{"id":69408,"date":"2022-05-18T01:00:55","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T05:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69408"},"modified":"2022-05-17T10:20:08","modified_gmt":"2022-05-17T14:20:08","slug":"qotd-spartas-excellent-military-reputation-was-not-matched-by-actual-battlefield-excellence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/05\/18\/qotd-spartas-excellent-military-reputation-was-not-matched-by-actual-battlefield-excellence\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Sparta’s excellent military reputation was not<\/em> matched by actual battlefield excellence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Sparta had a formidable military reputation<\/em>, but their actual battlefield performance hardly backed it up<\/strong>. During the fifth and fourth centuries, Sparta lost as often as it won. Spartan battlefield tactics were a bit better than other Greek poleis<\/a><\/em>, but this is damning with faint praise. The Spartiates<\/a><\/em> themselves were mostly like every other group of wealthy Greek hoplites<\/em><\/a>. But the Spartan military reputation<\/em> was extremely valuable \u2013 the loss of that reputation during the Peloponnesian War does much to explain the rough decades Sparta would experience following its end.<\/p>\n

That<\/em> is one of the core things we can learn from Sparta: a reputation for military excellence can often be more valuable than the excellence itself \u2013 real or imagined. A powerful army can only fight one battle at a time, but the idea<\/em> of a powerful army can intimidate any number of enemies all at once<\/strong>. […] when Sparta was forced to turn from intimidation to force, it ran out of force with frightening speed.<\/p>\n

Those who have been here for a while may already be wondering, “Wait, though \u2013 this is the guy who is always telling us that winning battles isn’t as important as achieving strategic objectives and who is always on about logistics and operations! What about that?” I think that<\/em> actually goes a long way to explaining how an army with a modest advantage<\/em> in tactics and organization ends up without a winning record. […] I want to stress something here: the horrors of Spartan society cannot be justified on the grounds they produced superior soldiers, because they quite evidently did not<\/em><\/strong>. Sparta’s actual military record was, in fact, depressingly average. Only the reputation was special; the men were just men.<\/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":"

Sparta had a formidable military reputation, but their actual battlefield performance hardly backed it up. During the fifth and fourth centuries, Sparta lost as often as it won. Spartan battlefield tactics were a bit better than other Greek poleis, but this is damning with faint praise. The Spartiates themselves were mostly like every other group […]<\/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":[62,1526,7,5,41],"tags":[31,1457,1152,269,1151],"class_list":["post-69408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-army","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-peloponnesianwar","tag-propaganda","tag-sparta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i3u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69408","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=69408"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73699,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69408\/revisions\/73699"}],"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=69408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}