The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy by Myke Cole

Author:Myke Cole [Cole, Myke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472843753
Amazon: 1472843754
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2021-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

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MASTERS OF GREECE? SPARTA SQUANDERS ITS HEGEMONY

For victory, if the gods are kind, will return to us our country and homes, freedom and honors, children, to those who have them, and wives. Happy, indeed, are those of us who shall win the victory and live to behold the gladdest day of all! And happy also he who is slain; for no one, however rich he may be, will gain a monument so glorious. Now, when the right moment comes, I will sound the battle cry . . . then let us all, with one spirit, take vengeance upon these men for the outrages we have suffered.

Thrasybulus to the Athenian exiles before the Battle of Munichia, Xenophon, Hellenica

404 BC saw Sparta at the head of a massive naval empire that spanned all of Greece and well into the Balkans. It might have spanned the west coast of modern Turkey as well as the islands there, but Sparta’s debt to Persia was too great to ignore. Every Spartan of note knew that Persian money had made this victory possible, and Persia’s price was clear and simple – domination of the Greeks of Asia, without interference from the Greeks of Greece. Sparta now willingly tugged its collective forelock and let Persia proceed. A central pillar of the Bronze Lie, that the Spartans were enemies of the Persians, xenophobes who kept a European Greece free of oriental influence, was proven laughably false. Gone were the days when Sparta would send a delegation to Cyrus the Great, warning him to keep his hands off Greek people wherever they might find themselves. This new Sparta had bigger concerns.

The first of these was to consolidate Spartan power by cracking down on the democratic factions in the city-states across Greece. Pro-democracy leaders were massacred and Spartan garrisons, led by military governors, installed. In their place, Lysander set up decarchies – ruling councils of ten men, all loyal to him. Sparta now had the Athenian treasury and more importantly the tributary city-states which were still required to pay into it. Sparta’s reputation, already suffering from 30 years of protracted war, defeat after defeat, rejected attempts to make peace, the debacle at Sphacteria, and the final reliance on Persian gold, now plummeted as Lysander’s heavy hand squeezed Greece entirely – butchering political opponents, replacing them with his personal friends. But the worst blow to Spartan prestige was the city turning its back on the Greeks abroad, leaving them to suffer under the Persian yoke.

Other Spartans didn’t help matters. The egomania of men like Pausanias and Lysander was not an isolated thing. In 403 BC, Clearchus was sent to Byzantium to aid the government there in a war against Thracian tribesmen. No sooner did he arrive and recruit an army of mercenaries than he took control of the government. Diodorus tells us that he used a festival as an excuse to gather the leading Byzantine men together and massacre them, slaughtering the city’s chief magistrates and strangling 30 leading citizens. He

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