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... vil service. Another contribution to the Spartan government that Lycurgus provided was the money system. The Spartans used pieces of iron instead of silver and gold. This type of monetary system was of very little value outside of the Spartan city-state and made the citizens dependent upon the local economy. The warrior culture of Sparta was battle tested time and time again and proved to be the strongest battle ready nation within the Grecian region.
The Spartans were called upon during many different engagements to help police the region. The Persian king Darius started an offensive maneuver to gain control of Greece. The Darius sent word to the Greeks requesting "earth and water", which was a sign of surrender. Many of the city-states in the region accepted the Persian offer, but Athens and Sparta refused. The first battle of Marathon in 490 B.
C. was won by the Athens, the sister city-state and second superpower of Greece. The Spartans arrived after the battle of Marathon and were surprised that the Athens had already fought off Persia and achieved a temporary victory. The significance of the Battle of Marathon is that this was the first time that Athens and Sparta would unite together for the sake of preserving Greece against an outside threat but this would not be the last unification of the region. The main differences between these two city-states were the contrasting values: Dorian Sparta and Ionian Athens. "Sparta and the Dorians must stand for the Indo-European tradition unredeemed by the feminine influence of Crete, while Athens and the Ionians enjoyed a direct inheritance from Mycenaean civilization that had long tempered that tradition and helped them to create ideals of grace and harmony. " Although Sparta and Athens had their differences in cultural values, one warrior and one artistic, the two were now banded together against one common enemy, Persia. Athens had the Greeks finest navy and Sparta was the greatest Grecian land army.
The next engagement with the Persians was the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B. C. Darius's on Xerxes and heir to the throne sought to finish what his could not and set off to Greece again. Athens and Sparta would team together again in the defense of the Grecian city-states.
Xerxes forces added up to 150, 000 men and over 20, 000 vessels against the 7, 000 Greeks infantrymen at Thermopylae pass commanded by Leonidas, the Spartan king. The pass was a narrow road that stood between the mountains and the sea. Prior to engaging the Greeks, Xerxes expected surrender and waited for four days when he received reports that the Spartans were bathing and combing their hair. This was the Spartan warrior's way of preparing for death when faced against an undeniably overwhelming force. The Spartans received reports on the Persians as well and when, and "one of them remarked that the Persian archers' arrows would fly so thickly they would darken the sky. 'So much the better', his comrade replied. 'We can fight in the shade'. " There is no question about the discipline and bravery of the Spartan soldier, which only knows how to fight in combat or die at war.
The Battle of Thermopylae was fought down to the last Spartan. The Xerxes' forces were able to defeat the Spartan commanded stronghold when a traitor led the Persians around to a position to outflank the Grecian's forces. After Leonidas heard of this movement he sent the majority of the army away and his royal guard of 300 men remained as the last of the doomed stronghold. "'Have a good breakfast, men', tradition reports his words. 'We shall dine in Hades!' " Although the battle was lost, it was also a victory because the goal of the engagement was to hold the Persian forces back until the remaining Grecian forces could move to the shores of Salamis where later they crippled the Persian navy. The Battle of Thermopylae is best example of Spartan heroics, strategy, discipline, training, and fighting tactics.
The Battle of Plataea, in 479 B. C. , was an engagement that was won by the mistakes of the Persian forces commander, Mardonius. When caught in a stalemate that lasted over ten days, the Spartan general Pausanias, running low on water and food, moved by night to a different encampment. Mardonius, seeing the Spartan forces the next day appearing to be falling apart politically from the Athenian forces, began his attack against the Spartan main body.
The Spartans were able to hold off the attacking Persians until the Athenian forces arrived, which led to the defeat of the Persian army and the death of Mardonius. The Battle of Plataea would be the final phase of the outside threat, at least in the fifth century B. C. , and from this the two remaining superpowers of Greece would eventually come head to head. The Peloponnesian War that lasted from 431 to 404 B. C. and would put the Spartan empire in control of the Grecian peninsula.
The struggle Sparta and Athens began less than fifty years after the defeat of the Persians. Athenian control of the seas would have to be equalized by Persian money if Sparta was going to win the war, and eventually at the Battle of Syracuse the Spartans proved to be the masters of land and sea within Greece. With Sparta now in control of the Grecian empire, it would be necessary to provide men for duties other than war fighting. The problem with keeping Greece together as one political unit with the Spartans as the political center would prove to be their final battle.
With the manpower lost in the Peloponnesian War and forced to spread out the remaining men to fill political billets Sparta's forces were spread thin. Growing resistance to the Spartan political shortcomings eventually led to their defeat by the Thebes in the battle of Leuctra in 371 B. C. The fighting forces of Macedonia and Philip II eventually overwhelmed the Grecian territory. Philip II unexpectedly arrived at Greece and swiftly took control of the territory.
The Spartan warriors were not able to overcome the engulfment of Greece by the Macedonian empire. The Spartans proved to one of the toughest warrior cultures in history. Although there is no question as to the fighting capabilities of the Spartans, there is not a lot of legacy left behind other than combative stories. The problem with having a warrior culture eventually was seen when Sparta was tasked with the political control of the entire Grecian area. The training regiments and social structure of the Spartans were geared towards building the strongest men and nation physically, but without the artistic and political training, the warriors or Sparta were unable to bring the Grecian empire together. History remembers so much from the philosophy teachings of Socrates and the Athenian paintings, dishes, and sculptures, but little is remembered about the other superpower in Greece and of the warriors of Sparta.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Board, C. M. Classical Greece: Great Ages of Man. (New York, New York: Time-Life Books, 1965) Boyer, Sophia and Winifred Label. Gifts from the Greeks: Alpha to Omega. (Chicago, Illinois: Rand McNally, 1970) Dryden, John. Translation. Plutarch: The Lives of the Noble Grecian's and Romans. (New York, New York: Modern Library, dt unk) Hale, William H.
The Horizon Book of Ancient Greece. (New York, New York: American Heritage Co, 1956) Hawkes, Jacquetta. Dawn of the Gods: Minoan and Mycenaean Origins of Greece. (New York, New York: Random House, 1968) National Geographic Society. Greece and Rome: Builders of Our World. (Washington, District of Columbia: National Geographic Society, 1968) Preston, Richard A. , Alex Roland, and Sydney F. Wise.
Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and its interrelationships with Western Society. (Belmont, California: Wadsworth/ Thomson Learning, 2001) Reuben, Gabriel and Sheila Schwartz. How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome. (Chicago, Illinois: Benefic Press, 1967) Tomlinson, R. A. Argos and the Arnold: From the End of the Bronze Age to the Roman Occupation. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, 1972) Way, John. Warfare in the Classical World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weapons, Warriors, and Warfare in Ancient Civilisations of Greece and Rome. (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995)
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