In order to serve in the army as a hoplite” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>hoplite (the Greek heavy infantryman who was the basic unit of every polis army) – the key concern around the declining Spartiate citizen body – a man had to have enough wealth to afford the arms and armor. In a state where – because of the oft-praised Spartan austerity – functionally all wealth was tied to the land, that meant that any new Hoplites needed to be given land in order to be able to serve. But all the best land in Sparta was tied up in an ever-shrinking number of kleroi.

Thus the Spartan state might grant marginal, borderland to small groups of freed helots – the neodamodes and the Brasidioi – but actually bringing up the military strength of the polis in full could only be achieved by de-consolidating the kleroi – the best, most productive land (because you can only support so many hoplites on disputed, marginal land). This is one thing, of course, that the wealthy Spartiates who dominated the state were unwilling to do. The mothakes and hypomeiones, pushed to the edges of Spartan society, might be brought in to make up the difference, but unless they were made equals – homoioi – this was a recipe for instability, as seen with Lysander and Cinadon. This is the other thing the Spartiates were unwilling to do – if I had my guess, because for the poor Spartiates who still clung to their status (and might still use the Apella to block reform, even if they couldn’t use it to propose reform), that status differential was just about the only thing they had (apart from all of the slave labor they enjoyed the benefits of, of course).

(A different polis might have tried to make up this difference by either hiring large numbers of mercenaries, or arming its own people at state expense, as a way of using the fortunes of the rich to fund military activity without expanding the citizenry. But, as Aristotle notes – (we’ll come back to this when we talk about Spartan war performance) the public finances of Sparta were pitiful even by ancient standards – for precisely the same reason that deconsolidating the kleroi was politically impossible: the state was dominated by the wealthy (Arist. Pol. 2.1271b). With no real source of wealth outside of landholding and all of the good land held by the Spartiates, it seems that Sparta – despite being by far the largest polis in Greece and holding some of the best farmland outside of Thessaly, was never able to raise significant revenue.)

Instead, the clique of wealthy Spartiates arrayed about the kings did nothing, decade on decade, as the Spartiate citizen body – and the military power of Sparta – slowly shrank, until at least, in 371 it broke for good. But what is perhaps most illustrative of the dysfunction in the Spartan political system is the sad epilogue of efforts in the second half of the third century (in the 240s and 220s) to finally reform the system by two Spartan kings.

The first effort was by Agis IV (r. 245-241; Plut. Agis). By the time Agis came to power, there were only a few hundred Spartiate households. Agis tried to reform through the system by redividing all of the kleruchal land into 4,500 plots for Spartiates and another 15,000 for the Perioikoi (who might also fight as Hoplites). Agis gets the Apella to support his motion – his offer to put his own royal estates into the redistribution first earns him a lot of respect – but the Gerousia, by a narrow margin, rejects it. Agis is eventually politically isolated and finally executed by the Ephors (along with his mother and grandmother, who had backed his idea) – the first Spartan king ever executed (I have left out some of the twists and turns here. If you want to know Plutarch has you covered).

Cleomenes III (r. 235-222) recognizes what Agis seemingly did not – reform to the Spartan system could not happen within the system. Instead, he stages a coup, having four of the five Ephors murdered, exiled eighty citizens – one assumes these are wealthy and prominent opponents – and possibly had the other king assassinated (Plut. Cleom. 8, 10.1; Plb. 5.37). Cleomenes then redistributed the kleroi into 4,000 plots and made his own brother his co-king (Plut. Cleom. 11), essentially making him a tyrant in the typical Greek mold. He then set about continuing his war with the neighboring Achaean League in an effort to re-establish Spartan hegemony in the Peloponnese and presumably retake Messenia (which by that point was free and part of the Achaean league).

It was far, far too late. Had this been done in the 380s or even the 350s, Sparta might well have resumed its position of prominence. But this was the 220s – Macedon had dominated Greek affairs now for a century and the Antigonids – the dynasty then ruling in Macedon – had no intention of humoring a resurgent Sparta. In 224, a Macedonian army marched into the Peloponnese in support of Sparta’s enemies and in 222 it smashed the Spartan army flat at Sellasia, almost entirely wiping out the Spartiate citizen body – new and old – in the process (Plutarch claims only 200 adult Spartiate males survived, Plut. Cleom. 28.5). The victorious Macedonian – Antigonis III Doson – for his part re-crippled Sparta: he occupied it, restored its constitution to what it had been before Cleomenes and then left, presumably content that it would not threaten him again (Plut. Cleom. 30.1). The time when a state with a citizen body in the few thousands could be a major player had been over for a century and the great empires of the third century were in no mood to humor self-important poleis who hadn’t gotten the message.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part V: Spartan Government”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.