraged; it was compulsory. At the age of 12, a boy was paired with an older man, usually
one of the unmarried warriors, aged between 20 and 30.
This man would have been responsible not only for the conduct of the boy, but also for
providing for him materially. He was a surrogate mother, father, teacher and mentor. But he
was also a lover, for institutionalised pederasty was a part and parcel of life for the Spartan
warriors. These intimate relationships seem to have had lasting psychological and emotional
effects on the men.
When the time came for them to get married, it must have been a difficult adjustment to make.
But the pragmatic Spartans came up with an unusual way to help them through their wedding
night. They practised a custom called 'marriage by capture'. On her wedding night, a bride
would have her head shaved, like a small boy in the agoge. She would be dressed in a man's
cloak and sandals and left alone in a dark room.
Meanwhile, her husband would quietly leave the common mess, come to her, lay her down on a
straw palette, have sex with her and then slip back to sleep with his comrades as usual. This
wasn't just a quaint wedding-night ritual. It could carry on for months or even years.
There has been much debate about the significance of this bizarre ritual. However, it seems
obvious that it was a piece of sexual theatre, designed to acclimatise men to the presence of
women when, until then, their only experience of sex had been with other men.
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The priority of babies
Yet, however hard the Spartans tried to make marriage more palatable to their young men, it
seems that persuading them to do their duty was sometimes problematic. According to one
story – which is probably exaggerated, but too good not to repeat – Spartan women would beat
men about the head and then drag them round an altar to get them to commit.
There's another more credible account. In the middle of winter, unmarried men were stripped
naked and forced to march round the marketplace, singing a humiliating song about how their
punishment was just and fair because they had flouted the laws. Sparta was no place for a
confirmed bachelor.
The treatment meted out to these men may seem extreme, but its severity stemmed from a
very real need – to produce the next generation of warriors. The obsession with competition
and physical fitness for girls reflected the same anxiety. Women were well fed and well treated
because healthy women were more likely to produce healthy babies.
A fragment of a sculpture of Eilythea, the goddess of childbirth, shows her in labour – spirits
either side of her clutch her belly, helping her to get through the terrible pain. Spartan women
would have paid this image a lot of respect, because of the constant pressure on them to keep
producing sturdy male children.
It was a huge priority for the Spartans to keep the numbers of their warrior élite high. There
were never that many of them – at most 10,000, a number that steadily declined throughout
the 5th century. One reason was that Spartan women didn't get married until they were 18 and
men until they were 28 or 29, incredibly late by Greek standards.
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A state run by women
Spartan women weren't just baby makers. At a time when Greek women were expected to be
invisible, they had power and responsibility in their own right. In fact, they were so cocksure
that they dared to take on the men: in politics, on the streets and even in that most sacred
bastion – the sporting arena.
It wasn't only Spartan women's physicality that shocked the outside world. Their freedom was
equally notorious. Aristotle described Sparta as a gyneocratia – a state run by women – and he
didn't mean it as a compliment.
In Athens and other Greek city-states, women were not allowed to own land or control large
amounts of wealth. Heiresses and widows married according to the wishes of fathers or
brothers – usually to cousins or uncles, to keep the wealth in the family. And with the exception
of travelling in carriages to weddings and funerals, riding would have been out of the question.
But in Sparta, women held the keys to the coffers. They could be land-owners, and property
holders in their own right. They could inherit estates, and even seem to have had the right to
choose who or even whether to marry.
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Sporting legend
Whereas, in Athens, laws were drawn up to restrict women's visibility in public, some Spartan
women actually achieved the unthinkable – they became celebrities. The most famous example
was Kyniska, a Spartan princess and, in her day, a sporting legend.
Kyniska means 'little hound', and she was obviously a tomboy from a sporty family. The names
of her female relations translate as 'well horsed', 'flash of lightning', 'she who leads from the
front'. But it would be Kyniska who would go down in history as the owner of a champion
chariot team.
She was an expert equestrian and very wealthy, the perfect qualifications for a successful trainer.
She didn't race herself, but employed men to drive, and she made no secret of her ambition.
She entered her team at the Olympic games – the showcase for outstanding athletes from all
over the Greek world. The team won, and the men were astounded. Four years later, she
entered again. She won again.
The bitter irony is that Kyniska probably didn't see her victories. At Olympia, the usual men-only
rules applied. But she made certain that the world wouldn't ignore her success. She dedicated a
monument to herself right in the heart of the Olympic sanctuary. The inscription read:
I, KYNISKA, VICTORIOUS WITH A CHARIOT OF SWIFT-FOOTED HORSES, HAVE ERECTED THIS
STATUE AND DECLARE I AM THE ONLY WOMAN IN ALL OF GREECE TO HAVE WON THIS CROWN.
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Rough justice
Spartan women weren't only powerful in the sporting arena. They also played a role in the
political life of the city. They were trained to speak in public, and although they had no official
role in the decision-making process, they made sure their opinions were heard.
And it was the women who seemed to have been the most vociferous when it came to enforcing
the warrior ethic. Sparta's unwritten laws were policed at street level by a kind of communitybased rough justice. Women were in the forefront, praising the brave and insulting cowards as
they passed. We know what they called out from a collection called The Sayings of the Spartan
Women.
In Athens, silence was a mark of breeding, but Spartan girls were positively lippy. They were
masters in the art of laconic speaking – named after Lakonia, the heartland of Sparta. Deployed
properly, a laconic phrase could draw blood from even the most armour-plated warrior.
When a warrior was describing the brave death of his comrade, a woman said: 'Such a noble
journey ... Shouldn't you have gone too?' When a man complained that his sword was too short,
his mother replied: 'Take a step forward and it will be long enough.'
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More Nazi than nurture
However, although Spartan women enjoyed freedom of speech and financial liberty, it would be
a mistake to paint a picture of Sparta as a kind of feminist wonderland. We should think of
Spartan women as regimental wives, the backbone of the system – breeding sons and then
surrendering them to the agoge when they turned seven.
Because Sparta was constantly anxious about its declining birth rate, every Spartan boy must
have been the apple of his mother's eye. Helots were there to do the domestic chores, and
there was plenty of time to dote on little Leonidas. But when the time came to send them off to
the agoge, though it must have been a wrench, it was done without hesitation. This was Sparta,
and maternal instincts came a poor second to the interests of the state.
Our concept of motherhood is of a gentle, supportive relationship between mother and child.
But in Sparta, there was no room for sentimentality. In a state where unswerving obedience to
the warrior code was rated more highly than life itself, mothers wanted to make absolutely sure
that sons did their duty.
Their approach was more Nazi than nurture. When a son left for battle, his mother would issue a
traditional farewell: 'With your shield or on it' – in other words, either come back victorious or
come back dead. If a son failed to live up to this injunction, he could expect little sympathy from
his mother. One story goes that a Spartan mother, confronting her runaway son, hitched up her
skirts and asked him if he intended to crawl back where he had come from.
Following the defeat of Persia, there had been few opportunities for Spartan men to make their
mothers proud. But that was about to change.
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The helots revolt
Since the Persian invasion, Sparta and Athens had co-existed peacefully, and against all the odds,
the alliance had held firm. But given the huge ideological differences between the two Greek
powers, it was almost inevitable that, at some point, mutual mistrust would boil over into
outright conflict.
In 465 BC, a series of massive earthquakes hit Sparta. The consequences were devastating and
the loss of life immense. However, the earthquakes presented a golden opportunity to Sparta's
'enemy within': the huge population of helots, whose slave labour propped up the Spartan
system. In the aftermath of the disaster, the helots seized their chance and revolted.
The rebel slaves came to Mount Ithome, at the heart of Messenia, the homeland that had been
taken from them by the Spartans. They fortified the position and waited for the Spartans to
come. But for all their fearsome reputation, the latter failed to put down the revolt.
As the conflict dragged on, Sparta was forced to appeal to Athens and its other allies for
assistance. Some city-states sent troops to help put down the revolt, and the Athenians brought
in siege equipment, technology not developed by the hide-bound Spartans.
It was then that the Spartans began to fret. The enslavement of the Messenians had always
been a slightly sticky issue. The Greeks had absolutely no problem with slavery, but they found
less easy to swallow the subjugation of an entire native Greek population. The Spartans knew
this, and their paranoia grew. What would happen if the Athenians sided with the rebels? Or,
even worse, spread the virus of democracy among Spartan citizens themselves? It was not a risk
worth taking, and they sent the Athenians home.
Athens took serious offence at its dismissal by the Spartans. Being summarily sent home with no
explanation was not the treatment they expected from an ally whom they had only been trying
to help.
They tore up the old treaty of allegiance and began to collude with Sparta's enemies. And, to
add insult to injury, they even helped the rebels who had managed to escape, by setting them
up in a new city. It was the beginning of open hostilities.
Now it was only a matter of time before Sparta and Athens would be at war again – this time
with each other.
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The Peloponnesian War
When the war between Sparta and Athens finally came, many things could be said to have
caused it. However, the simple truth was that, over a period of 50 years, Sparta had allowed
Athens to become so powerful that its own sphere of influence in the Peloponnese was now
under threat.
In 431 BC, seizing on a rather flimsy pretext, Sparta declared war and sent troops to invade
Athenian territory. They forced their way to within seven miles of the hated city walls of Athens
itself.
The Athenian victims of the first year of the war were given a ceremonial burial in a graveyard
outside the city. Here, in their honour, Pericles delivered an impassioned speech to the crowd.
Pericles' funeral oration has gone down in history as one of the all-time great war speeches. It
was based on a simple and satisfying proposition: everything we, the Athenians, do is right and
everything our enemies, the Spartans, do is wrong.
The Spartans, from their earliest boyhood, are submitted to the most laborious training in
courage. We pass our lives without all these restrictions, and yet are just as ready to face the
same dangers as they are ... We meet danger voluntarily, with natural rather than with stateinduced courage.
Pericles' speech is a rallying cry in defence of a way of life – a call to arms against an enemy
whose social system, politics and even character were so alien as to make peaceful co-existence
impossible. It set the tone for an all-out war that, at that time, was unprecedented in its scale
and savagery. History would know it as the Peloponnesian War, but in fact it would rage from
Sicily in the west to the Hellespont in the east – and would last more than two decades.
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The Athenian plague
It quickly became a stalemate, with Sparta dominant on land and Athens at sea, with neither
side able to deliver the killer blow.
Every year for five years, Spartan armies laid waste to Athenian territory, burning farms and
destroying crops. The countryside was abandoned as the Athenians withdrew behind the walls
that connected their city to the port of Piraeus. They became, in effect, islanders, reliant on
their fleet to keep them supplied.
Within a year, plague came to the overcrowded city. Corpses were piled high in the streets, and
almost a third of the population of Athens was wiped out. The historian Thucydides, who was an
eye-witness to much of the war, described the sufferings of the Athenian plague victims as
'almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure'. Wealth and power were certainly no
protection. Pericles himself succumbed to the virulent disease.
For Sparta, the plague was proof that the gods were on their side. But gods can be fickle.
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Trapped at Pylos
Thucydides later wrote that nothing shocked the Greeks as much as what happened on an island
in Sparta's own backyard.
Pylos was a port on the west coast of the Peloponnese and of major strategic importance to the
Spartans. In 425 BC, it was seized by the Athenian army, helped by the former slaves who had
revolted against Sparta after the earthquake. The Spartans could not stomach this provocation
and sent an army to retake Pylos.
They laid siege to the Athenians in the town and set up a smaller unit on the mile and a half of
rock that stretches across Pylos bay – the island of Sphacteria. Their plan was to blockade the
Athenians by land and water. But they seem to have forgotten whom they were dealing with.
The Athenians were totally at home on the sea. Within a few days, they had sent a large fleet
into Pylos bay and seized control. The tables were turned – Sparta was forced to withdraw,
leaving behind the 400 or so troops who had been posted on the island of Sphacteria. They were
trapped, and for 72 days there was a stand-off.
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Surrender of the Spartans
The stalemate was finally broken when the Spartans scored a spectacular own goal. A group of
soldiers stupidly let a campfire get out of control. It raged across the island, burning away all the
protective cover. The Spartans had nowhere to hide. The Athenians could now see exactly how
many they were and where.
The Athenians decided to try and take the island with 800 archers and 800 lightly armed troops.
They landed but refused to fight the Spartans at close quarters. Instead, they picked them off
with javelins and arrows and rocks. Whenever the Spartan phalanx advanced, the Athenians
retreated.
Soon it was the Spartans who were backing off, leaving behind 300 dead as the survivors headed
for a defensive position at the north end of the island. But an Athenian commander sent a
detachment of archers to cut them off from behind. The Spartans were surrounded in what
looked like a mini-Thermopylae in the making.
Over 50 years before, King Leonidas and his 300 hand-picked troops had sacrificed their lives for
the glory of Sparta at the battle of Thermopylae. For the Spartans on Sphacteria, there was no
higher ideal to aspire to. Hopelessly outnumbered by the Athenians, this was their chance to
emulate the heroics of their grandfathers and bring honour to the state. They knew exactly what
was expected of them – a heroic struggle, a beautiful death, the final test passed.
But that wasn't what happened. The Athenians were far too clever. They held back for a while,
and then politely sent over a herald to ask if the Spartans would like to surrender. And,
unbelievably, that's exactly what the Spartans did.
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Hostages in Athens
If it had been anyone other than Spartans, surrender wouldn't have been a surprise. After all,
these half-starved men had been trapped on the island for more than two months and were
being used by the Athenian archers for target practice. But these were Spartans. They had spent
their lives preparing to die fighting. Surrender should not have been an option.
Perhaps Pericles had been right in his famous speech, with its mockery of the Spartans' 'stateinduced courage'. On this occasion, it had been undermined by the Athenians' tactics and mindgames. First, they had refused to give the Spartans what they had wanted – a stand-up fight.
Then they had given them something they had never expected – an opt-out clause from their
death-or-glory contract.
The myth of Spartan invincibility had been comprehensively shattered. For Athens, it was a
victory to savour.
There is a remarkable relic from that shocking defeat in Athens – a shield probably taken from
one of the hoplites who had thrown in the towel. Judging from its condition, whoever it
belonged to must have been put through the mill. You can just about make out an inscription on
its battered surface, which would have been punched in at a later date. It simply reads: 'TAKEN
BY THE ATHENIANS FROM THE LAKONIANS AT PYLOS.'
Along with this trophy, 120 Spartans were brought to Athens as hostages: if Sparta made so
much as a move on Athenian territory, they were to be executed. They were objects of
fascination in the city, where they were displayed in public like exotic animals.
Thucydides tells us that one of the crowd asked mockingly if the 'real' Spartans had died on the
island. 'Spindles would be worth a great deal,' came the Spartan reply, 'if they could mark out
brave men from cowards.' 'Spindles' was the Spartan word for arrows, a weapon they
considered wimpy and womanish because they killed from a distance. This was meant to be a
crushing response, delivered in true laconic style – but it comes across as just plain sulky.
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Suing for peace
Sparta was so rattled by the events on Sphacteria that it immediately sued for peace. But Athens
was in no mood to be generous. It capitalised on its advantage and held out for better terms.
It would be five years before the Spartan hostages saw their home again. When they returned,
they suffered none of the punishments usually meted out to so-called 'tremblers'. They were
not stripped of their citizenship, they were not forbidden to walk around with cheerful faces and
they were not beaten up in the streets. For once, the women kept their cutting comments to
themselves.
Spartan society was pole-axed, but before long the laughter and mockery of the Athenians
would be silenced, as the final act of the bloody war was played out.
An enemy of change
Delphi is one of the most significant religious sites in ancient Greece. To the Greeks, it was the
'navel of the world', an umbilical cord connecting them to their archaic past, when the distance
between heaven and earth didn't seem so great. But as well as providing a link to the past,
Delphi was also a window on the future – thanks to its famous oracle.
If you had a question to ask, on anything from love affairs to foreign affairs, you would go to the
oracle at Delphi. There you would write your question on a sheet of lead: Will Phoebe love me?
Should we invade Attika this summer?
The female medium – known as the pythia – would then enter a state of drug-induced frenzy by
chewing bay leaves or inhaling the fumes of henbane. A male priest-poet would be on hand to
interpret her usually incomprehensible but divinely inspired utterances and turn them into
elegant hexameter verse. However, oracles were notoriously ambiguous, and the true meaning
of their 'predictions' often only became clear after the event.
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Embalmed in tradition
Perhaps that was why places like Delphi were, by the end of the 5th century BC, seen as just a
bit old-fashioned. A new spirit of scepticism and rationality was abroad in Greece, and
fundamental beliefs about men, the gods and the universe were being called into question.
Nowhere was this more true than in Athens, where philosophers speculated that the sun was
just a red-hot rock about the size of the Peloponnese.
But elsewhere in Greece, notions like this were still simply unthinkable. In Sparta, safe and
secure in the Eurotas valley, it was still possible to believe that the gods were in their heaven
and all was right with the world.
Sparta had once been a revolutionary society – but that had been 250 years before. Now the
revolution that had created its unique social system had become embalmed in tradition. The
warrior élite at the top of Sparta's complex caste system were suspicious of change and hostile
to anything new. Eighty years after the event, their role model was still Leonidas, the Spartan
king who, with 300 followers, had sacrificed himself in the pass at Thermopylae resisting the
Persian invasion.
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Ideological conflict
For the previous 10 years, these conservative-minded warriors had been at war with their
former allies, Athens, the source of radical democracy, atheism and rationalism. Naturally, the
conflict had done nothing to change Spartan attitudes. What had begun as a struggle for
dominance had become an ideological conflict as bitter as the one that would divide the world
during the Cold War.
The Athenians saw Sparta as a frightening and oppressive place that reduced its citizens to cogs
in a threatening military machine. For the Spartans, Athens was the source of corruption that
threatened the whole of Greece. As one Spartan put it: 'We are the only Greeks who have
learned nothing wicked from you Athenians.'
So while many Athenians took a more sceptical view of the usefulness of oracles, it was an
article of faith among Spartans that, when oracles spoke, you listened.
If, in 415 BC, Spartans had come to Delphi demanding to know what the future held for their city,
and assuming the oracle was on form, they would have taken back some unsettling messages.
Soon (the oracle would have said) they would see the walls of their bitterest enemy reduced to
rubble, and they would gorge themselves on the fruits of victory. But before long, they would
themselves taste the bitterness of total defeat.
The war between Sparta and Athens had been bloody and inconclusive. Ten years of fighting
had produced plenty of killing, but no killer blow. Following devastating plague in Athens, and a
military humiliation for the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria, the two sides had finally
concluded an armistice and withdrawn to lick their wounds.
After six years of uneasy peace, the wounds were to be spectacularly reopened in Syracuse on
the island of Sicily. Syracuse had been founded during the period of colonisation when Greek
cities had been created all over the Mediterranean and beyond. In the war that had turned the
whole of the Greek world into two armed camps, it had allied itself to Sparta.
In the year 415, war fever swept Athens, and its focus was Syracuse.
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Enter Alcibiades
One of the leading campaigners for the conquest of Syracuse was the young aristocrat
Alcibiades. Good-looking and ambitious, he was in many ways the quintessential Athenian.
Popular with the people, he was also a patron of the 'new learning' that had taken root in
Athens. He was a patron, friend and pupil of Socrates, and according to rumours circulated by
his enemies in the city, he was also an atheist who mocked the gods.
Alcibiades was a hard liver, given to wine and women – despite the scoldings of his wise friend
Socrates. During the plague that had devastated Athens, it was said that his dissipation had
tipped over into something worse. As the death toll had mounted and the city despaired, he was
rumoured to have scorned the gods by profaning sacred rites.
And yet, despite this dubious reputation, when Alcibiades talked war, the Athenians listened. His
arguments in favour of the conquest of Syracuse were those of a young man in a hurry: peace
was all very well, but where was the glory in that? Taking Syracuse would make all those who
took part rich and famous.
By promoting an attack on a Spartan ally, Alcibiades may also have been satisfying a personal
grudge. During the armistice negotiations that had ended the first 10 years of war, he had
become convinced that the Spartan delegates were snubbing him because of his youth. This was
a double insult because his well-connected family had represented Spartan interests in Athens,
in peace and in war, over several generations. Revenge in Syracuse would be a sweet.
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An act of sacrilege
In wars between a city-state of warriors and a democracy, it is all too easy to assume that the
warriors are always the aggressors. In fact, it was said to be easier to get 30,000 Athenians to
agree to go to war than it was to persuade a single Spartan. And on this occasion, Alcibiades'
gung-ho appeal swept all before it in Athens.
Although they had little real idea of how big a task they were undertaking, the Athenians began
to assemble their invasion force. A few voices warned that it would be no pushover. Alcibiades
simply used this as an argument to make the task force even bigger.
Eventually more than 130 triremes were moored in Piraeus harbour, ready to sail – an empire in
arms. But before the fleet could get under way, an outrageous act of sacrilege rocked the city.
Over the course of a single night, an attack was made, by persons unknown, on the hermae,
good luck statues found all over Athens. According to the more polite accounts, the statues
were left without noses. In reality, the vandals probably targeted the hermae's prominent
phalluses – a double blow against the city-state's virility and good fortune. The desecration of
the hermae was so shocking that it was assumed to be the prelude to an attack on Athenian
democracy itself.
Conspiracy theories were readily believed in a city full of disenchanted aristocrats fed up with
seeing power in the hands of the demos – the people – for more than 60 years. And it was
particularly easy to believe that a maverick such as Alcibiades could be behind the plot. This was
exactly what his many enemies in the city began to insinuate.
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Playing the Spartan
Despite the bad omens and the accusations flying about, the Athenian expedition set sail, and
Alcibiades went along, too. But his enemies made the most of his absence, spreading rumours,
further blackening his reputation, accusing him, turning the full force of the democratic
apparatus against him. Finally, the city authorities recalled him to face charges of sacrilege and
conspiracy.
Alcibiades knew all about the fickleness of the Athenians. He was, after all, a master at
manipulating them for his own ends. Reckoning that his chances of a fair hearing were slim, he
went on the run. Where he ended up amazed everyone.
He went to Sparta.
There this crowd-pleaser set about winning for himself a new and highly unlikely following. He
gave the performance of a lifetime. He adopted the Spartan lifestyle with a vengeance – his
cloak was more ragged, his food poorer than those of even the most hard-line Spartan.
It all came perfectly naturally to him. Although he had been a sworn enemy of Sparta, like many
aristocratic Athenians he was also a lakonophile – an admirer of the traditional values of the
Spartan system. He had been given a Spartan name. He had been wet-nursed by a Spartan
nanny. He could play the Spartan with real conviction, and the real Spartans were simply bowled
over.
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Alcibiades and Timea
It wasn't just the Spartan crowds who fell for Alcibiades' formidable charms. The rumour was
that he had also made a conquest of Timea, the wife of the Spartan king Agis.
Sparta's sexual codes were notoriously at odds with those in the rest of Greece. Elsewhere,
adultery could be punishable by death, but in Sparta, married women, with the consent of their
husbands, enjoyed multiple sexual partners.
This wasn't mere wife-swapping. The reason for this seeming liberalism was acute anxiety
among the Spartans about the decline in their population. Women bearing children of fathers
selected for their strength and courage simply meant more soldiers for the future.
No one knows for sure if Agis was a cuckold or a willing accomplice, but the relationship
between Timea and Alcibiades would have consequences long after Alcibiades had left the
scene.
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Revolutionary thinking
Alcibiades repaid Spartan hospitality by revolutionising their military thinking.
He urged them to establish a permanent garrison in Athens' own backyard – a move that proved
to be far more disruptive to supplies and communications than the traditional limited annual
incursions that the Spartans had relied on.
He also advised them to come to the aid of their allies in Syracuse, something the Spartans had
been reluctant to do. Alcibiades convinced them to send the Spartan general Gyllipus to help
oversee the defences, a low-cost way of honouring their commitments. This advice would prove
fatal to thousands of his fellow Athenians.
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War against Syracuse
The expedition against Syracuse had started well for the Athenians, but with the arrival of
Gyllipus, things began to go wrong.
Gyllipus didn't bring much in the way of reinforcements. He wasn't a brilliant tactician. He had
no secret weapon under his scarlet cloak. But the mere presence of a Spartan warrior raised the
morale of the beleaguered Syracusans. They began to fight back.
After sending for reinforcements, the Athenians launched a massive night attack on a string of
hill forts overlooking the city. Inch by inch, they fought their way to the top, and at one point, it
looked as if they might succeed. But at dawn, the exhausted Athenian soldiers were pushed
right back to their camp in the harbour. Now all they wanted was to get the hell out of Syracuse.
But on very eve of their departure, the gods – or nature – took a hand. Although the Athenians
had a reputation for being the most godless and rational of the Greeks, none of them was bold
enough to ignore an omen as emphatic as an eclipse of the moon. The priests of the army camp
advised the soldiers to hold tight and promised that, by the time of the next full moon, the
omens would be better.
It was a bad call. In the late summer of 413 BC, Gyllipus ordered a line of ships to be anchored
across the narrow mouth of Syracuse's harbour. The Athenians were trapped. They tried to
escape, but only a handful of ships were able to break out. The rest were forced back to the
beach.
They then tried to march away overland, but the Syracusans cut them off. In the fighting that
followed, thousands of Athenian troops died. They were perhaps the lucky ones. The survivors
would pay the full price for Alcibiades' treachery.
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Hell on earth
The survivors of Athens' military adventure against Syracuse – some 7,000 of them – were taken
to one of the stone quarries outside town. Today this has been transformed into a beautiful park,
but for the Athenian prisoners, it was quite simply hell on earth: a narrow rocky chasm with no
shade, no water, nothing.
The prisoners, including the dying, were kept there for nearly three months. At first, they were
baked by the sun during the day. Then, as summer turned to autumn, they froze at night. They
were given little food or water. Disease soon broke out, but because the ground was so rocky,
the dead were left unburied. As well as hardship, hunger and disease, there were summary
executions and torture.
The Syracusans would bring their children to the cathedral-sized quarry's edge to mock their
defeated enemy. And they spiced up the routine brutalities with a dash of high culture. The
Athenian prisoners had only one chance to live: the Syracusans had a passion for the verses of
the playwright Euripides, and prisoners who could recite them in a style that pleased their
tormentors were allowed to leave the quarry to be sold as slaves. It isn't known if any of the
Athenians were brave enough to quote Euripides' lines: 'Unhappy Greeks, barbarians to each
other.'
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Grief and discontent
It was said that, on the night that news of the military disaster at Syracuse reached Athens, wails
of grief could be heard passing along the walls as the story was carried from the port to the city
itself.
The years of war had taken its toll on Athens. In the law courts of the agora, a poignant
exchange took place. A man complained that his mother now had to earn her living as a nurse
and a ribbon seller: 'We do not live the way we would like,' he said with understatement.
The political discontents, who had for years been simmering, boiled over. Aristocrats finally
staged their long-anticipated coup, taking over the city and throwing out the democratic system.
But the Athenian fleet declared for democracy, and so Athens was split.
For the Spartans, Syracuse should have been a prelude to total victory. It says a lot about their
lack of foresight that they failed to capitalise on the Athenian disarray. They may have produced
the best hoplite warriors in the Greek world, but when it came to military and political strategy,
they were novices.
After a year of turmoil, Athens finally pulled itself together, restoring a less radical version of its
democratic system, and readying itself for the next phase of the seemingly endless struggle
against Sparta.
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Lysander
But defeat for Athens had only been deferred. The man who delivered the final blow was
Lysander, a Spartan but by no means a typical one.
His origins were humble. He was a mothakes, which translates as 'bastard' but actually meant
that, while his father was a full Spartan citizen, his mother was a helot – possibly even one of the
despised Messenians whose mass enslavement provided the economic foundation of the
Spartan utopia.
Despite this mixed parentage, Lysander qualified for admission to the agoge – the brutal
training system that turned Spartan boys into warriors. What he lacked in social standing, he
made up for in very un-Spartan nous, and he soon emerged from the pack as both a military
leader and a political operator.
The Spartan ideal was still represented by Leonidas, the lion-hearted hero of Thermopylae.
Years after that heroic last stand, the dead king still cast a long shadow. Compared to him,
Lysander was something new in Sparta – an operator, a politician, a self-styled fox. In fact, he
once said, 'If the lion's skin doesn't reach, we must patch it out with the fox's.'
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Wooing the Persians
Lysander's politicking included wooing the Persian empire, whose invasion 80 years before had
briefly united the fractious Greeks under the leadership of Sparta and Athens. Now that Greeks
were killing Greeks, Persia's autocratic kings were happy to stand on the sidelines handing out
gold to whichever side seemed likeliest to serve their own interests.
Most Spartans claimed to despise the Persians – their dissipation, the bowing and scraping at
their court and their willing submission not to the rule of law, but to one man, a despot, the
Persian emperor. But Lysander was happy to put traditional Spartan ideals behind him and suck
up to their former enemy if that was what it took to open their coffers.
By forging a close personal friendship with Cyrus, the Persian king's son, Lysander was able at a
stroke to increase the pay-rate of the Spartan navy.
Freelance oarsmen and mercenaries followed the money and deserted the Athenian fleet.
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Athens is defeated
Ships were what counted now. To prevail, Sparta, the quintessential land-power, needed to win
at sea. Spartans made lousy sailors and worse admirals. Lysander, as ever, was the exception.
Fuelled by Persian gold, his fleet was able to defeat Athens and her allies time and again.
Eventually he was able to impose a naval blockade, cutting Athens off from its grain supplies.
The climax came in 405 BC when Lysander encountered a large Athenian fleet. As ever, he outfoxed them, refusing to come to battle, making them think he was scared, then striking when
their guard was down.
The Athenians were routed – and their city was at Lysander's mercy. 'In the space of a single
hour,' according to one account ...
he put an end to a war that, for its length and for the variety of its incidents and the uncertainty
of its fortunes, eclipsed any that had gone before.
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Sparta's terms
As soon as Athens capitulated, resentment and jealousy, simmering for decades within the
Greek world, boiled over into full-scale vengeance. The Theban Erianthus said that the city
should be razed to the ground and the land turned over to sheep.
But the Spartans didn't get hysterical. Even after years of fighting and the loss of thousands of
lives, they calmly set out their terms:
• the removal of democratic government and its replacement with an oligarchic junta of 30
• the reduction of the Athenian fleet to three ships
• the total destruction of the city walls, which Sparta had always scorned.
And as the walls were burnt down, and Sparta was recognised as the ruler of the Greek world,
Lysander watched the 'flute girls' – prostitutes – switching sides and triumphantly serenading
the death of an empire.
A committee of pro-Spartan quislings took over the city, and blood flowed in the streets as old
scores were settled. Among the victims was Alcibiades. Despite his defection to Sparta and the
terrible consequences that had followed, he had somehow managed to sweet-talk his way back
into the Athenians' affections. In the wake of the defeat, he was seen as someone who might
eventually lead an Athenian revolt – which was doubtless why the order came from Sparta to
have him murdered.
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Marking the victory
Lysander chose to the mark the victory over Athens at Delphi. As well as being a religious site
and home of the famous oracle, Delphi was recognised as a place to make political statements.
The Sacred Way, along which all visitors passed on their way to the oracle, was lined with
temples and treasuries belonging to the different city-states, each one an expression of that
place's power and wealth. It was here that Lysander glorified his own achievements with a
grandiose monument that made a mockery of the Spartan code of understatement and selfeffacement.
Only the base is left now, but once it would have been crowded with about 30 more-than-lifesize bronze statues representing the junior Spartan officers and allied commanders who had
worked with Lysander to give him his victory. And in the middle was Lysander himself,
accompanied by his steersmen and his priest, being crowned by none other than the god of the
sea, Poseidon.
Even by the standards of Delphi, it was an extraordinary piece of self-advertisement. Lysander
had realised that victory over Athens had changed everything. Sparta was now the most
powerful city-state in the Greek world – an imperial power if it chose to go down that route.
And Lysander had big plans for his own place in the new Spartan world order.
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Ominous oracle
In Sparta in 400 BC, four years after the defeat of Athens, things were, on the surface, just as the
Spartans liked them: unchanged. Their Shangri-la was safe and secure, the river Eurotas flowed,
the mountains were full of game, the fields were fertile, the helot slaves were quiet, and the
unique social system designed to produce the best warriors in the world had emerged intact
from decades of war.
But within a generation, the Spartans – who boasted that their women had never beheld the
camp fires of their enemies – would witness exactly that, as well as the dismantling of their
utopia.
The collapse of Sparta didn't exactly come out of the blue. Some time in the year 400, an oracle
– one of the messages from the gods to which the Spartans paid such strict attention – had
started to circulate in the city:
Boasting Sparta, be careful not to sprout a crippled kingship ...
Unlooked-for ordeals and numberless trials shall oppress you
And the stormy billows of man-killing war shall roll down upon you.
Unlike most oracles – which were usually ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness – this one
was quite explicit. It seemed to refer directly to a power struggle that even then was being
played out in Sparta.
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Contenders for the throne
Agis, one of Sparta's two kings, was dead. There were two contenders for the vacant throne:
Latychidas, Agis's son, and Agesilaus, the dead king's half-brother.
The succession should have been straightforward. Latychidas was the heir apparent. The throne
was his by right. And, besides, Agesilaus had been born lame.
Male Spartan children born with any kind of physical imperfection usually ended up as a small
pile of bones in the euphemistically named 'Deposits' – unless, of course, they were of royal
blood, when the normal rules didn't apply. So Agesilaus had been spared.
At the age of seven, he was enrolled in the agoge – the formidable Spartan training system. No
member of the Spartan royal family had ever been subjected to the agoge, but despite his
disability, Agesilaus thrived in the competitive atmosphere. He was said to be aggressive and
hot-tempered, longing to be first in all things and, at the same time, 'so gentle and ready to
obey authority that he did whatever was demanded of him'.
When King Agis died, Agesilaus was confident enough to bid for the throne. But it was just then
that the troubling oracle began to circulate in Sparta. The reference to a 'crippled kingship'
seemed unambiguously to point to his own disability – and the threatened consequences were
dire.
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Rumour and innuendo
But oracles are only as good as the interpretation that is placed on them – and on this occasion,
an alternative was supplied by none other than Lysander.
Lysander had personal reasons to back Agesilaus's claim: they had once been lovers. On
reaching puberty, all Spartan boys in the agoge were obliged to take an older man as a lover
until they were of marriageable age. Lysander had courted and won Agesilaus, a typically canny
choice by the ambitious admiral.
For an old fox like Lysander, twisting an oracle to serve political ends presented no problems. All
he had to do was remind the Spartans of a little bit of recent history.
Did anyone recall, he wondered, the rumours that had gone around when that slippery Athenian
poseur, Alcibiades, had been in town some years before, rumours concerning him and Timea,
King Agis's wife? And wasn't it also said that, when she had been nursing her newborn son – and,
by the way, hadn't he arrived about nine months after Alcibiades had left? – she had been heard
to whisper over and over the name 'Alcibiades' rather than 'Latychidas'?
Lysander's innuendoes did the trick, allowing the Spartans to believe that 'crippled' could mean
'illegitimate'. The son was out – the uncle was in.
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Money-mad
Agesilaus came to the throne as the most Spartan king that the city-state had ever known. A
product of the agoge, his belief in the rightness of the Spartan system was absolute and
uncompromising.
But while Agesilaus may have been an arch-conservative, Sparta itself was changing. The war
had taken more Spartans further away from home and for longer periods than ever before. They
had seen for themselves that there was more to life than 'black soup' – the Spartan staple dish
made of pig's blood and vinegar. For centuries, they had successfully repressed their desire for
material things, but in the post-war boom, they seemed suddenly to go money-mad.
No one was immune, not even Gyllipus, the general who had defeated the Athenians at
Syracuse. He was exposed as a thief when gold meant for the Spartan treasury was found
hidden in the roof of his house, a tawdry scandal that resulted in his exile from the city-state.
Agesilaus tried to put a stop to all this nonsense. He led by extreme frugal example, his ragged
red cloak becoming his trademark. But there was a bigger problem: what should be done with
Lysander?
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Putting Lysander in his place
Lysander's astute management of the oracle had increased his power, and the consummate
politician was looking for his pay-back. But, for once, he miscalculated.
During his successful naval campaign against Athens, Lysander had accumulated a crowd of
cronies, clients and political climbers who treated him with far more respect than they treated
the young lame king in the ragged cloak. However, Lysander's one-time protégé had very
definite ideas about the dignity owed to a king of Sparta, and he decided to put Lysander in his
place – very deliberately and very publicly.
Following that decision, whenever Lysander recommended a course of action, Agesilaus did the
opposite. Whenever one of the older man's cronies sought a favour, it was refused. It soon
became clear to everyone that association with Lysander was the kiss of death.
The final breach came when Agesilaus ordered Lysander to serve at his table. 'You know well
how to humiliate your friends,' Lysander is supposed to have said. The king replied: 'Yes, I do, or
at any rate those who set themselves up to be more powerful than myself.'
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A constitutional revolution
Lysander left Sparta under a cloud. He went to Delphi and began to plot against Agesilaus. He
tried to bribe the oracle into issuing alarming prophecies, knowing that these would destabilise
the superstitious Spartans.
He was killed in battle before his plots could be realised. It was only after his death that it was
discovered just how high he had been aiming.
Searching through his papers, Agesilaus discovered a speech written for Lysander. It made the
case for a revolution in the Spartan constitution – the creation of a kind of meritocratic kingship,
open to all-comers, and awarded to whoever was thought to be the best candidate. Lysander
had obviously seen himself as the likeliest contender.
Agesilaus wanted immediately to publicise the letter and show just what a threat Lysander had
been. But when one of the city elder's read the speech, he found the argument so persuasive
that he urged Agesilaus 'not to bring Lysander back from the grave, but rather to bury the
speech with him'.
The speech was hushed up, and Sparta continued seemingly just as before.
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A sacrifice and a warning
However, the world around Sparta was changing fast. It wasn't long before a series of disasters
proved the truth of the Delphic oracle's gloomiest predictions.
Agesilaus was a magnet for gloomy omens. It was as if the archaic powers of Greece, in retreat
elsewhere, had found a way back through this spirit-haunted king. A year after his accession, the
priest announced with great alarm during a routine sacrifice that, according to the signs, Sparta
was even then surrounded by enemies.
This, in fact, was hardly a revelation.
For nearly three centuries, Sparta had flourished thanks to its system of social apartheid, with
helot slaves at the bottom providing the sweat and toil, and the perioikoi – the free but
disenfranchised traders and artisans – providing the commercial muscle and material goods.
And at the top were the homoioi, the élite citizen-warriors, a tiny minority that protected its
privileges by keeping a collective thumb firmly on the majority beneath them.
So, on this occasion, the priest's warning about Sparta being surrounded by enemies might have
seemed to be merely stating the obvious. But, in fact, there was far more to it than that: a few
days later, a conspiracy for the complete overthrow of the Spartan system was unmasked.
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Cinadon's conspiracy
One of the conspiracy's leaders, Cinadon, was neither a helot nor a perioikoi but what was
known as a 'lower-grade Spartan'. There were a number of ways you could be reduced to this
limbo-like state. Cowardice in battle made you a 'trembler'. Low or mixed birth made you a
mothakes, like Lysander. You could even be stripped of citizenship for failure to pay your subs to
the common mess.
The alarming thing about Cinadon's conspiracy was its reach. It appeared to involve everyone
from helot through perioikoi to the 'lower-grade Spartans' – all of those who had been excluded
from the full benefits of the Spartan utopia and who, according to Cinadon, wanted 'to eat the
Spartans, raw'.
Once they had made their confessions, Cinadon and his fellow conspirators were driven through
the city at spear-point, through a gauntlet of whips, to face their final punishment. They
probably ended up at a crevasse a few miles outside Sparta called Keadhas, a place of execution.
Ever since, legends about this place have always been sinister, but it seems that, for once, the
locals weren't exaggerating. An archaeological study has revealed that the floor of the crevasse
is thick with human remains – it's literally a subterranean bone yard.
A small sample of bones removed for analysis were quickly identified as the remains of 17
human beings. They dated from the 6th-5th century BC, and were mostly from adult males;
however, they also included the remains from two women and a child aged about 10. Several
other adult skeletons were observed in positions suggesting that they had died while trying to
climb out of the crevasse, suggesting that at least some of the victims had been alive when they
were thrown into it.
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Fewer Spartans
The Cinadon conspiracy had highlighted the major flaw in the Spartan system: its almost
pathological élitism.
Sparta may have been the first Greek city-state to define citizenship, but it had always been the
privilege of a small minority. This minority was reduced still further by the Spartan instinct to
exclude anyone who failed to measure up to their exacting standards. The consequence was
that Sparta was running out of Spartans.
A hundred years before, at the time of Thermopylae, there had been perhaps 10,000 full
Spartan citizens. Now there were as few as 1,000.
Anxieties about population produced a 'body-bag syndrome' in Sparta – a reluctance to commit
large numbers of full citizens to battle. Now, when Sparta went to war, the homoioi formed only
the officer élite. The men who did the actual fighting were helots – who had been promised
their freedom – and allies who were increasingly reluctant and alienated from the Spartan cause.
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Thebes
When, in 404, the walls of Athens had been pulled down to the sound of flutes, one
contemporary historian had thought that 'this day was the beginning of freedom for Greece.'
Over-bearing and arrogant, the Athenian empire had had few friends. But the Spartan empire
proved to be just as oppressive.
Where Athens had demanded money from its allies to finance its fleet, Sparta demanded men
to fight its wars. Athens had turned its allies into cash cows. The Spartans turned theirs into
battle-fodder.
It was a bad time to fall out with your friends, because Sparta had a new enemy to deal with:
Thebes.
Militarily speaking, Thebes had never really been in the big league, but in recent years, it had
been getting more and more experience, thanks almost entirely to the irrational grudge held
against the city-state by the Spartan king Agesilaus, who took any opportunity to march out
against it. The result was that Thebes gradually got better at fighting back.
After one encounter, in which Agesilaus himself was wounded, a fellow Spartan said to the king:
'The Thebans are paying you well for teaching them to fight, when they had no desire for it in
the first place and no skill either.'
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Day of reckoning
Things came to a dramatic climax in Sparta in the spring of 371 BC.
A meeting of city-states had been called to try and sort out a whole range of bitter rivalries and
turf wars that had flared up. Diplomacy and tact would obviously pay premiums, but these had
never been Agesilaus's strong points.
Sparta was supposed to be top dog at the meeting, but Agesilaus noticed the respect with which
the other Greeks treated the Theban delegate Epanimondas. A skilful general, he had been
responsible for several bloody noses recently administered to Sparta. Agesilaus saw red and
picked a fight with him. Epanimondas stood his ground, and even had the temerity to answer
back. Agesilaus completely lost his temper and struck Thebes's name from the peace treaty.
Twenty days later, armies from the two city-states clashed at a place called Leuctra. Agesilaus
wasn't there. Having caused the fight, he refused to lead the Spartan forces into battle.
Apparently, he didn't want it said that he was too fond of fighting. It was left to Sparta's other
king to take charge of a mixed bag of 700 Spartan warriors and about 1,300 helots and reluctant
allies.
Against them were 6,000 Thebans – all highly motivated and led by the charismatic
Epanimondas.
The disparity in numbers alone is enough to explain the Spartans' defeat. But added to that
were some novel tactics adopted by the Thebans, including phalanxes 50 men deep rather than
the usual eight – a staggering mass of bronze and muscle bearing down on their opponents.
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Consequences of the defeat
Approximately 400 Spartans died at Leuctra. This may not sound like much until you consider
that these represented around 40% of Sparta's warrior population. As a military force, Sparta
was effectively out of action.
The consequences of the defeat were profound.
Through centuries of war, no enemy army had ever entered the Spartan homeland in the
Eurotas valley. The Thebans did it twice, and on the second occasion, there was fighting in the
streets. They never succeeded in taking the city itself, but they did destroy forever Sparta's
dominance of Greece and its aura of invincibility.
But for Sparta, there was something far worse – a sight that no Spartan ever wanted to see: the
walls of the city of Messene, erected after the defeat at Leuctra by helots who for 300 years had
been enslaved by their Spartan masters.
After Leuctra, the Thebans had stormed into Lakonia, the Spartan heartland, and liberated the
helots. It was said that the walls of their city, in the shadow of Mount Ithome, went up in 74
days. They were built by people who had no intention of ever being slaves again.
The liberation of the Messenians was popular throughout Greece. There had always been
something distasteful about their enslavement by the Spartans. Now the city-states eagerly
signed a peace treaty recognising the existence of this brand new city-state and its liberated
citizens. Only the Spartans refused to sign. They never gave up their ambition to retake
Messenia, even though they lacked the military muscle to realise it.
As for Agesilaus, the last picture we have of him is in Egypt, hired out at the age of 80 as a
mercenary general in an attempt to fill Sparta's empty coffers. When the Egyptians came to
greet this legendary warrior king, they saw an old man in a ragged cloak sitting on a beach.
According to one historian, they simply laughed.
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Permanent relegation
Sparta never recovered from the defeat at Leuctra and the loss of its Messenian helots.
Relegation to the second division of city-states was permanent.
In the decades that followed, when the Macedonian king Philip embarked on his daring and
aggressive campaign to unify the whole of Greece, Sparta could only watch impotently from the
sidelines. Philip had to defeat Thebes to achieve his aim, but Sparta he could ignore, dismissing
it as an old, toothless dog skulking in its kennel
In the centuries that followed – as the Greeks ran up against the new regional powers of
Carthage, Sicily and, ultimately, Rome – the city-state periodically tried to revive its fortunes by
reinstating elements of the old Spartan system. But without their Messenian slaves, Sparta just
wasn't Sparta. Utopia had been dismantled, and no one could put it back together again.
Instead, for Romans visiting their theatre, the Spartans put on displays of the competitive
dances and religious ceremonies that they had once been famous for. Stronger fare was on offer
at the nearby sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. Here young boys submitted themselves to brutal
whippings, often with fatal consequences – a crude parody of the rite of passage that used to
take place there.
To end up as a purveyor of sado-tourism to a bunch of Romans is a fate that not even the
gloomiest oracle would have predicted. Even so, it does, in a perverse way, demonstrate the
powerful spell that Spartan ideals continued to exert long after the city-state's power crumbled.
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Sparta and Western civilisation
Centuries after Sparta passed into obscurity, these ideals have remained hard-wired into the
circuitry of Western civilisation.
It is a long way from the rugged landscape of Sparta to the artful artificiality of an English
country estate. But at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, there's a testimony to the enduring appeal of
Sparta.
Looking around the neo-classical wonderland built for the 18th-century Whig grandee Lord
Cobham, you might assume that it was the culture of Athens that was being celebrated there.
But in one of the follies in its grounds – the Temple of Ancient Virtues – you can see that it is not
all Athens' show.
Lord Cobham obviously put a lot of thought into which Greek figures he wanted to honour in his
temple, the people he wanted the England of his day to emulate. And so there was a statue of
Socrates, described as 'the wisest of men' and an 'encourager of the good' – qualities his muchnagged friend Alcibiades could have testified to. Next to him, inevitably, was Homer, 'the first of
poets ... the herald of virtue'.
But alongside them is a more interesting choice: Lycurgus, the semi-mythical inventor of the
Spartan social system. The inscription under his statue reads:
A FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY WHO, HAVING INVENTED LAWS WITH THE GREATEST WISDOM AND
FENCED THEM AGAINST ALL CORRUPTION, INSTITUTED FOR HIS COUNTRYMEN THE FIRMEST
LIBERTY AND THE SOUNDEST MORALITY, BANISHING RICHES, AVARICE, LUXURY AND LUST.
It's a pretty fair summing up of the Spartan ideal, with its puritanical appeal to self-discipline and
self-denial, and its promise of timeless perfection in a changing and imperfect world.
Of course, there's no mention here of the darker aspects of Sparta – the mass slavery, the brutal
education system, the endless fighting. And no mention either that it was the very pursuit of
perfection that, in the end, made Sparta unable to change, even while the world changed
around it.