The Battle of Leuctra
Monday, June 22, 2020
We tend to think that a Greek is a Greek is a Greek--"They're all Greeks to us," to mangle a phrase from Shakespeare.
But the modern country of Greece--officially called the "Hellenic Republic"--dates only to the 1820s. Before that the area was held by the Ottoman Empire (and before that, the Byzantine; and before that, the Roman).
But until its subjection to Roman rule in 27 BCE, and the unification that resulted from being a single Roman province, the area of Greece was occupied by a varying number of city-states: relatively small areas centered on a single city, such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Delphi, and Rhodes. A city was called a polis, a root which gave us modern English words like metropolis, politics, policy--and police!
Anyway, the ancient Greeks were not only not citizens of a single country, but were in fact often at war with each other in a series of shifting alliances. (The word "citizen," by the way, derives from the Latin word civitas; what was important was your city, not your country, harking back to the Greek idea of city-states.)
Thus, from 395 to 387 BCE, Sparta was at war against a coalition composed of Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos. This concluded in an uneasy truce, which left open the door to further conflict. Sure enough, in 371, hostilities again broke out in the Battle of Leuctra between Sparta and Thebes (with their allies, the previously-disbanded Boeotian League).
The Boeotians had 8,000 to 9,000 men, and the Spartans perhaps 11,000. Traditionally, Greek generals placed their strongest troops on the right end of their line (a position often weakened by the fact that soldiers wore their shields on their left arms, exposing the right). This meant that the strongest soldiers (the right end) would face the weakest members of the enemy (that side's left). The Boeotian leaders defied the common wisdom and placed their strongest troops on their left, facing the Spartans' strong right.
It worked, and the Thebans and their allies won the day. This marked the beginning of the end of Spartan dominance, and paved the way for the rise of Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander (the Great) three decades later.