Chapter 1: What led to Sparta's rise to power after the Peloponnesian War?
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The polarised 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. Roel Kaninadijk, Derby Fellow in Ancient History at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Dr. Owen Rees, Lecturer in Applied Sciences at Birmingham Newman University.
Welcome.
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. Thanks for having me, Tristan. It's such a pleasure. We've had you both on in the past for individual episodes, but you are both experts on 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? Roel, I'll start with you.
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 very much the story for Sparta in this century.
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Chapter 2: What factors contributed to Sparta's rapid decline in the 4th century BC?
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. And the other irony with Sparta is the fourth century is when we actually get almost good evidence. bold claim for Sparta. The Spartan history of the early fourth 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's still a propagandistic nature to what he's doing, but it is better than we've had before.
He was there and he could tell what Sparta was actually like at that time.
Precisely that. And he is writing about it in various different books. He's given us these different perspectives. So it is quite odd. You are right. We sort of overlook the fourth century as a result. And the irony is never sort of lost on us.
Xenophon's, at least in my opinion, a much easier source to read anyway, isn't he?
He is. I'll upset people now. He's just such a more interesting reader.
This is a very Xenophon-loving environment here, I think. We both love him very much, both because he's accessible as a source. He's easy to read. He's easy to pick up. He wears his opinions on his sleeve. But also because he's a very amusing figure as a character 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.
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Chapter 3: How did the Spartan Empire change after defeating Athens?
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're reading someone like Xenophon, you get moments you're like, you were clearly there. This is a bit too vivid.
And sometimes he will say that or imply it and other times he will leave it sort of quietly. He gives a lot of detail about the defense of the oligarchy of the 30 in Athens after the Peloponnesian War. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. Okay. Well, I won't say anything about it now. Spoilers. He's very conspicuously able to give a very detailed account. But he wasn't there.
But he wasn't there. No one could possibly. You can't prove anything.
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?
Chapter 4: What role did Persia play in Sparta's downfall?
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. 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 know, you get all these glimpses of other parts of the Greek world and even beyond that. Yeah. 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 fourth 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 fourth 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.
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 organise in some ways historical events as well.
This is where, when you get later, the speeches of Lycurgus and Demosthenes and the like.
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. The fourth century is the century of Plato, Socrates' students, basically.
So Plato and then obviously his protege in Aristotle. The Aristotelian school is very much obsessed with politics and political systems. There's a lot of work being done on when we talk about Sparta. A lot of our political models of Sparta come as much from the 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.
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Chapter 5: How did the Theban Sacred Band influence the power dynamics in Greece?
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 Cunaxa.
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 Persia's ledgers. So that is definitely something that is going to come to head.
This is the March of 10,000, which we've covered, actually, in the previous episode. It's a great story.
What a narrative that is, the March of 10,000. We'll put a link to that in the description. And also, you mentioned earlier the Basavagus Postmaeus. 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?
Yeah. So what is the 30 tyrants?
So once Sparta has taken control, brought an end to the Peloponnesian War, it has won its 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've mentioned. They'd take the fleet away. from them and would install a tyranny of 30 pro-Spartan Athenian elites.
So an oligarchy, this idea, is it? That's exactly what this is, yeah. A tyrannical oligarchy.
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences of the Battle of Leuctra for Sparta?
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.
Cynodon 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.
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?
I mean, so it plays out very differently on land and sea, which is why Xenophon actually separates these two things. 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.
Fundamentally, on land, you have a coalition of Athens, Argos, Corinth, and Thebes, the four greatest cities on the mainland. Arguably, 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 Agasileus 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 trapped.
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 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 Akronania and they march into Thebes and all these kinds of things. They're trying to find something that they can do to pry this alliance apart. It doesn't really work.
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Chapter 7: How did Sparta respond to internal and external pressures post-Leuctra?
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, right? 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, right?
If anybody violates this arrangement, I will back them with chips and money, which are the two things that the Persians have in abundance.
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 ordered to them? I guess for pride's sake in one way, it's a bit humiliating because you're being told to do this and yet you still expect yourself to be the dominant power.
I think something to always note about Greek peace treaties, however they're determined, They're never meant to last long. Even when they're given timeframes, 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.
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.
In fact, ideologically, I think that the king's peace is arguably the most important moment in the fourth century because it brings the Greeks something new, which is the most important part of that peace, 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.
That includes from leagues, as in like alliances and things like that. So you cannot assert control, even if you're not controlling the city itself.
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 or 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.
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Chapter 8: What ultimately led to the end of Sparta's hegemony in Greece?
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're 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 defending territory. They're 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. They have very good agricultural resources. They have 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 very, very capable called the Sacred Boundary. 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.
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 inaction is beginning to create.
The Persians are just watching at the sides. They're just rubbing their hands at the moment.
Probably chuckling to themselves.
They have their own problems as well. It's not exactly quiet on the Eastern front, but you do get the 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. They are provoked by Sparta into joining the war.
which they then sort of capitalise 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 with the King's Peace. As we've discussed, these are not subject allies. They are allies, defensive allies only, and they're not paying tribute.
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