The Spartan Way

Nic Fields

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783830497
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

For a period of some 200 years, Sparta was acknowledged throughout the Greek world as the home of the finest soldiers. Xenophon called them 'the only true craftsmen in matters of war'. Nic Fields explains the reasons for this superiority, how their reputation for invincibility was earned (and deliberately manipulated) and how it was ultimately shattered. The Spartan Way examines how Spartan society, through its rigid laws and brutal educational system, was thoroughly militarized and devoted to producing warriors suited to the intense demands of hoplite warfare - professional killers inculcated with the values of unwavering obedience and a willingness to fight and die for their city. The role of Spartan women, as mothers and wives, in shaping the warrior ethic is considered, as are the role of uniform and rigorous training in enhancing the small-unit cohesion within the phalanx, and the psychological intimidation of the enemy. The final chapters chart the course of Sparta's successes through the period of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, through the Corinthian and Theban wars of the fourth century BC, which culminated with the shattering military defeats at Leuctra and 2nd Mantinea, and the years of her decline with the Spartans as a source of mercenaries for the wars of other states.

Chapter 1

A Land of Orderliness

Mountains and sea

Greece proper with the Aegean basin is part of the great mountain zone running from the Alps to the Himalayas. For some seventy million years the great landmass of Africa has been burrowing irresistibly under Europe.¹ This titanic force has displaced, shattered, crumpled, and stretched the rocks, creating mountain ranges, ocean trenches, gorges, and upland basins. Mountain building continues, as shown by frequent earthquakes in ancient and modern Greece, and the land is 75 per cent mountainous, culminating in Mount Olympus, 2,917 metres high. The mountains themselves are primarily hard folded limestone ridges, piling up one behind the other, running from the north-west to the south-east and right down to the sea. Many of them are more than 2,000 metres in altitude. Xenophon, writing in the first half of the fourth century BC, noted the following about his homeland of Attica, the territory of the Athenians: ‘High mountains with steep and narrow passes barricade our land ... and the interior is also circled with steep mountains’.² Indeed, Athens is set in a bowl of mountains, with the sea and its port of Peiraeus to the south-west.³ The other crucial element in the Greek topographical equation is of course the sea, with its coastline and islands, and no one place in Greece is more than a hundred or so kilometres from the sea. Greece has about 2,000 islands, roughly 200 of which are inhabited, and almost 15,000 kilometres of indented coastline.⁴

Despite its small area, Greece has startling regional variations in climate, and the mountains everywhere generate their own microclimates. Visitors tend to forget that most of the country lies between the latitudes of 35° to 41° north, roughly the same distance from the equator as Japan or California. It is the lowlands of the Peloponnese and Attica that enjoy a true Mediterranean climate. Mild and minimally wet winters precede long, hot summers. The prehistoric climate, as inferred from pollen cores, had been less arid that today’s.⁵ How far climate differed in classical antiquity is uncertain. The wonderful beauty and diversity of Greece were seldom fully appreciated by ancient Greeks (to whom it was commonplace). Greece has a rich flora and fauna, the former often riotous at middle attitudes, with many species peculiar to that country, or to one mountain or island (especially Crete). In pre-Neolithic times Greece was more wooded than now. The date and nature of deforestation are controversial, but there is no good evidence that classical Greece was more wooded than today (e.g. Athens had to import timber from Macedonia for its navy).⁶ Plato, writing at the beginning of the fourth century BC, noted that by his day Attica had suffered from soil erosion and tree loss: ‘But in the old days when the land was intact, its mountains were covered with earth ... and the now rocky plains were covered with rich soil and there were plentiful forests on the mountains’.⁷ Natural vegetation, much influenced by man of course, is a marvellous mix of North African, west Asian and south European, and consists chiefly of garriga (dwarf shrubs, e.g. thyme, Jerusalem sage), maquis (low scrub), savannah (scattered trees), and woodland (oak, pine, fir, beech, cypress, sweet chestnut).⁸ The first three were valuable pastureland.

It must never be forgotten that New World crops (potato, tomato, tobacco, maize, etc.) were totally unknown in classical antiquity. Originating in India, the date of the establishment of citrus (an important cash crop for Greece today) in the Mediterranean is disputed. So the ancient Greek diet looked somewhat different from that of modern Greece, and revolved around the Mediterranean triad of cereal, olive and vine.⁹ Traditionally Greek agriculture, now very much in decline, involved seasonal hard work–ploughing, sowing, picking olives, and tending vines–a hurried harvest, and long periods of relative leisure, that is, what we know as subsistence farming with daily life played out in a village setting. The productivity of Mediterranean agriculture was significantly increased because trees were often inter-cropped with cereals and legumes, increasing total yields per unit area. But we are too inclined to think of Mediterranean life as la dolce vita, effortlessly easy. Human labour was not relieved by the sunny climate: all the heavy work was always to be done when the sun was at its fiercest, and the resulting harvest crop was all too often meagre. Hesiod’s advice in summer was to ‘strip to sow, and strip to plough, and strip to reap’.¹⁰ Hesiod (fl. 700 BC) tells of the endless toil of the Boiotian peasant, tied physically and mentally to his small patch of dirt and rock, worn down by bitter quarrels with his neighbours, his family, and the local magnates, resigned to being the nightingale ‘gripped fast in the talons of the hawk’.¹¹

The peasant’s life was hard and insecure; indeed his very existence was precarious. He made a miserable living, at the mercy of the seasons, by primitive farming, and at times could hardly provide enough even for himself and his family. Even at the best of times, he lived frugally. He brought very few luxuries. He won the necessities of life by long toil from his little plot of ground. Bad weather, crop failures or worse still the peasant’s absence at war (the campaign season was summer) was always uppermost in men’s minds, as Aristophanes makes clear:

We will pray to the gods
to grant the Greeks wealth,
that we may all harvest
barley in plenty, and plenty of wine
and figs to devour,
that our wives may give birth,
that we may gather again
the blessings we’ve lost
and that red war may end.¹²

It is fairly true to say that wars force men everywhere to kill each other when they want to be left at peace. Yet peace for the Greeks was not easy, being as they were confined by the mountains and the sea, the lowlands, for lack of space, confined to a few coastal strips and pockets of arable land. Thucydides postulates that the underlying cause of Greek colonisation was the need for land; cultivable land is precious while bare rocks are so plentiful, and it is of the former that he speaks.¹³ Their population was greater than their means of subsistence and so they sought fresh lands, sometimes at others’ expense. It must be stressed that if food crises were common in antiquity, famine itself, on the other hand, was rare.¹⁴ Finally, animal husbandry on a small scale probably had a place on all but the smallest properties.¹⁵ Larger flocks and herds were moved to mountain pastures in the summer (i.e. transhumance). The value of manuring was appreciated and organic wastes were collected conscientiously from settlements and applied especially to trees and vines.

The human landscape

Greece in our period of study resembled modern Greece in little except its physical geography. Modern Greece, or the Hellenic Republic, is a European democracy ruled by a central government whose authority is active, readily obeyed and uniformly powerful over the length and breadth of the country. In classical antiquity this large mass of disciplined and highly organized humanity did not exist.

The polis (pl. poleis), or the ‘city state’, was the characteristic form of ancient Greek urban life. Its main features were small size, political autonomy, publicly funded institutions, social homogeneity, and a real sense of community and respect for law. Moreover, it was the members of the polis that turned out to meet the enemy; every citizen was a soldier as it were. Yet the tumultuous and autonomous Greek polis was not really a city, nor was it simply a town as its population was distributed over a rural territory that might include many agrarian villages and hamlets. It also emphasized people, the citizens, rather than territory. It was, as Aristotle so neatly expressed it, ‘an association of several villages that achieve almost complete self-sufficiency’.¹⁶ No ‘city’ in the modern sense was created, for the association established a new and overriding citizenship in which the political independence of the ancestral villages was submerged evermore. For Aristotle man was pre-eminently ‘by nature a political animal’,¹⁷ being designed by his nature to realize his full potential through living the good life within, and only within, the framework of the self-governing polis, the key signifier of civilization. Just as the crowning of an acorn is the fully mature oak tree, by extension the crowing of all human social life and organization was for Aristotle the Greek polis. Appropriately, he defined the citizen, politês (pl. politai), as the man who shares in political judgement and rule.¹⁸

So a Greek polis was not just a physical space, it always had human dimensions, and could be crossed on foot. Most poleis had fewer than a thousand citizens. The distinctive sense of the polis was, therefore, a ‘citizen state’ rather than a ‘city state’, where ‘the Spartans’ or ‘the Athenians’ were the polis, as it was. So ancient Greece was divided up into many political units of small proportions, conceivable in the absence of large-scale territorial states, which always have gargantuan appetites for conquest. We tend to feel that progress is continuous, a journey from the cave to the cosmos, and that every age improves on what went before. There is such a strange power in the word ‘modern’.

While the polis was always defined in terms of its members (e.g. the Spartans not Sparta, the Athenians not Athens), rather than geographically or through bricks and marble, its development was also a process of urbanization and the walled city, for instance, is common in Homer. Undeniably the archaeological remains of Bronze Age Greece reveal fortifications of great strength and complexity, of huge, barely squared-off boulders, as at Mycenae, Tiryns and Gla, yet these Mycenaean citadels are the counterparts of mediaeval castles rather than of walled cities. But when the residential fortress ceases to be the citadel and becomes the polis, fortifications now protect the citizen body and not merely the ruler and his household. Greek poleis, to quote Winter, ‘were much more than fortresses, they were complete social, political and economic units to a degree never achieved by their modern successors’.¹⁹

Because it was an agrarian-based society, the polis itself controlled and exploited a territory, the chôra, which was farmed by the citizens and their households. Around ten acres devoted to grain, olive trees, and vines could feed a peasant family of five or six (rather than provide a mount for a single aristocrat). As the chôra was delimited geographically by mountains or sea, or by proximity to another polis, parochial border wars were common. Thus, its citizens were residents of a chôra rather than the city itself, which was only one element in the state, though an important one, of course, since everyone made use of its agora as a centre for socialising, its acropolis as a place of refuge, and its temples and shrines to honour the gods. Politically, however, the astu, as it was called, was a piece with the surrounding chôra. The polis was, in essence, a community of warrior farmers, males of military age who would necessarily fight for it, in which the military power of the community controlled the political and institutional life (magistracies, council, assembly), and the reader is warned to remember at all times that, in the Greek view, the political and military spheres were totally indivisible.

There is some truth in the ancient claim that Greek poleis squabbled over ‘paltry boundaries and strips of land not so remarkably good’.²⁰ It seems Greeks could not live together in peace, and the nearest and most powerful neighbour was the natural enemy. Border wars were thus common, as were inter-polis agreements and attempts to establish territorial rights over disputed areas. In a land of scant natural resources, autonomy was jealously guarded, but the necessities of collaboration made for a proliferation of extramural alliances, leagues of small communities, usually ethnically related, and hegemonies. There was also constant interchange and competition between poleis, so that despite their separate identities a common culture was always maintained. In brief, a good social definition of the polis might run as follows: a form of state based on a given territory whose central authority did not rest upon monarchy but with a group of agrarian citizens sharing notionally equal political powers.

A modern nation is a mass of people sharing customs, traditions, interests and culture, conscious of its identity and of the distinction between it and the rest of the world. Moreover, for a modern nation to exist it is necessary for the majority of its members to consider ...