Introduction
The classical era was a time of warfare, and nowhere can this be evinced better than in a look at the state of Sparta. From a confused beginning, shrouded in myth and legend, that city rose to preeminence among the cities of the Greek world, and famously proved its citizen-soldiers' immense skill at the defense of Thermopylae, where a vastly outnumbered force inflicted disproportionate casualties on the attacking Persians and fought down to the last man. That military elite was bred for war by eugenics and strenuous, lifelong training, and fed by a vast body of slaves (helots).
But the Spartans, following that apogee, had sunk very low a few centuries later. They had first been bloodied in the Corinthian War, in which their old foe Athens had regained a measure of its former power; they were nearly destroyed by the Thebans a few decades later, when Epaminondas and Pelopidas led a new model army against them at Leuctra (371 BC(E)) and Mantinea (362 BC(E)). During the time of Alexander the Great, the Spartans were so ineffectual and weak as to not even be included in the Macedonian-led Greek League. While the Spartans managed to fend off the assault of Pyrrhus of Epirus, they were seriously bloodied by the attack. Sparta was in major social unrest, weak politically, and demographically almost a nonfactor, by the mid-third century BC(E).
The brief flash of glory that Sparta reclaimed during the last years of the third century, an event often overlooked in classical history, was generated by a social revolution that rocked the Hellenistic world to its core, which in turn led to the most titanic conflict to sweep over the Greek peninsula in decades. This is the story of that revolution and its genius, Cleomenes III.
Prelude: Sparta Before Cleomenes
The Spartan king Areus (309-265 BC(E)) had had some successes during his reign. His was a time full of schemes to recover lost Spartan power, from an alliance with the Ptolemies of Egypt to his expedition to conquer Crete. The Cretan expedition, however, was ruined by the attack of Pyrrhus of Epirus, launched in favor of another claimant to the Spartan dual throne[1]. Areus managed to defend ably enough against that, but died in 265 in battle against Antigonus II Gonatas, king of Macedon, against whom he had allied with the Chremonidean League of Athens and Rhodes. His son Acrotatus had similar dreams of Spartan revanche, and to that end launched an attack on the nearby city of Megalopolis in 260, using its domination by the tyrant Aristodemus as a pretext. But he was killed in the assault, and Sparta once more lapsed into weakness and decay.
It was clear that Sparta needed social reforms. Its phalanx, the core of its army, was made up of citizen-soldiers, but by this time that phalanx had no more than seven hundred members, a dangerously small number for national defense. Too, the phalanx was supposed to keep the helots from rising up and destroying their Spartan masters, but such a check was not a serious one when only seven hundred phalangites remained. The reason for the decline in phalangial numbers lies in several fields. One is simple attrition: the Spartans had been embroiled in war since the time of Thermopylae, and their replacement rate for their hoplites was extremely low (due in large part to their eugenical practices and brutal training). Another was financial. The Spartans never had all that powerful of an economy to begin with, but the expansion of Aegean trade caused a major influx of cash into their citizen body, with the result that those citizen-soldiers who made more profits began to buy out the smaller landowners. All of the Equals (homoioi, the men who made up the phalanx) had to own land, and dispossessed phalangites were reduced to the status of hypomeiones, second-class citizenry. This reduction of the available manpower within the citizenry had coincided with Sparta's burst of prosperity following its victory over Athens, but soon its effects could be seen in the poor performance of the phalanx against the other Greek states in the Corinthian and Theban wars. After the Battle of Leuctra, the situation was made worse when the victorious Thebans stripped Sparta of the rich territory of Messenia, home to many helots (and thus a free source of labor and grain). The Spartan economy had crashed, and geopolitically it was now checked by the establishment of Messenia and the aforementioned city of Megalopolis as strong independent states on its borders.
These problems existed to some extent in the rest of the Greek world, too, but in Sparta they were made worse. Constant warfare had seriously undermined the free smallholding class, the same class that provided the backbone of the classical hoplite phalanx. (This was also beginning to force a transition in the armies of the Greek cities to a more Macedonian model, relying on combined arms forces that included more lightly armed soldiers and on paid mercenaries.) As the great cities - Corinth, Athens, Elis, and so forth - swelled with former farmers fleeing the destruction in the countryside, the urban proletarian class grew, with accompanying political activity in those cities as well.
So radical schemes were beginning to proliferate in Greece, but at Sparta most of all: discussion on abolition of all outstanding debts, on massive land redistribution, and even to free helots to increase the size of the phalanx. These schemes were not philosophically motivated - though some Stoic influence can be seen - but rather were pet projects of the dispossessed former upper class. In the short term, the Spartans felt, this would help prevent a real revolution by the helots, overthrowing the Spartan state from below. In the long term, though, these radical social proposals would paradoxically end in the reestablishment of a proper Lycurgan state, the elimination of the new luxuries that had undermined Spartan morals, and most of all the Spartans would once more be at the head of the best army in the Greek world.
These proposals finally found their champion in Agis IV, a Eurypontid king, who took the throne in 245 BC(E). The need to expand the phalanx was deeply impressed upon him both by his Lycurgan upbringing and by his experiences in the ongoing war against the Achaeans. Antigonus II, perpetual bogeyman and the man who controlled both the Piraeus (thus giving him effective control of Attica) and the Acrocorinth (which controlled Corinth, which in turn controlled the gate into and out of the Peloponnese), was at war with the Achaean League, led by the young dynamo Aratus of Sicyon. Aratus had begun the war with a sneak attack on the Acrocorinth; he then followed it up with a descent upon the port of Lechaeum. Fearful of the increasing strength of the Achaean League, Agis led an army against them, but after an initial success, capturing Pellene, Aratus himself arrived and defeated the contemptible little Spartan force, driving them out again.
Agis IV: Precursor to Revolution
So in that year (243 BC(E)) Agis maneuvered one of his friends, a Lysander, into the ephorate and had him introduce a land redistribution scheme. Half of the Spartan land would be divided up into 4,500 lots, to be given to the Equals and the best of the perioikoi (some of those second-class citizens mentioned before); the other half would be awarded to 15,000 of the other perioikoi. These measures would vastly increase the size of the well-trained phalanx and would relieve some of the social burden, but were clearly opposed by some of the richer landed class. These men found their champion in Agis' Agiad counterpart, Leonidas II. Leonidas contacted the other members of the gerousia and persuaded them to vote down Agis' plan (doubtless aided by bribes provided by the richer Spartans). Infuriated by this delay, Agis had his pet ephor Lysander declare Leonidas anathema, for having lived at a foreigner's court (namely, that of Seleucus II) and for having adopted their dissolute and morally outrageous ways. Leonidas was accordingly deposed and replaced with his pliable son-in-law Cleombrotus.
But this was not the end of Leonidas' resistance. Upon the end of Lysander's term in office, he returned to the city and began conspiring with the new ephors to put Lysander and another of Agis' supporters, Mandrocleides, on trial. The two got wind of these plans and went to Agis, who formulated a scheme to launch a coup and replace the ephors. Leonidas was briefly driven out by the new men in office, but he only fled to Tegea, just to the north of Sparta, where he could be protected by one Agesilaus. That Agesilaus opened channels with Agis and his cronies, and convinced him that the only way to secure the cooperation of the wealthy for the land-redistribution scheme would be to cancel all of their debts. Agis' cohorts in the ephorate duly did so, but as it turned out the advice had merely been a delaying tactic for Leonidas to build up an army and displace Agis.
Agis was prevented from moving on Tegea by the missives of Aratus of Sicyon. 'Like an unlucky lover', Aratus had made several descents on Athens and the Piraeus in his ongoing Macedonian war, and each time had failed miserably. Now he was looking for help from his old enemy Sparta, and Agis agreed, not wanting to see either Macedon or Achaea gain too much power. While he was away at the Isthmus, Leonidas struck, marching south with his army and reoccupying Sparta. Upon Agis' return, he and Cleombrotus were arrested and put through a kangaroo court trial. Cleombrotus, because he was Leonidas' son in law, was allowed to go into exile. Agis was not so lucky; the ephors, for the first time, condemned a king to death, and he was strangled in 241 BC(E).
The Making of Cleomenes
Agis IV's wife, Agiatis, was kept in the family by the victorious Leonidas, who had her married off to his young son Cleomenes III. She apparently worked on him, laying out her first husband's old schemes and plans for land redistribution (which, due to first the stalling of Agesilaus and then the clear opposition of Leonidas, had never got passed), and soon he too became a convert to the revolutionary ideal. But the time was not right, for the Greek world was (more or less) at peace. Aratus had finally given up on the Piraeus and agreed to a truce with Antigonus II in 241; two years later the old king would be dead. That peace, however, would not last. Antigonus' successor Demetrius II would soon begin meddling in Epirus (which had collapsed into virtual anarchy), and in 239, his old allies the Aetolian League, combined with Aratus at the head of the Achaeans, would explode the 'War of Demetrius' against him, with the backing of Ptolemy III.
Sparta under the last years of Leonidas II (who would reign until 235 BC(E)) was quiescent. She did not attempt to involve herself in the war of Demetrius, and her ruler Leonidas was staunchly opposed to any attempts at any sort of reform. Upon Leonidas' death, his son Cleomenes III took the throne. That year was accompanied by the acquisition, by the Achaean League, of a new member, namely the formerly pro-Macedonian polis of Megalopolis, a strategic position whose seizure allowed Aratus both to check Sparta and to eliminate a potential threat by Demetrius in his rear. It also, however, confused the politics of the League even more, for the tyrant of Megalopolis, one Lydiades, would become Aratus' strongest political opponent. Action against Cleomenes thus became relatively unlikely, so he - under the tutelage of his wife - was able to take action.
The first years of his reign were surprisingly - or perhaps not so surprisingly - quiet. Cleomenes worked with the ephors, still dominated by supporters of his dead father. He recognized them as the true power in Sparta, for they had had a king killed. For the Achaeans and others, this was a man to nevertheless be approached cautiously. His wife's social leanings were well known, and it had been expected for some time that he would be revolutionary in nature and action. But at the same time, Aratus needed some help against the Macedonians. Demetrius II had been initially defeated by the fearsome combination of the two Leagues, but Macedon had great strength, and the king also elected to call on the Illyrians to aid him. The Illyrians, fighting under Queen Teuta, engaged in piracy throughout the Adriatic and pillaged Aetolian coastal possessions. They would eventually invite the ire of Rome, but for now Aratus needed real allies, and to that purpose he looked to bolster Spartan power, even if it meant approaching Cleomenes. His opponent Lydiades urged war against the Spartans, but Aratus - who was focused more on Argos and the Macedonian conflict - instead persuaded the Aetolians to cede him the Peloponnesian cities of Mantinea and Tegea.
The War of Demetrius was, in the meantime, taking interesting turns. In 233 Demetrius' general Bithys marched south and smashed Aratus' army at Phylacia (for which he was voted honors by the Athenian assembly, in an ironic twist that made Aratus think twice about 'liberating' that city). But from this success came a disastrous sequel. Epirus, where Demetrius had set up a compliant puppet monarchy, had collapsed into civil war, out of which emerged a republic that federated itself with Acarnania. This revolutionary state, with no small amount of power due to the Acarnanian acquisition, provided a dangerous threat to Demetrius' western border. And to the north, the Dardanians of Scupi began to make trouble, Macedonia's perpetual problem. Demetrius moved north to combat this threat, but in 229 he was defeated and killed by the barbarians. His son, Philip V, was but nine years old, and thus required a guardian. Demetrius' cousin, Antigonus 'Doson', stepped up to the plate and took over the thankless job of regent, agreeing to peace with the Achaeans due to a few events. One was the revolt of Thessaly, which was normally under Macedonian control and was the source of much of Macedon's cavalry. Another was the seizure of Athens by the populace, who had bribed the Macedonian garrison with 150 talents (20 of which were donated by Aratus). Though Athens declined membership in the Achaean League, she also was no longer under Macedon's thumb, and entered a period of relative peace, staying on reasonably good terms with both.
Now that Antigonus III was cleaning up his own affairs, Achaea looked very imposing and threatening indeed, especially with the demagogue Lydiades constantly railing against Sparta and attempting to get war measures passed. The ephors thus ordered the still-quiet Cleomenes to seize several cities on the Achaean border, including Megalopolis. The Spartans launched their expedition in 229 BC(E), and the Achaeans, finally waking up to the threat, declared war within a few months at the urgings of Lydiades. Aratus, though, was general of the League, and he made no immediate effort against the Spartans. It fell to Lydiades, who had the position of second-in-command, to take the field at the Battle of Laodicea, and he did so in a fury, launching an unsupported charge against the Spartans that failed miserably and got him killed. One is tempted to speculate that Aratus planned this end for his political opponent all along.
But if this were a scheme of Aratus', it was an extremely dangerous one. The League normally would have been able to best the weakened Spartans, but Cleomenes had risked fiscal disaster by acquiring mercenaries to bolster his Spartan elites, and these mercenaries were beating Megalopolitan forces with frightening ease. (The Spartan state was short of cash due to this initiative and is thus one of the few Greek cities to have failed to contribute monies to help rebuild Rhodes after the earthquake there in 227.) Aratus was soon short of troops to send against the Spartans, and elected to sound out the Macedonians about coming south to help him fight. But the staunch opponent of Macedonian imperialism could not be seen openly contacting his enemies, so he used the Megalopolitans to contact Antigonus as secret intermediaries, using their old relationship as Macedonian allies. Antigonus agreed to come fight the Spartans - for he too was fearful of social revolution, even though the Epirote League had been successfully cowed - but with the proviso that the Achaean assembly had to make a formal request. Aratus was unwilling to go that far, and had in fact only wanted to sound out the Macedonians, so he spoke against the proposal and it was thus voted down.
Revolution and War
Doubtless Aratus' job in blocking the Macedonian proposal was made easier by Cleomenes' easing of pressure on Megalopolis. In 227 he returned to Sparta with his mercenaries (leaving the Spartan troops in the field) and prepared to make use of his recent successes. He knew from Agis' failure that only an autocracy could push through social reforms; even trying to stay within constitutional measures would certainly backfire. He had not the money to bribe people as had his predecessor, but with the recent honors won from the war against Achaea and his position at the head of a mercenary army loyal to him alone, he could persuade men on the fence, and so he did.
With this support he launched a coup d'etat against the ephors, four of whom he had killed. The ephorate was abolished and its position in oversight of the kings was eliminated. To wipe out the power of the great landholders, Cleomenes simply exiled them, and awarded all of their land, as well as his and his family's, to the state for redistribution. He recalled old exiles and awarded them some of the new state land, and gave the rest to a new group of citizens, from not only some foreigners but also perioikoi. (Even the new citizens, though, had to come from a 'good family'; Cleomenes was, after all, reestablishing an ultra-Lycurgan Sparta.) He also canceled all outstanding debts and assigned the conduct of the agoge, the old Spartan training system, to his Stoic tutor Sphaerus.
Cleomenes III was now master of Sparta, a position reinforced when his Eurypontid counterpart (and stepson) Eudamidas III died and was replaced by Eucleidas, his own brother and a clear puppet. Agiads now held both of the kingships, and the tradition of balance was overthrown. Polybius, the Achaean chronicler, would later call him tyrannos, having eliminated a legitimate constitution and replaced it with his own perversion. And it is plain to see that that is what he did, but the alternative (to him) was unthinkable: the end of Sparta as a great polis, and social revolution from below. Better to launch it from above, where it could be controlled. To underline his hold on the Spartan revolution, he had his mercenaries enroll in the agoge, forming a private army within the state.
Cleomenes' aims may have been more oriented towards reviving the Spartan army to its former preeminence, but to all of his neighbors the implications were social revolution, encouraged by the Stoics he kept at Sparta. Expanding the citizen body, redistributing land, and canceling debts were revolutionary proposals, and imagination will have done the rest. This was accompanied, of course, by increasing social unrest within the cities of the Achaean League and the rest of the Peloponnese. The combination of real increase in power and perceived increase in Spartan power induced Ptolemy III to switch his financial aid from Aratus to Cleomenes as an opponent of Macedon; the discussions in the Achaean assembly over a Macedonian alliance cannot have gone unnoticed. So Cleomenes' financial troubles were saved, mostly, but at the price of sending his mother and children to Egypt as hostages.
Aratus had recaptured Mantinea in Cleomenes' absence, but in 226 Cleomenes returned from Sparta with his new model army (equipped with the Macedonian pike, the sarissa) and drove the Achaeans out, subsequently pwning them at the Battle of Hecatombaeum. This, combined with Antigonus Doson's refusal to aid the Achaeans unless he was awarded control of the Acrocorinth - a demand that Aratus found intolerable - conspired to allow negotiations later that year, the result of which was a treaty that saw Sparta assume hegemony in the Achaean League, returning prisoners and all conquered territory as a sop to Aratus. Cleomenes was only prevented from ratifying this treaty because he got sick, and in the intervening winter Aratus withdrew the proposal and got some nerve, having been elected general again. Breaking off negotiations may have seemed like a good ploy when it happened, but Cleomenes (recovered from his illness) clearly had the best of the fighting in 225. When negotiations were reopened that winter, Cleomenes wanted more, namely control of the Acrocorinth for himself, a clear affront to its liberator Aratus. This, combined with his hatred for Cleomenes' espousal of social revolution, prevented him from agreeing.
But Aratus' refusal to come to terms continued to have devastating impact on the League. Cleomenes was able to conquer Corinth and the Argolid, and besieged Acrocorinth; Aratus' intransigence also drove him to make war on Sicyon, Aratus' home town. All appeals to the other powers of Greece (Athens and Aetolia) failed, and Aratus finally elected to come to terms with Antigonus Doson, and give away Acrocorinth as the price for destroying Cleomenes and revolution. He also managed to parlay the desperate situation into a tyranny for himself, becoming a sort of autocrat within the League, and awarded with his own personal bodyguard. Antigonus was informed of the agreement and immediately moved south, and Cleomenes marched north to counter the threat. The Cleomenean War was now entering the decisive phase.
Endgame
Antigonus' march south revealed one of the more ugly truths about Cleomenes: he was first and foremost a Spartan old-style imperialist, and when he abandoned the attack on the propertied-class-dominated Achaean League to oppose Antigonus at the Isthmus, his support in the countryside - which had briefly flared into social anarchy - began to melt away. At Argos, the 'alliance' with Sparta was being reconsidered even before Cleomenes met the Macedonians in battle. And Antigonus was adeptly engaging in behind the scenes diplomacy, for he managed to get Ptolemy to cut off his subventions to the Spartans. This forced Cleomenes into further drastic action, selling freedom to six thousand helots to incorporate them into his phalanx and bolster his coffers. Manumitting the helots certainly improved his radical credentials, but the circumstances in which it took place clearly meant that he was out for war first and foremost.
Cleomenes constructed a defensive line at the Isthmus and managed to hold off Antigonus for awhile, but the Macedonian had plenty of men. While keeping Cleomenes occupied with the main force, he dispatched Aratus to Argos to raise a revolt against Cleomenes, who had failed to deliver on his promise of social revolution. At the same time he tightened his alliances, resurrecting the old Greek League of Alexander to include Thessaly, Epirus, Achaea, and Boeotia. This was an alliance of states against social revolution (it is an indicator of Macedonian recovery that Antigonus was able to impose a membership in a counterrevolutionary alliance upon the revolutionary Epirote federation), and a instrument for the furtherance of Macedonian power. This propaganda tool, combined with the seizure of Argos (which an expedition by Cleomenes' stepfather Megistonous failed to prevent) made Cleomenes fearful of encirclement and induced him to abandon the Isthmus.
The next year, 223, was not successful for Cleomenes either. Superior Macedonian and allied manpower allowed Antigonus to seize both Tegea and Orchomenus, opening an aperture into Laconia. Cleomenes was unable to outmaneuver his more numerous opponents, and thus prepared in 222 to stake it all on a single battle. The news of the fall of Mantinea, Heraea, and Telephusa cannot have improved his position. But Antigonus, thinking the war practically won, sent his Macedonian troops home, staying only with his mercenaries during the winter. Cleomenes seized his chance and surprised the defenders of Megalopolis, one of the four great cities of the League, capturing the city entirely. The loss of Megalopolis threatened to turn the tide of the war again. Antigonus got his Macedonian troops back to the Peloponnese and prepared to try to break into Laconia. Cleomenes raided Argive territory to try to bring them over onto his side, convincing them that Aratus and Antigonus could not protect them. This failed, though, and Cleomenes took up position on a hill at Sellasia.
Antigonus arrived at Sellasia and was unable to dislodge Cleomenes by maneuver, so decided to attack the entrenched hill position. The Macedonian infantry surged up the hill, but was at a clear disadvantage due to the height advantage the Spartans held; too, the allied Achaean troops were unprotected from the rear, having insufficient cavalry. Cleomenes dispatched a force of light infantry and phalangites to envelop the Achaeans, and for some time the allies were hard pressed. At the last second, though, a cavalry commander from Megalopolis, Philopoemon (who would later go on to greater things at the head of the Achaean League), gathered some horsemen together on his own initiative and struck the enveloping troops in the rear, routing them. The disorder in these ranks seeped through the remainder of the Spartan army and turned into a general rout after the Macedonians renewed their attack and broke the left flank of the Spartan army. Cleomenes managed to escape, but his defeat was total and his army was broken; he told the citizenry of Sparta to accept the allied terms and took ship at Gytheum to Egypt.
Reaction
Antigonus III became the first foreign conqueror to enter Sparta in triumph after the Battle of Sellasia. He took the opportunity to roll back many of Cleomenes' reforms. The cornerstone, the strong kingship unfettered by ephors, was eliminated, and a new ephorate was given total control over the state. While some of the citizenry that Cleomenes had added to the rolls stayed as such, many had been killed in the rout following the battle, reducing Spartan power to an acceptable level. Too, Antigonus looked to the future, worrying about the Achaeans, and wishing the Spartans to be a check on Aratus' anti-Macedonian ambitions, which would certainly be renewed with the peace. Sparta was forced into the Macedonian orbit as a member of their League.
Cleomenes had fled to the court of Ptolemy III, and immediately began trying to resurrect his fortunes, gaining an allowance from the initially-cautious pharaoh and the promise of a fleet and army to reclaim Sparta. But Ptolemy III's death in 221 BC(E) and replacement by Ptolemy IV ruined the Spartan's hopes. Ptolemy IV was young at his accession, and had to rely on ministers; one of these, Sosibius (who would later orchestrate the war that led to the disastrous Battle of Panium), convinced him that Cleomenes was a danger and a social malcontent. The Spartan king was imprisoned, but managed to break out in 219 in a last attempt at revolution, trying to raise the Alexandrian mob against Ptolemy. The attempt failed, and Cleomenes committed suicide in true Stoic fashion.
Antigonus' victory over 'imperialistic particularism' and Sparta left him the most popular man among the propertied classes of Greece, but he would not last long to enjoy the fruits of his victory. Fighting against the same Dardanians that had killed Demetrius II, he won the battle but died of tuberculosis shortly afterward, living long enough only to make arrangements for the young Philip V. Philip would have an excellent position from which to start, as his regent had left immense reserves of cash, power, and goodwill behind.
The specter haunting Greece, social revolution, had briefly been allayed by the defeat of Cleomenes, though it is of course debatable how much he really meant to bring it up. Even as used as means to an end, social change was a powerful message, and one that might easily have got out of control, as it nearly did in 225 and 224. This problem would reappear much later, when Macedonian power had eroded but Rome had not fully supplanted it: Mithridates brought this banner up once more when Roman paymasters had supplanted the rich Greeks. But by and large, that specter was fended off. Sparta returned to relative obscurity, even with the brief break of Nabis' tyranny, and the Achaeans went on to greater things before their own disastrous war in 146. And in greater geopolitical terms, the Cleomenean War and its ancillaries saw the first intervention of Rome into the Greek world. The Illyrians that Demetrius II had called in had aroused the ire of the Italian merchants, who drove the Republic into war; with ease and aplomb, the Romans landed in Illyria, annihilated the few fighting forces that the pirates could cobble together, and left as soon as they had come, like a bolt from the blue. Displaced Illyrians would fight in both armies as mercenaries, and a large contingent made up part of the Macedonian and allied force at Sellasia. This Roman action had been brief, and the Romans had been reluctant to fight initially, and eager to leave. This would not be the case later on.
The classical era was a time of warfare, and nowhere can this be evinced better than in a look at the state of Sparta. From a confused beginning, shrouded in myth and legend, that city rose to preeminence among the cities of the Greek world, and famously proved its citizen-soldiers' immense skill at the defense of Thermopylae, where a vastly outnumbered force inflicted disproportionate casualties on the attacking Persians and fought down to the last man. That military elite was bred for war by eugenics and strenuous, lifelong training, and fed by a vast body of slaves (helots).
But the Spartans, following that apogee, had sunk very low a few centuries later. They had first been bloodied in the Corinthian War, in which their old foe Athens had regained a measure of its former power; they were nearly destroyed by the Thebans a few decades later, when Epaminondas and Pelopidas led a new model army against them at Leuctra (371 BC(E)) and Mantinea (362 BC(E)). During the time of Alexander the Great, the Spartans were so ineffectual and weak as to not even be included in the Macedonian-led Greek League. While the Spartans managed to fend off the assault of Pyrrhus of Epirus, they were seriously bloodied by the attack. Sparta was in major social unrest, weak politically, and demographically almost a nonfactor, by the mid-third century BC(E).
The brief flash of glory that Sparta reclaimed during the last years of the third century, an event often overlooked in classical history, was generated by a social revolution that rocked the Hellenistic world to its core, which in turn led to the most titanic conflict to sweep over the Greek peninsula in decades. This is the story of that revolution and its genius, Cleomenes III.
Prelude: Sparta Before Cleomenes
The Spartan king Areus (309-265 BC(E)) had had some successes during his reign. His was a time full of schemes to recover lost Spartan power, from an alliance with the Ptolemies of Egypt to his expedition to conquer Crete. The Cretan expedition, however, was ruined by the attack of Pyrrhus of Epirus, launched in favor of another claimant to the Spartan dual throne[1]. Areus managed to defend ably enough against that, but died in 265 in battle against Antigonus II Gonatas, king of Macedon, against whom he had allied with the Chremonidean League of Athens and Rhodes. His son Acrotatus had similar dreams of Spartan revanche, and to that end launched an attack on the nearby city of Megalopolis in 260, using its domination by the tyrant Aristodemus as a pretext. But he was killed in the assault, and Sparta once more lapsed into weakness and decay.
It was clear that Sparta needed social reforms. Its phalanx, the core of its army, was made up of citizen-soldiers, but by this time that phalanx had no more than seven hundred members, a dangerously small number for national defense. Too, the phalanx was supposed to keep the helots from rising up and destroying their Spartan masters, but such a check was not a serious one when only seven hundred phalangites remained. The reason for the decline in phalangial numbers lies in several fields. One is simple attrition: the Spartans had been embroiled in war since the time of Thermopylae, and their replacement rate for their hoplites was extremely low (due in large part to their eugenical practices and brutal training). Another was financial. The Spartans never had all that powerful of an economy to begin with, but the expansion of Aegean trade caused a major influx of cash into their citizen body, with the result that those citizen-soldiers who made more profits began to buy out the smaller landowners. All of the Equals (homoioi, the men who made up the phalanx) had to own land, and dispossessed phalangites were reduced to the status of hypomeiones, second-class citizenry. This reduction of the available manpower within the citizenry had coincided with Sparta's burst of prosperity following its victory over Athens, but soon its effects could be seen in the poor performance of the phalanx against the other Greek states in the Corinthian and Theban wars. After the Battle of Leuctra, the situation was made worse when the victorious Thebans stripped Sparta of the rich territory of Messenia, home to many helots (and thus a free source of labor and grain). The Spartan economy had crashed, and geopolitically it was now checked by the establishment of Messenia and the aforementioned city of Megalopolis as strong independent states on its borders.
These problems existed to some extent in the rest of the Greek world, too, but in Sparta they were made worse. Constant warfare had seriously undermined the free smallholding class, the same class that provided the backbone of the classical hoplite phalanx. (This was also beginning to force a transition in the armies of the Greek cities to a more Macedonian model, relying on combined arms forces that included more lightly armed soldiers and on paid mercenaries.) As the great cities - Corinth, Athens, Elis, and so forth - swelled with former farmers fleeing the destruction in the countryside, the urban proletarian class grew, with accompanying political activity in those cities as well.
So radical schemes were beginning to proliferate in Greece, but at Sparta most of all: discussion on abolition of all outstanding debts, on massive land redistribution, and even to free helots to increase the size of the phalanx. These schemes were not philosophically motivated - though some Stoic influence can be seen - but rather were pet projects of the dispossessed former upper class. In the short term, the Spartans felt, this would help prevent a real revolution by the helots, overthrowing the Spartan state from below. In the long term, though, these radical social proposals would paradoxically end in the reestablishment of a proper Lycurgan state, the elimination of the new luxuries that had undermined Spartan morals, and most of all the Spartans would once more be at the head of the best army in the Greek world.
These proposals finally found their champion in Agis IV, a Eurypontid king, who took the throne in 245 BC(E). The need to expand the phalanx was deeply impressed upon him both by his Lycurgan upbringing and by his experiences in the ongoing war against the Achaeans. Antigonus II, perpetual bogeyman and the man who controlled both the Piraeus (thus giving him effective control of Attica) and the Acrocorinth (which controlled Corinth, which in turn controlled the gate into and out of the Peloponnese), was at war with the Achaean League, led by the young dynamo Aratus of Sicyon. Aratus had begun the war with a sneak attack on the Acrocorinth; he then followed it up with a descent upon the port of Lechaeum. Fearful of the increasing strength of the Achaean League, Agis led an army against them, but after an initial success, capturing Pellene, Aratus himself arrived and defeated the contemptible little Spartan force, driving them out again.
Agis IV: Precursor to Revolution
So in that year (243 BC(E)) Agis maneuvered one of his friends, a Lysander, into the ephorate and had him introduce a land redistribution scheme. Half of the Spartan land would be divided up into 4,500 lots, to be given to the Equals and the best of the perioikoi (some of those second-class citizens mentioned before); the other half would be awarded to 15,000 of the other perioikoi. These measures would vastly increase the size of the well-trained phalanx and would relieve some of the social burden, but were clearly opposed by some of the richer landed class. These men found their champion in Agis' Agiad counterpart, Leonidas II. Leonidas contacted the other members of the gerousia and persuaded them to vote down Agis' plan (doubtless aided by bribes provided by the richer Spartans). Infuriated by this delay, Agis had his pet ephor Lysander declare Leonidas anathema, for having lived at a foreigner's court (namely, that of Seleucus II) and for having adopted their dissolute and morally outrageous ways. Leonidas was accordingly deposed and replaced with his pliable son-in-law Cleombrotus.
But this was not the end of Leonidas' resistance. Upon the end of Lysander's term in office, he returned to the city and began conspiring with the new ephors to put Lysander and another of Agis' supporters, Mandrocleides, on trial. The two got wind of these plans and went to Agis, who formulated a scheme to launch a coup and replace the ephors. Leonidas was briefly driven out by the new men in office, but he only fled to Tegea, just to the north of Sparta, where he could be protected by one Agesilaus. That Agesilaus opened channels with Agis and his cronies, and convinced him that the only way to secure the cooperation of the wealthy for the land-redistribution scheme would be to cancel all of their debts. Agis' cohorts in the ephorate duly did so, but as it turned out the advice had merely been a delaying tactic for Leonidas to build up an army and displace Agis.
Agis was prevented from moving on Tegea by the missives of Aratus of Sicyon. 'Like an unlucky lover', Aratus had made several descents on Athens and the Piraeus in his ongoing Macedonian war, and each time had failed miserably. Now he was looking for help from his old enemy Sparta, and Agis agreed, not wanting to see either Macedon or Achaea gain too much power. While he was away at the Isthmus, Leonidas struck, marching south with his army and reoccupying Sparta. Upon Agis' return, he and Cleombrotus were arrested and put through a kangaroo court trial. Cleombrotus, because he was Leonidas' son in law, was allowed to go into exile. Agis was not so lucky; the ephors, for the first time, condemned a king to death, and he was strangled in 241 BC(E).
The Making of Cleomenes
Agis IV's wife, Agiatis, was kept in the family by the victorious Leonidas, who had her married off to his young son Cleomenes III. She apparently worked on him, laying out her first husband's old schemes and plans for land redistribution (which, due to first the stalling of Agesilaus and then the clear opposition of Leonidas, had never got passed), and soon he too became a convert to the revolutionary ideal. But the time was not right, for the Greek world was (more or less) at peace. Aratus had finally given up on the Piraeus and agreed to a truce with Antigonus II in 241; two years later the old king would be dead. That peace, however, would not last. Antigonus' successor Demetrius II would soon begin meddling in Epirus (which had collapsed into virtual anarchy), and in 239, his old allies the Aetolian League, combined with Aratus at the head of the Achaeans, would explode the 'War of Demetrius' against him, with the backing of Ptolemy III.
Sparta under the last years of Leonidas II (who would reign until 235 BC(E)) was quiescent. She did not attempt to involve herself in the war of Demetrius, and her ruler Leonidas was staunchly opposed to any attempts at any sort of reform. Upon Leonidas' death, his son Cleomenes III took the throne. That year was accompanied by the acquisition, by the Achaean League, of a new member, namely the formerly pro-Macedonian polis of Megalopolis, a strategic position whose seizure allowed Aratus both to check Sparta and to eliminate a potential threat by Demetrius in his rear. It also, however, confused the politics of the League even more, for the tyrant of Megalopolis, one Lydiades, would become Aratus' strongest political opponent. Action against Cleomenes thus became relatively unlikely, so he - under the tutelage of his wife - was able to take action.
The first years of his reign were surprisingly - or perhaps not so surprisingly - quiet. Cleomenes worked with the ephors, still dominated by supporters of his dead father. He recognized them as the true power in Sparta, for they had had a king killed. For the Achaeans and others, this was a man to nevertheless be approached cautiously. His wife's social leanings were well known, and it had been expected for some time that he would be revolutionary in nature and action. But at the same time, Aratus needed some help against the Macedonians. Demetrius II had been initially defeated by the fearsome combination of the two Leagues, but Macedon had great strength, and the king also elected to call on the Illyrians to aid him. The Illyrians, fighting under Queen Teuta, engaged in piracy throughout the Adriatic and pillaged Aetolian coastal possessions. They would eventually invite the ire of Rome, but for now Aratus needed real allies, and to that purpose he looked to bolster Spartan power, even if it meant approaching Cleomenes. His opponent Lydiades urged war against the Spartans, but Aratus - who was focused more on Argos and the Macedonian conflict - instead persuaded the Aetolians to cede him the Peloponnesian cities of Mantinea and Tegea.
The War of Demetrius was, in the meantime, taking interesting turns. In 233 Demetrius' general Bithys marched south and smashed Aratus' army at Phylacia (for which he was voted honors by the Athenian assembly, in an ironic twist that made Aratus think twice about 'liberating' that city). But from this success came a disastrous sequel. Epirus, where Demetrius had set up a compliant puppet monarchy, had collapsed into civil war, out of which emerged a republic that federated itself with Acarnania. This revolutionary state, with no small amount of power due to the Acarnanian acquisition, provided a dangerous threat to Demetrius' western border. And to the north, the Dardanians of Scupi began to make trouble, Macedonia's perpetual problem. Demetrius moved north to combat this threat, but in 229 he was defeated and killed by the barbarians. His son, Philip V, was but nine years old, and thus required a guardian. Demetrius' cousin, Antigonus 'Doson', stepped up to the plate and took over the thankless job of regent, agreeing to peace with the Achaeans due to a few events. One was the revolt of Thessaly, which was normally under Macedonian control and was the source of much of Macedon's cavalry. Another was the seizure of Athens by the populace, who had bribed the Macedonian garrison with 150 talents (20 of which were donated by Aratus). Though Athens declined membership in the Achaean League, she also was no longer under Macedon's thumb, and entered a period of relative peace, staying on reasonably good terms with both.
Now that Antigonus III was cleaning up his own affairs, Achaea looked very imposing and threatening indeed, especially with the demagogue Lydiades constantly railing against Sparta and attempting to get war measures passed. The ephors thus ordered the still-quiet Cleomenes to seize several cities on the Achaean border, including Megalopolis. The Spartans launched their expedition in 229 BC(E), and the Achaeans, finally waking up to the threat, declared war within a few months at the urgings of Lydiades. Aratus, though, was general of the League, and he made no immediate effort against the Spartans. It fell to Lydiades, who had the position of second-in-command, to take the field at the Battle of Laodicea, and he did so in a fury, launching an unsupported charge against the Spartans that failed miserably and got him killed. One is tempted to speculate that Aratus planned this end for his political opponent all along.
But if this were a scheme of Aratus', it was an extremely dangerous one. The League normally would have been able to best the weakened Spartans, but Cleomenes had risked fiscal disaster by acquiring mercenaries to bolster his Spartan elites, and these mercenaries were beating Megalopolitan forces with frightening ease. (The Spartan state was short of cash due to this initiative and is thus one of the few Greek cities to have failed to contribute monies to help rebuild Rhodes after the earthquake there in 227.) Aratus was soon short of troops to send against the Spartans, and elected to sound out the Macedonians about coming south to help him fight. But the staunch opponent of Macedonian imperialism could not be seen openly contacting his enemies, so he used the Megalopolitans to contact Antigonus as secret intermediaries, using their old relationship as Macedonian allies. Antigonus agreed to come fight the Spartans - for he too was fearful of social revolution, even though the Epirote League had been successfully cowed - but with the proviso that the Achaean assembly had to make a formal request. Aratus was unwilling to go that far, and had in fact only wanted to sound out the Macedonians, so he spoke against the proposal and it was thus voted down.
Revolution and War
Doubtless Aratus' job in blocking the Macedonian proposal was made easier by Cleomenes' easing of pressure on Megalopolis. In 227 he returned to Sparta with his mercenaries (leaving the Spartan troops in the field) and prepared to make use of his recent successes. He knew from Agis' failure that only an autocracy could push through social reforms; even trying to stay within constitutional measures would certainly backfire. He had not the money to bribe people as had his predecessor, but with the recent honors won from the war against Achaea and his position at the head of a mercenary army loyal to him alone, he could persuade men on the fence, and so he did.
With this support he launched a coup d'etat against the ephors, four of whom he had killed. The ephorate was abolished and its position in oversight of the kings was eliminated. To wipe out the power of the great landholders, Cleomenes simply exiled them, and awarded all of their land, as well as his and his family's, to the state for redistribution. He recalled old exiles and awarded them some of the new state land, and gave the rest to a new group of citizens, from not only some foreigners but also perioikoi. (Even the new citizens, though, had to come from a 'good family'; Cleomenes was, after all, reestablishing an ultra-Lycurgan Sparta.) He also canceled all outstanding debts and assigned the conduct of the agoge, the old Spartan training system, to his Stoic tutor Sphaerus.
Cleomenes III was now master of Sparta, a position reinforced when his Eurypontid counterpart (and stepson) Eudamidas III died and was replaced by Eucleidas, his own brother and a clear puppet. Agiads now held both of the kingships, and the tradition of balance was overthrown. Polybius, the Achaean chronicler, would later call him tyrannos, having eliminated a legitimate constitution and replaced it with his own perversion. And it is plain to see that that is what he did, but the alternative (to him) was unthinkable: the end of Sparta as a great polis, and social revolution from below. Better to launch it from above, where it could be controlled. To underline his hold on the Spartan revolution, he had his mercenaries enroll in the agoge, forming a private army within the state.
Cleomenes' aims may have been more oriented towards reviving the Spartan army to its former preeminence, but to all of his neighbors the implications were social revolution, encouraged by the Stoics he kept at Sparta. Expanding the citizen body, redistributing land, and canceling debts were revolutionary proposals, and imagination will have done the rest. This was accompanied, of course, by increasing social unrest within the cities of the Achaean League and the rest of the Peloponnese. The combination of real increase in power and perceived increase in Spartan power induced Ptolemy III to switch his financial aid from Aratus to Cleomenes as an opponent of Macedon; the discussions in the Achaean assembly over a Macedonian alliance cannot have gone unnoticed. So Cleomenes' financial troubles were saved, mostly, but at the price of sending his mother and children to Egypt as hostages.
Aratus had recaptured Mantinea in Cleomenes' absence, but in 226 Cleomenes returned from Sparta with his new model army (equipped with the Macedonian pike, the sarissa) and drove the Achaeans out, subsequently pwning them at the Battle of Hecatombaeum. This, combined with Antigonus Doson's refusal to aid the Achaeans unless he was awarded control of the Acrocorinth - a demand that Aratus found intolerable - conspired to allow negotiations later that year, the result of which was a treaty that saw Sparta assume hegemony in the Achaean League, returning prisoners and all conquered territory as a sop to Aratus. Cleomenes was only prevented from ratifying this treaty because he got sick, and in the intervening winter Aratus withdrew the proposal and got some nerve, having been elected general again. Breaking off negotiations may have seemed like a good ploy when it happened, but Cleomenes (recovered from his illness) clearly had the best of the fighting in 225. When negotiations were reopened that winter, Cleomenes wanted more, namely control of the Acrocorinth for himself, a clear affront to its liberator Aratus. This, combined with his hatred for Cleomenes' espousal of social revolution, prevented him from agreeing.
But Aratus' refusal to come to terms continued to have devastating impact on the League. Cleomenes was able to conquer Corinth and the Argolid, and besieged Acrocorinth; Aratus' intransigence also drove him to make war on Sicyon, Aratus' home town. All appeals to the other powers of Greece (Athens and Aetolia) failed, and Aratus finally elected to come to terms with Antigonus Doson, and give away Acrocorinth as the price for destroying Cleomenes and revolution. He also managed to parlay the desperate situation into a tyranny for himself, becoming a sort of autocrat within the League, and awarded with his own personal bodyguard. Antigonus was informed of the agreement and immediately moved south, and Cleomenes marched north to counter the threat. The Cleomenean War was now entering the decisive phase.
Endgame
Antigonus' march south revealed one of the more ugly truths about Cleomenes: he was first and foremost a Spartan old-style imperialist, and when he abandoned the attack on the propertied-class-dominated Achaean League to oppose Antigonus at the Isthmus, his support in the countryside - which had briefly flared into social anarchy - began to melt away. At Argos, the 'alliance' with Sparta was being reconsidered even before Cleomenes met the Macedonians in battle. And Antigonus was adeptly engaging in behind the scenes diplomacy, for he managed to get Ptolemy to cut off his subventions to the Spartans. This forced Cleomenes into further drastic action, selling freedom to six thousand helots to incorporate them into his phalanx and bolster his coffers. Manumitting the helots certainly improved his radical credentials, but the circumstances in which it took place clearly meant that he was out for war first and foremost.
Cleomenes constructed a defensive line at the Isthmus and managed to hold off Antigonus for awhile, but the Macedonian had plenty of men. While keeping Cleomenes occupied with the main force, he dispatched Aratus to Argos to raise a revolt against Cleomenes, who had failed to deliver on his promise of social revolution. At the same time he tightened his alliances, resurrecting the old Greek League of Alexander to include Thessaly, Epirus, Achaea, and Boeotia. This was an alliance of states against social revolution (it is an indicator of Macedonian recovery that Antigonus was able to impose a membership in a counterrevolutionary alliance upon the revolutionary Epirote federation), and a instrument for the furtherance of Macedonian power. This propaganda tool, combined with the seizure of Argos (which an expedition by Cleomenes' stepfather Megistonous failed to prevent) made Cleomenes fearful of encirclement and induced him to abandon the Isthmus.
The next year, 223, was not successful for Cleomenes either. Superior Macedonian and allied manpower allowed Antigonus to seize both Tegea and Orchomenus, opening an aperture into Laconia. Cleomenes was unable to outmaneuver his more numerous opponents, and thus prepared in 222 to stake it all on a single battle. The news of the fall of Mantinea, Heraea, and Telephusa cannot have improved his position. But Antigonus, thinking the war practically won, sent his Macedonian troops home, staying only with his mercenaries during the winter. Cleomenes seized his chance and surprised the defenders of Megalopolis, one of the four great cities of the League, capturing the city entirely. The loss of Megalopolis threatened to turn the tide of the war again. Antigonus got his Macedonian troops back to the Peloponnese and prepared to try to break into Laconia. Cleomenes raided Argive territory to try to bring them over onto his side, convincing them that Aratus and Antigonus could not protect them. This failed, though, and Cleomenes took up position on a hill at Sellasia.
Antigonus arrived at Sellasia and was unable to dislodge Cleomenes by maneuver, so decided to attack the entrenched hill position. The Macedonian infantry surged up the hill, but was at a clear disadvantage due to the height advantage the Spartans held; too, the allied Achaean troops were unprotected from the rear, having insufficient cavalry. Cleomenes dispatched a force of light infantry and phalangites to envelop the Achaeans, and for some time the allies were hard pressed. At the last second, though, a cavalry commander from Megalopolis, Philopoemon (who would later go on to greater things at the head of the Achaean League), gathered some horsemen together on his own initiative and struck the enveloping troops in the rear, routing them. The disorder in these ranks seeped through the remainder of the Spartan army and turned into a general rout after the Macedonians renewed their attack and broke the left flank of the Spartan army. Cleomenes managed to escape, but his defeat was total and his army was broken; he told the citizenry of Sparta to accept the allied terms and took ship at Gytheum to Egypt.
Reaction
Antigonus III became the first foreign conqueror to enter Sparta in triumph after the Battle of Sellasia. He took the opportunity to roll back many of Cleomenes' reforms. The cornerstone, the strong kingship unfettered by ephors, was eliminated, and a new ephorate was given total control over the state. While some of the citizenry that Cleomenes had added to the rolls stayed as such, many had been killed in the rout following the battle, reducing Spartan power to an acceptable level. Too, Antigonus looked to the future, worrying about the Achaeans, and wishing the Spartans to be a check on Aratus' anti-Macedonian ambitions, which would certainly be renewed with the peace. Sparta was forced into the Macedonian orbit as a member of their League.
Cleomenes had fled to the court of Ptolemy III, and immediately began trying to resurrect his fortunes, gaining an allowance from the initially-cautious pharaoh and the promise of a fleet and army to reclaim Sparta. But Ptolemy III's death in 221 BC(E) and replacement by Ptolemy IV ruined the Spartan's hopes. Ptolemy IV was young at his accession, and had to rely on ministers; one of these, Sosibius (who would later orchestrate the war that led to the disastrous Battle of Panium), convinced him that Cleomenes was a danger and a social malcontent. The Spartan king was imprisoned, but managed to break out in 219 in a last attempt at revolution, trying to raise the Alexandrian mob against Ptolemy. The attempt failed, and Cleomenes committed suicide in true Stoic fashion.
Antigonus' victory over 'imperialistic particularism' and Sparta left him the most popular man among the propertied classes of Greece, but he would not last long to enjoy the fruits of his victory. Fighting against the same Dardanians that had killed Demetrius II, he won the battle but died of tuberculosis shortly afterward, living long enough only to make arrangements for the young Philip V. Philip would have an excellent position from which to start, as his regent had left immense reserves of cash, power, and goodwill behind.
The specter haunting Greece, social revolution, had briefly been allayed by the defeat of Cleomenes, though it is of course debatable how much he really meant to bring it up. Even as used as means to an end, social change was a powerful message, and one that might easily have got out of control, as it nearly did in 225 and 224. This problem would reappear much later, when Macedonian power had eroded but Rome had not fully supplanted it: Mithridates brought this banner up once more when Roman paymasters had supplanted the rich Greeks. But by and large, that specter was fended off. Sparta returned to relative obscurity, even with the brief break of Nabis' tyranny, and the Achaeans went on to greater things before their own disastrous war in 146. And in greater geopolitical terms, the Cleomenean War and its ancillaries saw the first intervention of Rome into the Greek world. The Illyrians that Demetrius II had called in had aroused the ire of the Italian merchants, who drove the Republic into war; with ease and aplomb, the Romans landed in Illyria, annihilated the few fighting forces that the pirates could cobble together, and left as soon as they had come, like a bolt from the blue. Displaced Illyrians would fight in both armies as mercenaries, and a large contingent made up part of the Macedonian and allied force at Sellasia. This Roman action had been brief, and the Romans had been reluctant to fight initially, and eager to leave. This would not be the case later on.
Spare time. Class hasn't started yet, and my buddies hadn't started playing Team Fortress 2 yet. 
