![]() Two generations later – so we are told by the Lacedaemonian poet Tyrtaeus – having lost control of the fertile bottom lands of Messenia, they launched a war to recover them. The Spartans first surged forth from Laconia, where Lacedaemon was situated, and gained control of the Pamisos river valley on the western side of the Taygetus massif in the late 8th century BC. This gentlemanly modus vivendi had, however, one precondition: Lacedaemon’s continued dominion over Laconia and Messenia in the southern Peloponnesus and its brutal subjection of the helots on both sides of Mount Taygetus. The manner in which they mixed music with gymnastics and fellowship with competition caused them to be credited with eudaimonia – the happiness and success that everyone craved – and that made them the envy of Hellas (as the Greeks called their homeland). Theirs was, in fact, a life of great privilege and pleasure, enlivened by a spirit of rivalry as fierce as it was friendly. Theirs was a rough-and-tumble world, but it was not bereft of refinement and it was not characterised by an ethos of grim austerity, as some have supposed. Together they sang and they danced, they worked out, they competed in sports, they boxed and wrestled, they hunted, they dined, they cracked jokes, and they took their repose. There was very little that they did alone. ![]() But, in the course of the Archaic Period (c.750-500 BC), with the establishment of the good order and lawfulness that the ancients from Homer on called eunomia, this is precisely what Sparta (or Lacedaemon) became: a meticulously, more or less coherently ordered whole – apt to elicit admiration.Īs a ruling order, the Spartiates constituted a seigneurial class blessed with leisure and devoted to a common way of life centred on the fostering of certain manly virtues. Herodotus once described Sparta as a kosmos, and Plutarch later followed his lead. A detailed analysis of the Battle of Plataea affords an intimate insight into these two military systems – one based on heavy infantry, the other on archery, cavalry, and more lightly armoured men – and into the ultimate superiority of the former. In Paul’s second article, he deals with that extraordinary collision between the ‘Western way of war’ represented by the Greeks and the ‘Eastern way of war’ embodied in the armies of the Great King of Persia. The weakness is obvious: the phalanx was a ponderous formation, and if it could be taken in flank or rear, it was doomed. What emerged was a shield-wall (when viewed from the front) given great solidity by its depth (viewed from the side). Even the most cursory reading of Homer (whose work, in its final form, dates to around 750 BC) reveals a form of warfare very different from the tight-packed, heavily armoured, eight-ranks deep blocks of spearmen that we hear of in the pages of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, writing in the 5th and 4th centuries.Īs Paul Rahe explains in the first of two articles forming our special this time, the hoplite shield, the aspis, seems to have driven this ‘military revolution’ – the shift from the individualistic fighting of aristocratic champions to the mass-formation fighting of the essentially middle-class phalanx. What might be called ‘Homeric warfare’ had been based on the prowess of individual aristocratic warriors mounted on horses or chariots and wielding bows or javelins as primary weapons. Photo: akg-images / De Agostini / G Dagli Orti. We do know that they brought it to the highest level of perfection. ![]() We do not know whether the Spartans were the originators of the hoplite phalanx. ![]() While the rest of Greece was working in the fields, the Spartans were drilling. This freed up the adult male citizen-body – around 10,000 strong at peak – for full-time military training. What is certainly true is that Sparta fielded the only fully professional army in Classical Greece – because it was the only city-state whose citizen elite were not required to labour, because they had a class of subject helots, effectively state serfs, to work their farms for them. Sparta looks more like a model for militarists, empire-builders, even fascists. Not so Sparta, with its obsessive focus on brutal discipline, preparation for war, and the subjugation of others. Athens is associated with art, reason, and democracy the sort of place where liberals, intellectuals, and bohemians might have felt at home. Everyone is either an Athenian or a Spartan, it has been said. ![]()
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