The Spartan Army

By J. F. Lazenby

The classic and comprehensive military history of the Spartan army and how it became the most formidable war machine in Greece for at least two centuries.
 
Professor Lazenby begins The Spartan Army by looking at the composition, training, and organization of the army, tracing its roots back to the eighth century BC. The second part analyses some of the main campaigns—Thermopylae, Plataea, Sphakteria, Mantineia, The Nemea, Koroneia, Lechaion, and Leuktra. The final part continues the story to the end of Greek independence. Since this book was first written over twenty-five years ago, novels, computer games, and films such as 300 have raised interest in the Spartan military to new heights. The return to print of this excellent study is sure to interest academics and more general readers alike.
 
“[Lazenby] has performed a valuable service in . . . focusing instead on the organization and role of this central institution of Spartan life . . . it is this kind of re-examination of the precise working of its social institutions, and the debate it engenders, which is necessary to achieve a deeper understanding of the character of the Spartan state.” —Stephen Hodkinson, The Classical Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781848849969

Book preview

Part I

Preparation

Chapter 1

The Age of Xenophon

When the Theban general, Epameinondas, went marching down the valley of the Eurotas at the end of 370, it had been nearly six hundred years, as Plutarch says (Agesilaos 31.2)¹, since the beautiful land of ‘hollow Lakedaimon’ had seen an invader, and even then it was to be nearly another century and a half before Sparta itself was occupied by foreign troops. Nor had the Spartans merely successfully defended their own homeland, in splendid isolation, during all this long time: ever since about the middle of the sixth century their polis had been recognized as one of the greatest powers in the Greek world (cf. Herodotos 1.56.1–2), and for a generation, since the end of the Peloponnesian War, it had been the dominant power. Yet there had probably never been more than eight or nine thousand full Spartan citizens of military age.²

Other Greeks had little doubt why this was so: apart from praising the excellence and stability of Sparta’s institutions in general (cf., e.g., Thucydides 1.18.1), it was, above all, to the superiority of her army to which they bore witness. Herodotos’ account of the ‘three hundred’ at Thermopylai, for example, though there may be much in it of the stuff of legend, surely reflects something of the awe in which Spartan soldiers were held (cf. 7.208.3 and 218.2), and later writers again and again say that their enemies either feared to face them in battle, or gave way at the first onset.³ An incident recorded by Xenophon (XH 4.4.10) is especially revealing: a Spartan cavalry officer, seeing some hoplites from Sparta’s ally, Sikyon, reeling back before an Argive attack, dismounted his men, tied their horses to trees, and, taking the shields from the Sikyonians, boldly advanced against the enemy, while the Argives, seeing the sigmas on the advancing shields, ‘feared nothing from them as though they were Sikyonians.’ The implication is clear: the Argives would have felt very differently had the shields borne the dreaded lambdas.⁴ If this is how most of Sparta’s foes felt, it is perhaps not so surprising that her army does not appear to have suffered any significant defeat in pitched battle between the disastrous fight against the Tegeates early in the sixth century (Herodotos 1.66), and Leuktra in 371.

It is clear, too, that the Greeks were aware of the main reason for the superiority of Spartan soldiers – what Thucydides calls, in one passage (4.33.2), their ‘practised skill’ or ‘experience’ (ἐμπειρία). Elsewhere (2.39.1) Thucydides has Perikles sneer at their ‘laborious training’ (ἐπιπόνοϚ ἀσκήσις), while Herodotos describes them as ‘past masters’ (ἐξεπισταμένοι: 7.211.3), and the Persians, by contrast, as ‘lacking in professional skill’ (ἀνεπιστήμονεϚ: 9.63.2). Aristotle, perhaps, puts his finger on the point when he says (Politics 1338b27ff.) that it was not so much the methods the Spartans used to train their young men which made them superior, as the fact that they trained them at all, and that this was also true of the adults is the point of the story told by Plutarch in his life of Agesilaos (26.4–4), and repeated by Polyainos (2.17). On one occasion, having received complaints from Sparta’s allies about the comparative fewness of the troops she had fielded, Agesilaos ordered the whole army to sit down, and then first the potters, then the smiths, then the carpenters and builders, and so on, to stand up, until almost all the allied soldiers were on their feet, but still not a single Spartan. The point, of course, was that the contingents of the allies were composed of essentially part-time soldiers, the Spartan of full-time professionals – Spartan soldiers knew no other trade.⁵ Well might Antisthenes the philosopher say of the Thebans after Leuktra that they were ‘no different from little boys strutting about because they had thrashed their tutor’ (Plutarch Lykourgos 30.6).

It was not, however, so much the skill-at-arms of the individual Spartan that was important, as his training as part of a unit, for hoplite fighting left little scope for the display of individual skills (see pp. 35–6, 45–6). Thus one of the speakers in Plato’s dialogue Laches makes the point (182a–d) that skill-at-arms was only really important when one side or the other had given way and the combatants were in pursuit or in flight: what mattered before this happened was clearly the ability of the individual soldiers to fight together as one man, and in this Spartan soldiers were unsurpassed: as Herodotos has the exiled Spartan king, Demaratos, tell Xerxes (7.104.4), Spartans fighting as individuals were ‘no worse’ than other men, but fighting together were the best of all men. Thus, at Thermopylai, only troops trained to move as one and instantaneously obey words of command could have carried out the series of feigned retreats Herodotos describes (7.211.3), and at Plataea, he implies (9.63.2), the lack of expertise and skill shown by the Persians lay precisely in their inability to combine together. At Mantineia, in 418, King Agis’ last-minute attempt to adjust his line, although it nearly led to disaster (Thucydides 5.71.2–3), shows his supreme confidence in the ability of his men to carry out such manoeuvres, and both in this battle, and at the Nemea in 394, Spartan commanders were evidently able to keep their men in check and wheel them to the left to roll up the enemy line, whereas their opponents were allowed to pursue too far. At Koroneia, also in 394, and in Arcadia in 370, Agesilaos was able to carry out – in the very face of the enemy – the kind of manoeuvres we associate with the ceremony of ‘Trooping the Colour’.

All this too must have had a profound effect on the morale of Spartan soldiers, producing in them what has been well-described⁶ as ‘a cool steadiness born of ingrained, rigorous discipline that shuts the mind to fear.’ This is the point of the well-known stories Herodotos tells of Spartan behaviour at Thermopylai, for example – of how they calmly went on with their exercises and with combing their hair, when the Persian scout rode up to view the position (7.208.3), or of how Dienekes welcomed the news that there were so many Persian archers that their arrows would hide the sun (7.226). On Sphakteria, in 425, though surprised by the Athenian attack before dawn, the Spartans at first advanced confidently against the Athenian hoplites, though they must have seen that they were outnumbered two to one, and Thucydides’ description of their advance at Mantineia conveys a vivid impression of professionals who knew just what they were doing – the Spartans, he says (5.69.2), needed no encouragement from their commanders, but instead encouraged themselves with martial songs, ‘knowing that long-continued practice in action is a more effective safeguard than any hurried verbal exhortation however well-delivered.’ Similarly, in Xenophon’s time, we find Spartan soldiers holding the enemy in contempt – for example before their disastrous fight with Iphikrates’ peltasts near Lechaion (cf. XH 4.5.12) – or so eager to fight that their officers had difficulty in restraining them, as before the so-called ‘Tearless Battle’ in 368 (XH 7.1.31).

Yet for all this, we know very little about the organization, training and equipment of the Spartan army, partly, perhaps, due to the secretiveness to which Thucydides bears witness in the fifth century (2.39.1, 5.68.2), but mainly to the lack of attention paid to military details by most ancient writers. What little good evidence there is comes mostly from the late fifth and early fourth centuries, when we have Thucydides’ remarks about the composition of a Spartan force trapped on the island of Sphakteria in 425 (4.8.9 and 38.5), and his detailed description of the Spartan army at the battle of Mantineia in 418 (5.68.3), and, above all, the writings of Xenophon, who, though born an Athenian, was a soldier himself, and spent much of his life in Spartan territory, and fought alongside Spartans both in Asia Minor and in Greece.

It seems best, then, to begin at the end, as it were, and to look first at what Xenophon has to say,⁷ then to look at Thucydides and Herodotos, and finally to look at the beginnings of Spartan military history. This hysteron-proteron approach produces its own problems – for example, it is not really possible to treat the accounts of Xenophon and Thucydides completely in isolation, and the first chapter will be much longer than the rest – but it would be difficult to say anything very much about the early Spartan army without constantly referring forwards to its later history, and it will be one of the main conclusions of this book that we can trace the organization known to Xenophon at least back into the early fifth century, and, perhaps, in its essentials, even to the eighth.

If, then, we begin with what Xenophon says in his history of Greece (Hellenika), we find that from at least 403 (2.4.31) to the time of Leuktra (6.4.17), the regular infantry of the Spartan army was divided into units called ‘morai’ (μόραι), apparently six in number (cf. 6.1.11 and 4.17), and each commanded by an officer called a ‘polemarch’ (πολέμαρχοϚ: cf. 4.4.7, 5.4.46, etc). In addition, there were subordinate officers called ‘pentekosteres’ or ‘pentekonteres’ (3.5.22, 4.5.7; Anabasis 3.4.21), implying the units called ‘pentekostyes’, which, although not mentioned in the Hellenika, are mentioned in the Anabasis (3.4.22), though there the reference is, of course, not to the Spartan army. The smallest unit seems to have been called an ‘enomotia’ (ἐνωμοτία: XH 6.4.12), implying the officer called ‘enomotarches’ or ‘enomotarchos’ (ἐνωμοτάρχηϚ, ἐνωμοτάρχοϚ), again referred to in the Anabasis (3.4.21, 4.3.26), but not in the Hellenika. As for numbers, there appear to have been not more than thirty-six men in each enomotia at Leuktra, when seven-eighths of the army had been called up (cf. XH 6.4.12 and 17), and there are said to have been about 600 hoplites in the mora which met with disaster near Lechaion in 390 (XH 4.5.12).

This is about all the information we can glean about the organization of the regular army from the first six books of the Hellenika, but three passages in the last book (7.1.30, 4.20 and 5.10) refer to units called ‘lochoi’ (λόχοι), and the last two of these passages imply that there were in all twelve such units in the army, whereas morai are never referred to in the seventh book. Nevertheless, it is simplest to assume that this is due to mere coincidence, and that there were both morai and lochoi in the Spartan army in Xenophon’s time, each mora being divided into two lochoi, and this is partially confirmed by the references to polemarchs in the seventh book of the Hellenika (1.17 and 25), by the statement in the treatise on The Constitution of the Lakedaimonians, attributed to Xenophon, that there were officers in the morai called ‘lochagoi’ (i.e., ‘commanders of lochoi’: LP 11.4, cf. 13.4), and by references elsewhere in Xenophon to lochoi and lochagoi in forces which were either clearly modelled on the Spartan army or were commanded by Spartan officers, though not consisting of regular Spartan troops. Thus he refers to lochoi, pentekostyes and enomotiai in the special unit formed by his fellow-mercenaries after Kounaxa (Anabasis 3.4.21–2, cf. 4.3.26), and to lochagoi in both Derkylidas’ and Agesilaos’ armies in Asia Minor (XH 3.1.28, 3.2.16, 4.1.26), and in Mnasippos’ force on Kerkyra (6.2.18).

The most cogent evidence against the view that the morai were subdivided into lochoi, as well as into pentekostyes and enomotiai, is that Xenophon twice refers to the summoning of polemarchs and pentekosteres to a conference (XH 3.5.22, 4.5.7), but does not mention lochagoi, who would presumably have outranked pentekosteres, and elsewhere (Hellenika 4.3.15, Agesilaos 2.6) refers to half a mora and to a mora and a half, where he might have been expected to refer to lochoi.⁸ However, for what it is worth, lochagoi are said to have attended sacrifices with polemarchs and pentekosteres, in the Constitution (LP 13.4), and if Xenophon’s failure to mention them at the conferences is not just another coincidence – there are, after all, only two such passages – it is just possible that they were deliberately left with their units in case of a surprise attack – there is, perhaps, a pattern to be discerned in the attendance of polemarchs and pentekosteres, but the absence of lochagoi and enomotarchai. As for the argument that Xenophon would not have referred to half a mora or to a mora and a half if he had been able instead to refer to a number of lochoi, it must be borne in mind that half a mora was not necessarily the same thing as one or more lochoi, since such a force could have been made up of enomotiai drawn from more than one of a mora’s component lochoi. In any case, what is the alternative to believing that the morai were subdivided into lochoi before 368, when lochoi are first mentioned? It has been suggested, for example, that morai were abandoned in favour of lochoi after Leuktra,⁹ but there is no compelling reason why this should have been so, and the casual way in which Xenophon first refers to lochoi (XH 7.1.30) belies the notion that he was suddenly talking about a new kind of unit.

But if there were lochoi in the Spartan army between 403 and 368, as there almost certainly were, how many of them were there in each mora? As was suggested above, the simplest hypothesis is that the two references in the Hellenika (7.4.20 and 5.10) to ‘the twelve lochoi’ mean that there were two lochoi in each of the six morai, and this is probably right: as we shall see (below, p. 57), there is some reason to believe not only that there were lochoi in the Spartan army during the Peloponnesian War, but that there were already twelve of them at least by 425, if not by 480, and, indeed, as far back as we can trace (see pp. 70, 90). The treatise on the Constitution, however, appears to say that each mora contained four lochagoi, and this clearly implies that there were four lochoi, for although it has been suggested that two of the lochagoi might have been attached to the polemarch as staff-officers,¹⁰ this is very forced. Alternatively, it has been suggested that there may have been four lochoi in each mora before Leuktra, but that after that disaster the number was halved,¹¹ but this would either mean our having to abandon the plausible hypothesis that there were already twelve lochoi at the time of the Pylos campaign, or our having to suppose that the number was subsequently doubled sometime before the date reflected by the Constitution, and then halved again after Leuktra. There is also the point that if what the Constitution says is to be accepted, we would have to accept that at one time there were only two pentekostyes in each lochos, since the Constitution also says that there were eight pentekosteres in each mora. But in Thucydides’ description of the army at Mantineia, there are four pentekostyes in each lochos (5.68.3), and although we shall see reason to believe that he may have been mistaken about the number of lochoi which took part in the battle, there is no reason to doubt that he was right about their internal structure. Thus we would have to posit yet another change in the organization of the army between Mantineia and the date reflected by the Constitution, and all this is, surely, to place far too much weight on a single passage, and on a series of numbers at that, when numbers are notoriously susceptible to corruption in ancient texts – in this case, for example, a copyist may easily have read ‘δὑο’ (two) as ‘δʹ’ (four).¹² It is more sensible to take the view that the reference in the Constitution to four lochagoi in each mora is either a simple mistake by its author, or is due to an error in the copying of our manuscripts.

If, then, there were two lochoi in each mora, we can at least accept the statement in the Constitution that each mora contained eight pentekosteres (LP 11.4), implying eight pentekostyes, for this is not contradicted by anything said in the Hellenika, and is supported by what Thucydides says about the internal composition of the lochoi at Mantineia. Moreover, since this would mean that there were forty-eight pentekostyes in the army as a whole, the term ‘pentekostys’ itself could be explained: the word could mean either a ‘fifty’ or a ‘fiftieth’, and although the former might seem the more obvious, there is, in fact, no evidence that there ever was a unit of fifty men in the Spartan army – at Mantineia, for example, each pentekostys is implied to have contained about 128 men (Thucydides 5.68.3) – and although a pentekostys may not, strictly speaking, have been a ‘fiftieth’ of the army, it would surely have seemed absurdly cumbersome to refer to such units and their commanders as ‘tessarakostogdyes’ and ‘tessarakostogderes’!¹³

But the most important question of numbers is the number of enomotiai in each mora, for one of the few relatively certain things about the Spartan army at this period is that each enomotia had a total strength of 40 men (see p. 16 below), and if we knew how many enomotiai there were in a mora, it would be a simple matter not only to calculate how many men there were in a mora, but how many men there were in the army as a whole. Unfortunately, Xenophon never even hints how many enomotiai there were in a mora, in the Hellenika, but the Constitution says that each mora had sixteen enomotarchoi (LP 11.4), implying sixteen enomotiai, and this agrees well enough with what Xenophon says about the strength of the enomotiai at Leuktra (6.4.12, cf. 17), and of the mora which got into difficulties near Lechaion (4.5.12). At Leuktra each enomotia is said to have been drawn up in three files of not more than twelve men, and since later it is said that only thirty-five of the forty age-classes had been called up, this probably means that in fact the enomotiai at Leuktra each contained thirty-five men, their full strength being forty men. Thus, if there were sixteen enomotiai to the mora, each mora at Leuktra would have contained 560 men, and the full strength of a mora would have been 640 men: the Lechaion mora is said to have had about 600 men.

Plausible as this view is, however, and widely as it is held, there is one serious, if not fatal, objection to it: it requires us to accept that the total strength of Sparta’s regular army, at the height of her imperial power, was only 3840 men (6 × 640), excluding cavalry and other infantry such as the Hippeis, Skiritai and neodamodeis. But it is barely credible that at a time when Argos, for example, could allegedly field 7,000 hoplites for a campaign not fought in her territory, and even Euboea 3,000 (XH 4.2.17), Sparta could hardly have fielded 4,000, even if all six morai were present, as well as the Hippeis. It is true that there is very little good evidence for the size and composition of Spartan armies at this period, and what little there is is difficult to interpret because of the equivocal use of the term ‘Lakedaimonians’ (see p. 19 below). But Xenophon says that there were 13,500 hoplites on the Spartan side at the Nemea – in fact there were probably more (see p. 163 below) – including 6,000 Lakedaimonians (XH 4.2.16), and since there were probably five morai present (see p. 163 below), if we allow only 560 men to each mora, this would mean a total of only 2,800 Spartan hoplites, or 3,100, if we add three hundred Hippeis. Similarly, if Diodoros is right to say that when Agesilaos invaded Boeotia in 377, he had an army of 18,000 men, it is difficult to believe that he was also right in saying that of these only 2,500 were Spartan hoplites (five morai of 500 men each: 15.32.1). Again, there is good reason to believe that there were 7,000 hoplites on the Boeotian side at Leuktra, of whom 4,000 were Thebans (see p. 179 below), and Plutarch’s figure of 10,000 for the Spartan side (Pelopidas 20.1) is plausible – Frontinus (Strategemata 4.2.6) gives them 24,000 foot alone and Polyainos (2.3.8 & 12) 40,000 men! – but can we really believe that there were only 2,540 Spartan hoplites there (four morai of 560 men each and 300 Hippeis)? Apart, however, from any particular difficulties which may arise from the figures given by the sources for individual campaigns, it is too much of a strain on one’s credulity to have to believe that the state which from time to time was the arbiter of Greek affairs from Byzantion to the Peloponnese could ultimately only rely upon an army of just over 4,000 hoplites.¹⁴

In Thucydides’ description of the Spartan army at Mantineia, however, there are not two enomotiai in each pentekostys, as implied by the Constitution, but four (5.68.3), and if this was the case in the army of Xenophon’s time, each mora would have had not sixteen enomotiai, but thirty-two, assuming that there were eight pentekostyes in each mora. This, in turn, means that the full strength of a mora would have been 1,280 men (32 × 40), instead of 640 (16 × 40), and the whole number of the Spartan regular infantry, excluding the Hippeis, would have been 7,680 men (6 × 1,280). Thus, at the Nemea, if five of the morai were present and thirty-five age-classes had been called up, as later for Leuktra, the Spartan hoplites would have numbered 5,600 men (5 × 32 × 35), which is near enough Xenophon’s figure for the ‘Lakedaimonians’ (XH 4.2.16) – the correspondence would be even closer if we should add the 300 Hippeis and at Leuktra, similarly, where there were four morai (cf. 6.4.17), each would have numbered 1,120 men (32 × 35), giving a total of 4,780 Spartans, including the Hippeis (4 × 1,120 + 300), which fits Plutarch’s total of 10,000 infantry for the Spartan side far better than 2,540 (4 × 560 + 300).

There are, at first sight, two main objections to believing that there were thirty-two enomotiai in each mora: firstly, the statement in the Constitution that each mora had sixteen enomotarchoi, and, secondly, the fact that all the figures given by ancient sources for the strength of a mora are less than 1,280. However, we have already seen reason to doubt the Constitution when it apparently says that each mora had four lochagoi, and we should, perhaps, not pay too much attention to what it says about the number of enomotarchoi – its author may have confused the number of enomotarchoi in a mora with the number in a lochos¹⁵ – and it is arguable that Thucydides’ evidence about the number of enomotiai in a pentekostys, and thus in a lochos, should carry more weight, even though for him the lochos was apparently the largest unit (see below, p. 51ff.).

More serious is the second objection – that the figures in ancient sources for the size of morai are all less than 1,280 – but even this is not as serious as it may seem: there are, in fact, very few references to the size of morai in ancient sources, and of these, only one need be taken seriously in this context – Xenophon’s statement (XH 4.5.12) that the mora caught by Iphikrates’ peltasts near Lechaion in 390 contained about 600 hoplites. Apart from this, we have only Diodoros’ assertion (15.2.1) that the morai in Agesilaos’ army in Boeotia in 377 each contained 500 men, Plutarch’s report, in his life of Pelopidas (17.2), that Ephoros said that there were 500 men in a mora, Kallisthenes 700, and ‘certain others, of whom one was Polybios’ 900, and the entries in Photios (s.v. μόρα) that each mora contained either 1,000 or 500 men. Of these, we need not pay too much attention to the statements of Kallisthenes, Polybios and the ‘certain others’, and of Photios, since we have no means of knowing whether they refer to morai in general or to particular morai on particular occasions, nor what period they are talking about, though it is worth noting that both Kallisthenes and Polybios wrote after Leuktra and yet apparently both mentioned morai. Diodoros’ figure is presumably derived from Ephoros, but is also very dubious: it occurs in a passage in which it is stated that the Skiritai were stationed near the king and were largely responsible for many a Spartan victory, both of which are almost certainly wrong (see below) – they look like general conclusions wrongly drawn from a particular exploit of the Skiritai in 377, described by Xenophon (XH 5.4.52–3), possibly confusing them with the Hippeis – and, as was argued above, a total of 2,500 for the Spartans in Agesilaos’ army hardly fits the figure of 18,000 men given by Diodoros for the whole army. Photios’ figure of 1,000, of course, would be very nearly right, particularly for the campaign-strength of a mora, when 35 age-classes were called up, if there were 32 enomotiai in a mora (32 × 35 = 1,120).

This leaves Xenophon’s mora at Lechaion, and it is straight away arguable that we should place no more reliance upon a single statement about a particular mora for the size of morai in general than upon some of the figures for Caesar’s legions, for example, for the size of legions. In the case of this particular mora, indeed, there is reason to believe that it was under strength: in the first place, all the men from Amyklai in it had presumably been given furlough to go home for the festival of the Hyakinthia, like their fellow-Amyklaians in the rest of the army (XH 4.5.11–12), and, in the second place, detachments from the mora may have been stationed in the forts at Sidous and Krommyon, captured in 392, in Epieikeia, fortified at the same time (XH 4.4.13), and in Oinoe, captured by Agesilaos just before the disaster (XH 4.5.5). We also have no means of knowing how many age-classes had been called upon on this occasion: if it was thirty-five, as for the Leuktra campaign, then the full strength of the mora would have been 1,120 men, if there were thirty-two enomotiai in a mora, and thus, when it made its fatal march back towards Lechaion, it would have been at only just over half strength, if Xenophon’s figure of ‘about 600’ is correct; but if only twenty-five age-classes had been called up on this occasion, for example, the mora would originally only have mustered 800 men and the absence of about 200 would be easily explained.

On the other hand, if a mora really only contained sixteen enomotiai, it would only have had a full strength of 640 men, even when all forty age-classes were called upon, and it would be very difficult to understand how this particular mora came to be so nearly at full strength on this occasion: it must have been very rare for all forty age-classes to be called up – the last five were only called up after Leuktra, for example (XH 6.4.17) – and we know that the Amyklaians were absent on this occasion. It is easier to understand how this mora may have become seriously depleted than how it came to have only about forty men short of its full complement, and thus Xenophon’s figure for the size of this particular mora, far from supporting the view that there were only sixteen enomotiai in a mora, in fact turns out to suggest that there were more.

In view of the lack of evidence, and the conflicting nature of the evidence we have, it is obviously not possible to be certain about even the basic organization of the Spartan army in Xenophon’s time. But the most likely view to be right seems to be that at least from the end of the Peloponnesian War to the 360’s, the regular infantry were divided into six morai commanded by polemarchs, and subdivided into two lochoi, eight pentekostyes and thirty-two enomotiai, commanded respectively by lochagoi, pentekosteres and enomotarchai. It is fairly certain that each enomotia at full strength contained 40 men, and this would mean that a full-strength pentekostys consisted of 160 men, a lochos of 640 men, and a mora of 1,280 men.

There were, in addition, probably three other units or types of unit in the regular army at the same period – the Skiritai, the Hippeis and the cavalry. From time to time forces of neodamodeis also appear, but they do not seem to have formed part of the regular establishment. The Skiritai are mentioned in connection with only two episodes in the Hellenika, and Diodoros surely exaggerates when he declares (15.32.1) that the lochos of Skiritai ‘creates many an important turn of the scale in battle and is mostly responsible for victory.’ The origin and meaning of the name is obscure, but probably derives from the district of Skiritis mentioned by Xenophon (XH 6.5.24–5, 7.4.21):¹⁶ presumably the people who inhabited it were perioikoi, but the unit obviously had a different status from that of normal perioecic contingents. At Mantineia, in 418, for example, they fought in the battle-line (Thucydides 5.67.1), when, if we are to believe Thucydides at least, no other perioecic contingents were present, and they are singled out for special mention in Xenophon’s description of the army Agesipolis took to Olynthos in 383, when other perioikoi are mentioned (XH 5.2.24). There is nothing in either of these references to them to suggest that they were anything else than hoplites, but there are some hints that they may have had a skirmishing role: in 377, for example, during Agesilaos’ second campaign in Boeotia, they boldly followed the Thebans up the hill to the very walls of Thebes (XH 5.4.52–3), and according to the Constitution (LP 12.3 and 13.6), they were used as pickets, outside the lines, at night, and as advanced guards on the march.

The Hippeis are mentioned even more rarely in the Hellenika – indeed, there is possibly only one reference to them (6.4.14), and that depends upon an emendation (see below). However, the reference to the ‘hippagretai’ in the account of Kinadon’s conspiracy (3.3.9) is some confirmation that the Hippeis still existed, for the word seems to mean something like ‘choosers of the Hippeis’ – the Constitution says they were the officers responsible for recruiting the corps (4.3) – and it is possible that some of the references to ‘hippeis’ which are usually interpreted to mean ‘horsemen’ (i.e. cavalry), in fact refer to the Hippeis. When Agesilaos, for example, after crossing the frontier and marching to Tegea in 387, is said to have sent ‘some of the hippeis’ (τῶν μἐν ἱππἑων: XH 5.1.33) in various directions to hurry up the perioikoi, although the meaning could be ‘some of the cavalry’ since speed was obviously important, it is possible that members of the corps of Hippeis are meant, since the cavalry ranked low in the Spartan military hierarchy (see p. 16 below), and such a task really required men of some authority.

According to the Constitution (loc.cit), the three hundred Hippeis were chosen by the hippagretai, who were appointed by the ephors from ‘the men in their prime’ (ἐκ τῶν ὰκμαζόντων), and since the context is concerned with the methods used by Lykourgos to instil a spirit of rivalry into the young men (cf. τοὐζ ήβῶνταζ: LP 4.2), it seems clear that the author thought all the Hippeis were young men. In some sense they also probably still constituted a ‘Royal Guard’ who fought around the king in battle, as they had done at Mantineia (cf. Thucydides 5.72.4), for in Xenophon’s account of Leuktra, although the manuscripts would have it that ‘the horses’ (οἱ ἴπποι: 6.4.14) fell back before the Theban attack on the right wing,