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worth 25% of your grade. The second Sparta at Wargame session happens the class immediately after that. And it's a few more points to the semester's total. You'll definitely want to be in class for both. Note that there's no final exam in this course. So you'll be all done after the Sparta at Wargame session on the last day of class. The second thing I want to note at the beginning of the class is later this week the graduate student union on campus is going to be planning a strike. It's going to be doing a strike. I'm waiting to get guidance from my department and the college, but our current plan is to hold this class as normal on Thursday. If anything about that changes, I will put an announcement on our campus website. Be alert to your email and to the announcement section of our Canvas website. See if anything is good. Okay, last time I talked about how it was that Spartan power became permanently crippled in the immediate aftermath of that old loop trip. I noted how the puncturing of Sparta's myth of invincibility at the Battle of Lutre itself had severe consequences in terms of keeping Sparta's allies in line. And then we talked about what a Pannonondis, the Theban commander, did to a suddenly vulnerable Sparta, his invasions of Laconia, his establishment of the Apollos of Messenia. assistance to the Arcadian Federal League, the founding of Megalopolis. As a result of all these actions, from the early 360s BC on, Khorna became a second great power in the Greek world. It would finish the Classical period, which ends, as we know, in 323 BC by scholarly convention. It would finish the Classical period in this same diminished state. get it all to the succeeding period in Greek history, the typical Hellenistic age, but I will just tell you that Sparta fared no better in the Hellenistic age either. This period of preeminence in Greek affairs came to a definite end. we have been discussing. So in this course, we have come as far as we're going to chronologically. We're ending where we ended last class with the 360s BC, the aftermath of Lutra and the Pannoninuses invasion. We traced spark history from the late. early Arran age or dark age into the archaic age of Greek history, the establishment of the Spartan city-state, the rise of Sparta to power within the Peloponnese, the height of its influence in the classical age, its wars with the Persians and then the Adenians, and now more recently, we've traced its fall. supremacy in the years following the Athenian War and its fall from influence after the Battle of Lutra in 371 BC. So having discussed the how of Sparta's collapse last time with the years right after Lutra, the question I'd like us to hash out today is why this happened. To some extent, it was inevitable that Spartan influence was going to wane, that Spartan power was going to decline. This is because all great powers in the history of, oh, I don't know, the world, will decline. There has never been, in human history, there's never been a civilization, a city state, a nation that has wielded permanent power for all time. An example of classical antiquity alone, we've seen indirectly the Athenian Empire that Sparta's rival Athens put together in the aftermath of the Persian Wars. For 60 or 70 years, the city-state of Athens put together a naval empire in the Aegean Sea, sufficient to elevate Athens to be Sparta, compete with Sparta for having the most influence in the Greek world. But of course the Athenian Empire was overthrown with the Spartan victory and the Athenian War, the destruction of the Athenian Empire, tearing down of its walls, the end of its fleet. Athens recovered somewhat in the years following the early fourth century but never regained its empire, never regained level of mastery. So there's one example of a power that rose and fell just in the confines of our course. Of course, there are many other examples, including from classical antiquity. The Roman Empire probably holds the record among ancient empires for predominance of one community. The Roman Empire lasted anywhere from 500 years, at a sort of very minimum calculation, to maybe 1500 years. depending on how you want to measure it. You want to say the Roman Empire ended when the Romans lost control of Italy. Fine. So then you could calculate the Roman Empire lasted about 500 years. But of course, even when Rome lost control of Italy in the 5th century AD, there was the Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople that lasted for another thousand years. So it gets complicated when you start talking about exactly when the Roman Empire ended. empire declines and falls. But whatever dates you pick, eventually even the Romans, even the vast and long-lived empire of Rome just came to an end. So of course, Sparta's time of preeminence in Greece eventually would decline. The question is, why did Spartan hegemony fall? collapsed when it did after roughly 150 years of preeminence in Greece. And why so sudden? Why did Spartan power end so suddenly? Was anyone or anything to blame? Where should we apportion blame or responsibility? What factor or factors should we highlight here? I want to start the speculation on this question with an ancient hypothesis. Plutarch, writing in his biography of Aegeus Aelaus, felt compelled to give his opinion. You had this in your reading for the last class. And his opinion is exactly the kind of answer one would expect Plutarch to give. Plutarch being a self-appointed arbiter of ancient morals and leadership qualities. Here's what Plutarch put forward. Sparrow was like a human body, which is healthy in itself, but has consistently followed two strict and severe lifestyles. Just one error tipped the scales and overturned its entire success. We should not be surprised by this. The Spartans' constitution was perfectly designed to promote virtue and peace and harmony. But they then added empire and sovereignty one by force, elements which in Lycurgus' view were unnecessary for maintaining the happy life of any state. And so they were overthrown. So what do we think he means by this? They added empire and sovereignty won by force, elements which in Lycurgus' view were unnecessary to maintain the happy life of the state, and so they were overthrown. Presumably he's talking about when Sparta reached the pinnacle of its power in the 5th century BC, became entangled with the Athenians in the various Athenian Wars or Peloponnesian Wars, as other sources call them. And when Sparta finally was able to overthrow Athenian power at the end of the Athenian War, Sparta didn't. withdrawal into its own state and leave the rest of the Greek world to do what it wished. Sparta took over much of the Athenian and Aegean Empire, leaving part of it to the control of the Persians, but taking over sort of direct influence in a large part of it, and then vying with other city-states of the central and southern Greek world to maintain their preeminence, fighting, sending an expedition to Asia Minor to fight on behalf of the Greek city-states. now trying to resist the encroaching Persian Empire, then being called back, fighting the Corinthian War with Corinthians and Argaes and Athenians and Thebans in the 390s and 380s. All this fighting, one assumes, is what Plutarch is referring to when saying that Sparta tried to add empire and supremacy. It's fuzzy, you could say, you could take it back to, I don't know, the late archaic period in the formation of the Peloponnesian League. There was Sparta taking a proactive role outside its own territory in Livonia. Maybe we should go back even earlier, the conquest of Messenia. Isn't that Sparta adding empathy? It's hard to know exactly where Plutarch is abounding his explanation. But probably talking about adding empire and sovereignty won by force, he's probably referring to the years immediately after the Athenian War, when the Spartans did have the choice. They could have, if they wished, contract, give up all the responsibilities that they had taken over in the course of fighting the Athenians in this fight. the bar-flung campaign all the way across the Aegeans, and they didn't. So presumably this is what Plutarch is referring to. So, and of course the analogy to the human body is a... favorite one for Plutar. He's not saying that the Spartans themselves, the Spartan community itself, the constitutional order of the Spartan community was itself flawed. No, it was operating fine. But the problem was when the Spartan body politic, if you will, tried to do too much. They overreached themselves. And then their strict and severe lifestyle, presumably here he's referring to the Likurgen Constitution, which all its strict rules about activities and behaviors of Spartan men and Spartan women. That works fine for the community itself, but when the Spartans tried to rule others, tried to add empire, that this is not what the Lycurgian Constitution, Lycurgus, what Lycurgus had ever foreseen for Sparta. His rules were not rules for how to run an empire in Greece. No, his rules, as we studied, Plutarch's biography of Leibbergers, reading Xenophon's Spartan Society. His rules were interpret, they were focused on the Spartans making the best of themselves within their own community. So this is Plutarch's tape on... what happened to Spartan. So this is a pretty long-term view. He's at least talking about Spartan behavior in the 30 to 35 years before what happened at Luke Troon, the decline of Spartan power. Depending on what he's talking about with empire and sovereignty, conceivably, he's going back decades or centuries earlier than that. So it's a very long-term explanation of what happened to Spartans. So we'll call that explanation number one, unhealthy Spartan expansionism. I summarized it like this is excellent but severe constitution not designed for empire. Spartans went too far after the Aeneid war

became imperialist and fell apart. Maybe that's what he meant. Another possible explanation for this big question of why and why now did spark power come to the end. Another explanation comes from the reading you had for today. For a change, it was not an ancient text. You read a journal article by the scholar George Cockwell, who was a well-known late 20th century historian of ancient Greece, who died several years ago. He was like, I am a professor of ancient history. You wrote books and articles asking and answering various questions about the Greek world and. classical period of Greek history. We talked last time about what this means to be a scholar and to write a scholarly article. What was this piece that you read? What does it mean that it was a scholarly article where it was published? All that stuff. We went over that because scholarly articles like this are, can be difficult to read and understand and it helps if you know going in some things about this genre of writing, right? This is not a textbook, like I've given you brief textbook selections to read. Certainly wasn't an ancient source to read. Anyway, one of these articles that Cockwell wrote and I assigned tackles our question, what was it that truly did the Spartans in? How do we explain their sudden fall? Can anyone tell me what Cockwell's opinion was? talked a bit about it last time. We read his first couple of paragraphs, sort of tried to get a sense of what direction he was heading. But there was the rest of his article. What was his opinion? Yeah? Military failure. He said that the Thebans were just that in the neighborhood. Military failure, yes. That it was down to the Thebans defeating the Spartans at Lutra. This is the explanation that he says was the real one. Not a shock. This is just repeating the opinion that he had earlier published in a classical quarterly article where he argued the defeat of Sparta in 371, that's the battle of Lutra, was not due to unwise policies. No, it was because Sparta failed for military reasons. Her army was unequal to the military genius of Pannon. So he says, at the beginning of this article, I had you read, I argued before that it was a military explanation. So all the way to the end of this article, and guess what? He hasn't changed his mind. His conclusion is the same. It was a military failure. But what then was he spending most of this article doing? He didn't just restate what he said in 1976, in the 1976 article, which I didn't assign you to read. What was he doing then for most of this article? Because I'll tell you, he wasn't rehashing this article's discussion of military tactics at the Battle of Lutra. He barely talked about military tactics or the Battle of Lutra in this whole article that you read. So even though he concludes that, yeah, I was right before. It was military factors. It was the genius of the Pamanandas and the Thebans. What did he spend most of this article saying? Yes. saying that it was an internal issue of there were no true Spartans really. And it wasn't an issue of infertility or anything. It was more so that they could not essentially keep up with the light-curving reforms as, I guess, the rest of the world continued to advance around them. And with light-curving reforms not being, I guess, reformed themselves. In what way was the rest of the world becoming advanced? It was just more so that they started to run into issues of. Besides being power hungry at this point, they were running into issues of how they were gonna be able to control such large territory with only so many people in power following one certain way of life. Well, I think that's partly right. He definitely invokes the conservative, traditional, sparkly way of doing things as becoming increasingly out of step. Late in his article, he talked about how The battlefield was changing, tactics were changing, and the Spartans were still doing things the same old way they always did, including having their king, one of their kings, lead their army into battle. And this was a problem for them because sort of being stuck in the old, like, Kyrgyz way of doing things, they weren't adapting. But that wasn't actually the bulk of the article. I'll give you a hint, the bulk of the article was not presenting a positive reason for why the Spartans ended up fainting. He was shooting down other arguments. He was shooting down other theories about why the Spartans fell. in order to make way for his preferred theory that they failed for military reasons. So what ideas was he attacking? second paragraph where it talks about the 7, there were no more than 700 historians. Yes. I believe he talks about how later on. And then he says, actually, there's a possibility it was 4,000 or 4,500. Yes. So this was a confusing part of his art. He turned to, you're absolutely right, this second paragraph signals to his readers, I've got to confront a thesis that lots of people put forward that it was Sparta's low population. of Spartiate full citizens that explains why they collapsed. Not military genius of the Pamanon. It's not my theory. It's the idea that there were so few Spartiates that that's why they lost. Aristotle, in his politics, talks about this. Xenophon, in his report of the Battle of Lutra, talks about there only being 700 Spartiates. So how far, then, was the failure of Sparta internal, per social system, and with a big emphasis on, does it come down to demographics? Does it come down to the number of Spartiates? And so the largest section of his article was his addressing of this depopulation, Spartiate depopulation thesis, and his argument that, no, this was not the problem. The first way that he tries to knock this thesis down is by getting into an abstruse argument about the number of Spartans who fought at the Battle of Mantenea in 418. And that's what you're referring to, this argument, were there 4,000 Spartans at that battle, or were there more like 2,000 Spartans at that battle? This is a big deal for Caulkwell to figure out, because his idea is that if there were 4,000, or more Spartaeates at the Battle of Mantenea, then the population decline represents, there was a sudden fall of population between the middle of the Athenian War, when Mantenea happened in 418 BC, and Lutra. So Sparta had this sudden sharp decline in population in the Spartaeates, and if that happened, he'd be willing put more credence in the idea that it was a population. But Cockwell thinks that's wrong. And there's all kinds of arguments. And I did not expect you guys to follow the strength of the points he was making about why there were only 2,100. And Toynbee was wrong when he argued this. And someone else was. I hope that you were able to roughly follow his logic and see the kinds of arguments he was making, because it's useful to see how ancient historians argue sources. But the trick of it is that he wants to say that there were more Spartiates there at... I'm sorry, he wants to say there were less Spartiates there at the Battle of Mantenea, which means that Spartiate population was very, very low for the entire last 40 to 50 years. And for Cockwell C, that's a big counter argument here to this idea that Spartan power ended because of low population. How could the decline of Spartan power be due to low population when for 40 or 50 years, they dealt they had this tiny population, and yet they defeated the Athenians in the Athenian War. They reached their highest point of influence besting all these other city-states in the Corinthian War, and this entire time they had a low Spartiate population. So they must have adapted. See, so that's not a good explanation. That's why in case you were wondering, and maybe, I don't know, bored out of your skull about all his back and forths about whether there were 4,500 or 2,500 men at Mantanaia, that was the significance of that piece. He needed to assert that there weren't that many Spartiates at Mantanaia to show you that they could win, like they won overwhelmingly at Mantanaia, they could win big battles, even though they didn't have a lot of Spartiates. this same low number of Spartiates for years to come. So it's not about manpower loss. The Spartans had figured out how to deal with having only 2,000 or even less Spartiate full citizens. That was probably the bulk of this article trying to shoot down that thesis. Were there any other ideas that he was challenging in the course of the article that you noticed? Yeah. Well, he talked a lot about how they were stepping away from a lot of like Curtis, like Curtis's original ideas and like their traditions. Talked about how, or he suggested a lot of them started valuing money, gold and silver more. And. and that fear is allowed to move up in society because whatever. Okay, that's right. You're combining a couple things there, one that he disagrees with and one that he agrees with. He puts forward the idea that, because he's aware that Plutarch, for example, our first explanation, Plutarch, and he also puts forward some thoughts from Xenophon, want to make a moral attribution and say the Spartans have gone soft. And he disagrees with that. And he basically puts forward the success that the Spartans had. Again, he's looking at the last 40 to 50 years of Sparta's influence, because it was right at the beginning of that period that supposedly this moral decline happened. Money poured into Sparta after the Athenian War. During and after the Athenian War, this made the Spartans morally weak. And they were distracted by desire for empire for more money. He rejects this. You know, in the same way I suppose that I talked about this when we talked about the aftermath of the Athenian War. I highlighted this charge that Sparta was becoming corrupted by greed for money and the fact is that it's hard to trace that the Spartans, aside from a few isolated cases of

Spartans getting in trouble for embezzlement or something, Run their empire and there's no immediate sign that they were unable to do so or did so badly or were fighting Poorly at battles and this is what cockwell argues that it's not it's not that the Spartans had gone soft But you're also but you're right in noting that there were changes There was a moving away from a strict interpretation of the Lakergan Constitution in the adaptation the Spartans were They weren't just keeping the strict, Spartiates on top, perioicoi, independent Lacedaemonians, not participating in the Constitution, but free Spartans in the middle and then hell-op slaves at the bottom. There were these subclasses that were being created, subclasses we've talked about, the Neodama des, the Hupo Mayones, the Inferiors. 48, but still free Lackademonians to Motha case. He had a couple paragraphs about that. the Spartans were producing, even as the number of Spartiates became smaller, one way that the Spartans were able to manage to have the success that Cockwell wants to crow about for the last 40 to 50 years is their adaptation of the class structure at Spartan, the creation of these neo-demodates, freeing numbers of helots to fight for them in the phalanx. And not just swell their numbers thereby, wants to argue that this meant that the Spartans were better integrating the helots into Spartan society. He tries to make a big deal of the fact that this last Spartan revolt, I mean the last helot revolt before the revolt of Messenia during a Pamanandises invasion in 370 and 369 was almost a hundred years earlier in 365, I mean in 465, the earthquake which led to a helot rebellion. almost a hundred years between Hellot rebellions. Cockwell wants to say, why were the Hellots not angry at the Spartans? Why this long period of an absence of rebellion? I suppose they could have been just frightened of the Spartans, but no, there were moments of Spartan vulnerability, so it was something else. And he wants to say it was the integration of Hellots and other sort of... non-full elite Spartiates into Spartan society with the creation of these new classes. So So this is the argument that Caulkwell is presenting here. And any other thoughts about Caulkwell's argument? Questions you have about it or reaction you have to his thesis? Okay. Well, let's add Coppola. The genius of Pamanandis. It's odd to summarize his thesis this way because, as I said, the vast majority of the article that you read in which Caulkwell is establishing, this is the best answer. He wasn't positively talking about the genius of Epaminondas. That was his previous article. He just starts and ends this article with his assertion that fair enough, we studied the Battle of Lutra. I emphasized the new tactics that Epaminondas was employing, tactics which would have taken a lot of courage by him and his even soldiers, which Well, that's a long battle. Pamanandas in his New Ways of War said to the Al-Fatihah and Lutra, it wasn't what Plutarch thought nor long-term social problems. And this, of course, is what he spends 90% of his article arguing. It wasn't about moral decline. It wasn't about failure of the Likertian system to integrate people. It wasn't about the low numbers of Spartiates from demographic things. I'm going to bury you in words and citations of ancient texts to show you that it wasn't that stuff, and if it wasn't that stuff, it must be what I have always said, and it was the Peminundus's genius and the new ways of war. That's spell the end for spark influence. Okay, so we've got two theories here that long term, but in the end, very sudden decline of spark of power after the Battle of Lucre. What other theories might we suggest, other than unhealthy Spartan expansionism or the military genius of the Thebans and the inability of the Spartans to keep up with military changes of copper? What other theory might you put forward? Hint, there's stuff that Caulkwell was attacking that probably most scholars think are a better explanation than Caulkwell's. Yeah. under the unhealthy Spartan expansionism, or would that be something else? Nope, that's totally different. How would you articulate that low Spartan population led to the fall of Spartan power again? How did that happen? How would you say that? I mean, with a growing empire, generally you need a larger bureaucracy. And if you only have a set number or a set group that can rule that bureaucracy. It just won't work long term because eventually stuff's going to fly under the rug and it's just going to crumble from the inside out. You saw that in the Rugging Republic. Eventually they started admitting the plebeians into the patrician class so that they could grow the ruling number. I see. Yes. If you want to make that Roman analogy, I suppose you could say, cockwild style, that the Spartans were, with this neo-Delmodeus class, including Helots into the Spartan military, they were resorting to a similar move. Let me just eliminate from your explanation the use of your word bureaucracy and accept everything else you said. Because bureaucracy doesn't really characterize any Greek empire at this time. The Athenian empire, they didn't need a bureaucracy. receive officials to run the empire. They just intimidated the city-states to pay their tribute and fall in line or face an immediate Athenian attack. You don't need a bureaucracy for that because either the Athenians or the Spartans, in their time of influence, would send out administrators to run city-states. They let them run themselves. As long as those city-states understood, when the time came, you better cough up your troops and fight for us or you better cough up your money in the case of the Athenian Empire, or bad things will happen. But the Spartans definitely needed as to maintain their position of hegemony of the Greek world, particularly after winning in the Athenian War. The Spartans found themselves fighting more and more battles, fighting against all their rival Greek city states in the Corinthian War. Before that, launching attack on the Western provinces of the Persian Empire. try to keep the Greek city-states there free. All this takes troops. All this takes soldiers and resources. And if you are losing population, if you are able to put fewer and fewer men into the battle line, this is a problem. This is a problem. And so I think it's not hard to make the case that Cockwell struggles vitally to try to defeat, to make the case that the decline of Spartiate population was a major problem. And you can even take it to the Battle of Lutra itself, right? seemed to squeak by without a large population in battles before Lutra. At Lutra, there were only 1,100 Spartiates at that battle. And the Thebans at that battle attacked the Spartiate part of the battle line directly, and they ground them down. Would that have happened if there had been 3,000 Spartiates? Highly questionable. tactics that Apaminondas actually used to defeat the Spartans at Lutra probably depended on there being only 1100 of them there. What if there had been 3000 or 4000 or 5000? Hard to see that Apaminondas's strategy would have worked. So let's put as a possible explanation number three decline in Spartiate population. I typed this in, but I know that I'm going to get lots of grief from PowerPoint. So you all can write down as a third possible explanation, decline of Spartiate manpower. As a third explanation. Good. What else? Any other ideas that you have based on things that we come across in this course? ideas you get from Calcwell. Anything else? Yeah. Right? And how is that a problem? That increasing wealth inequality in Spartan? Because this is absolutely happening. But why is that problematic? Okay, right. So this would lead to rising social tensions within Sparta. We talked about this a week or a week and a half ago as a sort of a long-term problem for the Spartans. It's... How does that lead to them losing influence and losing at the Battle of Lutra? It's harder to trace directly, but there are two ways. One would be if fewer and fewer Spartiates have farms of sufficient size to be able to make their monthly contributions to their messes, that's going to mean they're thrown out of the Spartiate class and demoted to, you know, Hupo Maone status, or the etheriors. or some other inferior status. Well, that's essentially. Explanation number three, decline of Sparti manpower. It contributed, the social tensions contributed to decline of Sparti manpower because there were fewer Spartiants on the land, fewer Spartans on land of sufficient size to enable them to be paying members of the Sparti class. But what about the other way? What about the notion that the rising social tensions would have been a problem for the spark. Is there anything that you've been reading, you've been talking about that suggests that could have been an important factor in the decline of sparkly power? You immediately have your hand up again. Yes, I came busy preventing all the social rebellion. Thank you. Right, so in the aftermath of Lutra, the reading that you had was just full of stories of. this of King Aegeus and Aeas having to put out various fires of rebellion and potential rebellion and Helox fleeing and deserting to the Thebans and even Periochoi abandoning the Spartans and going over to the Theban side. If you want to talk about a very specific, I mean obviously we can talk in general terms, this would have been a drag on Spartan prosperity over the decades. But if you want to point to a specific incident, after the defeat at Lutra, it made it very difficult, if not impossible, for the Spartans to recover. Because they could no longer count on the helots to do what they're supposed to do, the periodic way to do what they're supposed to do, the Spartiates to do what they're supposed to do, if there were all these

actual rebellions and threats of rebellion and civil war. say social inequality and social tension helped bring down the Spartans by preventing them from recovering after Lutru. So I like that. Let's add that as explanation number four. Social inequality and social tension rising in Spartan. That's a good one. All right. Anything else? Any other ideas about what, any of you might put forward about explanation explaining Sparta's collapse? Yes. They lost their mystique. Oh, they lost the image of being freedom fighters? Okay, interesting. So there's actually two explanations in one thing. Because I would separate those two. I love that you said the loss of the spark was deep. It's something I've been talking about a fair amount of course. And they also have the loss of what their reputation is fighting for the freedom of the Greeks. I would separate those two. They're both united in the sense that it's a loss of the positive reputation of the Spartans among the other Greeks. But I would separate it because one means an increasing anger toward the Spartans because they were seen as betraying Greek freedom what they did at the end of the Athenian War, cutting a deal with the Persians to let the Persians take over all of Eastern Greece again when they were supposed to be fighting this war against the Athenians to liberate the Greeks from the Athenian Empire. And here they are giving a third of the Athenian Emperor over to the Persians and keeping two-thirds of it for themselves and constantly intervening in the internal affairs of other Greek city-states. The effect of this The loss of sort of positive views of Sparta and what they're fighting for Meant that the Spartans were going we're facing an increasingly hostile Greek world other Greek city-states were looking for Opportunities to take the Spartans down a peg to remove them from supremacy it leads to wars like the Corinthian War from 395 to 387 where all these other Greek cities accepting money from the Persians, but still for their own reasons as well, were attacking Spartans. The reason I separate that from the loss of mystique is the idea, because it's a somewhat different idea, and that is it's not that the Greeks are going to like or dislike the Spartans more, it's that the Greeks are going to stop fearing the Spartans. After the battle of Luchtra, the Spartans after the Thebans soundly beat them in a straight up hop like fight. Greeks no longer thought that the Spartans were invincible. And it's pretty clear that one of the reasons that the Spartans had all along been able to have all these allies come to battles and fight alongside them was because all these allies figured it was much better to fight alongside the Spartans than be opposed to them and inevitably lose the battle and get killed and lose the war. The intimidation factor of the Spartan mystique, of the fear of facing the Spartan hotline on the battlefield. Once that goes away, what happens in the aftermath of Lutra? Most of Sparta's Peloponnesian League allies go away, switch sides, go to the Thebes. And this also made it impossible for the Spartans to recover from their crushing defeat at Lutra. even if they had more of their own citizens, even if they could count on greater loyalty among the perioikoi and helots, how are they gonna fight off 40,000 Thebans with no aloths? So the crucial factor that one might say is, the loss of their reputation for invincibility. We'd seen them lose this once before, after the humiliation they suffered on Sphakria Island during the Athenian War. And what happened then? The Spartans lost control of their alliance. They made a peace with the Athenians. None of their allies agreed. Members of the Polyponnesian League joined Argos in an alliance. No one feared the Spartans anymore. It took a crushing Spartan victory at the Battle of Mantenea. to restore Sparta's reputation, restore Sparta's mystique, and once again make other city-states fear facing the Spartans in battle. So I would add two more here. One would be, let's say, imperialistic Spartan behavior leading to a bad reputation. This was a real thing. By the time that the Spartans fought the battle in Lutra, they did not have any friends in the Greek world. They had allies who were with them, because they'd always fought with the Spartans, and they were still held in line by the fearsome reputation of the Spartans. But many other Greek cities were looking for an excuse to end Sparta's supremacy. But then the next one would be the loss of Sparta's mystique, their reputation for invincibility. Once that was gone, the way that they had cruised by for decades was no longer open to them. Now I would say this has connections with one thing that Cockwell said, a key cornerstone of Cockwell's argument against the idea that it was low Spartiate population that explains their defeat. A key element in his argument was, look at the decades after Mantenaea, after the Athenian War, when we know the Spartans had a tiny population, winning and yet they still had this massive reputation. And my point is yes exactly they still had the massive reputation. Maybe it wasn't this fancy you know changes in the class structure where you know I had Neo-Damedes and Hupo-Mayones. Maybe it wasn't you know the brilliance of Spartans sort of managing their internal structure. Maybe it was simply the fact that the Spartans on their reputation as fearsome, the most fearsome, invincible warriors in Greece so that no one wanted to face them in battle. And once that goes away, that's what spells their end. Yes. So doesn't that imply that with their alliance being held together by fear that this was more of an inevitability than a, just an accident that happened and grew it? their entire old end. Why is it an inevitability that one's... reputation, supreme reputation is going to end. Why is that? I mean, because if they be one populace that didn't believe the reputation, all it was going to take was another sort of populace to rally up all of Greece to then do the same thing. If all of Greece knows that Sparta has a very limited population, all of Greece knows that they're at least bigger than Sparta. But all it would take is all of them, most of them coming together to just dogpile on Sparta. Right. I would say that that's not an inevitability for two reasons. One, Spartans was very secretive about their population loss. As we've talked about in this class, the Spartans did not make a public story about how many men they had. And they would sort of pass it off when challenged by allies, oh, you only brought a few hundred. Spartans went, well, we brought more soldiers than you. And so they were not advertising this. There's also a bit of a coordination problem. You might be in a city-state somewhere in Greece that, let's say you do know that Sparta, you do realize that Sparta doesn't seem to be as populous as it used to be. Right? But maybe your city-state is still smaller than Sparta or only a little bit bigger or something. You're just one city-state. How are you going to coordinate with these other city-states? In the meanwhile, you don't want to piss off the Spartans so they come march against you. There's a coordination issue. It's not inevitable that all the other city-states are going to just sort of set some things off with the Spartans and then come together. So as we actually see, the Spartans went decades and decades having very few citizens and still pulling it off. Caulkwell attributes this to clever things they're doing. He suggests in his article, well, maybe they're training the perioecoi. undergoing military training while like the rest of the Spartiates. That's an interesting idea, no evidence for it whatsoever, so I'm not inclined to accept it. Mike, I would say that if it's the reputation that's keeping the Spartans, the fearsome reputation that's keeping the Spartans on top, it doesn't matter if you're training the periodic or not. They're already opposing, Greeks are gonna join, wanna join you in alliance. They're not gonna wanna start a war with you. And when they see your Sparti eight troops, and they can't tell exactly how many there are, because we're all lined up in a hot-blooded phalanx coming right at you, you're still gonna run away. All right. So, we have these different theories. I hope you guys have written them down. Let's see, we had genius panelists. We had low declining Spartan manpower, right? That was one of them. What was the next one after declining Spartan manpower? Social tensions rising. Social tensions rising, yes. The next one after that was imperialistic Spartan policies pissing off of the Greek city-states. Maybe that's not how I phrased it before. And then we have the loss of Sparta's mystique, of Spartan's leisure for invincibility. So these are all different theories that are trying to explain why Spartan power collapsed so suddenly in 370s and 360s. I would like everyone to take a couple minutes to pair up, find groups of two or three of you, and I want you to talk among yourselves which you think is the most persuasive theory and why. I want you to work out, I want you to come to an answer of what you think is the most persuasive theory, or you can pick a couple of them if you think they are most persuasive. So we're just going to take a couple minutes. groups of two and three just like we do in the sport at war game and I want you to discuss go for it Thank you. For him, for him. You can just turn around behind you. I want to hear some answers. Someone wants to volunteer from your group. What you ended up coming down on, I want to hear about. Yeah. We decided that it wasn't necessarily just one, just because I feel like each civilization goes through all of these at one point or another. But the reason that it affected Sparta so negatively was because it was all of them at once. And so

each one is like a chip at the foundation. together and kind of just make some reasons fall apart. OK. So you're just refusing to do the exercise I asked you to do. It's all of them. I'm going to come back to this. That's not a bad answer. I'm going to come back to this. But I want to see some partisanship for one or another or a group of them. Yeah. OK. So we talked about as far as I'm concerned. the other city states would have eventually turned against them. But I think Sparta as a city state could continue on if they kept losing people, especially as a lot of slaves were running off other countries. like. There's obviously an ultimate limit. You can only decline so far. Yeah. And I think it was that then caused the Spartans to send less Spartans off to battles, which was then putting the battle's odds into other city-states who may not have the best training, thus hurting the Spartans. Right. And you can even say at Luketru this is one of the things that happened. You know, there were relatively very few Spartans, a whole bunch of allies, depending on their allies, and finally someone in the battle of Panamanandas, the demons decided, well, ignore all your allies, and I'm just going to punch you in the face. And that ended up working really well. Okay, so you are putting the emphasis on population decline. Population and mystique kind of interlining together, yeah. Okay, mystique, okay, good. Anyone come into another conclusion, either that conclusion or a slightly different conclusion about predominant factors? Yeah. slightly different reasons. Right. When reading Cockwell, we kind of felt like it was frustrating how he was dancing around this topic of the population decline. He would say it, but he never really built deep into it. He would just kind of dismiss it as, it couldn't be this, it couldn't be that. And I found that a lot of their decisions, at least in my mind, was due to the population climate. It felt like they were puffing their chest when really they should have been backing off a little bit to gain their population back, but they were still acting normal to try and throw that facade out to everyone to keep their reputation. You guys, is that sort of what you were thinking? Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, we were just thinking the same thing. We're in the same group. Yeah. Population. OK. All right. Cool. Anything else? Anyone else have other ideas? If you're waiting for me to declare that one of these explanations is the correct one, you're going to be waiting a long time. Because see, this is the nature of historical argument. When you're a historian and you're asking an interesting question about a major trend in history, it's not going to be one simple thing. We all want it to be one simple thing. The way it makes it easier to think we understand the world around us, we can just say, Oh, I was a genius of papam and onus. End of story. No need to think about it anymore. But as this group over here decided, you really can't just pick these apart. There is something to all of the theories that I put forward here. And that's why we took the time to go through all of them. History is complicated. Major events in history are usually going to result from not one little thing, but from a concatenation of factors. I mean, I agree with the ideas that were put forward about emphasis on particular ones. It seems like Spartan depopulation, Sparti depopulation, it was popular. If it's popular among you guys, that makes sense, because it's popular among most scholars. If you were to do a research paper on this question, you would find a lot of scholars, not Calquewell, obviously, but a lot of scholars not— named Cockwell, who would be putting their finger on Spartan depopulation as the most dominant cause. It was recently a book published called Spartan Oliganthropia, which means small population. And the whole thesis of the book was that this. Low number of Spartiates brought the end to it. But even those scholars who will put forward ideas about Spartan depopulation, they do not dismiss these other causes. They don't dismiss the idea that the Spartans' foreign policy had been really aggressive and made a lot of enemies in the decades before a nuclear trip. They don't dismiss the genius of the Peronon. really inconvenient and unfortunate for the Spartans, that their opponent that day at Luke's was someone willing to try a new strategy and to prepare his army to fight in that new way. So all these factors have something to do with it. I'm not even going to say that the best reason by far was the loss of the Spartan mystique, the collapse of the Spartan military reputation. Why would I back that one? Well, that's my theory. I'm writing a book on this. given scholarly talks on this subject at conferences. It's my theory that the loss of Sparta's military reputation played a huge role that scholars have not sufficiently acknowledged in bringing it into Sparta's supremacy. But does that mean that the rest of this stuff is garbage? No. Of course that stuff mattered. Right? The loss of Sparta's reputation brought on their defeat because once the myth of Sparta and its ability was gone and they were challenged at places like Lutra by a Pamanandus, then their low population meant that they had only a few soldiers and things could go. It all fits together. It all goes together. So Even though we'd love to be able to say it was just one thing and that we're done, we've solved the question. History is too interesting for that. Okay, history, there's usually a way for scholars to come up with different points of view, to find new evidence that other scholars haven't talked about. In the case of my book, I've identified a pattern of Spartans winning battles because the other side before the battle even begins. I've talked about some of these battles in this class. Scholars know what happened in these battles, but they haven't put that pattern together, right? So my thesis involves putting that pattern together and building a theory around it about Spartan invincibility, you know, letting them skate by for years until they were no longer able to. Anyway. So, good job in thinking about this. This is, there's no one answer. I think I like your answer in the front best, that it was all of them, even though the best answer is as far as military reputation and the mystique from my selfish point of view. All right. In the last five minutes, I want to talk a little bit about your upcoming exam in a week. What's the format of this exam? Identical to your previous exam? It's going to be one hour. Note that it is not cumulative. This is not a final exam. It's just another one hour exam we're having next week. It's just on the material we've studied since the previous exam. So that's parts four and five of this course. I have already uploaded to your exam number two materials folder under the file section of the website this format here. And I will be uploading. and the next day or two, all the lecture outlines, you know, the first slides that I show each day. And that's the material that this exam is going to come. As you see, an invocations essay, just like the previous one. I want to emphasize that with the invocations, we are looking for three elements to each one. A lot of people lost a lot of points on exam one because they didn't either fully or they didn't even try to answer all three elements. Who or what the term is, the context, by providing a date or if you don't want to provide a date, then talking about the context for these events, other things that happened before or after it, and finally, significance for Spartan history. It's most often the context or the significance for Spartan history say anything for, well, that immediately means you're gonna lose one or two points. And with a five point answer, if you routinely lose two points, that means you're getting three out of five. That means you're getting 60% on the identifications. 60%, that's a D minus. If your final grade on the exam is a 60, that's a D minus. Right? So, hit all three folks. We're happy, we give.