Since its men were raised to be soldiers virtually from birth, it was no wonder that Sparta boasted the most feared army in Ancient Greece. Rivals were more than reluctant to tangle with the Spartans in land combat, and they usually met disaster when they did.
The Spartans could be defeated, of course, but it took an army ridiculously superior in numbers -- like the massive Persian force at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. And even that was no easy task. The Spartan force of 300, hopelessly surrounded by perhaps hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers, chose to fight to the death rather than surrender.
Yet from 431 to 404 B.C., the Spartans were severely tested by Athens in the Peloponnesian War. They were met with a string of defeats at sea, where the Athenians were traditionally superior. And at Sphacteria, a small island near the bay of Pylos, the Spartans suffered an uncharacteristic and humiliating defeat on land.
Spartans Isolated
Athenian naval successes around Pylos left a Spartan force of 440 men stranded on Sphacteria. While that detachment was small in number, many of its members were members of Sparta's elite class. Sparta, which never had the population to field a large army, considered those soldiers invaluable. So the leaders of the city-statewere willing to initiate peace negotiations to save the force.
Talks broke down largely because of Athenian statesman Cleon, who felt Athens could take an extremely hard stance because it held the upper hand. The Athenians had initially planned to starve the Spartans into surrender, but politicians urged on by Cleon demanded more immediate action.
Cleon was eventually given command of the military expedition and promised to finish off the Spartan force within 20 days. Demosthenes, an architect of the triumph at Pylos (but not the famed Athenian orator of a later generation), was retained as a co-commander.
Athenians Victorious
The Athenians landed a force of 3,000 on Sphacteria. About two-thirds of the soldiers were light troops, who would be no match for heavily armored Spartan hoplites in hand-to-hand combat. But that ended up working to the advantage for the Athenians and their allies.
Missile troops pelted the Spartans with arrows, javelins and stones, and scurried away before the Spartans could close in. Repeated skirmishes thinned the ranks of the hoplites, who were eventually driven into a small fort near the north end of the island. They thought high ground adjacent to their position would prevent them from being encircled, but a small group of Messenian missile troops managed to climb to the heights without being detected. The Spartans were surrounded.
Spartans Give Up
Cleon and Demosthenes, perhaps seeing the political value of having Spartans as prisoners, offered terms of surrender. The historian Thucydides wrote that the Spartans "lowered their shields and waved their hands to show they accepted."
But it wasn't over yet, as Cleon and Demosthenes negotiated with Spartan commander Styphon. Initially, Styphon was third in the chain of command, but the original leader Epitadas had been killed, and the second-in-command, Hippagretas, was gravely wounded.
Styphon sought permission to send a messenger to ask Spartans on the mainland for further orders. But the Athenians agreed only to having a herald coming from the mainland speak to the Spartans on Sphacteria. The surrounded men, Thucydides wrote, received the following response from their superiors:
"The Lacedaemonians [Spartans] bid you to decide for yourselves so long as you do nothing dishonorable.'
The Spartans decided to give up their arms, ending a 72-day siege. According to Thucydides, 292 soldiers – including 120 of the elite class – surrendered. The remaining 148 had been killed. The historian describes Athenian casualties as "small.'
Normally, a surrounded force surrendering to an enemy many times its size is hardly abnormal. But at Sphacteria, those yielding were Spartans, who were supposedly bound by honor to die fighting before accepting defeat. Their capitulation stunned Greece.
The Rise and Fall of Cleon
Cleon, who managed to back up his boast that he'd end Spartan resistance within 20 days of his taking command, gained heavy political influence after the victory. Athens, as a result, adopted hard-line, imperialist policies.
But the success at Sphacteria had only short-term consequences, and the more-hawkish Athens began to suffer reverses. Spartans under the great general Brasidas captured the city of Amphibolis in 424 B.C. Cleon was placed in command of a force charged with taking it back, but the Athenians were decisively defeated there in 422 B.C., with both Cleon and Brasidas being killed in the battle.
Cleon is painted by Thucydides as an unscrupulous man and his death is described by the historian as being less than honorable. But whatever the case was, a truce -- known as the Peace of Nicias -- was negotiated in the year following Cleon's passing. The truce was supposed to last 50 years, but hostilities broke out after just seven.
The Spartans eventually prevailed, forcing the surrender of Athens in 404 B.C. They not only maintained their superiority on land, they eventually became capable of defeating Athens at sea. Their defeat at Sphacteria turned out to be more humiliating than devastating.
Sources:
Souza, Phillip; The Greeks at War; Osprey Publishing, 2004
Thucydides; History of the Peloponnesian War, Penguin Classics, 1954
Warry, John Gibson; Warfare in the Classical World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weapons, Warriors and Warfare in the Ancient Civilisations of Greece and Rome, University of Oklahoma Press, 1995
