DEGENERACY OF SPARTA
[353-240 B.C.]
The results of Lycurgus’ institutions continued to be made manifest. The Spartan city diminished in population from day to day, as though worn away by the friction of its iron institutions. The narrow circle, which it had drawn round itself, never widening but always growing smaller, finally came to enclose but an insignificant number of Spartans. Great numbers had perished in the wars, others cast by poverty into the lower classes could no longer take their seats at the public tables. Aristotle says, “Whoever is without means to contribute to the expense of these tables must forfeit his political rights.” The Spartans knew that they were menaced with destruction through lack of citizens; the cry that arose when the four hundred and twenty Spartan soldiers were imprisoned on the island of Sphacteria, still rang in every ear. Aristotle further states: “The territory of Sparta that is capable of providing sustenance for fifteen hundred cavalry and thirty thousand hoplites, to-day barely supports a thousand warriors.” In the assemblies of four thousand, there were scarcely to be seen forty Spartans; moreover, inequality of conditions grew as the people decreased in number.
Gold and silver currency had for a long time ceased to be proscribed and the disinterestedness of the Lacedæmonians to be extolled. Numerous examples of their venality were known; Eurybiades had been bought by Themistocles, Plistoanax and Cleandridas by Pericles, Leotychides by the Aleuadæ, the admiral and captains of the fleet by Tissaphernes. The kings, the senators, the ephors, all had repeatedly received bribes, and Gylippus, the liberator of Syracuse, who had been charged to carry to Sparta the plunder of Athens, kept back for his own use thirty talents [£6000 or $30,000]. Hence the remark of an interlocutor in the Alcibiades: “There is more gold and silver in Lacedæmonia than in all the rest of Greece; money flows to it from all parts and once there remains; the country is like a lion’s cave, one sees the footprints of those who enter, but of footsteps leaving there is no trace.” The commanders who returned from ports in Asia brought with them great wealth, and more than that a taste for luxury and ease, in a word, corruption; every one plunged into wild extravagance and the vices engendered by the possession of riches.
[405-240 B.C.]
After the Peloponnesian War, the ephor Epitadeus had passed a law authorising citizens to dispose of their property and land. The effects of this rhetra were so prompt to appear that Aristotle was given cause to write: “The land has passed into the hands of a few.” In the time of Agis IV the entire territory was owned by a hundred Spartans. Thus the government had become more and more oligarchical. All the national affairs were carried on by the ephors and the senate, even the general assembly was rarely consulted, and in consequence the rulers, being few in number, were all the more jealous of the privileges of their station and less disposed to suffer them to be curtailed. To open their ranks, moreover, for the readmission of families that poverty had driven forth would have been to expose themselves, by relinquishing the majority, to some territorial reform tending toward a fresh division of the immense domains now concentrated in the possession of a few. Public interest might point this way but private interest decidedly opposed it, and private interest won.
There resulted from this a violent hatred between the privileged and the lower classes; the latter being formed of Spartans degraded from their ranks, enfranchised helots, Laconians to whom had been accorded certain rights, and the children of Spartan fathers of the higher order and alien mothers. These classes were given denominations that kept them separate and distinct; there was doubtless also a wide difference in conditions. Below the Equals, who formed a restricted oligarchy, were the Inferiors, or Spartans, who were excluded from the public tables, and the neodamodes or helots enfranchised for services rendered the state, and lastly the periœci. Though they had no share in the actual government of their country these men estimated highly the value of their services to the state; and at different times many prominent figures, sons of Spartan fathers and helot mothers, such as Lysander, Gylippus, and Callicratidas had issued from this class. In a vindictive address against Lacedæmon the Thebans at Athens declared that the Spartans recruited their military governors from among men who had helot blood in their veins; and indeed many of these people had amassed competencies that gave them the ambition to leave the inferior station in which custom held them. When Cleomenes III promised liberty to those among the helots who could pay into the public treasury the sum of five minæ [£21 or $108], six thousand presented themselves.
Lacedæmon’s two royal houses, however, had been retained, and it should have been the function of these to maintain discipline in the state. But the newly-acquired wealth of Sparta, coupled with the growing authority of the ephors, appreciably diminished the power of the kings. Reduced to the rôle of hereditary generals these monarchs could never depart on an expedition without being accompanied by ten supervisors, who, under the name of councillors, in reality directed all the military operations. During the last years of the Peloponnesian War the decisive battles had been fought on sea, and the fleets were commanded, captives sold, cities ransomed and subsidies received from the Great King by men who were not of pure Spartan blood. Aristotle in his Politics calls the office of admiral among them “a second royalty.”
Lysander was not obeying the dictates of ambition when, as Sparta’s leading citizen, he undertook to reform for his own advantage the political system of the city. “He could not,” says Plutarch, “see without regret a city whose glory he had done so much to increase governed by kings who had no more ability to rule than he, so he formed the plan of depriving the reigning houses of their dignity to make it the common appanage of all the Heraclids.” The discovery of the plot of Cinadon [described later] revealed an abyss of hatred yawning beneath the social system of Sparta, and at the same time an alarming unanimity of feeling between the inferior classes, both free and slaves. A civil war could easily have resulted from the situation; but Sparta, with that vigilance which continued distrust arouses in all oligarchies, discovered and baffled all the plots that were formed against her.
Yet in spite of this hostility between the classes, in spite of many other difficulties, such as strife between the kings on the one hand and the senators and the ephors on the other, in which the kings were reduced almost to the condition of subjects, and rivalry between the kings themselves, the Spartan government, by reason of concentration of authority in a few hands, was powerful enough for action against other states. At home and abroad the ephors and the harmosts, those so-called conciliators, exercised a permanent dictatorship, maintaining garrisons at Megara, Ægina, Tanagra, Pharsalus, Heraclea in Trachinia, at the entrance of Thermopylæ; also Dionysius of Syracuse was Sparta’s ally. But this power, widespread as it was, was scarcely more than an influence, and an influence that was already on the wane, since the nation that lacks citizens has no resources within itself.
Sparta’s exactions offended those who still loved liberty and had not, to console them for its loss, the advantages offered by Athens to her subjects—extensive commerce, and the splendour of public festivals, of arts and of poetry. Sparta, equally grasping and more oppressive, robbed her subjects of everything. She levied on them an annual tribute of one thousand talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000] which vanished in Lacedæmon never to be seen again, and those who had furnished her with troops, like the Achæans and Arcadians, or with vessels, like the Corinthians, or auxiliaries, like the Thebans, received nothing in return.
The weight of this heavy Dorian rule began shortly to be felt, and many regretted the Athenian supremacy that was kindly even in its excesses. That the Greeks from the coasts of Thrace or Asia, those people who had never known how to say “No,” should tremble at sight of a Spartan mantle or wand of office, was in no way remarkable, since they had been accustomed to obey. Not that a double servitude, that of the oligarchs, friends of Lysander, and that of the Lacedæmonian harmosts was not a great burden to bear, even for them. But Sparta must not count on such docility in the mother-country. She had not hesitated to speak as sovereign in the matter of the Athenian exiles, nor to make decrees, as sole authority, for all Greece. We have seen how Thebes responded.
Thebes, a continental power, had long aspired to play in central Greece the part played by Sparta in the Peloponnesus. Between this state and Athens there might be jealousy, but not necessarily a clash of interests as in her relations with Lacedæmonia. In the intoxication of victory Sparta had believed prudence no longer necessary, and, incensed that the Thebans should have taken at Decelea the tithe belonging to Apollo, had scornfully rejected their claims to a share in the spoils and treasures brought back by Lysander, fourteen hundred and seventy talents, the remainder of the advances made by Cyrus. Corinth, no better received, made common cause with Thebes, and this formed another ground of complaint to Sparta against that state. The Argives, in a discussion relative to the fixing of boundaries, maintained their reasons to be superior to those of their adversaries. “He who is strongest with this argument,” said Lysander, drawing his sword, “reasons best about boundary limits.” A Megarian, in conference, spoke in a very loud voice. “My friend,” said Lysander, addressing him, “your words need a city to make them good.” Still more unceremoniously Sparta dealt with the Eleans, as we shall see later.
To the imperious demands of the Spartan government were added individual acts of violence, which are often more odious because a single victim, even though obscure, excites more pity than a whole people bowed under defeat; and there is less peril in attacking public liberty which is the property of all, than in endangering, by contempt of truth and right, the honour or the life of an individual.
A kind and hospitable man of Leuctra, Scedadus, received in his house one day two young Lacedæmonians, who were greatly struck with the beauty of their host’s two daughters. Returning from a voyage to Delphi, whither they had gone to consult the oracle, these two Lacedæmonians found the daughters alone in the house and violated them, after which they murdered them and threw their bodies into the well. When Scedadus returned next day his daughters did not, to his surprise, come forth to meet him, and his dog, howling plaintively, ran back and forth from his master to the well. Alarmed, Scedadus looked into the well, discovered the crime, and learned from his neighbours who were its perpetrators. He departed at once for Lacedæmon. In Argolis he fell in with a man as unfortunate as himself, whose son had fallen a victim to the brutality of a Spartan. This father had believed in Lacedæmonian justice, but had had none accorded him. Nevertheless Scedadus continued on his journey, and when he arrived in Sparta, told his story to the ephors, to the kings, to all the citizens he met, but no one would give it heed. Then wishing to call the divine anger down upon Sparta he invoked all the gods of heaven and earth, especially the furies of revenge, and put an end to his life. A tomb was later erected at Leuctra to his unfortunate daughters.
As against the few facts of this nature that have come to our knowledge how many have escaped us? We realise this more fully when we reflect on the hatred Sparta everywhere inspired even in the Peloponnesus.
The Arcadians and the Achæans served her from motives of fear alone; she was, they declared, a citadel placed upon their flank to keep guard over the whole peninsula. At Lacedæmon their sentiments were well known. On his return from an expedition in which a whole Spartan corps had been lost, in the Corinthian War which we shall treat of shortly, Agesilaus entered the towns only at night, leaving them at break of day, that his men might not witness the joy exhibited by the inhabitants at this disaster.[f]
Greek Philosopher
(After Hope)
