Bret Devereaux

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 …

This is a war fought at the apogee of Spartan strength; it was quite literally all downhill from here.

Ah! That does it thank you!

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.

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

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.