I am trying to reconcile the Spartan land dominance of this thread with @BretDevereaux’s fascinating and compelling “The Myth of Sparta” essays and I need help.https://twitter.com/Roelkonijn/status/1412107564452548612 …
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Also, while Bret is very right to stress the limits of Spartan ability, there is one thing at which they were undeniably better than other Greeks: maintaining cohesion in pitched battle. All 3 of the victories I mentioned directly resulted from this one thing.
Indeed, the Spartan failure is in translating that cohesive advantage into durable strategic results. It's a Ends-Ways-Means problem: they have some means (cohesive hoplite battle) but no sense of how to connect that to a set of ways which result in the ends they want.
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This is, of course, not an uncommon problem, c.f. the USA trying to bomb countries into friendship; bombs traditionally have the opposite result. But Sparta failed to learn their way out of that mismatch for about as long as the USA has been a country.
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Although the fact that the US is on course to spectacularly lose a war later this year in exactly the same way they lost the Vietnam War less than 50 years ago does suggest that *both* places had/have a problem learning from history.
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Yes, and there is some very good scholarship on how the things that make them good at pitched battles get misapplied with disastrous results - such as Anaxibios deciding to fight to the death against Iphikrates at Abydos, which just gets a bunch of Spartiates killed for no reason
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And honestly, I think the stubborn arrogance that made the Spartiates such awful diplomats was probably a factor in the cohesion of that phalanx too. Sparta really churned out men 'of a type.' Brasidas is, I think, the one ringing spartiate exception.
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