Greek Depth Study: Society and Politics of Sparta, 478-404 BC

Why did the number of Spartiates fall during the fifth century, and why did it matter so much?

1. 01Set out the mechanism

   Full citizenship required the ability to contribute produce from a landholding to a common mess. Anyone who lost that capacity - through the division or loss of land, or through debt - lost citizen status, and there was no route back for most.

2. 02Identify the pressures

   Combat losses in a state where every citizen fought were irreplaceable in the short term; the earthquake of the 460s is reported to have killed many Spartiates; and land tended to concentrate in fewer hands over time, an effect Aristotle later analysed as a structural fault.

3. 03Explain the consequence

   A smaller citizen body meant a smaller phalanx of the highest quality, greater reliance on perioikoi and on freed helots in the ranks, and a state increasingly unwilling to risk its irreplaceable manpower - which shaped Spartan caution in strategy.

4. 04Evaluate the evidence

   Note that our figures are scattered reports rather than records, that Herodotus' 5,000 at Plataea is a single datum, and that the ancient explanation of decline comes largely from fourth-century writers with their own arguments about Spartan degeneration.

Result: An explanation that ties the decline to the conditional nature of citizenship, states its strategic consequence, and flags the fragility of the numerical evidence.

Evaluate the value of Xenophon's account of the Spartan upbringing for understanding how the agoge worked in the fifth century BC.

1. 01Establish the author's position

   Xenophon was an Athenian exile who fought alongside Spartans, enjoyed Spartan patronage, was closely associated with King Agesilaus, and had his own sons educated in the Spartan system. He therefore had direct access unmatched by any other surviving writer.

2. 02Establish the purpose

   His account presents the system as the deliberate creation of Lycurgus and explains each practice by the good effect it produced. It is written to explain Spartan success to an outside audience and is admiring throughout - the framing of design and purpose is his interpretation, not an observation.

3. 03Test against other evidence

   The discipline, the messes and the collective upbringing are independently attested by Herodotus and Thucydides in passing, so the outline is secure. What is not corroborated is the attribution of every practice to a single lawgiver's plan, or the claim that the system worked as intended in every generation.

4. 04Note what he omits

   He says relatively little about the helots whose labour financed the whole arrangement, and nothing that would embarrass his hosts. The silence is itself informative about the perspective from which the account is written.

5. 05Judge the value

   Conclude that Xenophon is the most valuable single source for the practical detail of the agoge because of his access, provided it is read as an admiring insider's explanation - excellent on how the system operated, unreliable on why it existed and silent on what it cost.

Result: A judgement that uses Xenophon's access while separating description from his explanatory framework and noting his significant silences.

How far was Sparta's political stability the result of its constitution?

1. 01Establish the claim to be tested

   Sparta avoided the tyranny and civil strife common elsewhere in Greece, and Thucydides remarks on the long period of good order. The question is whether the constitutional machinery caused this or merely accompanied it.

2. 02Argue the constitutional case

   The checks were genuine: dual kingship prevented monarchy, the gerousia and ephors constrained kings and each other, annual election of ephors gave the citizen body a regular voice, and no single office concentrated enough power for a tyranny to grow.

3. 03Introduce the social explanation

   Set against this: the agoge and the messes produced an unusually cohesive citizen body with strong internal discipline, while the ever-present helot danger gave Spartiates an overriding reason to hold together. Stability may have owed as much to shared formation and shared fear as to institutions.

4. 04Note the limits of the evidence

   Our accounts of the constitution are mostly external and admiring, written by Greeks impressed by Spartan order; they naturally present the institutions as the cause. Contemporary evidence for how the system actually operated in a crisis is thin.

5. 05Judge

   Conclude that the constitution was a necessary condition, in that it blocked the routes by which other cities fell into tyranny or faction, but that its effectiveness rested on a social order - the shared upbringing and the helot threat - that gave Spartiates powerful reasons to accept it.

Result: A judgement that credits the institutions while showing that they worked because of the social system that surrounded them.

Use Thucydides' account of the two thousand helots to support an argument about the nature of Spartan control.

1. 01State what the source says

   Thucydides reports that the Spartans proclaimed that helots who claimed the greatest military merit should be selected for liberation; about two thousand were chosen, crowned and led round the temples, and then vanished, no one knowing how any of them died.

2. 02Assess its standing

   It is contemporary, from a historian with Peloponnesian contacts who elsewhere shows care with his information, and it is reported without rhetorical elaboration - Thucydides simply records that the manner of their deaths was unknown, which is the mark of a man reporting what he could establish.

3. 03Draw the analytical point

   The selection targeted precisely those helots with the standing and experience to lead a revolt, which shows a policy of pre-emptive elimination rather than random terror. Control was calculated, not merely brutal.

4. 04Connect to the wider argument

   Use it to support the claim that the helot danger was the central fact of Spartan policy: a state confident of its subject population does not need to identify and remove its potential leaders.

5. 05Acknowledge the limits

   Note that Thucydides does not say who ordered it or exactly when the killings happened, and that this is one episode; it establishes the character of control at a moment of maximum wartime anxiety rather than routine practice.

Result: A use of the source that grades its authority, extracts a precise analytical point, and states what it does not prove.

Assess the significance of Lysander in Sparta's victory over Athens.

1. 01Set the criterion

   Significance means more than presence at the moment of victory: ask whether Lysander did things that other Spartan commanders would not or could not have done, and whether the outcome depended on them.

2. 02State the case for

   Lysander secured and maintained the relationship with Cyrus that funded the fleet; he built networks of supporters in the allied cities that made Spartan control workable; and he won the decisive battle at Aegospotami, after which Athens could not rebuild. Each of these was a departure from ordinary Spartan practice.

3. 03State the case against

   Persian willingness to fund Sparta rested on Persian interests, not on Lysander personally; the occupation of Decelea, the fall of Sicily and the erosion of the Athenian treasury had already transformed the war; and Sparta produced other capable commanders, including Brasidas, when circumstances required.

4. 04Evaluate the evidence

   Note that Thucydides' narrative breaks off before the end of the war, so the final years depend heavily on Xenophon and on later writers - and that Lysander's reputation was contested at Sparta itself, which colours the tradition in both directions.

5. 05Judge

   Conclude that Lysander was significant above all as the instrument through which Sparta converted Persian money into naval dominance, and that his personal methods shaped the hegemony that followed more than they determined the victory itself.

Result: A graded judgement that separates the individual's contribution from the structural conditions, and notes where the source base thins.

Assess the claim that Spartiates were genuinely 'equals'.

1. 01Establish where the claim comes from

   The term homoioi is used in the sources and the equality it implies is central to the admiring tradition, developed most fully in later writers who present the system as a lawgiver's design for equality.

2. 02Test it against contemporary evidence

   Contemporary material undercuts it. Two royal houses held hereditary privilege; the gerousia was restricted to men over sixty and appears to have been dominated by leading families; and citizenship depended on holding enough land to pay the mess contribution, which means wealth differences existed and mattered.

3. 03Bring in the fourth-century critique

   Aristotle analysed the concentration of land as a structural fault of the Spartan system, and the fall in citizen numbers over the period is itself evidence that Spartiates were not economically equal - equality was a status that could be lost.

4. 04Restate the claim precisely

   What the evidence supports is equality of a specific kind: a shared upbringing, a common table, identical obligations in war and a public culture that suppressed display. That is a real and unusual form of equality, and it is not the same as economic or political equality.

5. 05Judge

   Conclude that the homoioi were equals in formation, obligation and public conduct, but not in wealth, birth or influence - and that the stronger claim belongs to the mirage rather than to the evidence.

Result: A judgement that rescues the useful core of a traditional claim while showing precisely where the tradition outruns the evidence.