The Bronze Lie Review

 

Aside from the Romans, there is no ancient culture more lionized than the Greek city of Sparta. The Spartans enjoy the almost unassailable cultural image of badass, ultimate warriors, men who carved themselves out of the brutality of the world into invincible armies who steamrolled all who stood before them. Even when they lose, like the near legendary battle of Thermopylae, they win because they die heroically defending freedom from evil, tyrannical dictators. It's such an intrinsic part of Western culture that French historian Francois Ollier coined the term "The Spartan Mirage" to describe the near rapturous acclaim the ancient civilization enjoyed then and now.

Which makes Myke Cole's book The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy so incredibly refreshing. Cole looks to achieve two things with his work, present an unbiased overview of Spartan military performance, then use the result of that analysis to punch as many holes as he can in the fetishized myth of who the Spartans were. And, for the most part, Cole is successful in this, walking his readers through every battle the Spartans participated in, from the Archaic era when Sparta is enslaving their neighbors, to the final desperate attempts at relevance before settling into their fate as a tourist trap for the ancient Romans. 

As Cole points out, the Spartans legacy rests on their reputation for being a society of professional soldiers who abhorred wealth, lived in a firmly egalitarian society, and defended their fellow man from tyrants both foreign and domestic. Cole abolishes each of these pillars as he goes, showing us a Sparta that often had to be dragged into fighting, who installed oligarchs and tyrants whenever they had the chance to, who won the Peloponnesian Wars on the back of Persian gold. Also, for a people who hated wealth more than anything, the amount of Spartan generals and kings who flee the city after taking bribes from their enemies becomes something of a running joke as the book continues.

The book is incredibly easy and accessible to read. Part of this comes from Cole's experience as a veteran and his personal testimonies from participating in reenactments using the same gear the hoplites themselves used.  His ability to guide the reader through the momentum of a battle, breakdown the tactical and strategic goals of not only the Spartans but the people they fought against gives the reader a clear sense of cause-and-effect out of the chaotic mess of human decisions on the battlefield. Cole's most helpful tool in this is his self-coined Law of Competence, which holds that everyone involved in these battles knew what they were doing, which allows us to discard anything in the ancient sources that depends on the people involved being complete morons. There's a tendency to take ancient sources at their word, completely at face value. We forget that people have always been people, every writer has an agenda and crafts their work to fulfill it. So it's nice to see Cole call bullshit when necessary and present what he is always clear is his own best, and personal, interpretation of the battle and the participants motives.

All throughout, Cole is constantly checking the presentation of the Spartans against their actions, calling them out and giving praise as the situation requires. Which makes the one exception to this stand out all the more. Part of the Spartan myth is that they were raised to be the ultimate warriors through the agoge - basically the school system for Spartan citizens. Cole largely goes along with the interpretation of the agoge as a early military academy except, his own analysis should lead him to question this. The boys in the agoge were separated from their families at the age of seven, were intentionally under fed and sleep deprived, and then encouraged to steal food to make up for the shortfall in their rations. Cole says that the idea of this is supposedly to make the Spartans learn to be stealthy and be fleet of foot around their enemies and that the regular beatings and trauma of going through the program would engender a shared sense of hardship which would solidify unit cohesiveness when battle came. Except, as Cole has regular reason to say, the Spartans almost never scout their enemies or the battlefield ahead of time, and their famed sense of cohesion is much more "touch and go" then everyone has been led to believe.

So if the agoge is a training academy, it abysmally fails to impart the lessons of stealth or unit cohesion and should be rightly brought low for doing so. More than likely though, the agoge was never meant to be a military academy, but a tool to beat adherence to Sparta's social structure into the younger generation. The shared sense of trauma may not have created military cohesion, but it probably did ensure the arch conservative streak that Sparta was famous for continued, even has Sparta itself faded into irrelevance.

Overall, what we see unfold in Cole's pages is a Sparta that did have an advantage in the straight ahead phalanx to phalanx battle that was standard in Greece at the time, but Cole is always insistent pointing out that this advantage came from the Spartans being the tiny aristocratic minority that sat at the top of a pyramid of slavery and oppression. That the Spartans trained at all is what separated them from the other Greek polis' totally amateur armies, but it wasn't regimented training run by the government, it was just aristocratic dandies filling up their free-time. What we also see is that this is also the only area Sparta had any advantage or really even competence in. As mentioned, Sparta almost never engaged in scouting or reconnaissance work before their battles, they are absolutely god-awful at sieges -seriously, the amount of times the Spartans are stopped dead in their tracks by their enemy moving behind a wall is hysterical. 

What especially helps is that Cole doesn't treat this like the Spartans are a sports team. While he does helpfully keep a running tally of their wins, losses, and draws, Cole understands that the numbers aren't the story. Thermopylae for example is one of the most decisive defeats in world history, yet it's the Spartans most celebrated battle. The story is that the Spartans knew the battle was hopeless but went any way, sacrificing themselves to save Greece from the tides of the Persian horde. None of that is true, as Cole lays out. Why send for reinforcements, for example, if the point is to die anyway? The battle of Thermopylae was meant to be the holding point, the best place they could use to neutralize the Persians massive numerical advantage. The Greeks amassed an army of 7,00 men to do this, then got flattened like pancakes in three days. Turning the battle into an intentionally doomed crusade was a propaganda story invented on the fly to keep the Greek morale from collapsing.

And yet, not all defeats are created equal. In a different context, like the Battle of Leuctra which saw the Sacred Band of Thebes completely annihilate the Spartan military and permanently crippled Sparta to the point where their power essentially disintegrated. What Cole does is put each battle in the context of the war the Spartans were fighting along with how they fit into the broader mythology we crafted for them over the millennia.

The picture that emerges of Sparta is a society of aristocrats who were terrified of the slaves who made up 90% of their society. Which, is fair, considering the multiple slave uprisings Sparta would then have to spend years putting down. Over and over, we see Sparta sending out token participation forces, sometimes even only they've been threatened by their allies, offering up one excuse after the other. Cole argues, persuasively, that what lay behind Sparta's refusal to innovate is that they had to constantly keep their defenses turned inward, lest their slaves finally get a chance to make good on their desire to "eat their masters raw." Furthermore, because Sparta was so stingy with who was a citizen, the number of full citizen Spartans continued to dwindle, making the Spartans hold on power more tenuous, more fragile, to the point where they couldn't afford to take any chances with new endeavors because they couldn't risk losing any of their dwindling numbers.

In the end, the effect of all this is that we see the Spartans as just another society. They have their own goals, their own flaws, they have every thing we have, just in a different flavor. Cole says at one point that all he's shown us is people, not evil people but, I have to take a small issue with that. I don't believe you can be part of society that depends on so much slavery and exploitation without being a little evil because of it. But then, what society hasn't been based off the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few? That the Spartans were so excessive about this just makes them different by degrees, not kind. Never mind the fact that we can only have these philosophical discussions when we know the details, when we see different cultures and societies not as some strange alien invention, but as an extension of ourselves. Thanks to Cole's work, I believe we can finally move our discussions of the Spartans out of the hazy mirage of godhood we've cloaked them in into the solid, messy world of humanity where they belong.