Sparta's Caste Of Conquerors

“Sparta

 

By Andrew Bayliss

 

Norton, 384 pages, $35

 

For those who study ancient Greece, the classical era, roughly the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., presents a case study in the failure to learn from history.

 

 Near the start of that period the Greeks saw the Persians, rulers of a vast empire, overreach themselves and fail in two invasions of Europe, the second time catastrophically. Yet in the wake of those episodes, the reigning Greek powers of the day, Athens and Sparta, did more or less as the Persians had done. They, too, overreached, invaded lands they couldn't conquer or couldn't control, and brought disasters down on their citizenries.

 

Eloquent voices warned the Greeks not to follow this path, to no avail. The playwrights of Athens dramatized the tragic tales of kings, including Xerxes of Persia, whose overweening ambitions led the rulers to ruin. The "Histories" of Herodotus, likely composed in the mid-fifth-century B.C., recounted the Persian defeat as a paradigm of the perils of reckless imperialism. An inscription at the shrine of Apollo at Delphi fruitlessly warned the oracle's visitors meden agan, "nothing too much."

 

The tale of Athenian overreach is better known today than its Spartan counterpart, largely because Thucydides, one of antiquity's finest historians, captured it in his account of the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 B.C. The end of the war and the aftermath of Sparta's victory over Athens, through the years 404-371 B.C., are known to us through the writings of Xenophon, a less insightful observer. Xenophon at times tries to show that the Spartans, too, abandoned self-restraint and overextended themselves. But his lesser narrative skills, and his tendency to minimize Spartan errors, make that theme hard to discern in his works.

 

Andrew Bayliss, the author of "Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower," is a defter writer than Xenophon. As the book's subtitle indicates, Mr. Bayliss, a scholar of Greek history at the University of Birmingham in England, situates the Spartans firmly within the time-honored pattern of overreach leading to downfall. The story he tells, especially in its grim final chapter, should be required reading for leaders of modern nations.

 

The bizarre social system from which Sparta derived its strength goes back to its early history. Working from patchy and near-mythical sources, Mr. Bayliss constructs a plausible theory of how the Spartans, members of the Dorian subgroup of the Greek people, arrived in their home in the south of the Peloponnese, the vast southern peninsula of Greece, and began a series of wars with their neighbors. By the seventh century B.C., their conquest of the Messenians, the Greeks in the fertile lands to their west, had provided them with a huge body of slaves, known as helots, whose labor supplied their food crops.

 

Liberated from farming and fearful of helot revolts, the Spartans developed their austere lifestyle and rigorous program of military training. Their system ensured that Spartan males -- known as homoioi, or "equals" -- because the state allotted them uniform tracts of land, could live as "gentlemen of leisure," as Mr. Bayliss terms them (though "leisure" should be understood as the freedom to exercise and drill constantly in a kind of lifelong boot camp). Helots fed these high-caste soldiers and serviced their every need; one source reports that each Spartan who went into battle against the Persians was attended by seven helots.

 

Mr. Bayliss seldom passes judgment on the Spartans and notes that, in recent centuries, they have had both admirers and detractors. But their need to keep their collective boot on the necks of their slaves -- in one annual ritual, the krypteia, Spartan youths tried to hunt and kill leading helots -- strikes him as the mark of a "hateful" relationship. "The Spartans might be viewed as parasites, feeding off the forced labor of their helots," he opines.

 

Sparta could mold its citizens into super-warriors but could not increase their numbers. With the high bar it set for entry into its elite training system, and its sclerotic marital customs limiting birthrates, its population of homoioi decreased while neighboring states were growing. Sparta needed allies to fill out its battle array, so it installed subservient leaders throughout the Peloponnese, their allies in the war against Athens.

 

Mr. Bayliss gives a cogent account of the Peloponnesian War, a 27-year slugfest that finally resulted in Sparta's domination. He sees through the high-minded claim made by the Spartans to be defenders of freedom fighting a "tyrant city," Athens, that oppressed its imperial subjects: "After all the noises they had made about liberating Greece from Athenian tyranny, [the Spartans] simply replaced it with their own." Swollen with confidence after defeating Athens, Sparta embarked on its own imperial program, compensating for its dwindling numbers by keeping an ever-tighter grip on its subjects.

 

The muster of Spartan homoioi was down to about 1,000 when an enraged Spartan king, Agesilaus, forced a showdown with Thebes, a far more populous city. At the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. the Thebans judged, correctly, that Sparta's Peloponnesian allies were tired of fighting its wars and would be slow to engage. The leader of Thebes, Epaminondas, reportedly held up a snake and crushed its head, to show his troops how defeating those thousand Spartans would neutralize the rest of the enemy army. The success of that gambit ended Sparta's reign as a Greek superpower.

 

Mr. Bayliss contrasts the failure of Sparta with the success of Rome, a state that freely admitted non-Romans, including conquered nations, to citizen status.

 

 "The Spartans' stubborn refusal to share their wealth and conquests with other Greeks limited their potential to grow," he writes. "The only freedom the Spartans were interested in was their own." Those who contemplate Sparta's trajectory will not, one hopes, be as blind to history's lessons as the Greeks themselves were.

 

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Mr. Romm, professor of classics at Bard College, is the author of "Since You're Mortal. Life Lessons From the Lost Greek Plays."” [1]

 

1. Sparta's Caste Of Conquerors. Romm, James.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 26 May 2026: A15.