Another thing that everyone thinks they know about Sparta is that its soldiers were particularly courageous and the nation was particularly warlike. Neither assumption is necessarily true.

One of the few things that 300 gets absolutely right is the little speech Leonidas gives to his son early in the film:

“In the end a Spartan’s true strength is the warrior next to him, give respect and honour to him and it will be returned to you… ”

There is, for a soldier fighting in a phalanx, no alternative. The shield you carry in a phalanx does not protect your body, but that of the man on your left. You, in turn, are dependent on the steadiness of the man on your right. If the line breaks the huge shield your carrying becomes a hopeless encumbrance and the eight or nine foot pole that was your spear is next to useless in close quarters, hand-to-hand combat and it certainly wouldn’t be much use as a javelin – despite what 300 shows.

So – for a Spartan soldier – acts of personal bravery were not encouraged. The Spartan mother is famous for encouraging her son to come back with his shield (victorious) or on it (dead). But why place value in the shield rather than the breastplate or helmet. Plutarch has Demaratus (Leonidas’s predecessor) explain that other armour “serves for their private safety only, but the shield is for the common defence and strength of the whole army.”

There is a story (I can’t find the source, I thought it was in Plutarch or Herodotus but I can’t find it in either at the minute – if anyone out there knows where it is, please let me know) of how a Spartan accused of cowardice by his companions sought in the next battle to prove how brave he was by breaking ranks and seeking to engage the enemy in single combat. The Spartan magistrates had ignored the charge of cowardice but punished the soldier severely for the show of courage. Breaking the line put the whole army at risk, not just the individual.

So, unlike the soldiers in 300, Spartans would not have rushed about chopping at random enemies and been praised for it. The effectiveness of a Spartan army depended on the cohesion of the phalanx and the tactical advantages that the Spartans enjoyed on the battlefield came from a lifetime of rigorous drilling that allowed them to perform feats of manoeuvre in combat that their “amateur” adversaries could not manage – the ability to hinge the battle line without breaking the line, to recover quickly when gaps did appear and to reorganise “organically” thanks to a deep command system that prepared soldiers throughout the ranks to step up into positions of authority during times of crisis.

A single Spartan soldier was no more or less brave or fierce than his opponent, his superiority came from his training.

Nor do Spartans appear particularly warlike. As 300 shows (but wrongly treats as an aberration due to corruption) they were quite willing to stay at home and miss battles rather than break their religious festivals. They’d already missed the Athenian victory at the battle of Marathon in the first Persian invasion – 490BC. But more than that, Spartan foreign policy generally seemed to favour defensive security rather than aggressive expansion.

It’s worth quickly comparing the history of Sparta’s 300-odd year hegemony in the Peloponnese (southern Greece) with the way Athenians developed their maritime empire. Apart from securing control of neighbouring Messenia, Sparta never sought the conquest and control of neighbouring states under a single banner. Rather it fought to develop a defensive alliance with individual states – those states pledged not to attack Sparta and to fight alongside her if she was attacked but otherwise they were free to do as they liked – and Sparta was tolerant of individual state’s different methods of government and made no claims for payment of tribute. At the start of the great war between Sparta and Athens Thucydides talks of the great democracies of the Peloponnese (including Elis) as existing comfortably within Sparta’s sphere of political domination.

By contrast, as Athens developed itself as a maritime power and began to exercise control over other states the polities which fell under Athenian influence were bound into an alliance and eventually an empire that demanded they follow Athens’ lead, that imposed Athenian forms of democracy and forced these states to pay money into Athenian coffers.

Sparta had 300 years of virtually unquestioned dominance, yet the Spartan system of buffers and free states persisted until their unique social system was eroded and corrupted by the depredations of the Peloponnesian War and the influx of Persian money. Sparta was traditionally slow to act – even in support of her closest allies – and careful not to risk her soldiers unduly. Far from encouraging an aggressive stance, Sparta’s social system (in which the number of full citizens was always small, the risk of revolt at home always high and the opportunities for individuals to make themselves personally wealthy almost non-existent) made Spartans far more cautious than their brasher, greedier Athenian rivals.

This is probably the last of these posts on Sparta for a while, I’ve spent far too long worrying about 300 – a film really not worth the effort – but no doubt I’ll return to the topic of Sparta eventually - I can’t help myself.