riverside_Wi0K0d_uIAMCLmA=_4.2.24 20Part 20II.docx

:

8,000 soldiers with him when he led this campaign against the Persian Empire in the early 390s BC. That sounds like an impressive force. But this 8,000 man force consisted of 2,000 freed helots, so 2,000 future Namadamidace. And 6,000 allies of the Spartans were controlled exactly with the city-states from Greece for supplying these 6,000 troops. But 6,000 allies of the Spartans and only 30 Sparti-8s went along with Aegiselaus to act as advisors and commanders of the whole force. Now. is to the credit, and you might recall also, a previous incident I've already mentioned reminded you of what happened during the Athenian War when Gillipus went to help the Syracusans. When Gillipus went to help the Syracusans, he didn't take Spartan troops with him. He took some soldiers, some allies from Peloponnese across the war to Sicily, and then he raised troops among the Sicilian allies of the Syracusans. no force of troops went with him. Now, it's to the credit of Sparta's leaders that despite frequently going out on these expeditions with none of the vaunted Spartiate hoplites to fight with them, that they still managed to do fine. It's a testament to their abilities. You don't have the finest soldiers the Spartans could have sent with you. You're sent with some other sort of random troops, some of them Spartans or slaves or allies. But nevertheless, they managed to succeed. Gilepys did in fact help the Syracusians defeat the Athenians. Brassidus, we read Thucydides' account of the brilliance of Brassidus' campaign. had to fight a different kind of war. We spent time in lecture talking about the speechifying of Brassidus, the persuasiveness of Brassidus, so that he would win more battles with his silver tongue than putting this ragtag group of soldiers in the field and actually having to win an outright hoplite battle. as we'll be talking about in the future, and was able to have success in his campaign against the Persians, even though there were no Spartiate hoplites, no Spartiate hoplite phalanx to back up his efforts. Another thing though made it easier for the Spartans to get away with this. is this sending out commanders to be in charge of other forces to fight for them. And this was Sparta's soldierly reputation and Sparta's tradition of leadership in the year. The Greeks were, by the time you get to the early fourth century, quite used to the idea. that the Spartans would lead combined Greek efforts. A Spartan commander or a Spartan king would lead a large force of Greek allies, and they may not necessarily have a very large force of Spartiates, or any Spartiates, with them. But because of the reputation of the Spartans as soldiers, as leaders, the Greeks were used to this. But how long could they sustain this? s- win military campaigns without having large numbers of their back soldiers helping them do so. This is something that we're going to be talking about in the next few lectures. All right, before I get to the next social problem facing the Spartans, any questions about the population crime? Yes. so willing to die on this bill of keeping their population in this societies when they were faced with similar problems or anything like that and allow a specific group of people, yes, but allow people in to try and replenish their losses. That is an excellent question. That is an excellent question. We don't know the answer for sure. But I suspect it has something to do with, well, there's a natural human tendency to favor the in-group and be suspicious of the out-group. It is a bit of a leap for any city, state, and the human community throughout history to sort of open their gates and let others in. But in moments of crisis, they weren't known to have done that. I'll give you an example. Argos, after its defeat by the Spartans at the Battle of Sapaea early in the 5th century BC, Argos for decades. Their population was much reduced and we're told in our sources that the Argoids made citizens of many people living in the Argoids, in the territory around Argos, that previously had been excluded. Now, at least though these are Argoids, or people that would have been familiar to the Argoids, and so in the extreme circumstances they were willing to make We're told that after a battle in the Athenian War, when the Athenians were in dire straits and had enrolled a number of slaves to be rowers in their ships, that there was a need to give citizenship to these slaves. Now that proves to be very controversial. Because that was, these are our slaves, making the slaves full citizens was something that a lot of a lot of people were looking for. But the Athenians had, on occasion, made mass citizenship to friends of the Athenians who would help them. The Plataeans, for example, when they were attacked by Athens' enemies, Plataeans were given mass citizenship. For the Athenians, because of their good service, their loyalty, they were thought of as friends. So it tends to take a lot for a human community to set down what they think of as the in group and protecting the in group. The Spartans, for whatever reason, never managed to do that. And I guess my best explanation for this is the insularity of the Spartan community that was built in from the beginning with the Lycurgus reforms. It wasn't just that Lycurgus was going to reform Spartan society and make things a little bit better. Lycurgus was remaking the whole Spartan community with a dedication to serve the Spartans. And it must be said, an in-built inbuilt feeling of superiority that comes with this. The Spartans thought of themselves as special people. They took great pride in their society, in their institutions, in their training, in their attitude. And the idea that the Spartiates are going to be only the best stock are ever made Spartans. Remember one of the first things that happened. When a Spartan is born as an infant, he is inspected. not by the parents, but by the elders. Is this infant, does it look off? Does it look deformed? Does it look weak? If it is, away with it. Not good enough to be a Spartan. So I think that this whole attitude that the special community of Spartans starting with the Lycurgian reforms, that's the only place I can go to explain this. For why the Spartans resisted, all ancient Greek city-states resisted it to an extent, but why the Spartans resisted even more than the others? Good question though. Something that I'm not sure anyone could answer for. Yeah. be an element of the Spartan institution being so peculiar among the city-states. So maybe there was a fear that if we start putting other people in. you're bringing in adults who don't have that cultural background, and so maybe there's that fear that all of a sudden you're going to have people go, well, I don't see why I should subject my infant to this treatment. I don't see why I should give up my seven-year-old son. And then all of a sudden you've got full Spartan citizens who don't see why they need to contribute in both of these exact rituals, because they're Spartan citizens, but culturally that's just not what we do. But then there'd be like that cultural divide and idea about who's actually contributing. another trait we know that the Spartans had and that was a traditionalism. The Spartans very much revere tradition, the way things had always been done. If something had always been done in a particular way, that in itself is a reason to keep it. Aside from judging whether it's good or bad, if that's part of our traditions, then that's something we should do. And if you bring in a bunch of outsiders, people who don't understand Spartan traditions, that might change things. switch things, they don't understand what it means to be a Spartan, what it's always meant to be a Spartan. So that I'll add, I'll suggest, I'll agree that could have been another fact. Any other questions about Spartan population decline? One thing I'll add, I've been talking about the Spartiates. Those are the ones whose numbers, as informed as we are about them precisely, those are the numbers that we have the best handle on. How many perioicorn were there in Spartan history? Well, we have even less information about perioicorn, where their numbers also decline. Well, judging from the same sort of battlefield figures that we get, we get less information about how many perioikoi show up for a given battle than we do about how many Spartiates. But based on those sorts of sort of troop numbers that show up for battles, it looks like there may have been a slight decline in perioikoi over the years, from at least 5,000 available in the time of Plataea. There may have been more. We know that 5,000 fought in Plataea. You know, there are another 2,000 or 3,000 that could have gone. To several thousand available in the fourth century. Not 5,000, not 8,000. So it looks like there may have been a bit of a decline in the number of perioe coi also over time, but it was not nearly as dramatic as the decline in the number of Spartans. And so what happens is at battles, particularly when you get the late fifth century, the early you find a much larger, the Spartan army that shows up, the core of a Spartan army that shows up for any battle, there's gonna be, where it used to be sort of 50-50, Spartiates to Perioikoi, now it's gonna be a relatively smaller number of Spartiates and a much larger number of Perioikoi, representing sort of the Spartan contingent, not to mention Neodamides, who show up to fight alongside them. and other power. All right, but there was another problem eating away at Spartan strength, even when it was at its peak of influence in the Greek world. And that's social and wealth inequality. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, who was also a witness to important historical events and occasionally talks about them, comments on the population decline of the Spardians. You might wonder, how does Aristotle

know about it, if the Spartans were keeping a secret? Well, Aristotle was writing in the middle and late portions of the fourth century BC, after Sparta had gone through its terrible decline. At that point, it was clear what had happened to the Spartans. So he talks about the population decline among the Spartiates. And he understood that it was a severe problem, that it undermined Spartan military strength. It was part of the reason for Sparta's fall from its position of dominance. But he offers a subtle twist to the story. The problem, it seems, went deeper than just having fewer elite soldiers to line up losses in war, or the earthquake or something. This was also a problem about Spartan property law. Here's what Aristotle has to say. One might also censure the Spartan institutions with respect to the unequal distribution of wealth. It is come about that some of the Spartans owned too much property and some extremely little, all into which the land has fallen into fewer hands. And this has also been badly regulated by the laws. For the lawgiver, he's referring to like Hergis here, made it dishonorable to sell a family's existing estate. And he did so rightly, but he granted liberty to alienate land and will by gift or request, that is after death. Yet the result that has happened was down to follow in the one case as well as in the other. And also nearly 2 fifths of the whole area of the country is owned by women because of the number of women who inherit the states and the practice of giving large dowries. That is, a large amount of land would go with the young woman being given in marriage. As a result of this, although the country is capable of supporting 1,500 cavalry and 30,000 heavy-armed troopers in its hotlines, they numbered not even 1,000. This is in Aristotle's time from Lutra and their Atheism. And the defective nature of their system of land tenure has been proved by the actual facts of history. The state did not succeed in enduring a single blow at the Battle of Nutra, but perished owing to the smallness of its population. So here Aristotle is underscoring the weakness that this brought to Spartans. Now, again, we'll talk about Lutra and its aftermath soon enough. It wasn't just because of small population that Lutra was so devastating to Spartan fortunes, but that was definitely part of it, right? It made it impossible for the Spartans to come back from the crushing defeat at Lutra, in part because they had only 1,000 citizens. But the larger point that Aristotle making is making this very interesting. He's suggesting that because of property inequality, either because of the fact that Spartan women could control land themselves and own the large proportion of the land in Spartan territory, and that because of the way that land moved from hand to hand, either because of women conveying land via dowries, or because of people dividing. dividing up their land that they're given by the state into smaller parcels or through gifts after their death, that what ends up happening is that you have much of Spartan land residing in the hands of few citizens and many Spartiates just having a very small piece of land. Now, why would that be a problem? Why would that prevent the Spartans from having lots of Spartans? He's not talking about the Spartans dying out because of this. He's not saying that the Spartans starved to death because they didn't have enough land. He's saying, though, that because of the way they distributed the land, which, by the way, is totally against what Plutarch, anyway, tells us was like Hergis' goal, right, in the Gallatarian society where land was equally distributed, or roughly equally distributed, right? This is clearly by the time you get to the fourth century in Aristotle's time, that has gone very much wrong. But how does that produce a situation where you have only a few Spartiate soldiers? Was there any aspect of the Spartan Constitution and the Spartan society that like Kyrgyz developed that made it so that Spartan citizens had to contribute a certain amount of food every month? What was that? What was the part of the Spartan society that required Spartan citizens to contribute a fixed amount? of produce from their land. Of course, they didn't produce it. They had a lot of slaves farming their land for them, produced it. But what did they have to do? Does anyone recall? When did the Spartans have to produce, on a monthly basis, produce from their land? Under what circumstances did most Spartan men eat? Where did they eat? At home with their families? In the social mess halls. The mess halls. And every month, every Spartan had to give a fixed contribution to the mess halls. If they could not give that fixed contribution, they were removed from citizenship. This is one of the ways that a full Spartiate could lose his status as a full Spartiate citizen. There are other ways. He could show cowardice in battle. He could fail out of the training system or end up dead. But one of the key ways that a Spartiate could fail to measure up and lose his status as full Spartiate citizen was to fail to make the appropriate contribution. on a regular basis to the heating clubs, to the mess halls. So that's where this comes in. If you have a situation where many Spartiates are just trying to survive themselves and make their required contributions with smaller and smaller plots of land over time as people die and one generation takes over for the next, and maybe there are lots of children among whom property had to be divided or land was lost in a dowry of a woman being, I mean, any of the sort of the systems that that Aristotle vaguely describes here for us, you could find yourself, as Sparty could find himself in a situation where he could no longer make the contributions that was required. Now this would mean that there are fewer Spartiates, fewer Spartiates to take their place in the Spartan phalanx. This relates to the next issue. It wasn't just a wealth inequality that was undermining Spartan society. It was a social inequality. that was becoming more and more exaggerated in Sparta over time. The wealth itself would have been apparent, right? It would have started to become apparent in Sparta over the generations that certain Spartan families had lots of land and wealth and others were becoming impoverished in most Greek city-states. This is the basis of... class system, those who had the most property and those who could barely get by on the property that they had. But it becomes more problematic in Sparta, because the Spartans tried to make up for the Spartate population loss with the creation of subclasses of Spartan citizens. So we've already learned about the Neodomal Dace, what they called the freed halots. Of course, they didn't make them Spartiates, but they were no longer halot slaves, so they had to create a sort of a subaltern class to call them Neodomal Dace, who, of course, were entitled to no particular privilege. in Spartan society except no longer being controlled or indeed murdered as slaves. But there's another class that one of our authors refers to called the Jupo Mayones. I didn't put the term on the term list because no need to try to make you spell this. It basically means not quite as good, sort of an underclass, all right? Who were these huppomeones? Well, we don't know. It's not defined for us, but probably it included Spartiates who had fallen from full status, and they were now considered huppomeones. Now, they would, huppomeones we know would sometimes fight for Spartans in battle, right? But they couldn't be part of the Spartiate poplite phalanx anymore, and they certainly couldn't take advantage of all the privileges that full Sparty 8 citizenship brought with it. So, and there's another class that's referred to the Mothakes, which may be people born of unions between Spartiates and non-Spartiates, but we're not sure. So there was this variety of subclasses that were emerging in Spartan society beneath the Spartiates themselves. And these subclasses were bound to create resentments, not least among the members of these subclasses who looked up to the Spartiates, around town as rulers of Sparta and indeed as that much of Greece. And as the numbers of the privileged few shrank, as we know that they were, other classes grew in relative terms of numbers and this was bound to create even more resentment. The most obvious way this resentment could boil over was revealed in one of your readings for today. And that was the Kinedon conspiracy. Xenophon is writing a history of Greece at this time. He's picked up where Thucydides left off in the middle of the Athenian War. But he continued after the end of the Athenian War. And he's talking about the history of Sparta and the rest of Greece for the decades following the Athenian War. in 398 BC, there was this planned rebellion by one of the not quite full Spartans, a man named Cynadon. He's described by Xenophon as being one of the lesser Spartans. And this whole rebellion was described as very social in nature. Kinedon was clearly planning to pit all the non-Sparteates versus the Spartiates. And Kinedon, as the city, the Xenophon's account reveals, attracted a great deal of support. is a brief excerpt. It was the case, the conspirators claimed, that they were in on the plot with everyone else. Helots, freed men, that is, freed helots, neodomedes. Lower-grade Spartans, these supermaiones I'm talking about. And perioecoid, perioecoid. Long, though sort of a central pillar of the Sparti order. since all these people showed clearly enough if there was ever any mention of the Spartan officer class that is the Hmoioi, the Spartiates, that they would be glad to eat them raw. So Xenophon is telling us that at least the conspirators believed that there was not just sort of tension in Spartan society, but that there was real

hatred. for the Spartans that was developing among all the non-Spartans. Pomeonis, Metamidase, Helox, even Periwinkle. So this was something, and then the Kinedon conspiracy was suppressed, right? You read in your history about how the Spartans were terrified of this rebellion. They were worried that this was going to, this revolution or whatever it was going to be, was going to tear Sparta apart. So they took lots of measures to make sure Kinedon got captured, and then they tortured him and found out he was co-conspirators for it. And they were able to suppress the conspiracy without any problem. But obviously, that posed a great threat to Sparta. society. But in a more general way I should mention that the Spartan political system, not just a class system that I've been talking about, but the political system who got to hold what offices also caused resentment. You did some reading in your biography with Giselaus today about Lysand, right? This very skillful, powerful Spartan general who was able to really bear a lot of for the final defeat of the Athenians in the Athenian War. How Weissander was very influential outside of Sparta, that he was celebrated when he would go to Aegean city states because of all the ties that he had forged, the people that he had placed in positions of power, and that when he and Agisalaus went on a joint campaign, all the Greeks they encountered rushed to Lysander to offer him gifts and seek his counsel and seek his help and practically ignored the king, Aegeus Aelaus, and how this caused resentment in Aegeus Aelaus. And Aegeus Aelaus would put Lysander down and eventually reassign Lysander to some other job. Well, this caused resentment not in a G.silaeus, of course, some G.silaeus did resent it, no doubt, in Lysander. Think about what it was like for Lysander, who was obviously a very ambitious man, and a man used to command, a man used to be fawn over by people looking for favors from him or people in his power, used to command over huge forces. Whenever he goes to Sparta, inside Sparta, how influential is he? He's useless. He's not an ephor, he's not a member of the Gerussian. The whole Spartan political system is simply not built to allow for ambitious, skillful leaders, political or military leaders, to advance anywhere. There was nowhere for Lysander to advance. Aside to when he turned 60, he gets to join 29 other people in the Gerussian. So people like Lysander were being cut off. And their resentment was going to build too. In fact, Plutarch reveals that after Lysander's death, it was shown that there were papers that Lysander left behind that he had plotted a coup. that he had plotted a way whereby there would be oracles from Delphi and other oracular centers in the Mediterranean world that would say Sparta was weak and Sparta needed to have a new kind of king so that someone from outside the traditional families would get to become king. And the whole point of these machinations was to find a way for Lysander to become king or take power. So nothing came of these things, but again, resentments were building in Sparta because of the way Spartan society was organized. All right, so clearly, for all the power that Sparta was wielding in the Greek world after the victory in the Athenian War, trouble was brewing. And it was not just internal trouble. were called, that the Spartans were supposed to share with Persia the Eastern Greek city states liberated from the Athenian Empire, at least according to the Persian interpretation of the baby-worded treaty they had made with the Spartans. This would become a matter of dispute with the Persians almost immediately after the Athenian War. In 402 BC, the Spartans by his brothers. And when this rebellion against the great king of Persia that Sparta back failed, Persia demanded tribute of the Greek city-states that they presumed to be under their control. Sparta would side with the Greek cities, and there would be war. And that war would complicate things for the Spartans immediately. And we're going to talk about that and other wars next time.