The Fall of Sparta
A History of Mankind (126)
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The philosophical dialogue was another of Plato's inventions. Previous philosophers expressed themselves through riddles, poetry or argumentation. Through the dialogue, Plato betrays his profound dislike of Athens' sophist-dominated society, while at the same time presenting much of its intellectual glory and letting posterity hear some of the arguments posed by Plato's enemies.
If Plato had done nothing other than inventing the philosophical dialogue and the Academy, he'd still be one of the major figures in the history of mankind.
He did much more. In his last work, the “Laws,” he came up with the idea of the curative purpose of punishment, that the wrongdoer can be taught something, even redeemed, by his punishment1. He also devised the idea of a state cannot be perfect until the philosopher becomes king or the king philosopher2, shared by most Chinese thinkers since the Warring States era, and in the process quashed the concept of democracy, exerting his revenge on Socrates’ executors to the point that the word itself would remain insulting to even democrats (who avoided the word) well into the 19th century AD:
“The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy – the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.”3
Like any other Athenian gentleman, Plato – like his brother Glaucon, his stepfather Pyrilampes and Xenophon – was a great believer in breeding sporting animals; like Solon, he was enthusiastic about the possibilities that the Spartan-style breeding of humans, eugenics, could present. In The Republic, he proposed a deceptive lottery to ensure that the greatest number of sexual acts would occur between outstanding women and outstanding men4 such as, for example, himself.
Seeking his ideal of a philosopher king, Plato traveled to Syracuse and became an adviser to Dionysius I; after a dispute, Dionysius I sent him to the quarry outside of Syracuse where many Athenian prisoners were left to die after the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily; this place, with an extraordinary, and spooky acoustic of echoes, almost certainly inspired the allegory also in Plato’s The Republic of the world as a dark cave, lit by fire which throws shadow-puppet figures on a wall. This allegory has a coda; after he's helped out of cave, one of the prisoners sees true reality, and Plato explains:
"Slowly, his eyes adjust to the light of the sun. First he can only see shadows. Gradually he can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves. Eventually, he is able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally he can look upon the sun itself."
Only after he can look straight at the sun "is he able to reason about it" and what it is in reality, Plato continues, saying that the freed prisoner would think that the world outside the cave was superior to the world he experienced in the cave: "he would bless himself for the change, and pity the others" and would want to bring his fellow cave dwellers out of the cave and into the sunlight.
Then, something happens. The returning prisoner, whose eyes have become accustomed to the sunlight, becomes temporarily blind when he re-enters the cave, just as he was when he was first exposed to the sun or as one is unable to see in the darkness for a while after being a long time under natural life. The prisoners, according to Plato, would infer from the returning man's blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Socrates conclusion is that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave.
In The Republic, Plato has Socrates describe the ideal "philosopher king" as one who loves “the sight of truth." After the failed attempt to turn Dionysius into one, Anniceris, a friend of Plato, bought his freedom for twenty minas, and sent him home. Dionysius meanwhile became one of the world's most powerful men, fighting the Carthaginians in Sicily – and butchering Carthaginians in Syracuse proper in 398-397 BC – while controlling parts of Southern Italy and intervening in Greek politics
After Dionysius's death (he was likely poisoned in 367 BC), his brother-in-law Dion requested Plato return to Syracuse to tutor Dionysius II, son of the deceased, and help him become a philosopher king. Dionysius II seemed to accept Plato's teachings, but he became suspicious of Dion, his uncle. Dionysius II expelled Dion and kept Plato against his will.
Eventually Plato left Syracuse. Dion would return to overthrow Dionysius and ruled Syracuse for a short time – until he was usurped by Calippus, a fellow disciple of Plato, evidence that Plato did learn from his misfortune.
Elsewhere in the Greek world, the after-effects from the Peloponnesian War resulted in a slow decline of Spartan power, bled by permanent wars that it couldn’t really afford given its shrinking demographic base. Sparta never intended to become an empire and indeed did not remain imperial5. The failure of the Kinadon/Cinadon Conspiracy, a 399 BC coup d’etat that sought to overturn the political system by giving extra power to Lacedaemonians outside the Spartan elite, may have been a lost opportunity to broaden Sparta’s manpower sources6, although one that Spartans didn’t desire nor welcome.
The Persian Empire, obsessed with staying imperial, consistently meddled to ensure that no Greek coalition would ever again rise to contest its hold over Asia Minor. Geopolitical maneuvering reached comical levels with the Corinthian War (395-387 BC) triggered by the rising power of Thebes, mostly unharmed by either the Persian invasions or the Peloponnesian War, and now allied to its old enemy Athens.
This war only ended when the Persians funded a Spartan fleet to destroy an Athenian fleet the Persians had funded to destroy a Spartan fleet the Persians had funded to destroy an Athenian fleet7.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
With Greek cities fighting each other along the margins of Persian power, Plato’s Academy, an intellectual island of relatively peaceful discussion, retreated into metaphysics. In many middle period dialogues, such as the Phaedo, Republic and Phaedrus, Plato advocates a belief in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife: a seed on which later Christian Platonism later grew8.
Neither Thebans nor Spartans were mollified. In 378 BC, a bellicose democracy replaced Thebes’ traditional oligarchy, under the leadership of the anti-Spartan Epaminondas, and immediately prepared for war, setting up a Sacred Band with around 300 elite hoplites who may or may have not been lovers. After skirmishes and peace talks, the armies of both poleis and their allies met in 371 BC at a field at Leuctra not far from Thebes.
Sparta’s army numbered about 10,000 hoplites, but the number of actual Spartan citizen soldiers was about 700, and these accounted for a majority of the estimated 1,200 adult citizens left alive at the time9. With a young Macedonian hostage to Thebes named Philip (born in 382 BC) likely in attendance, Epaminondas set up his army in an unusual echelon formation so that his deep, much-reinforced left wing, including the Sacred Band, met the main thrust of the Spartan right wing – the right being the side where armies traditionally placed their best troops, so that they would outflank the enemy while protecting themselves with their shields.
After most of the Spartan elite fell in battle, the Spartan army gave way. Over the following decade, Epaminondas campaigned deep in the Peloponnese, freeing Spartan helots in Messenia and elsewhere, and weakening Sparta’s complex web of alliances. A young northern Greek named Aristotle (born in 384 BC) arrived in Athens to study in Plato’s academy, just in time to witness the unexpected: the formation of a Spartan-Athenian coalition, not seen since the Persian invasion, this time to oppose those former Persian lackeys, the Thebans.
In the Second Battle of Mantinea (362 BC), Epaminondas’ astute tactics once again prevailed over his enemies’, but his luck ran out when he was killed in the thick of the fighting. Mantinea became a perfect example of a battle in which everyone lost: Sparta’s elite fighters were unable to regain their former fame, Athens was unable to defeat Thebes and Thebes lost its leader and too many good soldiers10.
The winners were those who didn’t take the field: in Athens, a new populist politician, a neo-sophist named Demosthenes, the wily son of a sword-maker who managed to gain power and influence despite measures put in place to stop just his kind from rising11; and, north of Greece proper, Philip of Macedon, who in 359 BC became King Philip II and reorganized his army taking advantage of everything he had learned as a hostage in Thebes, including the use of combined armies with missile forces and unorthodox formations.
See “Crime & Punishment in Ancient Rome,” by Richard A. Bauman, (Routledge, 1996), p. 3.
Spelled out by Socrates in Plato's Republic: "Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils... nor, I think, will the human race."
The Republic, Book 8.
Cit. “Plato: Temperament and Eugenic Policy” by William W. Fortenbaugh, Arethusa, vol. 8, no. 2, 1975, pp. 283–305.
Western scholarship is obsessed with the question of what exactly made the Roman Empire fall, but the protracted fall of Sparta (the city would remain largely independent, and often bellicose, until the Second century BC), is a much more interesting issue. The Spartan system was an excellent defensive system, but was ill equipped to administer an empire, and there were no provisions, such as a hereditary priestly class, that would have allowed it to survive being militarily conquered – a contingency that was all but inevitable in the ancient world and even today. Polybius, a Hellenistic historian who documented the rise of Rome, gave a balanced summary of the greatness and limits of Sparta through a useful comparison with the Roman Republic. He remarked that “the constitution so framed by Lycurgus preserved independence in Sparta longer than anywhere else in recorded history” (Polybius, 6.10). Furthermore: “The Lycurgan system is designed for the secure maintenance of the status quo and the preservation of autonomy. Those who believe that this is what a state is for must agree that there is not and never has been a better system or constitution than that of the Spartans. But if one has greater ambitions that that – if one thinks that it is a finer and nobler thing to be a world-class leader, with an extensive dominion and empire, the center and focal point of everyone’s world – then one must admit that the Spartan constitution is deficient and the Roman constitution is superior and more dynamic.” (Polybius, 6.50) As Cartledge (Op. Cit.) noted, most historiography which deals with the period between 404 and 362 is concerned to pin down where Sparta went wrong “with the benefit of hindsight,” attempting to isolate those factors “but for which [Sparta’s loss of hegemony] would either not have occurred in the form it in fact took or not have been resolved in the way it in fact was.” But, as Helen Roche writes in "Spartan Supremacy: A "Possession for Ever"? Early fourth-century expectations of enduring ascendancy," (in "Hindsight in Greek and Roman History," ed. Anton Powell, Classical Press of Wales, 2013, pp. 91-112) after two centuries of dominance in Greece, the adjustments needed to transition to Mediterranean empire “might very well have seemed both impractical and unnecessary to contemporary Spartans.”
Xenophon, the only source for the conspiracy, however writes in “Hellenica” that the plotters were exceedingly hostile to the Spartan elite and willing to “eat those people raw,” so perhaps a Kinadon triumph wouldn’t have been all that conducive to strengthening Sparta.
Complicated but true. In 394 BC, the withdrawal of the Spartan navy induced Samos to declare independence and reestablish a democracy that proved no match for the powerful, and nearby, Persian empire, and became a Persian dominion until the Athenians took over in 366 BC. In the next few decades, the island of Pythagoras and Melissus fell into a provincial obscurity from which it never recovered.
Some of his dialogues contrast knowledge and opinion, perception and reality, nature and custom, and body and soul. Others tackle questions about art: Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the Phaedrus, and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homer's great poetry, and laughter as well. In the same book, Plato – who knew about “The Clouds” and its effects on Socrates – wrote about the role of the mimetic arts, stating that such things have a power over the minds of men in society, and argued that actors and playwrights cannot portray characters with illiberal and base characters.
Medium-sized classical poleis, like Plataea, had around 1,000 citizens, and big ones like Eretria had 4,000–6,000; only the very big ones went above 10,000. Athens had 50,000–60,000 at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, but only some 30,000 in the fourth century BC; Sparta's case is absolutely stunning, since it had some 8,000 citizens at the time of the Persian Wars one century earlier. The estimates are by George Cawkwell, ‘The Decline of Sparta’, in M. Whitby (ed.), Sparta (2002), p. 237-50.
For many historians, Epaminondas ranks highly as one of the top military commanders of antiquity. However, Polyaenus’ “Stratagemata,” a controversial ancient classic of military strategy, only has him 7th among the ancient generals with the most strategems cited, behind Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and his father, and even the later Antigonus One-Eyed. It must be said that Polyaenus’ list is very controversial, as it’s headed by the little-known Athenian Iphicrates, a mercenary general contemporary of Epaminondas who is famous for having perfected the use of light skirmishes known as peltastes, and closed by Cyrus the Great and Carthage’s Hannibal, for some the most creative military leader of all time. Cit. “Polyaenus: Scriptor Militaris,” a 2010 paper by Everett L. Wheeler.
From 370 BC, the city used purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria), who amounted to of stone incised with rows of slots and with an attached tube. Citizens' tokens—pinakia—were placed randomly in the slots so that every member of each of the tribes of Athens had their tokens placed in the same column. There was a pipe attached to the stone which could then be fed dice that were colored differently (assumed to be black and white) and could be released individually by a mechanism that has not survived to posterity (but is speculated to be by two nails; one used to block the open end and another to separate the next die to fall from the rest of the dice above it. When a die was released, a complete row of tokens (so, one citizen from each of the tribes of Athens) was either selected if the die was colored one color, or discarded if it was the alternate color. This process continued until the requisite number of citizens was selected.) to stop oligarchs from bullying their way into office by buying popular votes – a view supported by Ancient Greek mythology, in which Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades used sortition to determine who ruled over which domain: Zeus got the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld.