{"id":69404,"date":"2022-10-23T01:00:16","date_gmt":"2022-10-23T05:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69404"},"modified":"2025-01-12T12:55:45","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T17:55:45","slug":"qotd-spartas-military-reputation-in-the-peloponnesian-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/10\/23\/qotd-spartas-military-reputation-in-the-peloponnesian-war\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Sparta’s military reputation in the Peloponnesian War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Herodotus’ work was well known, even in antiquity, and he set the tone for all subsequent retellings of the Persian wars (despite the frequent complaints by later ancient authors that Herodotus’ reliability was \u2013 let’s say, complicated. I don’t want to give the wrong impression: Herodotus is a valuable source, just one that \u2013 like all sources \u2013 has his own agenda at play). The Spartan reputation thus seems to be the product of half a century spent fighting far, far weaker opponents, combined with one very skilled propagandist with an agenda.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That reputation was already deeply held even by the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, such that Thucydides notes that “Nothing that happened in the war so shocked the Greeks so much as” the surrender of 120 Spartiates<\/a><\/em> at Pylos\/Sphacteria, instead of dying with their weapons in their hands (Thuc. 4.40.1). The Athenians had, in the event, managed to trap a force of Spartans \u2013 Spartiates<\/em> and other Laconians \u2013 on an island and harassed them with arrow fire from a distance, never closing with them, until the Spartans surrendered. This is, I must stress, in the context of a war that obliterated entire poleis<\/a><\/em>, shredded the diplomatic fabric of Greece and was by far<\/em> the largest war between Greeks that any of them knew of. But this<\/em>, the shattering \u2013 if just for a moment \u2013 of the Spartan reputation, that<\/strong> was what shocked people. The image<\/em> of Sparta \u2013 whatever the reality \u2013 was that deeply set.<\/p>\n

Thucydides, amusingly, relates that some Greeks were so shocked that they couldn’t believe it, and one ally of Athens inquired to the Spartiates<\/em> \u2013 then held as captives in Athens \u2013 if perhaps what had happened was that all of the brave men (you know, the real<\/strong> Spartiates<\/em>) had been felled by the arrows, to which the Spartans responded, “an arrow would be worth a great deal if it could pick out noble and good men from the rest, in allusion to the fact that the killed were those whom the stones and the arrows happened to hit” (Thuc. 4.40.2).<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-09-20.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Herodotus’ work was well known, even in antiquity, and he set the tone for all subsequent retellings of the Persian wars (despite the frequent complaints by later ancient authors that Herodotus’ reliability was \u2013 let’s say, complicated. I don’t want to give the wrong impression: Herodotus is a valuable source, just one that \u2013 like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,5,41],"tags":[31,1457,1152,269,1151,1582],"class_list":["post-69404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-army","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-peloponnesianwar","tag-propaganda","tag-sparta","tag-thucydides"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i3q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69404"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77368,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69404\/revisions\/77368"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}