revolutionary agitation and social change in classical sparta文档.pdfVIP

REVOLUTIONARY AGITATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN CLASSICAL SPARTA MICHAEL A. FLOWER In his article ‘Agesilaus and Sparta’, George Cawkwell eloquently described the effects of Leuctra and the subsequent Theban invasions on the Spartan state: ‘By 362 ... [Sparta] was eclipsed militarily, never to win a great battle again, and so far from being master even of the Peloponnese that she would spend the rest of time struggling to recover her own ancestral domain of Messenia, no longer a world power, merely a local wrangler.’’ Not surprisingly, much has been written in an attempt to elucidate those causes or factors which contributed to the catastrophe at Leuctra and, more importantly, which rendered that catastrophe irredeemable. Scholarly investigation, in other words, has centered on the reasons for the failure of Sparta.* The purpose of this study is to ask the converse of that question. How was it that Spartan society, at least within Laconia, survived the disasters of the fourth century B.C. virtually intact? Given the complexity and scope of the subject, I intend to focus primarily on relations among the Spartiates themselves, while making appropriate references to other groups. The Spartiates, of course, were those men with full citizen rights, otherwise known as the hornoioi or ‘equal ones.’’ In the winter of 370/69, Epaminondas led an army of some 40,000 hoplites into Laconia and Messenia, the first invasion of Spartan territory since the arrival of the D o r i a n ~ .Laconia~ was ravaged, Messenia was lost, and within six years the old Peloponnesian League had completely disintegrated. But de