"Who Are the Spartans?"

Decades before the death of Cyrus, before Cambyses had conquered Egypt, before Bardiya and Darius's conspiracy, the Persian Empire had reached the edge of the known world. Cyrus had crushed Croesus, burned Sardis, and overthrown the Lydian Empire. Now, for the first time, one of the great empires of the world had reached the shores of the Aegean sea.

This sea, situated just to the west of Asia Minor, marked what was then the end of the world. All of the great and ancient civilizations dwelt on this side of the watery expanse - the Medes, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Hebrews, Canaanites, the Egyptians, and, of course, the Persians. But dotting the shores of the wine-dark waters were various small colonies of people who called themselves Hellenes - or, as we know them, Greeks.

The Greeks had long lived freely, both here clinging to the coast of Asia Minor - "Ionia," they called the region - and inhabiting a small, mountainous peninsula on the far side of the Aegean. They had no unified government, no great empires or kings had united them. Instead they were divided into hundreds of small cities, each an independent state, and each perpetually despising all others. For centuries, the Hellenes had fought little wars amongst themselves, formed alliances against other coalitions, seen those alliances dissolve into infighting once again, and had generally remained in the same state of perpetual squabbling since time immemorial. Their greatest myth even told the story of one of those innumerable wars - of the long siege of the ancient city of Troy, in the land of Ilium north of Ionia - "the Iliad."

But in recent years, one city had risen to pre-eminence over the others, clawing its way to the top of the heap with blood and iron. And now that city sent a delegation to Cyrus as he settled affairs in his new regional capital at Sardis, warning him to treat the Greeks of Ionia well, lest he answer to the Spartans.

“Who are the Spartans?” Cyrus had derisively asked. Who were these red-cloaked men who dared to threaten the King of Kings, the ruler of the world? Why should Cyrus care what the lords of a pathetic backwater far across the sea at the edge of the civilized world thought? He dismissed the incident, and thought no more of it. He went on to his great conquests in the East, and thought he was finished with the men who called themselves the Spartans. 

“Who are the Spartans?” In the south of Greece, on the peninsula of the Peloponnese, there lies the little valley of Lacedaemon. In that valley there sat a small city – really more of a town, or a collection of villages – that was known as Sparta. 

“Who are the Spartans?” Sparta had not always been the mistress of Greece. In the time of the great war against Troy, more than 700 years before the current times, she had been the capital of the kingdom of Menelaus. But Sparta had suffered greatly during the Dark Age of Greece, when barbarian invasions from the north swept into the little peninsula. The once great city had slowly sunk into ruin.

It was one of these barbarian peoples, called the Dorians, who founded the new city of Sparta. But the city was weak, and threatened from all sides. The Peloponnese in those days was dominated by the great city of Argos, which lay far to the north near the Isthmus of Corinth, near the ancient capital of Agamemnon, who had led the Greeks against Troy, Mycenae. Still, Sparta was stronger than her immediate neighbors, and so quickly conquered the entire region of Laconia. Flush with victory, they struck to the west, over the mountain of Taygetos, against the people dwelling there, the Messenians. 

At first, the Spartans drove the Messenians back to their own citadel, and laid siege to it. Desperate, the Messenians sent to the Oracle at Delphi for advice. They learned that only the sacrifice of a royal virgin could save them. The king’s daughter was duly chosen, and just as the Oracle said the resurgent Messenians drove back the Spartans. Within months of their counter-offensive, there was fighting in Lacedaemon itself. Now the Spartans were on the brink of defeat.

So they in their turn approached the Oracle. They took the advice, and halted the war for a few months. When the Spartans re-emerged, the Messenians were caught completely off-guard. They were driven back to their city, defeated in battle after battle, and in the end were crushed, enslaved, and forever made to serve as the Spartan slave caste, the helots. 

What had the Oracle told the Spartans? She had proven the catalyst for the Laws of Lycurgus.

“Who are the Spartans?” Before Lycurgus, they were fat, indolent, like every other city in Greece. They were not particularly skilled in the arts of war, and they lost as many battles as they won. After the reforms of the great king, however, something terrible had emerged in the Peloponnese. 

The Spartans, faced with annihilation by the Messenians, had completely restructured their society into the world’s largest garrison. Men were devoted always to training in the art of war and the discipline of the phalanx. Women had the duty of bearing sons to serve in the ranks. Children were judged fit or unfit at birth. Those who did not make the grade were cast into a chasm on Taygetos. Sparta had no use for weakness. 

At the age of seven, the boys were introduced to the agoge, the battle school. There they were brutalized. Underfed, so as to learn to steal food. Beaten, to learn to bear pain. Taught never to surrender or to retreat. After eleven years of living at the agoge, the young recruits were given a knife and abandoned in the countryside, to survive upon their wits and cunning, and tasked with killing any helot they found. This was the ceremony of the Krypteia, used to terrorize the helots into submission, and to teach the boys to kill. 

Inducted into the army, the boys, now young men, would serve until their 60th year, assuming they did not die in battle before then. Upon their 30th birthday they were required to marry – Sparta needed more children, more soldiers. It was the duty of a Spartan wife to provide as many as she could. Headstones and marked graves were reserved only for those citizens who died in battle or in childbirth. 

The Spartan woman was, if anything, harsher than the Spartan man. It was she who equipped her husband or son as he marched out to war for the first time. Presenting him with his shield, she would say, “Come back with this shield, or upon it.” True Spartans never dropped their shield – their breastplate, their greaves, their helmet all protected only the soldier, but his shield was protection for all the men around him. The very integrity of the phalanx depended on the shield. Spartans died in place –they would not break the phalanx.

For those who did lose their shield, the punishment was terrible. A Spartan could expect no help from his mother. The story is told of one young soldier who fled a battle, and came to his mother for protection. Instead of shielding her son, she dragged him into the streets and announced his shame to the entire state. She and some of her friends presented the unfortunate youth to the people, and he was duly executed. No room for weakness in Sparta.

After another battle, a woman was informed that her husband and both of her sons had died in the fighting. She asked nothing, except simply, “Was our side victorious?” When told that the answer was yes, she turned away without a tear in her eye, and replied, “Then I am happy.” 

It was this terrible people that had now annihilated the Messenians. Now only the great cities of Argos and Arcadia could hope to oppose the Spartans. Soon, they, too, would fall before the new soldiers. Messenia was destroyed in 631 BC, a time when the Assyrians still ran rampant through the Middle East, when the Medes were poor nomadic farmers in the Zagros, and no one had heard of Persia. 

Now Sparta, the master of the southern half of the peninsula, marched northwards, against the city of Tegea, the principle city of Arcadia, halfway between Sparta and her great rival, Argos. Their war was long and terrible, but in the end the red-cloaked soldiers proved irresistible, and Tegea fell to Spartan might. Argos alone might have a chance of stopping the Spartans, and their war was not long in coming.

The two sides decided to avoid a long, grueling combat such as the Messenian or Tegean wars. Instead, each city picked 300 champions and sent them to the field, there to have one battle and settle the affair of supremacy in the Peloponnese once and for all. The two armies met, and the Battle of the Champions lasted all day. At last, two Argive soldiers remained standing, and seeing no living Spartans on the field, they withdrew to Argos to announce the victory. But they were mistaken. One Spartan soldier, sorely wounded, yet lived. He looted the corpses of the battlefield, then returned to Sparta.

Each side claimed victory. The Argives had more men remaining at the end of the battle, but the Spartans claimed the possession of the field. Furious with each other, the two sides went to war in earnest. 

It was immediately after the Battle of the Champions that an emissary from Croesus of Lydia arrived. He told the Spartans that he had attacked a group of people known as the Persians, who had supplanted the Medes as masters of Asia. Now he summoned allies to aid him in the spring campaign, and was told that Sparta and Argos were the two most powerful states in Greece. The Spartans assured the messenger that they would aid his master, as soon as their affair with the Argives was done. 

And so Sparta went to war with the last of her enemies. Argos, though mighty, proved unable to contend with the Spartan hoplite, who by now was widely reputed as the finest soldier in all of Greece. She was defeated and reduced, like so many others, to a simple client state, leaving Sparta mistress of the Peloponnese and so the most powerful city in all Greece.

Sparta had come far in the century since the Laws of Lycurgus. From a tiny collection of villages in the little valley of Lacedaemon, she had risen to become master of all she surveyed in a mere century. Scythian barbarians from the north sent envoys to Sparta. Great kings of Asia appealed to her for aid. The cities of Ionia looked to her for leadership in throwing off the yoke of the tyrants that ruled them. Plataea asked for her protection, Megara acknowledged her supremacy, and now no city in Greece questioned the right of the Spartans to lead. 

And so when the Spartan envoys crossed to Lydia to find the war already over, they expected their threat to carry some weight with this Cyrus. Surely the hegemon of Greece could command respect, even from some Oriental despot. And instead?

“Who are the Spartans?”

In time, the Persians would become all too familiar with the answer to that question.