In the history of human warfare, no warrior has been more celebrated or mythologized than
the Spartan soldier.
He has stood for millennia as a symbol of unbreakable will and discipline, as a consummate
professional whom no hardship could force to betray his loyalty to his comrades or his
own personal honor.
Frequently they are depicted in almost cartoonish fashion, as supermen obsessed with war, unbeatable
in even combat.
The reality is a good deal more complex, but the fact is that Sparta at its prime was an
extremely formidable opponent.
For a period of more than 150 years, from the 6th to the 4th century bc, no Spartan
field army lost a pitched battle - a remarkable battlefield record.
For their contemporaries whom they fought against, the Spartans were the epitome of
soldierly virtue.
How were these soldiers formed, how were they equipped, and how did they fight?
A Spartan boy’s training began at the age of 7, upon his induction into the famous Agoge,
the state-mandated educational curriculum for all male citizens.
Although the popular image of the Spartans is as bloody-minded, war-obsessed killing
machines, in reality the Agoge sought to turn young boys into well rounded, fully formed
Spartan citizens.
They learned reading and writing, poetry and dancing, hunting and athletics, all the skills
befitting the landed gentry they were.
All of this was typical of the education of well-born Greeks in other city states as well.
However the Spartan vision of manly virtue required more than cultural accomplishments.
The Agoge sought to make Spartan boys extremely tough, capable of bearing hardship and fending
for themselves.
According to Xenophon, an Athenian soldier and writer whose sons were permitted to attend
the Agoge, they were fed "just the right amount for them never to become sluggish through
being too full, while also giving them a taste of what it is not to have enough.”
Boys were encouraged to steal more food for themselves wherever they could find it.
If they were caught, they were brutally whipped to punish them, not for the theft, but for
their clumsiness in allowing themselves to be detected.
They slept on beds of reeds pulled from the river with their bare hands, and were given
only one new article of clothing each year, in the form of a red cloak.
They were not only permitted to fight each other, but encouraged to challenge one another
to personal combat.
The boys were expected to develop a contempt for hardship and suffering, and this mental
and physical toughness would serve them well on campaign.
At the age of 18 a Spartan boy became a reserve member of the army, and at 20 he sought to
be inducted into one of the public messes, the compulsory communal social and dining
groups . He had 10 years in which to try, and only on admittance did he become a full
citizen and a regular soldier.
Those who failed to be accepted in this time were doomed to only partial citizenship, and
a life of disgrace.
A full Spartan citizen soldier was a heavy infantryman, and was equipped as a hoplite,
just as the heavy infantry of the other Greek city states.
Citizens did not serve as light infantry, and Sparta had to rely on allies and mercenaries
to provide cavalry.
Hoplites were so called for the large circular shield they carried, the hoplon.
Initially constructed of wood, the Spartans began encasing the outsides of their shields
in bronze in the 5th century bc, to make them more robust.
It was a large, heavy piece of equipment that was essential not only to the safety of the
individual soldier, but to that of the man next to him as well.
Each man’s shield protected the left side of his body, but his right side was protected
by the shield of the man adjacent to him in the formation.
The shield was also an important symbol of a soldier’s courage.
If a soldier turned to flee the field of battle, the heavy, cumbersome shield was often one
of the first things he jettisoned to enable him to make his escape.
“Dropping the shield” became a synonym for desertion, which would brand any man as
a coward.
Spartan mothers were supposed to have handed their sons their shields before they left
on campaign, with the admonition that they come back “with it or on it.”
In other words, the only options for an honorable man were to carry his shield back successfully,
showing that he never broke ranks and fled from battle like a coward, or to be carried
on it as a corpse by his comrades.
Nothing in between.
In the archaic period Spartan soldiers wore a bronze cuirass to protect their torsos,
but eventually transitioned to the linothorax, a lightweight type of armor made up of layers
of linen held together with animal-based glue.
It may sound like an unlikely material for armor, but modern reconstructions have shown
that the linothorax could offer significant protection against enemy arrows and the slashing
attacks of swords.
It would not have offered the level of protection bronze did, but it was cheaper, cooler and,
importantly, much lighter.
In the physically demanding environment of battle, men would quickly become exhausted,
and weight had to be saved where it could.
The soldier would have been further protected by bronze greaves to guard his lower legs,
and a bronze helmet.
The most iconic image of the Spartan warrior has him wearing a Corinthian style helmet,
which covered most of the face, with its distinctive angular eye slits and nose and cheek guards.
A bright crest of horsehair was worn on top, making the wearer appear larger and more intimidating.
Over time however the helmets of the Spartan soldiers evolved, and later generations wore
the pilos style helmet, which was shaped like a rounded cone.
The pilos didn’t protect the wearer as completely, but it was lighter weight, and allowed the
wearer a greater field of vision and better hearing, an important feature in the roaring
chaos of battle.
The Spartan hoplite’s main weapon was the dory, a single-handed spear ranging from around
seven to ten feet in length, made of cornel or ash wood, with an iron spearhead at the
top, and an iron buttspike at the bottom to balance the weapon.
The bottom spike could be used to anchor the spear in the ground, and even to kill wounded
enemy soldiers lying on the ground as the formation moved over them.
The spear was essential to the Greek style of fighting, allowing a soldier to strike
out at the enemy while maintaining his place in a tight formation, and for multiple ranks
of men in the formation to fight.
Each soldier would also carry a javelin to throw at the enemy, and a short sword called
a xiphos.
It was to be expected that as the two battle lines closed on each other and the fighting
began, many spears would be broken in combat, or unusable at close quarters.
Then the soldier could draw his sword to continue the fight.
The Spartan short sword was noted to be considerably shorter than those carried by the soldiers
of other Greek states, which might have made them more useful in the close press of battle,
where there would be no room to wield a longer blade.
In one story, a Spartan mother hearing her son complain that his sword was too short
admonished him to “step a foot closer to the enemy and it will be long enough.”
Each man wore a red cloak, called a himation, and a formation of Spartan soldiers would
have presented an uncommonly unified appearance, compared to their contemporaries.
By the late 5th century bc, the Spartans were painting their shields with the famous lambda
symbol, the Greek letter L, which stood for the proper name for the Spartan state as a
whole, Lacedaemon.
In other Greek armies, a soldier’s shield would have been painted with a design of his
own choice.
Xenophon described the Spartans’ appearance on the field of battle as “a single mass
of bronze and red.”
The Spartan infantry fought in the same manner as that of other Greek city states, in the
hoplite phalanx.
The phalanx was a dense formation of spearmen, positioned so closely together that each man’s
shield overlapped the right side of the man next to him, with the spears of the first
few ranks projecting forward.
The result was a solid block of men, extremely strong and resistant to breaches by the enemy,
bristling with spears all along its front.
Men behind the front rank could add their force to the advance by pushing on the man
in front of them, creating a terrible momentum that made the phalanx extremely difficult
to stop or break.
When warring Greek city states met on the field of battle, the opposing phalanxes would
line up opposite one another, and advance to contact.
They would thrust, stab, hack and push until one side’s formation came apart, or the
men lost their nerve and broke.
If one side’s phalanx maintained its courage, discipline and cohesion longer than the other,
they could drive the enemy before them, giving them no choice but to retreat.
Then cavalry could ride down and slaughter the fleeing soldiers.
The phalanx did however have serious weaknesses.
First and foremost, it was an extremely slow and cumbersome formation.
The strength of the phalanx relied on the soldiers remaining closely packed together,
which meant that it had to advance very slowly.
Phalanxes had a notable tendency to drift to the right as they moved forward, as each
man sought to remain in the protection of the shield of his neighbor.
Rough terrain could cause dangerous gaps to open up in the formation, and so hoplite armies
tended to choose flat, open terrain for battle.
Even more importantly, the phalanx was inflexible and difficult to control.
With thousands of men packed into a tight group, each man relying on the proximity of
his neighbor for protection and trying never to open up a gap for the enemy to exploit,
it could not maneuver easily.
Once the opposing phalanxes were lined up for battle, it was extremely difficult to
do anything but move straight forward.
The armies of the Greeks city states were not made up of what we would think of today
as professional soldiers.
These were not men who made a career of fighting, but citizens called away from their normal
lives to serve for a brief time against a particular enemy.
Most Greek armies did not practice formation drill, which meant that complicated maneuvers
on the battlefield were simply beyond their capabilities.
The Spartans were an exception.
Spartan soldiers regularly practiced maneuvering together in formation, relying on their greater
discipline to keep ranks.
Moreover, unlike the rest of the Greeks, their command structure included officers at much
lower levels of organization, which made it easier for orders to be passed down the chain
of command.
The result was that Spartan phalanxes could accomplish what their enemies could not, wheeling
and repositioning the formation on the field of battle, even with the enemy line bearing
down on them.
If this sort of maneuver was pulled off successfully and well timed, it could potentially be a
battle-winning tactic in itself.
At the battle of Nemea, in 394 bc, the Spartans and their allies fought a coalition army of
Thebans, Athenians, Argives and others.
The Spartans, as always, took up the position of honor on the rightmost flank of their line.
Both sides formed their phalanxes and advanced into battle and, as often happened, both lines
drifted toward their right sides.
The Spartan phalanx defeated the Athenian force opposite them, and then, keeping good
order, managed to wheel their formation of approximately 6000 men to take the rest of
the coalition forces in the flank.
They rolled up the enemy line, inflicting nearly three times as many casualties as they
suffered themselves.
It was not the individual fighting prowess of their soldiers that allowed Sparta to become
the dominant military power of their heyday, but the greater discipline, organization and
control they achieved.
The result was a fearsome record of victories unmatched by any other Greek state.
For a period of more than 150 years no Spartan field army would be defeated in pitched battle,
though there would be minor setbacks in small engagements and irregular warfare.
In the end, Sparta’s reputation for invincibility would be shattered by the Thebans at the battles
of Tegyra, Leuctra, and 2nd Mantineia.
But by that time the Spartan legend was fully formed.
In more than two thousand years no other soldier has been able to compete with the reputation
of the Spartan hoplite for mastery of battle and complete, unwavering dedication to the
warrior ethos.