Battles and Wars

Thermopylae is a small mountain pass located northwest of the city-states of Athens and Thebes. During the second Persian invasion, this was the site of a epic battle that is possibly the most famous conflict that the Spartans ever fought in. In 480 BC, Xerxes I of Persia attempted to invade Greece with a gigantic army from all parts of his empire. When the Spartans and Athenians realized that they would have to join together to survive, they formed an army of ten thousand hoplites from all over Greece and marched to Thermopylae to hold off the Persian invasion. Though this was much smaller than the invading army, they believed that they only a small army of men was needed to block the fifty foot pass. The combined Greek forces formed a phalanx behind a short wall and waited for the Persians to attack. When they did, the result was pure bloodshed. A huge wave of Immortals (elite Persian infantry) rushed across battleground and crashed into the phalanx. Every Spartan threw his spear into the army, drew his Xiphos, and began to cut down wave by wave of men. Realizing that the Persians were losing the battle, a Greek man snuck over to the Persian side and informed them of a pass that would lead them around the phalanx, hoping that doing this would win him favor with Xerxes. The Persian army outflanked the phalanx using this route, and King Leonidas (the Spartan leader of the Greek army) sent most of the army home before they were entirely surrounded, leaving only three hundred Spartans and a few hundred other Greek hoplites. Though the Greeks were grossly outnumbered, they were able to hold off the enormous Persian army for a great amount of time until Xerxes ordered a full retreat and destroyed the remaining hoplites with volleys of arrows. Though this was a tragic loss to the Greeks, the heroic last stand allowed enough time for the main army to prepare to fight the final battle at Salamis, which resulted in victory for the Greeks and ended the Persian invasion. Because of the bravery of King Leonidas and his troops, Greece would never be under Persian control. (mouse over the image to see an artistic interpretation of the battle)

During the years after the second Persian invasion, Athens formed alliances with various Greek city-states to create a powerful political entity that later became the Athenian Empire. Fearing that Athens would overtake them in military power, Sparta formed the Peloponnesian League, named after the Peloponnesian Peninsula where Sparta was located. The Peloponnesian League, unlike its Athenian counterpart, was actually a sort of confederacy of city-states headed by Sparta. Each city-state remained independent and could make its own political decisions. Sparta and Athens were already rivals, so it did not take very much for them to go to war. It began on a colony of Sparta's ally, Corinth, called Corcyra. Athens formed an alliance with the colony and began to make moves that were deemed illegal by a previous treaty, so the Peloponnesians threatened war. In 431 BC, Thebes, a Peloponnesian city-state, attacked the Athenian city of Plataea, starting the great Peloponnesian war. The Peloponnesian League all but controlled the ground with its powerful soldiers, but the Athenians had a superior navy to counter this. Essentially, whenever the Spartans would attack Athens and destroy their food sources, the Athenians could survive behind their walls and still get food from the rest of the empire. Whenever Athens would blockade the Peloponnesian peninsula, it would have almost no effect because Sparta was self-sufficient and did not need products from other lands. The war went back and forth between the two powers with no ever truly gaining the upper hand. It was separated by an six-year truce from 421-415 BC, but neither side truly believed the peace would last. After both sides had officially declared war and the fighting had begun, a politician named Alcibiades convinced the Athenians to launch an invasion of Sicily. The combined forces of Spartans and Syracusans defeated the Athenians and destroyed half of their army, crippling the empire. Eventually a series of defeats caused political unrest, and the Athenian democracy was replaced twice by a oligarchies. Sparta, with help from the Persians, built up a navy to rival Athens' and destroyed the Athenians fleet. In 405 BC, Athens finally succumbed to the Peloponnesian league.

The battle of Leuctra marked the beginning of the end of Sparta's control of Greece. After many years of oppressive rule, the Thebans revolted and began a eight year long war with Sparta. In 371 BC, Sparta demanded a peace treaty, but the Thebans declined. In response to this, the Spartan king Cleombrotus brought 10,000 Peloponnesian hoplites (Greek infantry) and 1,000 cavalry to Boeocia, planning to march on and attack Thebes. The Thebans countered this with a much smaller army of 6,000 hoplites and cavalry (the exact number is unknown) under Epaminondas, the Theban military leader. The met at the plain of Leuctra in Boeocia, near Thebes. Epaminondas abandoned the traditional military tactics by enlarging the left wing of the phalanx to have a depth of fifty men and advancing it ahead of the rest of the army. The powerful Theban cavalry defeated its Spartan counterpart, allowing the larger left wing of the phalanx to move forward and outflank the Spartan phalanx. In this brutal attack, King Cleombrotus was killed and much of the Spartan forces destroyed, and Xenophon (a Greek historian) wrote that as many as 1,000 Spartans were killed. This decisive battle reinvented Thebes as one of the most powerful city-states in Greece. After Thebes liberated the Messenians (who had been under Spartan control), Sparta's age of dominance had effectively ended. (mouse over the image to see an artist's interpretation of the battle)