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- [00:00]
A
Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe. It's 404 BC, and the Spartans celebrate one of their greatest triumphs. After decades of on and off fighting with Athens, they had finally defeated their great rival. The polarized Greek world that had existed shattered, with Sparta now clearly ruling the roost over Greece, entering its golden age, its military zenith. And yet, within a few decades, this legendary city's dominance would come tumbling down, never to rise to such heights again. So why did this happen? What caused Sparta to fall from power so quickly in the early 4th century BC? It's a fascinating story that features battles, city revivals, overseas expeditions, formidable Spartan kings, and so much more. This is the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the Fall of Sparta. Joining me today, we have two returning guests. Dr. Rule Caniner Darby, Fellow in Ancient History at Lincoln College Oxford, and Dr. Owen Rees, Lecturer in Applied Sciences at Birmingham Newman University. Roel and Owen, it is a pleasure to have you both on the podcast at the same time in the same room. We never thought it could happen, but it has happened.
- [02:16]
B
Thanks for having me, Tristan.
- [02:17]
A
It's such a pleasure we've had you both on in the past four individual episodes, but you are both experts in ancient Greece and it felt about time. We covered the story of sparta in the 4th century BC, and it's often called the time when Sparta falls from prominence. And is that a fair statement to say at the beginning? Roald, I'll start with you.
- [02:35]
C
I mean, absolutely. It's a century that Sparta starts as the undisputed hegemon of the Greek world and ends as a minor state in the Peloponnese. All of its power is stripped away, all of its allies fall away. It is completely unable to reassert itself. I think that's. That's very much the story for Spartan Century.
- [02:51]
B
Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those sort of ironies of Spartan history where at the moment of its great success, it is already falling apart. So as much as it is them at their sort of hegemonic point, allegedly leading the Greeks, it is just a downward trajectory pretty much from that point onwards.
- [03:08]
A
Which is funny also, doesn't it feel that largely today, when we think of Sparta, we seem to overlook the 4th century BC quite a bit, at least in the popular idea. You think of Thermopylae, you'll think of Sparta beating the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, and then you kind of just forget about them because you know that the Macedonians and then the Romans come along.
- [03:25]
C
I guess there's a real tendency, I find, where people think that the end of the Peloponnesian War has something to do with the rise of Macedon, that these things are related. Right. The Greeks exhausted themselves in the Peloponnesian War and that allowed Macedon to rise. There's like 60 years between those things. Right. Like, you need to acknowledge that there are things happening in that time that also influence things. And in fact, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, I mean, a lot of Greeks would have thought like, right, okay, that was, you know, not very nice. But now we're back to the status quo, right? Sparta is back on top. Athens has been humbled, and we return to the kind of structures that we had before the Peloponnesian War. So they would have thought, you know, mostly that's the return to business as usual. And it's what happens in the decades after that really changed the landscape. Yeah.
- [04:07]
B
And the other irony with Sparta is the 4th century is when we actually get almost good evidence, bold claim for Sparta. You know, this is where the Spartan history of the early 4th century is very much the work of Xenophon, who has a good understanding of Spartan systems. He spends time in Spartan lands. He knows the Spartan king. His account is we get to see Sparta. Not necessarily realistically. There is still a propagandistic nature to what he's doing, but it is better.
- [04:35]
A
Than we've had before he was there. And he can tell what Sparta was actually like at that time.
- [04:39]
B
Precisely that. And he is writing about it in various different books. You know, he's given us these different perspectives. So it is quite odd. You are right. We sort of overlook the 4th century as a result. And the irony is never sort of lost on us with that.
- [04:55]
A
And yeah, Xenophon's, at least in my opinion, a much easier source to. To read anyway. Isn't he like he is.
- [05:01]
B
He's a more interesting. Oh, I'll upset people now. He's just such a more interesting.
- [05:05]
A
Sorry, Thucydides, sorry, Herodotus.
- [05:07]
C
I mean, this is a sort of very sort of loving environment here. I think we both sort of love him very Much both because he's accessible as a source. You know, he's easy to read, he's easy to. To pick up. He wears his opinions honestly, but also because, you know, he's a very amusing figure as a character that he. That appears in his own work or that appears through the interest that he writes about. You can kind of relate to him in certain ways. You can see what he likes, you can see what he doesn't like. And in that sense, he feels closer to you than somebody who stands very aloof of his material, like a Thucydides, who is just like, kind of laying it out as it is. And you have to kind of accept his authority. Xenophon feels more personable.
- [05:42]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And as a result, he gives just an amazing level of insight into things, especially when he's witnessed them himself. And you really do. When you. When you're reading someone like Xenophon, you get moments. You're like, you were clearly there. This is a bit too vivid.
- [05:57]
C
Sometimes he will say that or imply it. Other times he will leave it sort of quietly, like he's giving. He gives a lot of detail about the defense of the oligarchy of the thirty in Athens after the Peloponnesian War.
- [06:07]
A
We'll get to that.
- [06:08]
C
We'll get to that. Okay, well, I won't say anything about it now, but he's very conspicuously able to give a very detailed account.
- [06:14]
B
But he wasn't there.
- [06:14]
C
But he was there. No one could possibly. You can't prove anything.
- [06:20]
A
Xenophon, it sounds like he is our main source for much of the period that we're going to be talking about today, like the half century or so. But surely we've got a few other sources as well. Writing a bit later, my mind might think of Plutarch or Diodorus Siculus or the like. Are they also helpful additions to what Xenophon supplies?
- [06:35]
C
They're very helpful. I mean, both, because any source can tell you something more, even just about the kind of traditions that used to survive. Right. Plutarch has access to a lot of sources that we don't have anymore, and he quotes them and he talks about them, compares them. He also writes about topics that other sources, or Xenophon perhaps might not be so interested in. So he gives all these biographies. You get all these glimpses of other parts of the Greek world and even beyond that. And Diodorus obviously preserves this continuous history. I mean, he was trying to write a universal history. Most of it is lost, but there is a significant chunk especially the 4th century, that's preserved entire, so you actually rely on him. Once Xenophon's narrative ends in 362, you have Diodorus, and otherwise you would have very little at all. But I also want to mention a couple of other sources that become very prominent in the fourth century, especially the orators, because in the fifth, you have just the first beginning of that in the 4th century, the Athenian orators, these writers who write essentially speeches to the assembly, speeches to the council, and speeches in courts, and they become a hugely important additional source. And they're obviously hugely problematic in all sorts of ways, but they actually give us a whole extra layer. And often they refer to and appeal to and organize in some ways, historical events as well.
- [07:46]
A
This is where, when you get later that the speeches of, like, Lycurgus and Demosthenes and the like, right.
- [07:50]
B
In Epicus and even the speeches of Lysias, you know, for individual Athenian citizens who fought in many of the wars we're going to talk about, fought in many of the battles we talked about, just gives you that kind of the human side of these sort of stories as well. But on top of that, we also can't forget this is the 4th century, is the century of Plato, Socrates students, basically. So Plato, and then obviously his protege in Aristotle. And, you know, the Aristotle in school is very much obsessed with politics and political systems. And so, you know, there's a lot of work being done on when we talk about Sparta. A lot of our sort of political models of Sparta come as much from the sort of Aristotle tradition as much as anything else. So, yeah, there is a lot of. I always refer to it as like, patchwork. It's almost like a jigsaw of evidence. You're just trying to piece it all together whilst you navigate something. I know we've talked about a lot and you've talked about a lot on your podcast about the Spartan mirage. This is sort of one of the ways we try and navigate this, by bringing so many different forms of evidence together to try and build a semblance of a picture.
- [08:51]
A
Yeah, there's more realistic Sparta in the 4th century compared to the centuries, I guess, from the. And spare a thought for the often useless Justin, who I guess once in a while he does make a statement once in a while, doesn't he? I'm not a big. I'm not a big fan of Justin.
- [09:06]
C
Justin is precious because he is summarizing a lost Philippic. Right. So there was a whole tradition of people writing histories of Philip of Macedon they're all lost. And we have the summary of Diodorus and we have the summaries of Justin. And so we do need them both in order to get something like a story. And yeah, Justin is problematic, but Justin is one of those authors who talks about when Sparta builds a wall for the first time for the incident. So there are important things that are reported by Justin that otherwise we would find much more difficult.
- [09:32]
A
I know I'm being too harsh on Justin.
- [09:34]
C
I mean, it's right to be harsh on Justin, but, you know, we also can't afford to throw anything out. That's the problem of ancient history in general.
- [09:41]
A
You can tell how nerdy we're getting now that we're talking about a very obscure ancient stars and delving into the Justin run. But no, it's my fault for bringing it up. It needs to be done. But let's set the scene then. The beginning of the 4th century BC. Should we start at the end of the Peloponnesian War? So we'll kick us off. What does the world look like? How powerful is Sparta when they've just defeated the Athenians?
- [10:01]
C
So this is the point when Sparta is at the height of its power, right? Essentially it has subjected Athens and it has signed this, this surrender agreement, essentially, which makes Athens into one of its subject allies. So they are basically now made to do Sparta's bidding. Their fleet has been scrapped, essentially. Their empire has been dissolved. But it's not exactly clear, but it seems to be, Diodorus seems to be quite certain about this, that the Spartans don't just dissolve the Athenian empire and say, okay, that's done now, they actually just take it over. So they are now the ones who are having all these allies that used to be formally subject to Athens. They are drawing in the tribute. Thousand talents a year, we're told.
- [10:38]
A
This is a Spartan empire.
- [10:39]
C
The Spartan Empire, exactly. So this is a period when Sparta still has its fleet that was funded by the Persians, of course. So they still have naval hegemony, they have no rivals on the sea, and they control basically the entire Greek world, or at least the mainland and the islands in the Aegean.
- [10:53]
A
And so does Persia keep funding the fleet, or do the Spartans, by taking over all of these former territories of the Athenians, now have the money from them to keep funding the fleet?
- [11:02]
C
So it's a complex picture with the Persians, obviously what they want is they want to regain control of Asia Minor, right? So that's what they've been doing by funding these Greeks. So they want to take. They want to push back Athenian control so that they can resume levying tribute from the cities in what is now.
- [11:15]
A
Western Germany and Asia Minor, Anatolia today.
- [11:16]
C
Okay, that's right. And so that's what they ultimately want. Initially, they thought the Spartans could help them get it, but then when the Spartans sort of take suzerainty over that area, they kind of reclaim it for themselves. For a Spartan empire, that obviously doesn't sit well with the Persians. And so they covertly start building up. They start cultivating this asset, which is Conon, the Athenian general who fled from the fatal battle at Hykos Potamoi with a couple of ships. He fled to Cyprus, and the Persians are basically marinating him and building a fleet around him. So they're preparing to potentially challenge Spartan control of the sea in order to push them back. And because the Spartans get more and more involved in Asia Minor to, say, support the continued independence of the Greek states there from the Persians, it becomes more and more difficult for the Persians to leave them at it. Eventually, they just have to say, okay, well, we got to do something about these guys. That happens pretty quickly, actually, after the end of Peloponnesian War.
- [12:10]
B
It absolutely does. And I think it's also worth pointing out that there's a real. In the sources, there's a real sort of strain between are the Spartans liberating or are the Spartans building their empire further? You know, the main player early on is the commander Lysander, who is pretty much installing pro Spartan governments anywhere he can liberate. So we do have that spread of Spartan authority, that spread of Spartan influence throughout. So in a sort of a Persian perspective, it makes sense that they need to stem this tide. The easiest way to stem this tide has always been to encourage internal strife with the Greeks. And so the fleet is just an extension of that kind of policy, continuing on, as we've already seen in the Peloponnesian War. Continue on further.
- [12:55]
A
They've been backing the Spartans as it suited them in the Peloponnesian War. But as we'll see, the Persians will play their own game. As we talk through the story of Sparta over the following decades, they also.
- [13:04]
C
Kind of have to. Because Sparta makes this sort of great strategic mistake, right? They owe Cyrus for their victory in the Peloponnesian War. Cyrus is this prince of Persia, right? So he is the second oldest son of Darius ii. When Darius dies, his son Artaxerxes takes the throne. Cyrus doesn't like it, so he starts a bid to take the throne for himself. It's essentially rebellion. An internal struggle within Persia. Sparta because they owe Cyrus because they feel they have a personal bond with him rather than an abstract bond with Persia for winning the war for them. They back him, but Cyrus loses. He dies in the Battle of Kunaxa. So Artaxerxes II is affirmed as king, at which point, obviously, Sparta finds itself having backed the wrong side in a struggle for the throne, you know, on the wrong side of the Persians. So there's these moments when Sparta essentially makes a misstep that puts them further and further in the sort of on the red in. In Persia's ledgers. So that is definitely something that is going to come to a head.
- [14:01]
A
This is the March of the 10,000, which we've covered actually previous episode.
- [14:04]
C
It's great story.
- [14:04]
A
What a narrative that is. The march of the 10,000. We'll put a link to that in the description. And also you mentioned earlier the Bass Vegas postmaice. That's the last big naval clash, isn't it, where the Athenians are clearly defeated by the Spartans at sea. But let's go back to the Spartans and how they deal with Athens in particular, because you mentioned earlier. Is it the 30 tyrants, you said, or. So what is the 30 tyrants?
- [14:24]
B
So once Sparta has taken control, brought an end to the Peloponnesian War, it has won his battle, it has put Athens under siege, and then they finally have their accord agreement. As rules talked us through, there is a bit of a debate. What do we do with Athens? Athens during the Peloponnesian War was rather notoriously brutal, with cities that opposed it. So there was something of a conflict. Do we destroy Athens? Do we wipe it off? Do we try and control it? Do we turn it into a tiny version of what it once was? And the agreement in the end, there was a lot of internal conflict within Sparta about this. And the agreement was that they would take down the walls, as we mentioned, they'd take the fleet from them and would install a tyrant, a tyranny of 30 pro Spartan Athenian elites.
- [15:16]
A
So an oligarchy, this idea, is it?
- [15:18]
B
That's exactly what this is, yeah. A tyrannical oligarchy with the idea.
- [15:22]
C
Because there's a difference obviously between tyranny and oligarchy. It became known even already in ancient tradition as the 30 tyrants. But it's initially just the oligarchy of the 30. So it's such a narrow oligarchy that there's only 30 of them. Where more traditionally you'd get, you know, a few hundred or a few thousand.
- [15:37]
B
No, That's a fair point. That's a fair point. I might be buying into the Athenian narrative later. That's the Athenian historian in me.
- [15:44]
C
No, it's very funny because there's later traditions even sort of describe the campaign against the 30 as tyrant killing. Like they compare it to. Yeah, compare it to the Timodius and Aristogyiton.
- [15:52]
B
Yeah, yeah, precisely that. So, you know, that's very much the narrative. But yeah, really it's an oligarchy installed much like the Spartans have been installing in so many other different states. Because it's Athens, because Athens was that such a novel democracy. It's kind of. It has that resonance with us even to this day. You know, the 30 tyrants get put in place, although it doesn't last more than like a year really. There is a. Basically an uprising against it. I've just listened to a fantastic talk by an academic who might be opposite me, literally talking through this, you know, and sort of the overthrow of this tyranny and the reinstallation of democracy comes quite quickly. And what's interesting for me when we consider the Spartans is the Spartans don't really have the ability or the will to stop it.
- [16:35]
C
It's a very strange story because the Spartans obviously are backing this regime. Right, they're backing the 30. They have a garrison in Athens. And in fact, some Athenian sources will paint this as a time when Athens is under Spartan occupation. Essentially it's under the control of the foreign power. At the same time, the Spartans aren't necessarily going to put all of their weight behind the 30. They're not sort of marching in to clear out this rebellion. They do send an army and they do fight that rebellious army briefly, but then they kind of force them to reconcile, which effectively means that they must know that it means that democracy will be restored. These oligarchs get thrown out and the Spartans kind of sit by and let that happen. And it's a real question of why they're doing that, why they think that that is the better move for them. But it's likely that they think that it's just never going to stop. Otherwise it's just going to be this continuous civil war in Athens. And also it might have something to do with internal factional strife between Pausanias, who is overseeing this, and Lysander, who we've already mentioned, the admiral, who is very much in favor of keeping all these regimes everywhere that are pro Spartan, but who is getting a little bit too important and too influential in Sparta.
- [17:37]
B
Especially for a non royal, for A non royal.
- [17:39]
C
Exactly. And so there are some concerns about Lysander, which Pausanias is trying to nip in the bud in part by essentially sawing off, sawing off the legs of the chair he's sitting on, by taking away these regimes.
- [17:50]
A
So I've already mentioned how, you know, there's that soon after there's that campaign where quite a few Spartans go eastwards with Cyrus, the march to 10,000. We won't cover that in detail today because we've done that in the past. But can you summarise then what happens with Sparta and its power and I guess also its popularity amongst the Greeks in the decade or so following their great success defeating Athens? Because it seems to go bad pretty quick.
- [18:14]
C
Really quick, yeah. In fact these regimes that we mentioned that are put in place by Lysander, so he puts in these so called decarchies, these rules of the 10 which are even more narrow than the 30 at Athens and they're widely hated and they get thrown out very quickly. And so there's already this kind of low key rebellion against what the Spartans have done, although that doesn't mean a rebellion against Spartan interests, just in the regime that they have put in place. And it's clear from the sources that there is increasing just displeasure, discomfort with the fact that Sparta is now the undisputed hegemon. And especially the larger powers Corinth and Thebes and Argos are really unhappy with this and they're increasingly starting to think that something should be done. They're putting in these kind of moments of rebellion when to kind of show that they want to retain some or regain some level of autonomy.
- [18:58]
A
And these have been former allies of Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. But now Athens is out of the picture. They now see Sparta as the greatest threat to themselves, I guess.
- [19:05]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War a lot of these alliances very quickly come under like scrutiny is the wrong word. But you know very much now what, especially as Sparta begins to expand more and more, which of course it had never attempted to really do before. So Sparta is now trying to do something that its allies are not used to it trying to do. Sparta is notoriously isolationist in its mentality. During the fifth century, you know, they reluctantly send men outside of their own territory and really the Peloponnesian wars where you see it done systematically. So this is unusual and it creates an uncomfortable balance like so much so Thebes. There is a bit of an obsession in Sparta after the Peloponnesian War in what's going on with Thebes and the growth of Thebes potentially as a rival. And you could even date it. To the debate about whether or not we destroy Athens, I say we, the Spartans, should they destroy Athens. And, you know, Thebes is very much on one side of that debate. Yes, we should.
- [20:05]
A
There always are. On they. Anytime, any chance they can get to destroy Athens, they take it.
- [20:11]
B
And so, you know, even from that point, and then they seem to be sort of involved in the insurrection of the democrats coming back to Athens. So again, they're getting involved in the other side of that conversation within a year. And, you know, if you look at from a Spartan perspective, it's almost like they're just being prodded, poked at by the Thebans. It's like, we know you're just picking any side that I'm not on. So you get this real conflict. And when we get a new Sparta, as you know, is ruled by two kings. When we get a new king on one of those thrones, I guess Elios ii, he in particular has a real bee in his bonnet about the Thebans, and it sort of goes throughout his entire reign. So from that respect, I mean, this is why we kind of come back to the first point we talked about, which is the end of the Peloponnesian War. Sparta is at this zenith of its power, but everything is falling apart, including all the internal politics and the geopolitics that it was used to navigating before. That point is now quickly shifting and adapting to what they're doing.
- [21:12]
C
It's easy to skip ahead to when there's an actual war. But what you see in the period before that already, I'm always pointing this out to my students. When you look at individual campaigns, when all the allies of Sparta are meant to march with them, they're meant to follow orders, but you keep seeing them just not doing it. And that is itself a sign that they're just not willing to do Sparta's bidding and fight and die for Sparta's interests. So when the Spartans are going to war against the rebels in Athens, the Thebans refuse to march with them. When they go to war against Elis, the Thebans and the Corinthians refuse to march with them. When they go across to Asia Minor to fight the Persians, Thebans and Corinthians refuse to march with them. They just keep saying, yeah, you can tell us to go, we just won't go. Which is telling you so much about the extent to which Sparta is Still able to tell people, to order people around.
- [22:13]
A
Does it make sense then for us to now explore a little bit about how successful the Spartans are in Asia Minor? Or should we go now to what is called, Is it the Corinthian War or Nemea or chronologically wise, where should we start? Should we start with Asia Minor and Sparta or the mainland?
- [22:28]
C
Big question.
- [22:29]
B
Actually, it's a massive question. I think really you need to start with ages. Elias ii.
- [22:34]
A
Okay.
- [22:35]
B
And he's coming to the throne.
- [22:36]
A
Okay.
- [22:37]
B
So we're talking 400 BC.
- [22:38]
A
Okay.
- [22:38]
B
Okay. He comes to the throne late in life. He's about 40 years old. And more interestingly, he was not supposed to be king. He was not the next in line for the throne. He very much took an opportunity when his brother, I think it is, or half brother, died and exploits question about the legitimacy of the next in line. In part because of the support he had from the great Lysander, who was likely to have been his lover as a younger man. So close relationship between those two. So Agesilaus then takes to the throne in 400 and it is he who takes the Spartans properly to Asia Minor. So whilst the Spartans are over there sort of doing their actions, Agasaleus finally gets given control of both the army, the navy, and he properly takes, should we say, a more directed campaign into Asia Minor. So yeah, I guess a Leos has got to be the starting point.
- [23:33]
C
Yeah. This is actually Alcibiades influence. Right. So he is the one who seduces the other Spartan king's wife. Allegedly that his offspring. Allegedly. Which is why his offspring is, you know, of doubted parentage, which allows Agsilaus to become king. So it's all Alcibiades fault, just so we're clear on that.
- [23:48]
A
That pesky Athenian general you can always get back to. But come on, let's move on from Asgard.
- [23:52]
C
Let's move on. That's he's dead now. We don't need to talk about him anymore. So Helgasilaus takes over in Asia Minor, leads a large army. This is obviously when the Persians realize they have to respond in force. And there's different stories about how the eventual Corinthian war breaks out. One of those stories that's very prominent in the sources is essentially that the Persians send a guy to the mainland Greeks with a big bag of money saying, would you like to fight the Spartans in exchange for this big bag of money? Yes. Yeah. And of course, you know, Xenophon implies that a lot of people are very happy with this big bag of money that others reject it but are happy to fight this patterns. Anyway, supposedly the Athenians are like, no, we'll do it for free. There is a lot of discontent that sort of bubbles to the surface at that point. And the money may or may not have been a sort of nudge, like, you know, a further sort of nudge in that direction. The other account, Hellenikox Rinkia, I think doesn't mention the money at all. Is not interested in saying you were.
- [24:46]
A
Bribed into it by Hellenic oxy. Are these papyrus?
- [24:49]
C
Yeah. So this is a papyrus story. Another source, if you want to get really nerdy about this, there is a rival account which helps us in some cases and complicates things in others. Anyway, this is why the Persians are important, but also because they have been, as I said, marinating this Athenian commander and building a fleet around him, which at that point they actually send into the Aegean to challenge the Spartans. And so that is the moment when Persians are sort of simultaneously starting a war on land that is waged by the Greek, by a coalition of Greek states. And the war at sea, which is waged very much by the Persians themselves.
- [25:21]
A
Persians themselves at this time. So they held trigger. And do you think it's pretty likely that this is the true case, that the Persians seeing that this, this Spartan army threat on their territory, like classic, you know, they almost create a diversionary tactic by encouraging, you know, their upset allies at home to rise up and fight?
- [25:40]
B
Yeah, I think that's a perfectly valid way of looking at it. And I don't, I suppose the fill in the gaps part of the historian's job here is what they perhaps don't realize is how much discontent there is in Sparta at this point. So even though we've come out of this victorious moment by 400, a gazella comes to the throne. So what's that four years after the end of Peloponnesian War? 399. So five years of Peloponnesian War, we have a conspiracy in Sparta to overthrow the entire citizenry, the entire structure of the Spartan political system. The Cynodon conspiracy, where basically a rather disaffected non Spartan, but not foreign or enslaved. So he's likely to either be someone who's sort of fallen out of the Spartan system because he hasn't got enough money, or conversely, he might well have been sort of half Spartan. We're not 100% sure. And he seems to have united a group of helots. So that's the enslaved population. We've got the Perioikoi who were the people living around Sparta but aren't citizens. And we've also got other disgruntled previous Spartans who. Inferiors is what they're called in the source material. And there seems to be a conspiracy to basically band together and overthrow the Spartan system with the idea of sharing out that kind of citizen rights to everyone. So this is going on in Sparta. It is completely subdued by the kings. It is resolved. Cynadon is rather brutally and publicly paraded around, whipped and executed. But it gives you the idea of actually there are things going on in Sparta the Spartans are not happy internally. Do Persia know about that? I don't know. There's no way of us really knowing that. But what they are doing is also creating further stress to a system that is already in a potential period of flux.
- [27:32]
A
Right, well, let's keep going on from there then. So that's important to highlight the internal aspect of all of this. But how does the Corinthian war play out?
- [27:40]
C
I mean, so it plays out very differently on land and sea, which is why Xenophon actually separates these two things. Like, he talks only about the land campaigns, and at the very end he's like, also we go back a few years in time and then talk about the sea campaign, which is very interesting as a historical structure that's actually very novel. But fundamentally on land, even though. So you have a coalition of Athens, Argos, Corinth and Thebes, so the four greatest cities on the mainland, arguably, you know, even each of them individually is a larger population than Sparta. They band together, they try to fight the Spartans. It goes very badly for them. So Sparta does recall Agesilaus from Asia Minor, which is what the Persians want. So in that sense, the Persians get this early win, but he marches back into the mainland and defeats the coalition army that is gathered against him. That's actually the second battle, the Battle of Nemea, that happens earlier. There's a huge coalition going against the Spartans that also gets absolutely trashed. So the Spartans reassert themselves on land and it becomes this war of attrition after that, where the allied states know that they shouldn't encounter the Spartans in land battles sort of in the open, but they can support these sort of mercenary garrisons that they put in place in strategic places and that raid the countryside and win these sort of ambushes and minor battles against the sort of states that are trying to. Trying to back the Spartans. So on land, it grinds to a halt in this way, and you see the Spartans as Well, sort of flailing about trying to find some weak spot in the alliance. So they go and invade Acarnania and they march into Thebes and all these kinds of things. They're trying to find something that they can do to pry this prize, this, this alliance apart. It doesn't really work. But on land they managed to hold their own because on land they're just still a very powerful state and alliance. On the sea they get utterly defeated in the first battle. So it doesn't go well. It doesn't go well. The battle of Knidos in 394. I mean, arguably one of the most decisive battles in Greek history because it just destroys almost for good the Spartan ambition to also rule the sea.
- [29:36]
A
So actually, if we're talking about the fall of Sparta, this is still a.
- [29:38]
C
Key date because this is absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a crucial moment. So it's this Persian funded, arguably just Persian funded fleet because it's also commanded by the Satrap Pharnabazos alongside the Athenian Conon, which allows the Athenians to say like, actually no, it was an Athenian fleet, which sure guys, but it just happens to be, you know, massively funded by the Persians. But they destroy the Spartan fleet and then obviously that creates a complete shift in the situation in the Aegean and Asia Minor because once the Spartans don't have a fleet, how are they going to protect any of the states in that area? How are they going to exact money from them? They can't. They can't either do their duty as a hegemon or reap the benefits. And so at that point this is all in flux again. You know, obviously the Persians try to reassert themselves in Asia Minor and the Athenians very soon afterwards start to try and reassert themselves in Aegean.
- [30:30]
A
And so how does it all end then? Is there almost do they come to an agreement at the end of the day, a ceasefire or a full on peace treaty?
- [30:38]
B
So as we're sort of running through the end of the Corinthian war, we also have the Spartans take the port of Corinth. So there's real attempts to assert themselves throughout. There's a famous defeat of a Spartan Mora, in actual open battle against Peltast. The great moment where the hoplites are defeated by Peltast.
- [30:55]
A
The legend of Iphicrates, that.
- [30:56]
B
Yes, yeah, precisely that. But this all sort of ticks away. You know, this conflict is constantly growing and the different Greek states are adapting and trying to push back in their different ways. We're seeing a Bit of novelty in the way they're sort of trying to engage with the Spartans militarily after having been sort of trounced on land for so long. And then we sort of get to the next decade. So where are we? Sort of 380s and there's only one power in the Mediterranean who can end the Greeks arguing with each other, and that's the Persians. So you get what's called the king's peace. So there's this really interesting moment in Greek history where the traditional enemy of the Greeks has to come in and make them play nice.
- [31:35]
A
Guys, guys, we got to stop this now.
- [31:38]
C
Well, it's very interesting because you phrase it as like a truce or a treaty, but it's actually not a treaty. It's a diktat from the Persian king. Like he literally sends an envoy who reads out loud to them the agreement that's been made and that is, that is the end of the war. It's called the king's peace. It's called the peace of Antalkidas in some sorts because the Spartan who went to negotiate it with the Persian king, and obviously there are terms that favor Sparta, there are some terms that favor Athens, but for the most part it is the Persian king saying, no, no, no, this is how our geopolitics are organized. I'm telling you this, and if you have any trouble with this, you can take it up with me, which is almost literally what it says. If anybody violates this arrangement, I will back them with ships and money, which are the two things that the Persians have in abundance.
- [32:23]
A
How successful a treaty is this? Does it endure? Do they both abide by it? How does Sparta then fare once this diktat has been order to them? And I guess in for pride sake, in one way it's a bit humiliating because you know you're being told to do this and yet you still expect yourself to be the dominant power.
- [32:42]
B
I think something to always note about Greek peace treaties. Well, however they're determined, they're never meant to last long. Even when they're given like time frames, like 30 years, 50 years, whatever it be, there's always this understanding they will end. And that's a very different relationship with peace than perhaps we're used to talking about. So it doesn't last long at all. Conflict quickly starts to pick up before the end of the 380s, so not even 10 years.
- [33:07]
A
But does Sparta go around kind of saying, like, we are on the side of the great peace kind of thing? We're enforcing this treaty, but Using that as an excuse to actually advance their own aims.
- [33:15]
C
In fact, ideologically, I think that the king's peace is arguably the most important moment in the 4th century because it brings the Greeks something new. Which is the most important part of that piece, which is the autonomy clause, as it's called, which is that the Persian king says, okay, there are a couple of bits of the Aegean that belong to Athens, but otherwise every Greek state must remain autonomous.
- [33:34]
B
Which is clues from leagues, as in, like, alliances and things like that. So you cannot assert control even if you're not controlling the city itself.
- [33:42]
C
You're not allowed to, essentially. I mean, later treaties will make this more explicit. You're not allowed to change the government of another state. You're not allowed to impose a garrison on another state. All these things that the Athenians used to do and then the Spartans also started doing. And so this is essentially a no empires clause, right? There should be no more Greek empires. And that is obviously something that the Persian king wants, because if the Greeks remain divided and weak, then he can do what he wants. But it's also something that most of the Greek states want, and that's why it's such a stroke of diplomatic genius, is because all of these Greeks are also like, well, I don't want to pay tribute. So it's great if I can say, if somebody imposes tribute on me, I can just go running to the Persian king and says, he's not obeying the king's peace. He's not obeying the autonomy clause. And so this is something that the Greeks themselves will keep referring back to for the rest of the 4th century as long as the Persian Empire is around. And right up to the end, really, right until even when Alexander is campaigning against them, there are still Greek states that appeal to the Persian king, saying, these Macedonians are violating the king's peace, because that is, you know, it's illegal. According to the treaty, the Persians are supposed to support you if this happens. And so they love that clause. They love that idea. Except if you're Sparta or Athens and you're used to being a hegemon, you actually are really in trouble now, right, because you can't assert your power in the way that you used to. And so the Spartans have this thing where they declare themselves prostates. They declare themselves the champion of the peace or the guarantor of the peace, which means they go around telling everyone else, like, oh, you're violating the king's peace. We're going to stomp on you now. And they go around the Greek world, essentially sort of splitting up states and breaking up federations because they say it's a. They claim it's a violation of the Greek peace. And that's how they get to be, you know, the biggest fish in a very small pond, in a shrinking pond, essentially.
- [35:21]
A
They kind of manipulate the wording of it to kind of suit their own agendas there. So how long does this kind of Spartans triumphing themselves as like, you know, being the champions of the king's peace? How long does this last before there's, dare I say, a misstep by the Spartans and they go a bit too far?
- [35:39]
B
I mean, it's within like five years. It is quick. And the misstep is one of those historical questions of did the Spartans do it on purpose or not? So a Spartan commander, basically it's Thebes.
- [35:52]
A
It'S the city of Thebes.
- [35:53]
B
Enter Thebes stem. Again, remembering what I said earlier, Thebes has become the bugbear of the Spartans and in particular Agesilaus himself. So we mentioned the Asia Minor campaign. He went on. There's a story in which he basically tries to present himself as like the next Agamemnon, the man who took the Greeks to war with Troy. And he goes to Aulis and it's much like Agamemnon did to give sacrifice. Yeah, exactly that.
- [36:18]
C
Not his own daughter in this case, on this occasion.
- [36:21]
B
No, no, just a normal sacrifice. But it's interrupted by the Boeotian cavalry. So basically the Theban led league's cavalry interrupt it. And he is not happy about this at all. And this sort of hatred of the Thebans kind of just grows throughout his reign. So the idea that a Spartan army sort of, without any orders from kings, entered Thebes, takes control of the Kadmea, which is basically the Acropolis of Thebes, and garrisons it, which again goes against everything that they've agreed and are supposed to be upholding throughout the Greek world. The idea that that happened whilst they're trying to maintain that they're the ones who are asserting the king's peace, that they're the ones asserting the status quo is laughable and made worse by the fact that Agesilaos intervened. So the Spartans were going to very much punish the commander who did it. You know, it's that moment of it's a rogue commander, he's done wrong, we're going to punish him, everything's fine. And Agelaus intervened and so they find him, but they didn't move the garrison. And that seems to have his fingerprints all over it. And that really, for me, that is where this whole thing really falls apart.
- [37:32]
C
Well, it's not just for you. It's Xenophon, right? Like he actually steps in. Sorry, yeah, no, exactly, that's it. Your old mate Xenophon, he actually invokes the gods at this point. He says everything was going great for Sparta, but at this point they offended the gods. This is actually divine retribution will follow because they have committed this horrendous sort of. It's not just a misstep or diplomatic faux pas or even just a military sort of provocation. It's actually just they've done wrong. They've done something that is sort of morally reprehensible. No Greek condones it. And so, you know, retribution will follow.
- [38:05]
B
And it says a lot that Xenophon is this clear about it. Xenophon is very pro Spartan. Is the wrong. It's probably a bit of an overstep but you know, he very much massages especially Ages, what Agesilaus is doing. This is one of the closest moments we get in all of his accounts of Agesilaus, which includes a eulogistic biography of him. And it's the closest we get to him openly criticizing Echelaus. You know, all biases aside, all relationships aside, this was completely immoral, unethical, wrong, should not have happened. And everything that occurs after that, dare I say, was coming to them.
- [38:39]
A
So what goes after that? How do the Thebans respond?
- [38:42]
C
In a nutshell? The Thebans actually initially they have to put up with it, right? This is a Spartan backed oligarchy as well. Same as in Athens before. So you have an oligarchy that was already pro Spartan, which is propped up by this garrison. And so they have to their democratic faction essentially where they're at least non pro Spartan faction. It's very sort of amorphous what kind of political ideals they have. But they have to flee. They're in exile, but they just like the Athenians went to Thebes, the Thebans go to Athens and get support. They go back in.
- [39:10]
A
Ironic as well, by the way.
- [39:12]
C
Yeah, I know. And not just. I mean it's. It's very well noticed at the time as well. I mean there, there's a really interesting passage in Dinarchus where he actually says like, oh, that we keep quoting at each other this time, this decree that the Thebans issued that they helped us when we were in trouble as a way to persuade the assembly to help them when they are in trouble. This is something that is remembered and One of the people who backed this, the Theban uprising was one of the people who was involved in this Athenian uprising. So you have this kind of quid pro quo thing where okay, well we'll help you get your state back. So they send these exiles in and they manage to drive the Spartan garrison out, which triggers the so called Boeotian war. It's only a few years after the Spartans take over. There is this protracted conflict where the Spartans keep having to send troops to Thebes or to Boeotia into the region essentially to try and reassert themselves. But they can't seem to get anything done. They really just sort of fruitlessly campaigning, they're managed to nibble away some of the minor cities of the region, but they can't, they can't do anything to put Thebes back in, back in its place, essentially.
- [40:13]
B
Yeah, no, that's a really good point. And the, the what really comes across is the regular raiding that does occur is achieving nothing like rule saying. So you've got that kind of demoralizing reality of we don't have the power to put them back in their box to the point where we see Sparta very much sort of stops leaving as much as it had its own lands. So very much, you see the amount of military activity very much begins to wane again, as I mentioned earlier. So why I brought up the internal problems they're dealing with because one of the other reasons why Sparta is struggling to maintain its momentum during these decades is it can't sustain it from home all the way out to, well, originally Asia Minor, but now we're only talking central Greece. It cannot maintain that momentum.
- [40:57]
A
But what is the secret then to Thebes success at being able to hold out, being able to defend against these, you know, continuous. Smart. You're both laughing. I don't know why you're laughing when I ask this question. It's an important question.
- [41:08]
B
It's a great question. It's one of the big questions.
- [41:10]
A
I mean, so why is Thebes able to hold out? Why is it actually pretty powerful at this time?
- [41:16]
B
Thebes very much goes through with the reassertion of its control of the city. We see innovative change, shall we say. And this is often assigned to individuals. So one of those individuals is Epaminondas, the great Epmeinondas. Yeah, the great military commander. We also get Pelopidas and his creation.
- [41:32]
C
Of the sacred band Gorgidas is the one who creates Hippolopadas.
- [41:34]
B
Oh yeah. So the sort of, the fronting of it at this point. So the narrative is often that Thebes is basically having a revolution, a military revolution. This, I think, is probably overstated quite a lot.
- [41:47]
C
Quite a lot.
- [41:48]
B
Rule has written on this a lot. But I'm going to talk for now. I suppose the big thing for me is what Thebes is doing is filling a void that Sparta has created by its inability to sustain itself. So what Thebes does is, I suppose, the easiest way, and I think it's something you've said to before, Raul, is Thebes, like, catches up basically with what made Sparta so dominant on land during the previous century. Thebes has matched it, not necessarily surpassed it, but just matched it in terms of having a crack force that is capable of following orders.
- [42:25]
A
Is it that discipline that they focus on to kind of make them that next level?
- [42:28]
C
I mean, this is us hypothesizing, like, what makes this force so effective, because we know that it's effective, but we don't actually know anything about its training regime or its organization.
- [42:37]
A
Sacred Band or the Sacred Band. Sacred Band.
- [42:39]
C
And the rest of the. Of the Boeotian army under Theban control, we know a little bit more, but it's also not. It doesn't seem to show any special features. One of the things that the Boeotians really do play out in this conflict is they have very strong cavalry, which obviously works very well for them when they're defending their territory, because that's one of the things that cavalry is really good at. You know, you herd together your enemy army, you prevent them from spreading out across the countryside to pillage and burn. You've managed to keep them together so they can't do any damage. And this plays into Thebes main strength, which is they have, you know, they are the grain area of central Greece, right? They have these extensive plains that allow them to feed themselves, but they also do this really innovative thing where they're sort of defending territory by building this long palisade across the entirety of Boeotia, keeping the Spartans out or at least funneling their movements. So they're trying to play these different strengths in combination. You know, they have very good agricultural resources. They have this. This territorial defense. They have the cavalry to protect their lands. And they now have this increasingly effective hoplite militia, this hoplite force which is built around this core unit that's. That's. That's very, very capable, called the Sacred Bound. So militarily, as well as sort of strategically, they have a lot of cards to play when it comes to the defense of their own territory.
- [43:51]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And Whilst we talk about Thebes, one of the other areas of conflict here is Thebes is very much the head of its league, the Boeotian League. So when we're talking about Thebes and the Theban army, much like when we talk about the Spartan army, we're talking about them and their allies and those around them. So yeah, Thebes has very much, it is in its ascendancy now at this point, very much filling the void that Spartan in action is beginning to.
- [44:34]
A
And the Persians are just watching at the sides, they're just rubbing their hands at the moment, chuckling to themselves probably.
- [44:39]
B
Chuckling.
- [44:39]
C
Yeah. They have their own problems as well. I mean this is something that, you know, it's not exactly quite on the eastern front, but you do get a situation as well where the Spartans try for one last time to assert themselves as a naval power, which the Athenians at this point they've become completely resurgent as a naval empire. Like they are provoked by Sparta into joining the war which they then sort of capitalize on by rebuilding what's sometimes called the Second Athenian Empire or the Second Athenian Confederacy, which is not an empire of course, because we're all in abidance here. King's peace, as we've discussed. These are not subject allies, they are allies, defensive allies only. And they're not paying tribute, I think you'll find they're paying contributions to the joint defense which happens to be Athenian organized. So we're all in compliance with the terms of the king's peace, which is explicitly in the treaty. Right. In the alliance treaty it says in accordance with the King's peace as a defense against Sparta violating it. But that's very explicit. But the Athenians are forming a new tribute paying empire essentially which allows them to raise a new fleet. And they defeat the Spartans at Naxos and they defeat the Spartans at Alesea. And that is actually the end of Spartan naval anything. They just don't do anything on the sea after that. We have the battle of Knidos earlier which is like the major tipping point, but this is like the decisive end of any Spartan ambition to rule the sea.
- [45:56]
A
Well, let's go to that next big date then if we talk about another big battle with Spartan hegemony, which is 371 BC, the Battle of Lutra just before then. We've done a whole episode about the Theban sacred band in The Past with Dr. James Rom. But I should also ask you guys about the, the story that the sacred band is 300 strong and it's made of 150 pairs of homosexual lovers. Do we think that's likely?
- [46:19]
C
So it's debated, Right. So the general perspective is that they were. Because Plutarch tells us, right, that's the baseline. But David Lytow has a really interesting argument that came out in 2002, where he specifically tries to deconstruct that a little bit. The interesting thing is that even in Plutarch's account, the historical record of this unit is completely detached from this reputation it supposedly has as a unit that is composed entirely of pairs of lovers. He presents this in a very hedgy way. He keeps saying, legetai. They say it is said. Which is one of the ways in which he's kind of distancing himself from the claim. He's trying to say, oh, people tell me that this is true. I'm not sure. And the problem is that we don't get any independent attestation of this. So there is nothing in any other source that corroborates it. And so the suggestion there is that those two traditions are actually separate. You have this unit, which is very effective and has a very sort of historical presence in the campaigns that period. You also have the idea of a unit that is composed of lovers, which is also brought up in Xenophon and in Plato. In fact, there's discussion of the idea that this would be really effective, that this would really work. But very interestingly, those authors who both lived at the time when the Sacred Band was around, don't mention the Sacred Band as an example of such a unit, which obviously they should have. It's an argument from silence. But it's very strange that they don't do this. And so the argument there has been that there was, in the same time that the Sacred Band was around, there was an idea that this would have been a really good idea, like a really effective concept, and that those two things have become sort of merged in later traditions, so that they've become attached to the Sacred band, primarily because the Thebans already had kind of a reputation for really liking these pederastic relationships and being a really important part in their social and political sort of maturing, like the process of their upbringing. And so for that reason, there is some doubt as to whether this unit actually was composed of homosexual lovers. At the very least, you can say that, you know, it has that reputation because the Greeks were thinking about that as an idea and maybe thinking about trying it. And they may or may not have done so, but we can't be certain.
- [48:21]
B
You do wonder how Much of it is an attempt to explain the exceptional. So when you build a narrative of Spartan invincibility in your source material, in your writing and things like that, and then as we're going to get to a lucha, they are defeated. How do you explain that defeat? And, you know, pointing to the sacred band, and then you're like, well, what makes them special compared to the 300 bodyguards of the Spartans who they're quite clearly modeled on? How can they be better than them? How can that be explained? Well, then let's go into this almost theoretical superior morale building relationships. The idea being that you would fight stronger and harder and longer for the loved one next to you than like a friend next to you is the sort of idea. And then perhaps that would explain how the great Spartans could be defeated. So, yeah, part of those narratives as well.
- [49:11]
A
Well, let's go on to the vascular PKA because this feels like the big date we need to talk about. Who would like to talk through.
- [49:18]
C
So the idea is that a peace treaty is supposed to finish the Boeotian war. The peace treaty has of course, in conformance, in conformity with the king's peace, has all the states listed separately. The Thebans object, they want to sign for all of Boeotia. Right. Which confirms their hegemony in that region. Obviously, the Spartans say this is unacceptable. And really it is. You know, if we are still obeying the king's peace, it is. So they strike the names of Thebes and the Boeotians off of the treaty and they march only because the Spartans.
- [49:46]
B
Refused to do the same. They were told, we won't do that. But if we are going to do that, you can't sign for any of the Laconian or Messenian cities either, which of course is the Spartan territory. And Gaesaleus, him again when no.
- [50:04]
C
So, I mean, everyone sucks here, right? Like, it's not like. But that's fundamentally the idea is that the Spartans then launch a surprise invasion of Thebes to kind of finally set them straight. And this is like all out all Peloponnesian forces, like everybody who's still loyal to Sparta has to go. So they march in force. Later sources say 11,000 hoplites or something like that, very, very large army march into Boeotia by surprise route, going along the coast and then sort of marching inland, sort of from the Delphi direction, so from the southwest. And the Boeotians or the Thebans and their remaining allies confront them there. They are heavily outnumbered. There are only maybe 7,000 of them. We're not really sure about the numbers, maybe even fewer. And the Thebans sort of get together in council. They have a council of generals which is very common in the Greek world, especially in democracy. So the Athenians always sent out several generals. They have a council of generals. They debate together saying, should we fight or is this a lost cause? Right. We are heavily outnumbered. They're angry, they have cause. We are just us, our allies are melting away because all of these Boeotian cities that are under the Theban thumb, they obviously see this opportunity. So they're literally sort of bleeding out of the army. The Boeotians have this debate and say, like, are we sure we want to do this? Let's give it a go. Let's just do it and be legend.
- [51:18]
A
Epaminondas. And this is Epaminondas.
- [51:19]
C
He's at the forefront according to the tradition. Yeah, there is some very interesting evidence that some of the other Botarchs, some of the other Theban generals want an equal claim to this bravery. But in the later tradition, it's Epaminondas who puts his foot down and says, no, we're fighting. And Pelopidas shows up late and casts the tie breaking vote to fight. This is the dramatic, the dramatic moment, the movie scene essentially that you can almost picture in your minds. He shows up late, there's seven of them. He shows up late, he's the seventh and he casts the tie breaking vote. And so they fight. And this is sort of something that generally, as we've seen, is a bad idea of fighting a Spartan army. But it's become clear the Spartan army has become much more weakened than it was before. Its numbers are shrinking. It can't rely on its allies like it used to. And there's a lot of discontent in that alliance as well. No one wants to fight for Sparta. And so the Thebans figure out how to beat this army, which is you just gotta beat the Spartans themselves. You just gotta fight them, put this, put a stop to them. Ideally, kill their command structure. Like just cut off the head as they put it. Cut off. Crush the head of the snake as they put it.
- [52:21]
A
Is that what they say? Do they actually say that?
- [52:23]
B
That's supposed to be a quote of Epaminondas himself.
- [52:26]
A
And do you think that's the origins of the, you know, cut the head of the snake. Crush the head of the snake actually originates from here, then that is the origin.
- [52:31]
C
Yeah, that is. So crush the head of the snake and then the rest of the body is useless. That is how Epaminondas supposedly sells his plan to his troops. So you just hit the Spartans themselves, hit them as hard as you can, ideally kill their chain of command, kill the king and the leading officers who are fighting in the front anyway. So that's, you know, going to be achievable. I'm not going to say easy, but achievable. And then the rest will just run because they're not there because they want to be. Right? No one's there because they want to be. It's between Thebes and Spartans and at that level, actually the Thebans have numerical superiority. Locally they can outnumber the Spartans and locally they have a force that, that is willing to fight them. This is the sacred man. And so that's what they do. They make a battle plan where they put all of their guys together in this column, like this very deep formation, smash it directly into the Spartan part of the line, and they kill Cleombrotus, the Spartan king, or at least mortally wound him, most of the officers around him, and then eventually basically all of the hippes, the Spartan royal guard, are killed in the fighting. And at that point the rest of the army just has had enough and breaks and runs off.
- [53:32]
A
So Agesilaus, the king of Sparta, who had been involved in kind of causing this to happen, he's actually not the Spartan king who gets sent in the army. No, no.
- [53:41]
B
If you follow the story of Gesileus, he's very good at avoiding things.
- [53:45]
C
I love his mother in law.
- [53:47]
B
He's an amazing ancient historical figure. So at this point he's getting old.
- [53:51]
C
He's not well, is he? Is he?
- [53:52]
B
No, he's ill.
- [53:53]
C
He's ill. Recovering. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [53:54]
B
He's still ill as well. And he's got to be. I mean we're nearly 30 years away from now getting to the throne. So he's, he's like 70, he's an old man, previous conflicts. He's refusing to lead armies because he should be retired militarily according to the Spartan's own system. He is now too old to be in the army. So he very much uses that. He doesn't want to go to Thebes, he doesn't want to lead this. So he doesn't. He leads it to a younger. Yeah, Kolymbros.
- [54:19]
C
And Cleonbrotus has a bit of a point to prove as well because he's led the last few campaigns against the Boeotians and people have thought that he was kind of lackluster in his leadership. He didn't really want to hurt the Thebans. Like he wasn't making an effort. And so he is now being driven by people who are sort of watching him. And this is a very Spartan thing. Right. There's a lot of social peer to peer control. Right. There's a lot of scrutiny. He's being watched by his subordinates saying, is he going to do it? So Clean Brotus has to fight. And this is something Agus Leia is presumably relying on to be like, he'll do the job, you know, so we.
- [54:47]
B
Know what happened, he'll know what he gets, what he wants from it. But yeah, I guess Elias nowhere to be seen.
- [54:51]
C
Yeah.
- [54:52]
A
And obviously Clean Brotas, he doesn't do the job. He fails.
- [54:55]
C
No, he absolutely does the job. I mean this is very much a. Yeah, he does what's expected of him, but it just goes against him.
- [55:01]
A
Oh, okay.
- [55:02]
C
There.
- [55:02]
A
Thank you for clarifying. Psychologically, how massive is the Spartan defeat at Luca to its power in the story of Sparta's decline through these decades?
- [55:14]
B
I mean, it's enormous to the Greek world. Sparta has now been defeated. I mean, that's very much how it was perceived. And then the sort of growth of Theban influence in Greece was just rapid as a result of this. So, you know, we were talking about the fact that their allies are already sort of beginning to seep away. They're now just. Sparta is not the reliable power that we could sort of get ourselves behind. They often talk about sending shockwaves through the Greek world, this defeat, because it's very much the entire status quo of 40 years ago, of what we've just accepted for the past century, really. Athens, Sparta, top that is now gone entirely psychologically. It's not just the Greek world that is shaped by. It is Sparta itself is shaken by this realization of what's just occurred. They have lost. What is it, the 300 bodyguards, the king. They lost almost 400 of the 700 Spartans they sent in this army that is a sizable proportion of their spartiate, so that's their citizen population has now died. Like we hear that when the news enters Luthra, basically people were told to sort of be quiet about it and people who had lost, people would walk around when the news enters Sparta, when the news itself. So the families of the dead were supposed to walk around with smiles on their face and the families of basically the survivors were in shame. But Agesilaus again steps in rather helpfully domestically. And what is it they say? He basically rests the laws of Sparta for A day so that the survivors who come home are not declared cowards, which has legal and social ramifications on them, because basically Sparta can't afford for that to happen. They literally have to suspend a century of culture and of social norms to allow the society to try and recover from this.
- [57:02]
C
Although, to be fair, they've done that before. I mean, the Spartans have this law against cowardice, right? If you run away from battle, you're supposed to be punished and socially ostracized and all this kind of thing, but they never actually do it. Especially if a significant number of Spartans runs away from battle or surrenders, like Oxfacteria, they will always say, like, let's just, you know, let's find a loophole. So there's literally, I mean, we have these different accounts of these kinds of laws that exist at Sparta for cowardice. We have one occasion where they were applied after Thermopylae because one guy survived and that was very bad for him. And then we have three occasions where it's attested that they don't enact the law, they let the law sleep. The number of occasions where it is used is actually outnumbered by the number of cases where we're explicitly told that it was not applied. But fundamentally, after Luka, I mean, it's an earthquake. It's an absolute overturning of everything that the Greeks thought they knew about the Spartans and about their power structures and everything else. Not just demographically, which is a very important point, but also because in the final instance, Spartan hegemony rests on the idea that individually, Sparta could beat all of you. Right? Individually, all of those states that are allied to Sparta, if they band together, they might be able to get away with it. But if they individually resist Sparta, Sparta is just going to destroy them. Right? They can do that. They have the military power to trump each individual state. But at this point, people are starting to say, maybe that's not actually true. You know, maybe we can actually throw off the yoke and still feel safe.
- [58:21]
A
Do the Thebans pounce on this? Do they capitalize on their success and Sparta's weak and they know that feeling is going through the Greek cities that maybe Sparta is not the titan it once was. Do they then decide, you know, now's the time to strike, we won this battle, but we are still hundreds of kilometers from Sparta. Do we now kind of march more towards where Sparta is to make it clear to the people who live in Sparta and around there that, yes, this wasn't just a one off far away? We are now more dominant. Your allies you once had are no longer there and your power is now much clearly weaker.
- [58:58]
C
I mean, yes, this is exactly what the Thebans do. And this is why, like, you know, sometimes this has been considered to be the first sort of strategic offensive. Like it's not just beating them in battle and then saying, look, let's, you know, we've beaten you, let's make a treat. But actually proceeding into the Peloponnese and dismantling Spartan power at a local level. So what they do is they liberate Messenia, which at this point has been under Spartan subjection for according to tradition, like 200 years or even longer, 400 years, according to, depending on which source you follow on this. But for ages, Sparta has had to essentially has been able to double its territory by seizing Messenia. It is now liberated. It is set up as an autonomous state.
- [59:34]
A
And Messenia is that land to the left of the Spartan peninsula at the bottom of the Peloponnesian.
- [59:38]
C
Yeah. To the west. Yeah, so exactly. If you cut sort of the Peloponnese into four chunks and Spartae is in the sort of southeastern chunk and Messenia is the southwestern chunk. And they used to be sort of under Spartan control for the entirety of the classical period, at least at this point they become not just an independent state, but of course an independent state that has every interest in keeping Sparta weak. They never want to see Sparta resurgence. So that is the first move they make. And then the other move is that they set up the Arcadians in a great new established city which they call Megalopolis. Very imagine Megalopolis, big city. They set up this new city which is drawing together a number of Acadian communities, but also perioikoi communities. So these, these places that used to be subject to Sparta puts them in. Together in a new big sort of established polis, which allows them to also make a sort of stronger stand united against, against Sparta. So they sort of hem. Sparta, in what's left of Sparta now is sort of surrounded by states that are sort of emphatically and, and inveterately hostile to them.
- [60:40]
A
And Megalopolis is a strong city. From the start it's got strong. I mean, in the time of the successors, there's a big siege there and everything. So, you know, and that's only about 50 years or so later. So it has big walls already. A formidable city that's created and built at that time overlooking the Spartan homeland. So it's quite significant.
- [60:57]
C
Yeah, it is.
- [60:58]
B
And you know, when we talk about Them losing Messenia, that's not just a large proportion of land and farmland, that's also a large proportion of their helot community that they've been heavily relying on for workforce. Not all the helots. There are helots obviously in Laconia as well, but they have very much done the one thing the Spartans were always worried about throughout, especially sort of post 460 onwards, of losing control of the hela population that it relied so much on for its workforce.
- [61:27]
A
And is there any last attempt? Or maybe not even last attempt, but it seems very much that Sparta's star is very much dwindling at this point. Is there any last attempt? If Akaser Leios is still there, I know he's old at the time, but. But to try and revive Spartan fortunes once again, to bring it back from these humiliations, quite frankly, by Thebes, I.
- [61:47]
B
Mean, yeah, they do, I guess. Elios begins to actually go abroad to make money. And the easiest way to make money was for him to sell himself as a military expert. So he basically becomes a mercenary for hire, but as a commander, fundamentally. So he's going around doing just that. And then really, you might have a different view on this, but I don't see Sparta as really exerting itself well at all. Through the 360s. It is pretty much never fully recovering.
- [62:18]
C
It's putting out fires. But, I mean, I think it's important to start. Sparta never gives up, right? They never stop seeing themselves as this hegemonic power, even when at this point they've been humiliated. Their power has been drastically reduced. Their sway in the Greek world is now relatively marginal compared to other states that have ascended Thebes. Athens is back on its feet. You know, other states are really rising. Sparta is nowhere near that and cannot manage to assert itself, but it never stops trying. And so throughout the 360s, you have these sort of attempts to try and push back against those boundaries that are the walls that are moving in. You know, they try to sort of push that back out. They have some success, but also mostly it's, you know, it's dismal fighting. It's endless campaigns that don't really achieve anything. They aren't able to retake Messenia, which is their main purpose. They aren't able to dismantle Megalopolis, the Arcadian Federation, which is one of the strongest new powers in the region. They aren't even able to sort of. Traditionally, they've always been able to punish Argos at least, but in this case they're really not able to manage themselves against any of these states in any lasting way that rebuilds their hegemony.
- [63:20]
A
Sometimes you get the battle of Mantinea said 362 is like another last kind of hurrah of the Spartans. But how much truth can we look into that?
- [63:27]
B
I mean, it definitely is a final hurrah, if you want to think of it like that. I think their real last hurrah is the fact that they protect Sparta from Epaminondas himself. So the battle of Mantinea is sort of the big battle that sort of brings into question the dominance of the Thebans. The Thebans are defeated is the wrong word, but sort of ends in this moment of stalemate. Yeah. Whereas as the Spartans went to join the many allies to resist Thebes, it is said that Peraminondas spotted that Sparta was unprotected. And something that always strikes me is in the aftermath of Lucra, they never ever go to destroy Sparta. And now as we near the battle of Mantinea, they give it a go, will attack Sparta itself. And Agesileios has his final moment finally, as a big fan of his, where he races back basically from Mantinea with the force to protect the city, and he protects the famously unwalled city against the Thebans. And Epaminondas kind of goes, oh, okay, and then heads over to basically the great Battle of Mantinea occurs as a result, and, well, he dies. So I think it's fair to say he's defeated.
- [64:33]
C
Ephemenondas does not fare well. No. Yeah, that spear to the chest, it will ruin your whole day. Yeah. But this is the moment where Theban hegemony gets in trouble because it seems to hinge so much on the energy and the ideas and the innovative sort of diplomacy and maneuvering of figures like Epaminondas. Like when they are killed, the Thebans really struggle to maintain themselves as well. And they get caught up very soon afterwards in this long, drawn out, very costly third sacred war, which is a more regional conflict, but it sort of drains their energy. So the battle of Mantinea creates this situation where kind of no one knows what's going on, but Sparta remains completely unable to capitalize on that. So into the 350s as well. There's always campaigning going on. They're constantly trying to fight Megalopolis, they're trying to fight fight Argos, they're trying to fight Messenia. They get nowhere in any of these cases. They win battles, they sometimes take minor towns, but they're never able to Kind of disrupt the kind of ring of enemies that surrounds them. So right down to the end of the fourth century, I mean, they're continuously trying to regain Messenia and this. One of the quirks of their policy in this period is that the Greeks keep signing these common pieces that repeat the terms of the king's peace. Right? They keep saying everybody's autonomous. We're not doing any empires, we're not doing any hegemony. Sparta refuses to sign them. Why do they refuse to sign them? Because signing it means acknowledging that Messenia is autonomous. They cannot do it. So they must remain the sort of diplomatic pariah in the Greek world. They must remain outside of all of those treaties because they cannot say, they cannot agree to anything that allows Messenia to assert we are an autonomous state. So they can't sign anything that quotes the king's peace.
- [66:07]
A
So even though they kind of hang out in their own beliefs in what they believe, is it fair to say then that by the 360s, or even by and then the 350s, that Sparta has well and truly fallen by this time?
- [66:20]
B
Yeah. So for me, I very much follow Xenophon here. So one of the things I love about Xenophon's histories is he quite categorically ends it. Thucydides famously doesn't have an ending to his histories that we have. Xenophon's very much like Battle of Mantinea. That's it. Someone else can take this up now. If they want to write another history, they can continue to him, this was a watershed moment. And I very much see that in similar lines as this brought an end to sort of 150 years of how the Greek world thought it worked. I suppose pretty much every illusion that including Thebes is going to fill that void was very much smashed that moment. And that's why I think Xenophon has that as his point of departure. And yes, Sparta continues and tries to assert itself. We then get the reassertion like 100 years later trying to re establish itself and things like that. But the Sparta that we talk about, the Sparta of the descendants of Leonidas and all those kind of traditions, for me, 362.
- [67:18]
C
God, I would not agree with that. Actually, I think that I'm not having it wrong because. Fair enough, because it depends on how we interpret fall. If we say fall from grace, fall from hegemony, I absolutely agree with you. That's over. The Spartans will never recover that. But when you're talking about the fall of a city, I do kind of Want to see something more dramatic than saying, okay, well they have to relegate themselves. They have to acknowledge increasingly that they are just a second rate power. Now the actual invasion and destruction of Spartan territory happens a few times even with the Thebes, but they aren't able to take the city. Right. That doesn't happen until very much later. But you do get these increasing sort of incremental stages of further reduction of Spartan power in the decades that follow. So also, for instance, Philip II invades Sparta and strips away a number of its territories, gives them to neighboring states or makes them autonomous. So Spartan territory keeps on shrinking further and further. They have to give hostages to Alexander the Great after they try rebelling against him, which also obviously just revolt ends very badly. And so you have these continuous attempts by the Spartans to try and say, look, we still matter, we still have manpower, we still have money, we still have wealth, we still have territory, let's try and expand it, let's try and go back. And they never really give that up, you know, throughout the third century even they never.
- [68:29]
A
Silesia as well. Is that another battle?
- [68:31]
C
Exactly. That's a century after this. Like that's two to two. When the Battle of Silesia happened when essentially the Spartans provoked the Macedonians. And the Macedonians come down to me though, you never want this to happen. But that's at that point, you know, they've been defeated several times with Macedonians by that point they've defeated, you know, the Cremenidean War. And in fact, I mean Pyrrhus of Epirus besieges spot at one point. Like they, they have to save it from, they save victory from the, from the jaws of defeat there as well. So they are constantly taking a battering by everyone who now matters in the Hellenistic world. But they, they just never give up. You know, they're always trying again, trying again.
- [69:04]
A
What's that? Taliban? What's that one thing when, when Philip II of Macedon comes down and like you know, saying of the Spartans probably that their one word laconic response, what's that story?
- [69:13]
C
Yeah, so this is a story that's reported only in Plutarch, in the fantastically irrelevant little treatise on brevity. So it's specifically the topic of the treatise is just to say a lot in a few words. And he gives this famous example where Philip supposedly sent them an ultimatum saying if I come into your lands, I will destroy you utterly. To which the Spartans reply just effectively. And then Philip marches into their territory and destroys it utterly. There is always this impression that People have that this is a moment of Sparta sort of boldly asserting, like, go on, try it. You know, one of those molon lave moments, one of those come and get them moments like we dare you. But the problem is, of course the world has changed. If somebody dares at that point to try and attack Sparta, they'll probably win because the Spartans aren't. They don't have the kind of power that they used to. They don't have the kind of military superiority, they don't have the allies, they don't have the numbers. And the Macedonian military machine is just a better one. It's a more effective, more professional, better organized, faster, more flexible. It's just a. It's just a better army. And so at that point Sparta can try and be defiant and you know, go down in histories as this power that has this aura of esteem and this aura of defiance. But in terms of actual power, I.
- [70:26]
B
Mean, they're done because it had fallen in 362. Come back to my argument there, Tristan.
- [70:32]
C
Fine, fine, guys.
- [70:34]
A
This has been absolutely fantastic. As we all know, as those decades go on, you do see the rise of Macedon, Alexander the Great and his successors. Amazing period of history. A bit more. But my last question will be. Sometimes there is a link between Philip II of Macedon, Alexander the Great's father, and the man who sees Macedon rise in the 350s and 40s and 30s, early 30s, that Philip II of Macedon, either he's at Lutra or he's at Thebes at the time and he witnesses firsthand this demise in Spartan hegemony. So my question to you to end this is, how significant do you think is the decline of Sparta and the way that it does fall in Philip II's ultimate success in this conquest of Greece?
- [71:22]
B
I'll be honest with you. I often dismiss it as trying to explain through the Greeks how the Macedonians were able to rise up. Because it's not that the Macedonians are superior, it's that they learned from the Greek greatness and implemented the right lessons of the genius that is Epaminondas. This is the kind of narrative which I very much see that working within, from that perspective.
- [71:43]
C
No, I think that's exactly right. And so we need to doubt that story a little bit. But obviously Philip was interested in Greek affairs. The thing is, like when he starts out, he takes over this kingdom in 360 or 359, it's in a total shambles, right? And specifically it's in a shambles with regard to the Illyrians and the Thracians and the Thessalians at his borders and the Athenians messing with matters in the North Aegean. Sparta is a long way away, and Sparta is not going to become relevant to his immediate interests for a very long time. I think Philip gets away with not caring about Sparta, essentially. And that is the whole thing about this quote. Like, he tried to intimidate them with words because there's too much trouble actually going there. Unless defy him, in which case, fine, I'll go. But in terms of how important it is to facilitate his rise to power, it's much harder to say because you're dealing with a world in which it's become from unipolar. At the start of the 4th century, Sparta is in control to being very multipolar. Right. You have all these different states, the Arcadians, the Athenians, the Thebans. You have.
- [72:40]
A
Well, as you said, the Athenians have risen back up by this point.
- [72:42]
C
Exactly. And the Athenians, by far the most powerful Greek state. When Philip rises to power, there's no question. And so to what extent it matters that it's not Sparta, I'm not entirely sure that we could quantify that in any meaningful way. But you could imagine, for instance, Sparta winning the battle of Leuctra, humbling the Thebans, taking over the region again, and then when Philip expands southward, he encounters essentially the Spartans rather than the Thebans. But I don't know how that would have made any difference, because the whole point is that these Greek states have been exhausting each other in this constant infighting. And there is still obviously manpower and expertise left in that world. But there isn't the unity that you would need to make a stand against Philip.
- [73:20]
A
This has been absolutely great. This is why I wanted to get you both in person for this chat because it's been so much fun over the last hour or so. And it just goes to me to say thank you so much to both of you for coming back on the podcast.
- [73:31]
B
No, thank you so much, Justin. Always a pleasure.
- [73:33]
C
Absolutely. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you.
- [73:39]
A
Well, there you go. That was Dr. Rule cast and Dr. Owen Rees talking through the fall of Sparta. A fantastic chat. I loved getting them both in the office and doing that interview together. You can see how they work so well together. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Now, if you enjoy this episode, make sure that you are following the show either on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps.
- [74:06]
C
Us.
- [74:06]
A
And you'll be doing us a big favor. You'll also be doing us a big favor. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well. We'd really appreciate that. And don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up@historyhit.com subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.