The Spartan Army

J. F. Lazenby

• Publisher: Pen & Sword
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848849969
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

The classic and comprehensive military history of the Spartan army and how it became the most formidable war machine in Greece for at least two centuries. Professor Lazenby begins The Spartan Army by looking at the composition, training, and organization of the army, tracing its roots back to the eighth century BC. The second part analyses some of the main campaigns—Thermopylae, Plataea, Sphakteria, Mantineia, The Nemea, Koroneia, Lechaion, and Leuktra. The final part continues the story to the end of Greek independence. Since this book was first written over twenty-five years ago, novels, computer games, and films such as 300 have raised interest in the Spartan military to new heights. The return to print of this excellent study is sure to interest academics and more general readers alike. "[Lazenby] has performed a valuable service in... focusing instead on the organization and role of this central institution of Spartan life... it is this kind of re-examination of the precise working of its social institutions, and the debate it engenders, which is necessary to achieve a deeper understanding of the character of the Spartan state." —Stephen Hodkinson, The Classical Review

Part I

Preparation

Chapter 1

The Age of Xenophon

When the Theban general, Epameinondas, went marching down the valley of the Eurotas at the end of 370, it had been nearly six hundred years, as Plutarch says (Agesilaos 31.2)¹, since the beautiful land of ‘hollow Lakedaimon’ had seen an invader, and even then it was to be nearly another century and a half before Sparta itself was occupied by foreign troops. Nor had the Spartans merely successfully defended their own homeland, in splendid isolation, during all this long time: ever since about the middle of the sixth century their polis had been recognized as one of the greatest powers in the Greek world (cf. Herodotos 1.56.1–2), and for a generation, since the end of the Peloponnesian War, it had been the dominant power. Yet there had probably never been more than eight or nine thousand full Spartan citizens of military age.²

Other Greeks had little doubt why this was so: apart from praising the excellence and stability of Sparta’s institutions in general (cf., e.g., Thucydides 1.18.1), it was, above all, to the superiority of her army to which they bore witness. Herodotos’ account of the ‘three hundred’ at Thermopylai, for example, though there may be much in it of the stuff of legend, surely reflects something of the awe in which Spartan soldiers were held (cf. 7.208.3 and 218.2), and later writers again and again say that their enemies either feared to face them in battle, or gave way at the first onset.³ An incident recorded by Xenophon (XH 4.4.10) is especially revealing: a Spartan cavalry officer, seeing some hoplites from Sparta’s ally, Sikyon, reeling back before an Argive attack, dismounted his men, tied their horses to trees, and, taking the shields from the Sikyonians, boldly advanced against the enemy, while the Argives, seeing the sigmas on the advancing shields, ‘feared nothing from them as though they were Sikyonians.’ The implication is clear: the Argives would have felt very differently had the shields borne the dreaded lambdas.⁴ If this is how most of Sparta’s foes felt, it is perhaps not so surprising that her army does not appear to have suffered any significant defeat in pitched battle between the disastrous fight against the Tegeates early in the sixth century (Herodotos 1.66), and Leuktra in 371.

It is clear, too, that the Greeks were aware of the main reason for the superiority of Spartan soldiers – what Thucydides calls, in one passage (4.33.2), their ‘practised skill’ or ‘experience’ (ἐμπειρία). Elsewhere (2.39.1) Thucydides has Perikles sneer at their ‘laborious training’ (ἐπιπόνοϚ ἀσκήσις), while Herodotos describes them as ‘past masters’ (ἐξεπισταμένοι: 7.211.3), and the Persians, by contrast, as ‘lacking in professional skill’ (ἀνεπιστήμονεϚ: 9.63.2). Aristotle, perhaps, puts his finger on the point when he says (Politics 1338b27ff.) that it was not so much the methods the Spartans used to train their young men which made them superior, as the fact that they trained them at all, and that this was also true of the adults is the point of the story told by Plutarch in his life of Agesilaos (26.4–4), and repeated by Polyainos (2.17). On one occasion, having received complaints from Sparta’s allies about the comparative fewness of the troops she had fielded, Agesilaos ordered the whole army to sit down, and then first the potters, then the smiths, then the carpenters and builders, and so on, to stand up, until almost all the allied soldiers were on their feet, but still not a single Spartan. The point, of course, was that the contingents of the allies were composed of essentially part-time soldiers, the Spartan of full-time professionals – Spartan soldiers knew no other trade.⁵ Well might Antisthenes the philosopher say of the Thebans after Leuktra that they were ‘no different from little boys strutting about because they had thrashed their tutor’ (Plutarch Lykourgos 30.6).

It was not, however, so much the skill-at-arms of the individual Spartan that was important, as his training as part of a unit, for hoplite fighting left little scope for the display of individual skills (see pp. 35–6, 45–6). Thus one of the speakers in Plato’s dialogue Laches makes the point (182a–d) that skill-at-arms was only really important when one side or the other had given way and the combatants were in pursuit or in flight: what mattered before this happened was clearly the ability of the individual soldiers to fight together as one man, and in this Spartan soldiers were unsurpassed: as Herodotos has the exiled Spartan king, Demaratos, tell Xerxes (7.104.4), Spartans fighting as individuals were ‘no worse’ than other men, but fighting together were the best of all men. Thus, at Thermopylai, only troops trained to move as one and instantaneously obey words of command could have carried out the series of feigned retreats Herodotos describes (7.211.3), and at Plataea, he implies (9.63.2), the lack of expertise and skill shown by the Persians lay precisely in their inability to combine together. At Mantineia, in 418, King Agis’ last-minute attempt to adjust his line, although it nearly led to disaster (Thucydides 5.71.2–3), shows his supreme confidence in the ability of his men to carry out such manoeuvres, and both in this battle, and at the Nemea in 394, Spartan commanders were evidently able to keep their men in check and wheel them to the left to roll up the enemy line, whereas their opponents were allowed to pursue too far. At Koroneia, also in 394, and in Arcadia in 370, Agesilaos was able to carry out – in the very face of the enemy – the kind of manoeuvres we associate with the ceremony of ‘Trooping the Colour’.

All this too must have had a profound effect on the morale of Spartan soldiers, producing in them what has been well-described⁶ as ‘a cool steadiness born of ingrained, rigorous discipline that shuts the mind to fear.’ This is the point of the well-known stories Herodotos tells of Spartan behaviour at Thermopylai, for example – of how they calmly went on with their exercises and with combing their hair, when the Persian scout rode up to view the position (7.208.3), or of how Dienekes welcomed the news that there were so many Persian archers that their arrows would hide the sun (7.226). On Sphakteria, in 425, though surprised by the Athenian attack before dawn, the Spartans at first advanced confidently against the Athenian hoplites, though they must have seen that they were outnumbered two to one, and Thucydides’ description of their advance at Mantineia conveys a vivid impression of professionals who knew just what they were doing – the Spartans, he says (5.69.2), needed no encouragement from their commanders, but instead encouraged themselves with martial songs, ‘knowing that long-continued practice in action is a more effective safeguard than any hurried verbal exhortation however well-delivered.’ Similarly, in Xenophon’s time, we find Spartan soldiers holding the enemy in contempt – for example before their disastrous fight with Iphikrates’ peltasts near Lechaion (cf. XH 4.5.12) – or so eager to fight that their officers had difficulty in restraining them, as before the so-called ‘Tearless Battle’ in 368 (XH 7.1.31).

Yet for all this, we know very little about the organization, training and equipment of the Spartan army, partly, perhaps, due to the secretiveness to which Thucydides bears witness in the fifth century (2.39.1, 5.68.2), but mainly to the lack of attention paid to military details by most ancient writers. What little good evidence there is comes mostly from the late fifth and early fourth centuries, when we have Thucydides’ remarks about the composition of a Spartan force trapped on the island of Sphakteria in 425 (4.8.9 and 38.5), and his detailed description of the Spartan army at the battle of Mantineia in 418 (5.68.3), and, above all, the writings of Xenophon, who, though born an Athenian, was a soldier himself, and spent much of his life in Spartan territory, and fought alongside Spartans both in Asia Minor and in Greece.

It seems best, then, to begin at the end, as it were, and to look first at what Xenophon has to say,⁷ then to look at Thucydides and Herodotos, and finally to look at the beginnings of Spartan military history. This hysteron-proteron approach produces its own problems – for example, it is not really possible to treat the accounts of Xenophon and Thucydides completely in isolation, and the first chapter will be much longer than the rest – but it would be difficult to say anything very much about the early Spartan army without constantly referring forwards to its later history, and it will be one of the main conclusions of this book that we can trace the organization known to Xenophon at least back into the early fifth century, and, perhaps, in its essentials, even to the eighth.

If, then, we begin with what Xenophon says in his history of Greece (Hellenika), we find that from at least 403 (2.4.31) to the time of Leuktra (6.4.17), the regular infantry of the Spartan army was divided into units called ‘morai’ (μόραι), apparently six in number (cf. 6.1.11 and 4.17), and each commanded by an officer called a ‘polemarch’ (πολέμαρχοϚ: cf. 4.4.7, 5.4.46, etc). In addition, there were subordinate officers called ‘pentekosteres’ or ‘pentekonteres’ (3.5.22, 4.5.7; Anabasis 3.4.21), implying the units called ‘pentekostyes’, which, although not mentioned in the Hellenika, are mentioned in the Anabasis (3.4.22), though there the reference is, of course, not to the Spartan army. The smallest unit seems to have been called an ‘enomotia’ (ἐνωμοτία: XH 6.4.12), implying the officer called ‘enomotarches’ or ‘enomotarchos’ (ἐνωμοτάρχηϚ, ἐνωμοτάρχοϚ), again referred to in the Anabasis (3.4.21, 4.3.26), but not in the Hellenika. As for numbers, there appear to have been not more than thirty-six men in each enomotia at Leuktra, when seven-eighths of the army had been called up (cf. XH 6.4.12 and 17), and there are said to have been about 600 hoplites in the mora which met with disaster near Lechaion in 390 (XH 4.5.12).

This is about all the information we can glean about the organization of the regular army from the first six books of the Hellenika, but three passages in the last book (7.1.30, 4.20 and 5.10) refer to units called ‘lochoi’ (λόχοι), and the last two of these passages imply that there were in all twelve such units in the army, whereas morai are never referred to in the seventh book. Nevertheless, it is simplest to assume that this is due to mere coincidence, and that there were both morai and lochoi in the Spartan army in Xenophon’s time, each mora being divided into two lochoi, and this is partially confirmed by the references to polemarchs in the seventh book of the Hellenika (1.17 and 25), by the statement in the treatise on The Constitution of the Lakedaimonians, attributed to Xenophon, that there were officers in the morai called ‘lochagoi’ (i.e., ‘commanders of lochoi’: LP 11.4, cf. 13.4), and by references elsewhere in Xenophon to lochoi and lochagoi in forces which were either clearly modelled on the Spartan army or were commanded by Spartan officers, though not consisting of regular Spartan troops. Thus he refers to lochoi, pentekostyes and enomotiai in the special unit formed by his fellow-mercenaries after Kounaxa (Anabasis 3.4.21–2, cf. 4.3.26), and to lochagoi in both Derkylidas’ and Agesilaos’ armies in Asia Minor (XH 3.1.28, 3.2.16, 4.1.26), and in Mnasippos’ force on Kerkyra (6.2.18).

The most cogent evidence against the view that the morai were subdivided into lochoi, as well as into pentekostyes and enomotiai, is that Xenophon twice refers to the summoning of polemarchs and pentekosteres to a conference (XH 3.5.22, 4.5.7), but does not mention lochagoi, who would presumably have outranked pentekosteres, and elsewhere (Hellenika 4.3.15, Agesilaos 2.6) refers to half a mora and to a mora and a half, where he might have been expected to refer to lochoi.⁸ However, for what it is worth, lochagoi are said to have attended sacrifices with polemarchs and pentekosteres, in the Constitution (LP 13.4), and if Xenophon’s failure to mention them at the conferences is not just another coincidence – there are, after all, only two such passages – it is just possible that they were deliberately left with their units in case of a surprise attack – there is, perhaps, a pattern to be discerned in the attendance of polemarchs and pentekosteres, but the absence of lochagoi and enomotarchai. As for the argument that Xenophon would not have referred to half a mora or to a mora and a half if he had been able instead to refer to a number of lochoi, it must be borne in mind that half a mora was not necessarily the same thing as one or more lochoi, since such a force could have been made up of enomotiai drawn from more than one of a mora’s component lochoi. In any case, what is the alternative to believing that the morai were subdivided into lochoi before 368, when lochoi are first mentioned? It has been suggested, for example, that morai were abandoned in favour of lochoi after Leuktra,⁹ but there is no compelling reason why this should have been so, and the casual way in which Xenophon first refers to lochoi (XH 7.1.30) belies the notion that he was suddenly talking about a new kind of unit.

But if there were lochoi in the Spartan army between 403 and 368, as there almost certainly were, how many of them were there in each mora? As was suggested above, the simplest hypothesis is that the two references in the Hellenika (7.4.20 and 5.10) to ‘the twelve lochoi’ mean that there were two lochoi in each of the six morai, and this is probably right: as we shall see (below, p. 57), there is some reason to believe not only that there were lochoi in the Spartan army during the Peloponnesian War, but that there were already twelve of them at least by 425, if not by 480, and, indeed, as far back as we can trace (see pp. 70, 90). The treatise on the Constitution, however, appears to say that each mora contained four lochagoi, and this clearly implies that there were four lochoi, for although it has been suggested that two of the lochagoi might have been attached to the polemarch as staff-officers,¹⁰ this is very forced. Alternatively, it has been suggested that there may have been four lochoi in each mora before Leuktra, but that after that disaster the number was halved,¹¹ but this would eithe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Sources, Select Bibliography and Abbreviations
• Part I: Preparation
• Part II: Battle
• Part III: Epilogue
• Notes
• Glossary of Greek Terms