The Gaming Den

If the Spartans apparently had this badass system of training and military organization, why did they after a certain point start getting their asses regularly kicked by their neighbors, esp. the Athenians?

The hardcore Spartans were outnumbered by everyone else. Also, the Athenians were as awesome at sea as the Spartans were on land.

Didn't a certain conservatism also hurt them? IIRC, they were really fond of using the same equipment and tactics for centuries on end, while everybody else progressed.

But yeah, if you're going only by 300, you're going to get an underestimate of the skill level of other Greeks. For example (tieing in with zeruslord), the Spartans couldn't have won at Thermopylae without the Athenian navy keeping the Persians from landing more troops.

Not only that, but the Battle of Thermopylae had more than just the Spartans there. All of them were basically loyal Lacedaemonians, and they were still outnumbered at least 10 to 1, but there weren't just 300 guys. If anything, though, I'd say it was the steadily rising prevalence of Iron Age technology, whereas they used a lot of Bronze Age technology, and acted in Bronze Age manners. They had a strict oligarchy and their fighting force was basically the aristocrats (the Spartans we talk about generally are an upper class that were vastly outnumbered by the underclass helots), whereas more and more other forces incorporated more diverse, more advanced forces, and relied less on land supremacy in order to win fights, or simply were bigger... a lot of fights were lost by Sparta being prideful and taking the field against superior numbers and not having their asses backed up by the Athenians, et alia, and whereas they might have won fights, they didn't necessarily actually secure victory.

Well, how much better was a super-trained Spartan than say, some Lacedaemonian who just went through the normal rigors of civilian to military training? (that is, 2 to 3 months of intense drilling and exercise).

Popular history (and not just 300) makes them seem as good as like ten professional soldiers, but it can't have been much better than two.

Lacedaemonians who were not part of Sparta were also essentially upper-class being freemen. They were above helots and in many ways participated in the same society even though in many ways they were separate. They were also hoplites, for instance. So the contrast you are attempting to draw is probably not as existent as you think.

The point is that there were probably more than 300 hoplites, possibly as many as 1000, and that there were more men who were not hoplites besides, but they killed 10 times their number in order to hold the pass long enough for everyone else to retreat. They did so not only through training, but having superior tactical advantages in the scenario (albeit, obviously, not numbers).

It's true that the hoplites were some of the scariest opponents around. The Battle of Thermopylae was not an isolated incident of valor, though perhaps their bloodiest. Their basic tactics would later reappear in Roman armies, adapted for the realities of that era. The Romans, interestingly, were also some of the scariest opponents around when they came on the scene, and would eventually fall through pride and not being able to cope with the tactical (and, well, political) realities of the new age.

The Spartans were, really, distinct for being raised into battle. All of them. They trained for a military life from a young age in general, and then had military careers because that was how they supported their state, through taking other people's stuff and enslaving them. Really, even supposing their society permitted it, an Athenian man couldn't marry a Spartan woman for fear that she would stab him to death with a goddamn spear. In a culture which generally looks down on women, and regards them as weak and inferior, when your wives are killing machines, people stay the fuck away. Athenians, by comparison, were usually trained in rhetoric, philosophy, and crap. They all served in the army, but they were much less... monomaniacal regarding it.

The big advantage of the Romans was that their military machine was not thwarted by having a single tree in the middle of the battlefield. Hoplites and the later Macedonian phalanx kicked major ass on flat ground, but they would lose cohesion if hills, rocks or trees were brought into it.

Spartans just couldn't muster the number of troops that everyone else could. The Athenians could put more troops on the battlefield - and while the individual Spartans were better the difference wasn't that much.

Basically the Spartans persisted in playing tactics when everyone else started to play logistics.

Okay, let's be clear: Athens never defeated Sparta. There were two Peloponessian wars, and Athens lost both of them. Then Sparta became an empire until it was forced to withdraw chiefly by internal problems; although there were battles that exacerbated those internal problems.

The Spartans' biggest problem was that there simply weren't enough of them. Their methods for producing excellent warriors, from baby-throwing to werewolf-living produced a fairly high fatality rate from a fairly small population base in the first place. And that base was difficult to expand, because the only way to get Spartan citizenship by law was to inherit it. They were okay with that, because in the Greek terrain, quality was better than quantity.

But, while their culture was extraordinarily well-adapted to surviving as a city-state, once they started to expand they ran into some hard limits of birth rate and couldn't produce enough of their signature warriors to cover their losses. In particular, their loss at the Battle of Leuctra was a sore blow to them, not because the casualties were particularly high, but because they had become stretched so thin that any casualties were basically unacceptable.

Also, their culture was heavily reliant on Helots, a slave population, and as their own numbers spread thinner, the helot to spartan ratio rapidly became unmanageable, and there were several bloody revolts.

I have a friend who's parents immigrated from Sparta, and he said they have a folk tale that when a Spartan captive was brought before some foreign King, the King asked how many soldiers the man before him could kill, such was the reputation of the Spartan warriors. "None," answered the captive, "for one Spartan is not a soldier; but ten Spartans are a mighty army who will not be defeated until they tire."

The greater battle of Thermopylae had between 5000-12000 on the Greek side (depending who you listen to) with up to 2000 of them being from Lakedaemon, and the rest from other nearby states; and between 80,000 and 2,000,000 on the Persian side (again, depending who you listen to), with 200,000 being a modern guess. The famous stand of the Spartans only happened on the third day, after the Greek position was outflanked, as a rearguard maneuver to allow the rest of the army to withdraw. The 300 Spartans are recorded as being supported by 400 Thebans, and 700 Thespians who also refused to leave. It is presumed that a number of Spartan Helots also remained, possibly as many as 900.

That last stand was still a heroic act, both in character and accomplishment, but it's not as simple as it's often portrayed.

The Spartans didn't have engineers, either. Their ability to siege was basically nil. In the 1st Peloponessian War the Spartans "won" the land around Athens and the Athenians simply waited in the city for the Spartans to leave, which they did to avoid a revolt back home.

Then, plague. Oops. But it wasn't the Spartans that swung the heavy hammer, it was dumb luck, crowded conditions and poor sanitation. I'd give the Spartans credit here but they don't deserve it.

Think of loud, dumb jocks that like to kill and that's Sparta. The Athenians only lost the 2nd Peloponessian War after they pulled a Stalin-esque "let's kill all our best commanders" trick that crippled their navy.

I read the Spartans's own system caused their number to dwindle since it was almost impossible to advance into the ranks of the similes, the highest warrior caste, but not that difficult to fall out of the ranks of the similes (show cowardice on the field of battle and you and all your line are out, fail to feed your "meal group" once a month and you're out as well).

The Spartans simply "weeded out" too many to sustain their own numbers.

Think of loud, dumb jocks that like to kill and that's Sparta.

In fact, they were famously quiet, hence the name Lakedaimon, 'brief of speech,' for their country. And I don't think you could call them stupider, as a whole, than any other nation of the time. Spartan commanders historically demonstrated very good strategic and tactical thinking. Were they overly focused on murder-learning? Well, probably.

Now, they were assholes, but it was the Bronze Age; they were all assholes. Even the relatively enlightened Athenians were slave-keeping patriarchal ethnic-pride sonsabitches who were all too happy to subjugate their neighbors through economic power.

Don't forget looting the member states of their own treaty partners to build fancy golden buildings in Athens. The Athenians were world class dicks.

Really, to the greeks, there was no such thing as peace. There were times when you fought with your neighbors, and times when you got prepared to fight them later. The Greeks in general during that time were all violent and kind of stupid.

Any army that cannot field engineers or siege weapons is strategically poor as well as demonstrably stupid.

mean_liar wrote:Any army that cannot field engineers or siege weapons is strategically poor as well as demonstrably stupid.

That depends entirely on the context. Neither the Vikings nor the Mongols used siege weapons as part of their general plan, and yet they're both considered very successful armies of their times. Alexander of Macedon fought and won many sieges without the use of siege weapons; and you can condemn his armies as 'strategically poor and demonstrably stupid' if you like, but history already judged them as doing an okay job.

Vikings weren't an army, they were raiders. Their most impressive conquests involved building houses and not leaving.

The Mongols not only fielded extensive siege weaponry, they later leveraged subservient Chinese engineers and cannon. They were using Chinese rockets against the Song for christsakes. I have no idea why you think they neglected them in their army or were somehow not part of their general plan.

Alexander as well - the Athenian skill at siegecraft didn't just evaporate because Alexander was from Macedonia. His engineers were professionals rather than citizen-soldiers and extensively used state-of-the-art torsion catapults in huge numbers, even going so far as to keep a bunch handy at all times (rather than build them on-site, which was the standard practice most times).

Do you seriously believe you have standing for what you wrote or were you just taking a guess?

Just because post B is true doesn't mean post A isn't true.

The Mongols won most of their battles without siege weapons. They were mostly raiders. But unlike the Viking, they had a large chain of command and were not averse to using local or farmed talent, because all of the raiders were literally farmed talent.

Alexander's skill was such that he won several siege-style engagements before needing siege equipment. The fact that the equipment was available to him at a later time or behind him didn't stop him from riding ahead and winning anyhow.

And lastly... Loud dumb jocks aren't generally know to be loquacious.

-Crissa

mean_liar wrote:Vikings weren't an army, they were raiders. Their most impressive conquests involved building houses and not leaving.

I don't understand. That's the definition of conquest. Vikings rolled in and conquered significant chunks of Europe, and they did it without seige engines because it was the 8th-11th centuries, and fortifications were shitty. Especially in Russia.

The Mongols not only fielded extensive siege weaponry, they later leveraged subservient Chinese engineers and cannon. They were using Chinese rockets against the Song for christsakes. I have no idea why you think they neglected them in their army or were somehow not part of their general plan.

You're thinking of Genghis' armies, which did use quite a bit of siege to invade China. I was thinking of Ogedei's, which used no siege to invade Europe and did a pretty good job.

Alexander as well - the Athenian skill at siegecraft didn't just evaporate because Alexander was from Macedonia. His engineers were professionals rather than citizen-soldiers and extensively used state-of-the-art torsion catapults in huge numbers, even going so far as to keep a bunch handy at all times (rather than build them on-site, which was the standard practice most times).

Alexander had several armies, and some of them had neither siege engines nor engineers. That's why he was actually famous for his unorthodox siege victories, such as when he simply bluffed cities into surrender; or when he used fifth columnists to take others.

So while his forces as a whole were not without siege, some of his armies had to make do without, and they did.

Do you seriously believe you have standing for what you wrote or were you just taking a guess?

I'm fairly sure of myself, or I wouldn't have written it.

But we were talking about the Spartans. Look, I get that you don't like them; or the fan-wank over them. But they were very successful by the standards of their time, and they did it purely on the strength of their military ability, because they didn't have anything else (everything else in their culture having been sacrificed to produce military ability). And that will remain true no matter how many times you call them stupid.

tl;dr version. (Roy's got me hooked)

The spartans were the best soldiers around for a long time and had the best tactics and best generals, overall, for a long time.

They eventually were wiped out due to being socially, culturally, and economically outmaneuvered.

Militarily they were so powerful because of their disciplined battle formations, not individual prowess, although their individual prowess was high as well. They had a sliding scale of how many enemies a spartan was worth, something like ten athenians five boeotians three thebans or some such. Ten persians five athenians three thebans two lakedaeomoans or whatnot. Something. Due to the tactics of the day (phalanx) and the terrain of greece (choke-pointy), a smaller side had a real chance of winning against a larger side. The spartans successfully leveraged this for several hundred years.

Siege engineers are a useful tactical tool. Not having them might be a sign of stupidity, but it does not guarantee stupidity. In war, in some cases relying on siege engineers and siege engines could actually be a sign of stupidity - it all depends on the situation.