DEBUNKING THE SPARTANS
“The lies told about ancient Sparta are nearly as old as the city itself,” says historian and author Myke Cole. Here he peels back five of the biggest myths and legends surrounding the ancient city state
Since ancient times, people have believed that the Spartans were history’s biggest badasses – warriors who never fled, never surrendered and never backed down from a fight. The Spartans were supposedly incorruptible, spurning wealth and luxury, always placing the welfare of their city state above themselves. The notion of the Spartans as selfless, fearless, unbeatable heroes is so widespread that if you type “Spartans” into Amazon you’ll have to scroll through pages of self-help books before you get to any history. Today, an entire industry of fitness fads, mud runs, branded weapons, and everything from apparel to action figures is built on the back of what I have termed “The Bronze Lie”.
It is truly impressive how widespread this false belief is, and just as shocking when you realise how quickly it crumbles with even a cursory glance at the historical sources. Reading the ancient writers (always outsiders, because no Spartan writing survives beyond a few words chiselled in stone), the truth comes shining through immediately.
From all my research, the fact is this: the Spartans were just like anyone else. They were no worse, but they were also no better. They were every bit as cowardly, greedy and selfaggrandising as any other person, then or now. They were also just as capable of real heroics, bravery, and self-sacrifice. They were human beings, not supermen, and the myth of their prowess, while inspiring, is not history.
This myth snowballed across the millennia, but it was kicked into pop-culture overdrive by the 2006 hit film 300, which perpetuates the falsehood that 300 Spartans gave their lives on a suicide mission to hold back the Persian army of Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The mythic resonance of this battle is best summed up by the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s declaring, “There are defeats more triumphant than victories. Never could those four sister victories, the fairest the sun ever beheld, of Salamis, Plataea, Mycale and Sicily, venture to oppose all their united glories, to the single glory of the discomfiture of King Leonidas and his men, at the pass of Thermopylae.” Nothing could be farther from the truth, and it is this lie that I first debunk here, as it forms the foundation for all the rest.
Although in my book The Bronze Lie I focus on the human failings of the Spartans in an effort to debunk the many pervasive myths surrounding them, there are many glorious successes to their story as well: from their incredible victories at the Battles of First Mantinea (418 BCE) and the Nemea (394 BCE), to their brilliant use of soft power and alliances to advance policies without fighting. There are so many real Spartan heroes to celebrate, not the mythic Leonidas, but the very
real King Archidamus, who, when his efforts to secure peace with Athens failed, stepped up and did his best to lead a war.
There is also Brasidas, whose charm, diplomacy and wits secured much of northern Greece for his city state without ever lifting a spear. This barely scratches the surface of what the real Spartans have to show us. These were a people who gave us genuine heroes. But we will never see them, never have the chance to be inspired by them, if we insist on distorting the record. The lionisation of Sparta’s best is an attempt to honour them, but people are best honoured when we remember them as who they actually were.
THERMOPYLAE WAS A MYTH 1 GLORIOUS SUICIDE MISSION
Nearly everything we think we know about the
Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) is wrong. There were probably around 1,000 Spartans (the famous 300 were just the noble elite part of the Spartan force) and that’s not counting their slaves, who also fought. Each Spartan noble would have had at least one slave, but at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE, each had seven.
If this were the case at Thermopylae, then the Spartans would have had an additional 2,100 slave troops. This Spartan force was part of a larger army of around 7,000 allied Greeks. Far from being a suicide mission, Herodotus tells us they expected to be reinforced. And far from a glorious defeat, it was an utter disaster, a speed bump for the Persians, who went on to capture and burn Athens after a paltry delay of just three days. The defeat was so disastrous that the Spartan myth was likely coined at this time as an effort to shore up Greek morale and keep the rest of the Greeks from surrendering to Persia.
The Spartan king Leonidas’ celebrated taunt “Come and take them” to Xerxes’ demand that the Spartans surrender their arms conveniently ignores the fact that Xerxes did come and take them, after killing Leonidas and all of his men, cutting off the king’s head and sticking it on a pole.
SPARTANS NEVER RAN MYTH 2 FROM A FIGHT
The Spartans withdrew, retreated, backed down and fled the field of battle far too many times to document here. Their fear of Athenian naval supremacy was well known. After their victory at the Battle of Corcyra in 427 BCE, the Spartan fleet hoisted their sails and ran the moment Athenian reinforcements arrived. They famously backed down again in 411 BCE, despite the fact that their navy was much improved, buoyed by gold from the very Persians they fought at Thermopylae.
But the Spartans didn’t just flee on the water. Their most famous defeat at the hands of the rival city state of Thebes – the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE – snapped Sparta’s spine and ended their relevance as a military power in Ancient Greece. The defeat was so total that a second Spartan army, though certainly positioned to engage the Thebans, backed off rather than face them in the field.
SPARTANS NEVER MYTH 3 SURRENDERED
The best known example of a Spartan surrender is perhaps the most instructive. During Sparta’s long and wasteful war with Athens, the Peloponnesian War (really, multiple wars spanning more than 50 years), the Athenians established an epiteichisma (a forward operating base) in Spartan territory. In the course of trying to drive the Athenians out, 120 of the elite Spartan citizens found themselves cut off on the island of Sphacteria in 425 BCE. By all accounts, they fought bravely, living up to their legend. But when the Athenians surrounded them by scaling a cliff the Spartans believed to be unclimbable, the Spartans surrendered. What happened to those surrendering Spartans debunks another lie.
SPARTA PUNISHED THOSE MYTH 4 WHO SURVIVED DEFEAT
According to myth, the 120 captives from Sphacteria should have been termed tresantes - ‘tremblers’ who would live as outcasts should they ever return to Sparta – unable to hold public office, excluded from gymnastics, games and communal dining or from conducting business, forced to dress in rags and subjected to beatings by their own countrymen.
However, none of this happened when these 120 men were returned to the city state. Some lip service was paid, but in the end they were not really punished. These were elite men from powerful families and, as is so common with the rich and powerful, the rules did not apply to them.
SPARTANS HATED WEALTH MYTH 5
The myth that Spartans hated wealth and even refused to use gold and silver coins was one of many promulgated by the Greek philosopher Plutarch in his famous Life
of Lycurgus – a biography of Sparta’s almost certainly mythic founder. Plutarch claimed that the Spartans redistributed all wealth so that each man would only have what he needed to serve in the army and no more. There are so many examples of Spartan greed that they could easily fill their own article, so I’ll just point out a few here.
Most historians agree (and Aristotle points out) that Spartan wealth inequality was so exaggerated that it caused the oliganthropia - Sparta’s military manpower crisis that saw its elite citizen warriors dwindle until it finally resorted to arming its slaves. Service in Sparta’s military elite was dependent on a Spartan’s ability to pay his communal mess dues, and as wealth in the city state accrued in fewer and fewer hands over the years, fewer and fewer Spartans could afford to cover the bill and found themselves cast out of the elite status.
There are numerous accounts of Spartan kings and notable leaders accused of taking bribes. Perhaps most famous is the Spartan king Leotychidas, who after Thermopylae campaigned against the Thessalians – northern Greeks who had bent the knee to the Persians. His campaign was so ineffective that it came as no surprise when a glove packed with silver was found in his tent – bribe money paid by the propersian Aleudae clan to get him to wave off.
But perhaps more worrying for Rome was his covert pact with Antiochus, king of the Seleucid Empire based in Syria, which saw them agree to attack Egypt’s holdings in the Aegean and Asia Minor. The Romans were increasingly concerned about Philip’s relationship with another superpower and opted to stop him before he grew too powerful.
For this task they sent one of the newly elected consuls – the highest-ranking
Roman magistrate – named Titus Quinctius Flamininus, who arrived in Greece in 198
BCE at not yet 30 years old. Demands by Flamininus to Philip fell on deaf ears, and soon the two generals and their allies met on the field.
Flamininus’ forces managed to get the upper hand during the Battle of Aous Narrows, but the restricted pass allowed Philip to escape with most of his force. This defeat did prove a catalyst for the Achaean League to break rank with Philip, however, which was a serious coup for Flamininus. In a bid to win a new ally, Philip offered the captured Greek town of Argos to the ruler of Sparta, Nabis. Nabis accepted the gift but he immediately went over to the Roman side anyway, temporarily forgetting his previous animosity and rivalry with the Achaeans.
The Romans were winning the diplomatic game, and as the campaigning season of the next year opened, they strengthened their hand even more by winning over the Boeotian League, albeit mostly through thinly veiled intimidation. A decisive encounter was looming and would arrive after the winter, when the two sides clashed at Cynoscephalae.
Flamininus had been hounding Philip’s force as it searched for a well-provisioned position, and under heavy rain and dense fog the two forces camped either side of a ridge named the ‘dog-heads’, or Cynoscephalae. Both generals sent their cavalry towards the ridge under low visibility and the two sides were startled to find their enemy right in front of them. Skirmishing between the cavalry began, and as more forces rushed in to help, things soon escalated into a full pitched battle.
It was the advantages enjoyed by the Roman maniple system – which arranged soldiers in neat, semi-independent units of around
300 men – that proved pivotal in the fight at Cynoscephalae. Philip’s phalanxes, which were composed of dense clusters of pike men, initially enjoyed success on their slightly elevated position and drove the Romans back down the hill. Flamininus attempted to force his legions through on his left flank but was stopped in his tracks, and in some places his line began to collapse. Fortunately, the triarii – who were spear-wielding veteran legionnaries typically held in reserve – were ready and waiting to plug the gap, offering a defensive position for others to rally behind.
One of Flamininus’ officers then exploited his army’s flexibility by peeling off a contingent of maniples from the right flank, who were fighting higher up the hill, and leading them behind the Macedonian line. He sent his soldiers crashing down into the enemy rear, and the fighting soon descended into rout. The Romans mercilessly pursued their foe, hacking down around 8,000 of Philip’s soldiers and capturing another 5,000 as prisoners. It was nothing short of a decisive victory for Rome.
The terms of surrender were harsh for Philip, as Macedon was crippled through confiscated territory. However, the Greek sides who fought for Rome did not fare as well as they thought they would after his defeat, as Flamininus denied them new territory. In their desperation to throw off the yolk of Macedon they had invited in the Romans, but, ironically, they were merely swapping one overlord for another.
The prospect of Roman hegemony wasn’t lost on the Aetolians, who bemoaned their lack of awarded territory by Flamininus. But what the Romans sought was a balance of power in Greece – they wanted no one to threaten their
informal control of the region, regardless of whether they were friend or foe. In a sly move, Flamininus pronounced the Greeks as free and announced the withdrawal of all Roman troops. The locals rejoiced, but the physical removal of an army did not release the Greeks from Roman shackles. The Romans put in place loyal rulers wherever they could, and, if needed, they could simply send their forces back. Rome was the new master of Greece, and none truly believed anything different.
There was one task Flamininus was keen on settling before the Romans departed en masse, and that was war on Sparta. The ancient city’s gift from Philip, Argos, had been part of the Achaean League before the Second Macedonian War had begun, and the League wanted it back. Sparta’s ruler, Nabis, refused, and so Flamininus and his allies amassed a massive force numbering up to 50,000 men and marched on the city.
The allied forces swiftly recovered Argos, but after Nabis declined an offer of peace they continued their march. The two sides clashed outside the city’s boundaries and the Spartans were overwhelmed. Retreating within the city walls, Nabis had accumulated provisions to endure a siege and held out hope of survival. Flamininus was in no mood to wait, however, and ordered his numerous forces to storm the city. The narrow passageways of the city streets worked to impede the invaders’ progress, and the Spartans successfully used burning debris to repel their enemies. The soldiers were recalled and redeployed the following day. The Spartans again managed to endure, but by the third day they were so battered Nabis had little choice but to surrender.
Flamininus decided to leave Nabis in charge of Sparta under harsh terms, much to the Achaean League’s chagrin. They had dreamed for years of assimilating the city, and following the Roman’s departure from Greek shores wasted little time in realising this goal. It was Nabis himself who struck the match, though. Antiochus, the leader of the Seleucids of Asia Minor and Syria, had recently been beckoned by the Aetolians to ‘liberate Greece’ from the Romans. The Spartans leapt at the opportunity to throw off the Roman yolk and began to immediately attack the port of Gytheum held by the Achaean League. An Achaean general, Philopoemen, did not wait for the Romans to offer a response.
His naval counter-attack against the Spartans got off to a poor start, as embarrassingly his flagship fell apart at sea, but his luck turned as Nabis was assassinated by the Aetolians. Philopoemen marched on Sparta and captured it, fulfilling a long-held Achaean ambition. Sparta would stir and lash out at its new overlords over the next few turbulent years, but these would prove to be its death throes. Philopoemen was at first successful in peacefully re-incorporating Sparta into the League, but the city’s second revolt was put down with more force. Not only were many Spartans butchered, but their storied constitution was torn to pieces and a new one written in its place, essentially bringing to a close the city state’s existence as a cultural warrior territory.
The Romans would engage Antiochus at Thermopylae, the very site where Sparta had cemented its eternal legend, only a handful of years later. Despite the ending to that epic encounter being common knowledge to almost every Greek, Antiochus did not sufficiently prepare for the Romans employing the Persian trick of surrounding his forces via the alternate route around the pass. Like Leonidas before him, Antiochus was surrounded, and his forces were brutally crushed between the Roman pincer.
There were now no superpowers left to fight Rome in the entire Mediterranean. To make matters worse for any freedomloving Greeks, the subsequent defeat of Antiochus in Asia Minor provided the Romans with an embarrassment of riches. Rome’s treasury – and her leading men – found their coffers stuffed. The Romans now had uncompromising power, authority and wealth. With this new-found confidence in their own resources and ability, the Romans began to cast aside the façade of helpful protector of Greek liberty and assume their authoritarian role more openly.
It would fall to Macedon to defiantly resist Roman might one last time, but it was no longer
Philip at the helm, rather his eldest son Perseus. Perseus invested heavily in strengthening his position but was careful not to break any terms of his treaty with Rome. But this concession was not enough for the Romans – they couldn’t stand idly by while a rival king gathered power in their new dominion and stirred the patriotic hearts of the Greeks. They soon declared war on Perseus and sent 50,000 soldiers to Greece.
The young Macedonian king got the better of his opponents during their first two campaigning seasons there, and the rebellious towns viciously enslaved by the Romans only helped to elevate Perseus to the position of saviour and encourage some to defect to his cause. However, the young king still craved a pitched battle that would bring about definitive victory
– at least in the short term. He would get his wish at Pydna, where the two armies would clash and the war would be settled. Perseus’ phalanxes opened strongly; the Romans had not yet fully formed their lines and he sent his men charging into them, inflicting heavy casualties. However, this had the consequence of breaking the phalanxes’ tight formation, and the Romans swiftly capitalised on this error by sending units in between the exposed cracks in the enemy line. The legionnaries then proceeded to erode Perseus’ forces from the inside out, collapsing his phalanx and inflicting terrible casualties.
After the fall of Perseus, the Romans acted to hamstring Macedonian power by dividing the territory into four republics. This worked for a time, but three pretenders to the throne over the following few years encouraged the Romans to permanently garrison Macedon and eventually settle it as an official province of the empire. And so the burning flame of Macedon had finally been extinguished, and with it the last glimmer of hope for a Rome-free Greece for the next 500 years.
The conquest of Greece brought about a new age of Rome. The Greeks may have looked rather dimly upon the Italian ‘barbarians’, but many Roman senators looked upon Greece’s culture with admiration. Multitudes of captured paintings, sculptures and educated slaves were purchased by Rome’s leading men, and with the newfound wealth of international empire came the flamboyant age of Rome, complete with Hellenistic splendour. Some conservative Romans would fight in vain for traditional
Roman virtue to remain centre stage, but yet more found themselves enamoured with Greek art, literature, philosophy and lifestyle.
This reverence for the Greeks would continue into the Roman Principate and beyond, as Emperor Hadrian would remain a devout lover of all things Hellenistic. The Greeks may have lost their liberty under the Romans, but their legend and influence would continue to inspire many for millennia.
“NOT ONLY WERE MANY SPARTANS BUTCHERED, BUT THEIR STORIED CONSTITUTION WAS TORN TO PIECES AND A NEW ONE WRITTEN IN ITS PLACE”