Plausibility on Spartan Empire?
- Thread starter Onyx
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Onyx
Banned
Im not really sure honestly, I dont know really anything much about the Classical age, but maybe the points where the Spartans could become and Empire in there epoch or they could've had a revival for one.
When you get right down to it, Sparta was a military power because a slave class of Helots did all the agricultural work and freed up manpower to fight. Spartan commanders never liked to march too far from home, for fear of a Helot uprising.
Since the army needs to stay close to Sparta to keep a lid on their captive subjects, a directly-controlled Spartan empire sounds implausible. That doesn't mean they can't have allies and vassals, but it would probably be a pretty loose affair.
Yeah, I'm scratching my head over this one too. In loose terms the Spartans can be considered to have had an Empire, in the form of the Greek Hegemony they enjoyed after the war with Athens.
If the op means a larger scale, centralised Roman style affair, the Spartans just didn't have the population for it.
You have a population problem don't you with a Spartan Empire of any size or duration.
Only pure blood Spartans can be soldiers or leaders. Everyone else is a helot or a potential helot. As your Empire expands your pool of soldiers remains static around Sparta. And unlike Rome, Spartan culture will not accept someone making new "Spartans" out of helots. Spartan culture is build around the Spartan bloodlines, self-belief and the discipline that comes from being raised a Spartan in Sparta. Any thing else would just makes them another bunch of Greeks...?
Only pure blood Spartans can be soldiers or leaders. Everyone else is a helot or a potential helot. As your Empire expands your pool of soldiers remains static around Sparta. And unlike Rome, Spartan culture will not accept someone making new "Spartans" out of helots. Spartan culture is build around the Spartan bloodlines, self-belief and the discipline that comes from being raised a Spartan in Sparta. Any thing else would just makes them another bunch of Greeks...?
Putting aside whether Sparta could conquer a large territory or not, if Sparta underwent the reforms necessary to support an empire like Rome, it would cease to be recognizable as OTL Sparta.
What about a population policy that encouraged large families? Appeals to Spartan machismo. Solves population problem. They need more food, so they go conquer it.
scholar
Banned
That doesn't solve the problem. The Rome's encouraged larger families during the later era of the Empire, and the elite's population continued to decline.
Encouraging population growth is one thing, having population growth is another. A major factor in this is that men and women don't marry until an age that is a little young now, but comparatively old at that time. Further, man and wife does not share a roof, nor a bed chamber, all that often. Men are in barracks or off at war most of the time, and like many other greeks, homosexuality was not an uncommon practice. If that documentary is to be believed, spartan women had to shave their heads and dawn men's clothing and armor in order for their husbands to get used to them because they haven't been around women since before they even thought a girl was pretty, say 4-8. And then they would mostly be slowly starving, being encouraged to steal, and kill, in order to survive.
That's the kind of thing that breeds population stagnation, not growth. You can't have population growth large enough to even start a second major 'Sparta' city without tearing down the foundation of the military training system and barracks system, and that fundamentally changes Sparta from any perspective.
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A Spartan Empire is not likely to make it far beyond Athens, and certainly won't make it out of the immediate poleis. A few across the seas may be vassals, but direct Spartan Rule won't go far. The 'Empire' would be smaller than most Mediterranean Empires.
Basically this.
You can have early Sparta going to a different path (classical hierarchical Sparta as we know her from classical historical sources was a byproduct of Messenian wars somewhere in the mid sixth century BC IIRC) but if it is classical Sparta you think about, it had a sort of empire, in the sense of hegemony over of Peloponnese (except Argos and Sicyon IIRC). However, it hardly ever had the will, power or possibility to expand that so much, because of population constraints.
You want to talk about a Spartan empire, the 1st thing you have to get around is traditional Spartan conservatism. Spartans were conservative to a degree that's unimaginable today. Came from being raised in a barracks, conditioned to instant unquestioning obedience to every order. Any change at all from the way great-grampa lived made 'em very nervous. This is why their society hardly changed at all for half a milennium. 500 freakin' years. And they'd never had an empire before, so why would they need one now?
Even when the Spartans conquered Athens, their greatest rival, the issue of colonizing it seems to have never even been raised. What they were divided over was whether or not to destroy it. That would have been for the purpose of keeping things-- in Sparta, at least-- pretty much the way they'd always been.
The Spartans for the most part restricted their military activities to the Pelopennessus. This may have been so they'd be close to home in case of a helot revolt, but maybe not. The evidence is the helots were pretty loyal. Being a Spartan helot, as foreign as this is to our way of thinking, was viewed as a privilege. Even when Xerxes invaded, their solution was for all loyal Greeks to retreat into the Pelopennessus & fortify the Isthmus of Corinth. Become more of those privileged helots, maybe. The other Greeks were unpersuaded.
The size of Spartan society was regulated by birth, & like all Greeks they'd have had a huge problem expanding their definition of citizenship to include anyone whose family hadn't lived in Sparta for 10 generations. This was true even in relatively open-minded Athens, where voting depended on which tribe you belonged to, that also determined which god(s) you worshiped, & both depended on which semi-mythical ancestor you were descended from. If you had none of that, then you just couldn't be an Athenian. Except in Sparta it was worse.
The Spartans did do a little bit of colonizing inside the Pelopennessus. Somewhere I've got a reference that says they colonized a town a few miles over which later provided a 7th mora for their army, so it isn't strictly true they had only 6 morai-- but darned if I can figure out where it is right now or the name of the town.
Thegn.
Even when the Spartans conquered Athens, their greatest rival, the issue of colonizing it seems to have never even been raised. What they were divided over was whether or not to destroy it. That would have been for the purpose of keeping things-- in Sparta, at least-- pretty much the way they'd always been.
The Spartans for the most part restricted their military activities to the Pelopennessus. This may have been so they'd be close to home in case of a helot revolt, but maybe not. The evidence is the helots were pretty loyal. Being a Spartan helot, as foreign as this is to our way of thinking, was viewed as a privilege. Even when Xerxes invaded, their solution was for all loyal Greeks to retreat into the Pelopennessus & fortify the Isthmus of Corinth. Become more of those privileged helots, maybe. The other Greeks were unpersuaded.
The size of Spartan society was regulated by birth, & like all Greeks they'd have had a huge problem expanding their definition of citizenship to include anyone whose family hadn't lived in Sparta for 10 generations. This was true even in relatively open-minded Athens, where voting depended on which tribe you belonged to, that also determined which god(s) you worshiped, & both depended on which semi-mythical ancestor you were descended from. If you had none of that, then you just couldn't be an Athenian. Except in Sparta it was worse.
The Spartans did do a little bit of colonizing inside the Pelopennessus. Somewhere I've got a reference that says they colonized a town a few miles over which later provided a 7th mora for their army, so it isn't strictly true they had only 6 morai-- but darned if I can figure out where it is right now or the name of the town.
Thegn.
The idea of any of the Greek city-states having an empire in unimagineable, their mentality was far too based on the polis, that's why the Athenians were ultimately doomed to fail, it was nowhere near inclusive enough. They would have to have the mentality of the Romans, and there simply wasn't that in ancient Greece south of Macedonia.
I don't like to say ASB about scenarios people throw up here but that's how I'd have to describe the idea of a Spartan Empire, unless they came up with some major reforms. And this being Sparta they make the Taliban look forward thinking. Their entire system was only sustainable as long as they didn't have to deal with the outside world and had no manpower shortage. They relied on oppressing a far larger population through the most barbaric means imagineable. If they tried to have an actual empire their decline would have only been more swift.
If you want a logical scenario for a Spartan Empire you need either a successful dictator to introduce some crazy reforms or you need to go back to Lycurgus.
I don't like to say ASB about scenarios people throw up here but that's how I'd have to describe the idea of a Spartan Empire, unless they came up with some major reforms. And this being Sparta they make the Taliban look forward thinking. Their entire system was only sustainable as long as they didn't have to deal with the outside world and had no manpower shortage. They relied on oppressing a far larger population through the most barbaric means imagineable. If they tried to have an actual empire their decline would have only been more swift.
If you want a logical scenario for a Spartan Empire you need either a successful dictator to introduce some crazy reforms or you need to go back to Lycurgus.
Sorry, but I've gotta agree with Stormy here. He's approximately (if not absolutely) correct-- although the Athenians did make a pretty good stab at having a short-lived empire from 454-404 BC.
What interests me along these lines is that, following the Spartan defeats by light forces at Sphacteria (425 BC), Lechaeum (391 BC), & Leuctra (371 BC), Spartan power was essentially broken; but still, the value of intensively training soldiers from childhood had been proven.
From 335-323 BC, Alexander proved the supreme value of his organization & tactics.
From 280-275 BC the Roman legions proved their worth vs Pyrrhus of Epirus, & a little later (264-241 BC) vs Carthage.
I've speculated at some length in another place about circumstances that could have come about to unite these 3 nearly contemporary threads of military history, possibly some time between the end of the 1st Punic War in 241 BC & the beginning of the 2d in 218 BC.
Spartan training & discipline, united with Roman organization, & with Alexandrian leadership & tactics. The mind boggles.
Thegn.