… we have already noted that year after year Sparta would invade Attica with hoplite armies which were singularly incapable of actually achieving the strategic objective of bringing Athens to the negotiating table. The problem here is summed up in the concept of a strategic center of gravity – as Clausewitz says (drink!), it is the source of an enemy’s strength and thus the key element of an enemy’s force which must be targeted to achieve victory. The obvious center of gravity for the Athenians was their maritime empire, which provided the tribute that funded their war effort. The Corinthians saw this before the war even started. So long as the tribute rolled in, Athens could fight forever.

It takes Sparta years of fighting Athens to finally recognize this – an effort in 413/2 to support revolts from Athens is pathetically slow and under-funded (Thuc. 8, basically all of it) and it isn’t until Sparta not only allies with Persia but entrusts its fleet to the mothax Lysander that they seriously set about a strategy of cutting Athens’ naval supply lines. This isn’t a one-time affair: Sparta’s inability to coordinate ends and means shows up again in the Corinthian war (e.g. in Argos, Xen. Hell. 4.7), where they are pulled into a debilitating defensive stalemate because the Corinthians won’t come out and fight and the Spartans have no other answers.

This is compounded by the fact that the Spartans are awful at diplomacy. Sparta could be the lynch-pin of a decent alliance of cities when the outside threat was obvious and severe – as in the case of the Persian wars, or the expansion of Athenian hegemony. But otherwise, Sparta consistently and repeatedly alienates allies to its own peril. Spartan leadership at the end of the Persian wars had been so arrogant and hamfisted that leadership of the anti-Persian alliance passed to Athens (creating what would become the Athenian Empire, so Spartan diplomatic incompetence led directly to the titanic conflict of the late fifth century). And to be clear, Athenian diplomacy does not score high marks either, but it is still a far sight better than the Spartans (Greek diplomacy, in general was awful – rude, arrogant and focused on compulsion rather than suasion – so it is telling that the Spartans are very bad at it, even by Greek standards).

In 461, Spartan arrogance towards an Athenian military expedition sent to help Sparta against a helot revolt utterly discredited the pro-Sparta political voices at Athens and in turn set the two states on a collision course. Sparta had ejected the friendly army so roughly that it had created an outrage in Athens.

During the Peloponnesian War, Spartan diplomatic miscalculations repeatedly hurt their cause, as with the destruction of Plataea – the symbol of Greek resistence to Persia. Later on in the war, terrible Spartan diplomacy repeatedly derails efforts to work with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, who has the money and resources Sparta needs to defeat Athens; it is the decidedly un-Spartan actions first of Alcibiades (then being a traitor to Athens) and later Lysander who rescue the alliance. After the end of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta promptly alienated its key allies, ending up at war first with Corinth (the Corinthian War (394-386) and then with Thebes (378-371), both of which had been stalwarts of Sparta’s anti-Athenian efforts (Corinth was itself a member of the Peloponnesian League). This led directly to the loss of Messenia and the breaking of Spartan power.

In short, whenever Sparta was confronted with a problem – superior enemy forces, maritime enemies, fortified enemy positions, the need to keep alliances together, financial demands – any problem which could not be solved by frontal attack with hoplites, the traditional Spartan leadership alienated friends and flailed uselessly. Often the Spartans attempted – as with Corinth and later Thebes – to compel friendship with hoplite armies, which worked exactly as poorly as you might imagine.

It is hard not to see both the strategic inflexibility of Sparta and the arrogant diplomatic incompetence of the spartiates as a direct consequence of the agoge‘s rigid system of indoctrination. Young Spartiates, after all, were taught that anyone with a craft was to be despised and that anyone who had to work was lesser than they – is it any surprise that they disdained the sort of warfare and statecraft that depended on such men? The agoge – as we are told – enforced its rules with copious violence and was designed to create and encourage strict, violent hierarchies to encourage obedience. It can be no surprise that men indoctrinated in such a system – and thus liable to attempt to use its methods abroad – made poor diplomats and strategic thinkers abroad.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.