Kennell - Spartans: a new history

Ancient Cultures

These enjoyable, straightforward surverys of key themes in ancient culture are ideal for anyone new to the study of the ancient world. Each book reveals the excitement of discovering the diverse lifestyles, ideals, and beliefs of ancient peoples.

Published

Spartans
Nigel Kennell

Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World
Donald G. Kyle

Food in the Ancient World
John M. Wilkins and Shaun Hill

Greek Political Thought
Ryan K. Balot

Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture
Marilyn B. Skinner

Theories of Mythology
Eric Csapo

In preparation

Medicine in the Ancient World
Markham J. Geller

Science in the Ancient World
Daryn Lehoux

Ethnicity and Identity in the Ancient World
Kathryn Lomas

Roman Law and Society
Thomas McGinn

Economies of the Greek and Roman World
Jeremy Paterson

Economies of the Greco-Roman World
Gary Reger

The City of Rome
John Patterson

Family in Greek and Roman Culture
Emma Griffiths and Tim Parkin

This edition first published 2010 2010 Nigel M. Kennell

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kennell, Nigel M.
Spartans : a new history / Nigel M. Kennell.
p. cm. (Ancient cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-2999-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4051-3000-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sparta (Greece) History. 2. Sparta (Greece) History, Military. 3. Sparta (Greece)Biography. I. Title.
DF261.S8K45 2010 938.9-dc22
2009005158

Illustrations

Map

The city of Sparta

Figures

Map 1 The city of Sparta

Introduction

Spartans had disembarked from their triremes that day in 404 B.C.E. Now they stood on the soil of Attica, watching with the assembled crowds as imperial Athens walls came tumbling down to the music of flute- girls hired for the occasion. The empire that had spread democracy at spear point, massacred whole populations in the name of preserving its freedom, and become an object of vilification to most Greeks was no more. Months of negotiations after the spectacular Spartan naval victory at distant Aegospotami on the Hellespont the previous year had only served to reinforce the Spartans supremacy and confirm their position as the ultimate arbiters of any Greek citys fate. Spartas popularity was also at its peak. It was a time when, as the historian Xenophon wrote, people thought that freedom for Greece began on that day. The long and bitter Peloponnesian War was over. Spartas position seemed unassailable.

But the Greeks knew that such successes as the Spartans enjoyed brought the danger of hubris, overconfidence in ones own abilities, which leads ultimately to at, ruinous destruction. So it was with Sparta. Within the adult lifespan of a single man, the city went from undisputed leader of the Greeks to a bit-player on the regional scene, because of a single event Spartas stunning defeat by the Thebans at the battle of Leuctra in central Greece in 371 B.C.E. Stripped of the majority of their most productive farmland two years later, the Spartans had to endure the humiliation of seeing an independent city-state founded on that very land for their own former farm slaves by Greeces new great power. It was a blow from which Sparta never fully recovered.

How did this happen? How did such a successful military power collapse so rapidly? Was it just fate? Chance? The inexorable laws of history? What were the immediate factors in the years following Spartas victory over Athens? Were there deeper reasons characteristics, even flaws embedded in the very fabric of Spartan society? These are among the questions about ancient Sparta that have intrigued historians for millennia, since the time of Aristotle in fact. Endeavoring to reach answers to them has gradually come to involve the weighing of a wide array of different sorts of evidence literary, archaeological, epigraphical, and to an increasing extent in recent years, anthropological to pierce the fog surrounding the notion of Sparta.

The Spartans of our imagination are familiar from films, novels, comics, and even certain history books. The men were ruled by iron discipline and an utter devotion to the laws of their city and the freedom of Greece; the women were more or less equivalent to the liberated women of modern times. These images of the Spartan way of life have been transmitted down through the centuries from the pens of ancient Greek and Roman writers through the scribes of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance humanists and thence to the scriptwriters, pundits, and novelists of the twenty-first century. It is a remarkably consistent picture that has stood the test of time. In recent years, however, the traditional view of Sparta has come under increasingly intense scrutiny as historians and archaeologists apply new techniques, perspectives, and occasionally even new pieces of evidence to the question of what it was to be a Spartan.