Quick questions on Spartan decline from Pausanias to Leuctra (371 BC): HSC Ancient History

The 27-year war between the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League and the Athenian-led Delian League. Three phases.

The decisive battle of the period. Cleombrotus I, the Agiad king, invaded Boeotia with around 11,000 troops. Epaminondas met him at Leuctra in southwest Boeotia with around 7,000 Thebans.

Named for the Spartan king Archidamus II. Annual Spartan invasions of Attica produced no decisive result; Athens's naval supremacy kept her supplied. The plague at Athens (430 to 426 BC) killed Pericles and around 25 per cent of the population.

An Athenian force under Cleon and Demosthenes trapped a Spartan garrison on the island of Sphacteria, near Pylos on the Messenian coast. After a blockade and a final assault, 292 hoplites, including around 120 full Spartiates, surrendered rather than fight to the death (Thucydides 4.2 to 41). Nothing, Thucydides remarks, surprised the Greek world more: Spartans were expected to die at their posts as Leonidas's 300 had at Thermopylae.

The most dynamic Spartan commander of the war marched north in 424 BC with a force built partly of freed Helots (a telling sign of the citizen shortage) and captured Amphipolis, Athens's key northern colony. He died defeating Cleon at the Battle of Amphipolis (422 BC). His success opened the way to the Peace of Nicias (421 BC), a temporary truce.

Athens launched a major invasion of Sicily. After initial promise, the expedition collapsed catastrophically. Around 40,000 Athenians and allies were killed or enslaved (Thucydides 6 to 7).

Sparta, with Persian funding (the Treaty of Miletus, 412 BC), built a fleet. The Spartan admiral Lysander, supported by Cyrus the Younger, defeated the Athenian navy at Aegospotami (405 BC). Athens surrendered in 404 BC.

Lysander returned from Aegospotami with Persian coin and booty on a scale Sparta had never held. The Lycurgan system had banned private possession of gold and silver, prescribing unwieldy iron currency to smother private wealth. The state formally reserved the new metal for public use, but Plutarch (Lysander 16 to 17) records the ban eroding in practice: precious metal seeped into private households, and with it inequality among the supposedly equal Homoioi.

Aristotle (Politics 2.9, 1270a) diagnosed the structural disease: nearly two-fifths of Spartan land had come into the hands of women through inheritance and large dowries, and property was concentrating in ever fewer households. A Spartiate who could no longer pay his monthly syssition contribution dropped out of the citizen body (becoming a Hypomeion, an "Inferior"). Citizen numbers fell from perhaps 8,000 in 480 BC (Herodotus 7.234, an ancient figure) to around 1,500 to 2,000 by 371 BC (a modern estimate, e.g.

Early in Agesilaus II's reign, a Hypomeion named Cinadon plotted a rising of Helots, Perioikoi, Neodamodeis, and fellow Inferiors against the Spartiate elite. Xenophon (Hellenica 3.3.4 to 11) records his chilling arithmetic: in the Spartan agora one could count barely forty full citizens among some four thousand men, and the rest, he said, would gladly eat the Spartiates raw. The ephors lured Cinadon out of the city and executed him.

Aristotle (Politics 2.9, 1270a) treats the decline of Spartiate numbers as the structural cause. From around 8,000 at the time of Thermopylae (480 BC, Herodotus's ancient figure), the citizen body declined to around 1,500 to 2,000 by Leuctra (a modern estimate). Land consolidation in fewer families, much of it passing through heiresses and dowries, and the strict qualification requirements (failure of the syssition contribution meant loss of citizenship) drove the decline.

Internal policing absorbed military and political energy. The Helot revolt of the 460s BC showed the depth of the threat. After Leuctra, the loss of Messenia removed Sparta's economic foundation.

Sparta's high-handed conduct after 404 BC alienated allies and produced the coalitions that defeated her.