Sparta Was Much More Than an Army of Super Warriors

Ancient Sparta has been held up for the last two and a half millennia as the unmatched warrior city-state, where every male was raised from infancy to fight to the death. This view, as ingrained as it is alluring, is almost entirely false.

The myth of Sparta’s martial prowess owes much of its power to a storied feat of heroism accomplished by Leonidas, king of Sparta and hero of the celebrated Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.). In the battle, the Persian Army crushed more than 7,000 Greeks—including 300 Spartans, who are widely and falsely believed to have been the only Greeks fighting in that battle—and went on to capture and burn Athens. Outflanked and hopelessly outnumbered, Leonidas and his men fought to the death, epitomizing Herodotus’ pronouncement that all Spartan soldiers would “abide at their posts and there conquer or die.” This singular episode of self-sacrificing bravery has long obscured our understanding of the real Sparta.

Actually, Spartans could be as cowardly and corrupt, as likely to surrender or flee, as any other ancient Greeks. The super-warrior myth—most recently bolstered in the special effects extravaganza 300, a movie in which Leonidas, 60 at the time of the battle, was portrayed as a hunky 36—blinds us to the real ancient Spartans. They were fallible men of flesh and bone whose biographies offer important lessons for modern people about heroism and military cunning as well as all-too-human blundering.

There is King Agis II, who bungled various maneuvers against the forces of Argos, Athens and Mantinea at the Battle of Mantinea (418 B.C.) but still managed to pull off a victory. There is the famous Admiral Lysander, whose glorious military career ended with a rash decision to rush into battle against Thebes, probably to deny glory to a domestic rival—a move that cost him his life at the Battle of Haliartus (395 B.C.). There is Callicratidas, whose pragmatism secured critical funding for the Spartan Navy in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), but who foolishly ordered his ship to ram the Athenians’ during the Battle of Arginusae (406 B.C.), a move that saw him killed. Perhaps the clearest rebuttal of the super-warrior myth is found in the 120 elite Spartans who fought at the Battle of Sphacteria (425 B.C.); when their Athenian enemies surrounded them, they opted to surrender rather than “conquer or die.

These Spartans, not particularly better or worse than any other ancient warriors, are just a handful of many examples that paint the real, and utterly average, picture of Spartan arms.

But it is this human reality that makes the actual Spartan warrior relatable, even sympathetic, in a way Leonidas can never be. Take the mostly forgotten general, Brasidas, who, instead of embracing death on the battlefield, was careful to survive and learn from his mistakes. Homer may have hailed Odysseus as the cleverest of the Greeks, but Brasidas was a close second.

Almost no one has heard of Brasidas. He’s not a figure immortalized in Hollywood to prop up fantasies, but a human being whose mistakes form a much more instructive arc.

He burst onto the scene in 425 B.C. during Sparta’s struggle against Athens in the Peloponnesian War, breaking through a large cordon with just 100 men to relieve the beleaguered city of Methone (modern Methoni) in southwest Greece. These heroics might have put him on track for mythic fame, but his next campaign would make that prospect far more complicated.

Storming the beach at Pylos that same year, Brasidas ordered his ship to wreck itself on the rocks so he could assault the Athenians. He then barreled down the gangplank straight into the teeth of the enemy.