{"id":69424,"date":"2023-01-03T01:00:56","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T06:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69424"},"modified":"2024-07-29T20:57:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-30T00:57:50","slug":"qotd-spartan-dominance-over-the-peloponnese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/01\/03\/qotd-spartan-dominance-over-the-peloponnese\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Spartan dominance over the Peloponnese"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Sparta initially seems to have attempted (Hdt. 1.66-8) to have extended its treatment of Messenia to other parts of the Peloponnese (namely Tegea) in the mid sixth-century \u2013 the failure of this policy led to a more measured effort to subjugate the Peloponnese more loosely into a Spartan-lead military league (the Peloponnesian League). This project was never fully completed: Argos \u2013 the next largest power in the Peloponnese proper, but a solidly second-tier power compared to Athens, Corinth, Sparta or Thebes \u2013 successfully resisted Spartan efforts to dominate it throughout the period. But on the whole, by the late 6th century, Sparta did exert a (perhaps somewhat loose \u2013 the trend in scholarship lately has been to stress the plastic and fairly loose organization of the Peloponnesian League) kind of dominance over the Peloponnese.<\/p>\n

The core of this control lasted until 371, when Spartan defeat at the Battle of Leuktra shattered this control. Epaminondas, the Theban commander, used the opportunity to free the helots<\/a><\/em> of Messenia and reform them into a polis<\/a><\/em> to provide a local counter-weight to Sparta, while Arcadia and Elis split off from Sparta’s alliance to form their own defensive league against Sparta and, to top it off, a number of the perioikic<\/a><\/em> communities \u2013 including the Spartans’ elite light infantry scouts, the Skiritae<\/a><\/em> \u2013 along with various borderlands also formed the new polis<\/em> of Megalopolis on the northern Spartan border \u2013 it promptly joined the Arcadian league (this polis<\/em> would later give us the historian Polybius; his anti-Spartan stance comes out clearly in how he treats Cleomenes III). Sparta, surrounded now by hostile poleis<\/em> who had once been allies, would spend the rest of Antiquity as a political non-entity, save for one brief effort to restore Spartan greatness in the 220s, crushed by the Macedonian Antigonids who were in no mood to entertain Spartan delusions of grandeur.<\/p>\n

We might then say that Sparta is successful<\/strong> \u2013 though not entirely so (Argos!) \u2013 in establishing a hegemony over the Peloponnese<\/strong>, but only maintains it for c. 175 years<\/strong>. That’s not a bad run, but for the record of a larger state dominating its backyard, it is not tremendously impressive either.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-09-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sparta initially seems to have attempted (Hdt. 1.66-8) to have extended its treatment of Messenia to other parts of the Peloponnese (namely Tegea) in the mid sixth-century \u2013 the failure of this policy led to a more measured effort to subjugate the Peloponnese more loosely into a Spartan-lead military league (the Peloponnesian League). This project […]<\/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":[1527,1457,1151,1557],"class_list":["post-69424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-ancientgreece","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-sparta","tag-thebes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i3K","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69424","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=69424"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79072,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69424\/revisions\/79072"}],"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=69424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}