The Heracleidiad: The Rise and Fall of Sparta's Hellenistic Empire

[Municipal Engines]

Preface: "Who are the Spartans?"​

So asked Cyrus the Great when he received a small embassy from a small city after he conquered the Lydian Empire. They spoke to him with terse threats to leave the Ionian cities of Asia well alone, lest he face the wrath of those who sent them: the Spartans. The question was asked with bemusement and scorn. Who were these arrogant, unassembling people who believed themselves to be such a threat to the king of the world? These effete Greeks with their long well-groomed hair and dazzling fine cloaks of expensive vermillion. These backwards provincials who seemed to be walking contradictions, with the looks of pampered fops and the manners of idiot peasants.

Yet these words were thrown back in the face of Cyrus's heirs, when the Greeks under Sparta's leadership would humiliate the Achaemenid Empire in its invasions of their home and return the favour with their own much more successful invasions. In the centuries after, peoples from the Pillars of Heracles to the Ganges would ask the same question as Cyrus. This time, no scorn or bemusement would colour their voices, only fear and awe.

For the question is a pertinent one. The Spartans delighted in the dreadful mystery that shrouded their society, the strangeness of their laws and their rituals. And in this shroud of enigma the nature of their society would change and evolve to move with the needs of empire and the duties of hegemony. Throughout all their reforms and innovations, they would cling with conservative ferocity to the sacred traditions and customs that they thought elevated them above all others. In asking the question of themselves they would refine the core character of their people as their society would change to be strange even to their ancestors.

It is a question that has puzzled historians centuries after the eclipse of their empire and the nadir of their society, and no definitive clear consensus has been found. But it is one that is as important now as it was all those centuries ago. For Sparta and her empire, the great Laco-Hellenic Ecumene that flourished under her leadership, left a mark on human civilisation that cannot be ignored.

Who were the Spartans? We shall try to find out.

 

[Municipal Engines]

This is the culmination of my fascination with the Ancient Greeks in general and Sparta in particular. Having dabbled with the idea of Sparta-as-Rome and a lasting empire in the past, it didn't much get off the ground due to my own ignorance of the subject and youthful immaturity. But the interest in the ancient world and in the Greeks has not been diminished and research on it all has only kindled it. My plan is ambitious: nothing less than the detailed history of a sprawling, powerful empire from its rise in the unlikeliest of sources to its fall and perhaps beyond.

As an aesthetic and pragmatic style, I'll be writing from the POV of a modern amateur historian from this alternative timeline, hence some things (notably the dating) will come across as a bit strange. I hope you can enjoy or at least tolerate this quirk.

The second post will be up soon.

 

[Municipal Engines]

Chapter I: Woe to Medes and to Thebes​

The Problem with Winning: Politics and Faction in Hegemonic Sparta after the Attic Wars

​

Lysander is greeted with acclaim and celebration after the destruction of the Athenian Fleet​

The start of the 93rd Olympiad saw the end of decades of destructive endemic warfare that engulfed the Greeks, centred on the conflict between Athens and Sparta. The result was a devastated economic and social order across the Aegean, the destruction of the Athenian empire and the ascension of Sparta as the precarious sole hegemon of Hellas. This victory was thanks to the cunning and skill of the Spartan general Lysander.

In the wake of his victory over the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami, Lysander had circled the Aegean, capturing cities once subject to Athens. Under threat of slaughter, the Athenian garrisons were expelled back to their home city, to be replaced by Peloponnesian garrisons under a Spartan harmost. The democratic governments were overturned by laconophilic oligarchies; or perhaps more accurately, Lysander-philic oligarchies. These men belonged to political clubs set up by Lysander during his first admiralty in the second year of the 92nd Olympiad, in part through his diplomatic efforts in Asia that saw him also befriend Cyrus, the Achaemenid prince of Persia. Many had been part of his victories at Notium and Aegospotami, as expatriates and exiles of the cities they would come to rule. Lysander empowered these friends and supporters in their cities as governing decarchies, boards of ten, overseen by the resident harmost who would guard against outside threats and maintain a climate favourable to Sparta.

Before Aegospotami, harmosts and garrisons had already been installed in cities such as Chios and Lesbos, among other places. They had been set up in the aftermath of Athens's Sicilian disaster, in response to pleas for help from rebel cities against Athenian reprisals. Even after the destruction of Athenian seapower at the battle, these garrisons and their harmosts remained in place, though no longer could Sparta claim they were necessary for the poleis' own protection. The submission of Athens itself brought a similar system of client oligarchy to the city. After Lysander blockaded the port of Peiraeus and the two Spartan kings besieged the Long Walls, an anti-democratic government headed by a board of thirty - made up of friends of Lysander and supporters of his faction – stood victorious in the ashes of Athenian democracy.

It was a sudden end to a long-running conflict and a long-running order. The speed at which Sparta came into its new empire and the colossal role one man played in bringing it all about stirred fractious forces in the normally stable sphere of Spartan politics.

In the aftermath of the war, there were three factions present in the echelons of Spartan society, with two of them nucleating in the person of the kings, as was usual in Spartan politics. King Pausanias of the senior Agiad branch of the Spartan Heraclid line led the conservative, traditionalist faction, which opposed the new imperial foreign policy for a more balanced, moderate one. They were concerned that a bold imperial policy would alienate Lacedaemon’s allies. There was fear too that the wealth and luxury introduced by imperialism would corrupt its people and foster avarice and decadence that were so contrary to the hard austere principles of the Lycurgan Constitution. Some opposed the very idea of empire as something untenable for the Laconian social order. Their foreign policy was to remove the harmosts and permit internal autonomy in the conquered cities and try and retain the kind of conservative quasi-isolationism Lacedaemonia had enjoyed before the war with Athens. Not only, they claimed, such a policy would limit the corruption and decline of Spartan social mores and virtues, it would not risk alienating Sparta's traditional allies, as an overt and brutish imperial policy would.

The second faction wanted a strong, robustly imperial foreign policy, to enjoy the fruits of rule and conquest and the supremacy of the Spartan. King Agis II of the junior Eurypontid dynasty provided leadership for them, was an embittered man who held fast to slights from the Argives and the Eleans, for insults and failures that they had dealt him. They kept his imperial focus on continental Greece, preferring to police Sparta's continental allies and tighten control of the Peloponnesus rather than risk far-flung overseas enterprises. While Agis and his faction did not disapprove of the system of harmosts and narrow oligarchies, they wanted them loyal to Sparta, not to Lysander and were opposed to his unchecked power.

The third faction was formed around the personality of Lysander. It was made up of those who held him as friend, ally, benefactor and fellow ideologue. They hoped that Lysander would receive official recognition of his vast prestige and power, and that they would reap the benefits of support with posts as harmosts, commanders and governors. They also saw the Aegean as fertile land for the imperial plough to furrow, setting them against the Eurypontids' continental policy. Domestically, they welcomed the wealth of empire and preferred a departure from Lycurgan austerity to personally enjoy the privileges hegemony provided.

Of these factions, the Lysandreans and the Eurypontids were united in the goal of projecting a strong imperial rule, if divided on the expression of that imperial rule. The Pausanians and the Eurypontids both were riled by the attitude Lysander had adopted as the champion of an imperialistic policy that ensured his pre-eminent position. United in their desire to check Lysander's power, they were divided on the question of whether his imperialism (and imperialism in general) was bad for Sparta.

The first clash of the factions was over money: the spoils of the war and the tribute of conquered cities and corralled allies. The conservative faction objected to the ‘importation of silver and gold money as a violation of the ancient prohibition and sought an injunction to condemn the practise. Yet Lysander's faction fought back and a compromise was adopted in which the money could only be used for the public good. Impractical though the decree was, and its minimal enforcement attesting to the apathy it was regarded with, it enshrined into law the duty and the obligation of a Spartan citizen to commit to austerity and those with excessive funds patronise the public good and national interest. Later reformists and conservatives alike would use it as precedent for their works. In practice for the moment, the spoils, gifts and tribute gathered by the Spartans were quickly partitioned and spent by the state. Whatever else, it demonstrated that the faction backing Lysander was strong enough to check an ephor's proposal.

Pausanius's faction won the debate on what to do with the take. In fact, through well-reasoned words of prudence and concern the Pausanians convinced the Eurypontid and many Lysandrean imperialists to support their moderate, careful foreign policy for their allies. In a common display of austerity to affirm their traditions and constitutional principles, the Spartans parted with half their war spoils and made much of generously sending it to the poleis of the alliance. When Sparta had initially gathered the treasure, Thebes had demanded a tenth while all other Lacedaemonian allies held their peace. Thebes was omitted from the list of major beneficiaries in the dispersal of the spoils. Corinth, her economy devastated and her land ravaged by the war, was given that tenth in its stead. Another four tenths were distributed to the other allies, while Lacedaemonia kept the rest, largely for the maintenance of its navy and the reconstruction of the ravaged Peloponnesian economy. Corinth in particular was favoured for it had been a loyal ally in the past and stood as guardian of the Isthmus, gatekeeper of the Peloponnese and vital bulwark between Sparta and the rest of Greece. The imperialists recognised the necessity of winning the hearts and minds of their Hellene countrymen, and further were taken by the idea for Sparta to become a paragon polis and icon of leadership in the eyes of the Hellenic world.

As for the idea of empire as the goal of foreign policy, the imperialist factions in favour of the measure won out. They pointed to the Spartans' non-interventionist and over-cautious isolationist (the word "cowardly" was bandied about) foreign policy of the past, leading up to the 86th Olympiad, when the bold Corinthians had been a gadfly for their state, lambasting the Spartans for their inactivity regarding the Athenian rise to power and prominence and the establishment of its empire. The very empire, it was reminded of everyone, that came to existence by the natural course of Athens's committed and continued prosecution of the war against Persia to its conclusion. Such a thing could have been prevented if Lacedaemon had a robust and active foreign policy and if Sparta had assumed vibrant leadership of the poleis of the Aegean.

While these factions each had their moments and areas of triumph, they would send Sparta into a tumult over the issues surrounding Athens. Lysander's oligarchy there had conducted themselves as tyrants and waged a campaign of terror, murdering thousands through show trials and assassinations often simply because they coveted their wealth or feared their power. Citizens and metics fled Attica as refugees, filling Thebes, Megara and Argos. Even one of their own, the moderate oligarch and defector from the board's tyranny Theramenes, was condemned to death as the government grew more extreme but escaped the city with the help of his own supporters and benefactors from the anti-Lysander factions of Sparta. While the Lysandreans demanded the state issue a decree ordering the return of any of the exiles to the city, the Pausanians convinced the government to refrain, as the Thirty had been unduly tyrannical, irresponsible and cruel and were greatly unpopular throughout Hellas; overt support for such unvirtuous and despised men would earn them further contempt from their allies and the Hellenic people.

The policy of non-interference ended when the Thirty were expelled from Athens following a series of defeats dealt to them by the rebel democrats led by the noted Athenian general and ardent proponent of democracy Thrasybulus. In their place the Three Thousand - those selected to "share in the government" of Athens by retaining their rights as citizens unlike the rest of Athenians - selected a board of Ten, who refused to compromise with Thrasybulus's forces even as they occupied the city's port of Piraeus. The survivors of the Thirty, defeated and exiled, took control of Eleusis and planned their campaign of opposition from there.

Both oligarchic parties sent ambassadors to Sparta for aid. Lysander seized on the moment, securing a motion to send him to Eleusis with one hundred talents to raise an army. He went with a mission to re-establish the Thirty to power, eager to see his friends and loyalists once more ruling Athens. But King Pausanias – concerned for Lysander’s potential control of Athens and further accumulation of power and prestige – persuaded three of the five ephors to send him to Attica with a Peloponnesian army. They charged him simply to restore peace and order. It was custom for two ephors to be with the king on campaign, and a pair who were sympathetic to his policies and with who he was on friendly terms went with him for added state oversight and diplomatic authority. So he marched to Eleusis with his levy and took command of Lysander’s mercenary force and his brother Lybis’s navy.

Yet Pausanias, in command of such a Lacedaemonian force, merely shook his spear and rattled his sword. He did not escalate hostilities with the democrats in Piraeus beyond shows of force, demands for surrender and foraging marches. Though skirmishes did break out, Pausanias refrained from pressing the issue. Through the influence of Theramenes, who acted as the king's agent to the democrats, violence was avoided. Eventually ambassadors from Thrasybulus’s army met with King Pausanias and agreed to come to terms. His faction held the power in the talks, and Thrasybulus’s followers were able to agree with his terms.

They were generous and merciful and won Pausanias much praise among the Hellenes. The democrats and other exiles were allowed to return to Athens, on condition that the Three Thousand and any others who participated in the regime of the Thirty were pardoned and left unmolested. The Thirty were to refrain from conflict with the Athenians and simply rule in their haven at Eleusis, condemned to death in absentia and affecting a permanent exile from the city. Theramenes, the moderate oligarch and dissident of the Thirty, was to become Sparta’s proxenos – host of its embassy – and thus was under special protection by and consideration of Sparta.

Lysander, not wishing to be seen as impotent and idle during the talks, managed to winkle in his own additions to the settlement. The Peloponnesian garrison in Attica was re-instated and combined with a force of Athenians, selected by Theramenes and Thrasybulus, based at Phyle with some few remaining to protect Sparta's proxenos. Pausanias and his compatriot ephors selected the new harmost themselves, submitting their choices to the approval of the Ten in Athens and the democrats in Pireaus. The chosen man was named Metrocles and was considered to be a silver-tongued, likeable sort, cunning in a political way that the Athenians would appreciate.

Lysander further couched the restoration of democracy to the Athenians in terms that shined a positive light on Sparta. Lysander encouraged Pausanias to pursue terms implied that it was the Spartan state and Spartan kingship that was the restorer, preserver and defender of the polis’s traditions. It meant that Sparta was to be their moral and political guardian. Some historians suggest that the inclusion of this idea of the hegemonic responsibility of the Spartan state for Greek cities’ traditions was Lysander’s attempt to throw a spanner into the works; he believed a democratic Athens would inevitably align itself against Sparta, whereby the restoration of its Cleisthenean traditions empowered the bitter and angry mob surely seeking redress for their city's past humiliation.

Though successful in his endeavour to restore peace and order to Attica, Pausanias fell victim to the politics of faction when he returned to Sparta. Lysander had been simmering during the trip back home. He whipped up controversy and effrontery and his allies and cronies turned their political clout against Pausanias. Charging the Agiad king with shameful capitulation for such light terms and cowardice for not giving direct battle, the Lysandrean gerontes of the governing council of elders convinced the a narrow majority of their colleagues – -including King Agis – to censure Pausanias. Yet all five of the ephors of that year voted to acquit. The combined force of the imperialist factions could not bring itself to fully condemn the king for the completion of his mission.

The victory emboldened the anti-Lysandrean factions. Having discovered the nepotistic network of societies and political clubs that gave Lysander his influence, they took measures to chip away at its webs. They replaced and recalled who they could, otherwise forcing those out of office through more subtle, underhanded methods. The ephorate turned out faction members of the anti-Lysandreans with such security that the constitutionalists could chastise and rebuke Lysander for the haughtiness and severity that crept into his character after his rise, and for his Asian habits of lavish lifestyles of exclusive celebrations and luxuries that such personal imperial power earned him. A great many of his titles were not renewed by the state when the time came.

Further blows would come to Lysander with the death of Cyrus the Younger. The Achaemenid prince had been a good ally to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War and was a good friend to Lysander personally. As paramount satrap of Asia Minor, Cyrus lightly ruled the Ionian cities, allowing Spartan influence there as long as they paid the Great King his due. He had given the Spartans the funds to build and man fleets to defeat Athens, as well as giving Lysander himself official power in Asia Minor.

After the death of his father, Darius II, and the end of the war in the Aegean, Cyrus gathered an army to press his claim on the Achaemenid throne against his brother, Artaxerxes II. Counting on his support to the Peloponnesians and his known hellenophilia and great wealth, he gathered a large army of Hellenic mercenaries (poetically rounded off to an easily eponymous Ten Thousand) to form the backbone of his amassed forces. The leader of the mercenaries was disgraced Lacedaemonian former general and harmost of tyrannical, overbearing nature, Clearchus. By dexterous management, large promises and outright lies, Cyrus overcame the misgivings of the Greek troops over the length and danger of the war and led them from Sardis, through Cilicia and down the Euphrates to clash with his brother at Cunaxa. Knowing the battle hinged on the death of the King of Kings, Cyrus wanted his strongest body of troops – the sellspear hoplites – to take the centre against Artaxerxes. In his arrogance, Clearchus disobeyed and the Persian left wing under Tissaphernes freely engaged with the rest of Cyrus’s forces. In desperation to secure a swift, sure victory, Cyrus himself attacked his brother at the centre, but was killed in the fighting.

The loss of such an ally and such an opportunity – a good friend as Shahanshah of Persia – was salt on Lysander’s wounds dealt by the erosion of his faction’s power over the allied and subject cities of Lacedaemon. But new opportunities arose that would unite Sparta’s factions under a common goal.

 

[Unknown]

Good start.

BTW, what happened to your Draka TL?

 

[Sceonn]

A Triarchy? Interesting.

 

[TheCataphract]

This looks interesting!

Question though. One of the reasons Rome was able to build a lasting empire was the idea of the Latin Right, which was essentially an early trade agreement, that set the precedent in the Latin (and thus the Roman) City-States that citizenship could be extended to peoples from another city. Essentially this meant that when someone like, say Hannibal invaded the Italian Peninsula and defeated the Roman armies decisively in the field, there would rarely, if ever, be any revolts against Roman Hegemony as Roman Citizenship was attainable and thus these cities saw benefit in remaining under Roman rule. This stood in sharp contrast to the other empires of the time and gave the Roman State a degree of durability unmatched to my knowledge in Antiquity.

I'm seeing the beginnings of this so far in the timeline with the gentler treatment of the cities dominated by Sparta. Is this part of how you plan to build a lasting state out of this Spartan Empire?

Also, is this a hint at how you plan to deal with the chronic manpower shortages that tended to plague the Spartans?

 

[FillyofDelphi]

Interesting... the Spartans have a real uphill battle if they want to keep their unique identity though. I'm curious to see how the city-state will manage to reconcile its limited population base with the need to spread its influence directly over a wide geographic area. Especially if they plan to do so primarily through military means, without effectively surrendering their claim to a seperate ethnicity of conquerors.

 

[Municipal Engines]

Good start.

BTW, what happened to your Draka TL?

Thanks, I appreciate it.

As for my Draka TL, I've put off working on it for now. I've another reboot planned, since I went into the original reboot half-cocked. Momentum has dried up and I've been unproductive, unmotivated and unfocussed. This subject has restarted my creative juices and drive so I'm going to stick with it until I feel I can handle two projects at once. I've already got the beginning of the reboot written out and more of it planned, but I'm not going to start it up on the site for a long while.

A Triarchy? Interesting.

Officially, the diarchy of the Agiads and Eurypontids is the sole arrangement of potentates. Unofficially, Lysander's stunning and highly personalised victory over Athens and his Machiavellian ambition has allowed him to rival the kings, even if he has no position in the Gerousia.

This looks interesting!

Question though. One of the reasons Rome was able to build a lasting empire was the idea of the Latin Right, which was essentially an early trade agreement, that set the precedent in the Latin (and thus the Roman) City-States that citizenship could be extended to peoples from another city. Essentially this meant that when someone like, say Hannibal invaded the Italian Peninsula and defeated the Roman armies decisively in the field, there would rarely, if ever, be any revolts against Roman Hegemony as Roman Citizenship was attainable and thus these cities saw benefit in remaining under Roman rule. This stood in sharp contrast to the other empires of the time and gave the Roman State a degree of durability unmatched to my knowledge in Antiquity.

I'm seeing the beginnings of this so far in the timeline with the gentler treatment of the cities dominated by Sparta. Is this part of how you plan to build a lasting state out of this Spartan Empire?

Also, is this a hint at how you plan to deal with the chronic manpower shortages that tended to plague the Spartans?

Interesting... the Spartans have a real uphill battle if they want to keep their unique identity though. I'm curious to see how the city-state will manage to reconcile its limited population base with the need to spread its influence directly over a wide geographic area. Especially if they plan to do so primarily through military means, without effectively surrendering their claim to a seperate ethnicity of conquerors.

The solution that developes is more complex than Rome's eventual extension of citizenship across Italy. But the Latin Right is a good basis for the eventual solution to Sparta's oliganthropia. Just as Rome was inclined to absorb other Latins and share with them the governance of the empire, through pragmatic necessity and camaraderie of kinship, so shall Sparta be inclined to do the same for their fellow Dorians. Though as a naturally conservative people holding above all to law and custom, this system of expansion will evolve incrimentally and the core exclusivity and elevated, unique nature of the Spartiate class will remain, albeit with paths to entry.

This TL will, I think, become an inquiry through narrative history into the core nature and characteristics of the Spartans and the idea of Sparta from both our perspective and the perspective of someone in this ATL. The idea is to see Sparta reach its full potential, both in terms of empire and in terms of the virtues, customs and qualities that the Ancient Greeks admired, and in which the Spartans themselves take pride and find their unique identity in. How in responding to reformist impulses, the needs and duties of empire, and the effects the desires of their kings, citizens, allies and subjects, the Spartans evolve and achieve that potential.

So while I will try to be as historically accurate as I can and strive for realism and credible progression of events, but the purpose is to see the Laconic character and ethos adapted, mutated, perfected and taken to its logical conclusion. I'm fully expecting some incredulousness (as comes with a -wank) over the developments of the TL, and though I'll be building as historically and logically feasible foundation and butterfly effect as I can, there'll be lots of bits that might stretch a reader's sense of disbelief simply because I'll find it interesting and fun to explore.

 

[Salvador79]

An interesting project. Personally i don't admire Sparta one bit and don't buy into its glorification by anti-democratic Athenian thinkers. But the proposition to develop this construction to its utmost potential, especially judging from how well you've started to write it, sounds like an interesting challenge.