12 Paıdeía
are told, out of fear. And the city’s allies elsewhere within the Peloponnesus
were often disaffected and sometimes hostile.^22
In the early fourth century, one Corinthian leader summed up Sparta’s
strategic position elegantly by comparing her to a stream. “At their sources,”
he noted, “rivers are not great and they are easily forded, but the farther on
they go, the greater they get—for other rivers empty into them and make the
current stronger.” So it is with the Spartans, he continued. “There, in the place
where they emerge, they are alone; but as they continue and gather cities
under their control, they become more numerous and harder to fight.” The
prudent general, he concluded, will seek battle with the Spartans in or near
Lacedaemon where they are few in number and relatively weak. Thanks to
demographic decline, the structure of Sparta’s defenses was at that time fragile
in the extreme. But it had never been more than tenuous, and the Lacedaemo-
nians understood from the beginning what history was eventually to reveal:
that it took but a single major defeat in warfare on land to endanger the city’s
very survival.^23
As a consequence of the community’s strategic situation, fear was the fun-
damental Spartan passion. It was fear that explained why Lacedaemon was
notoriously slow to go to war, and it was fear that accounted for the remark-
able caution that she so conspicuously displayed on the field of battle. This
omnipresent fear lay behind her flagrant inability in matters of state to distin-
guish the dictates of interest from the biddings of honor, and it was fear that
made the distrust and the deceit that governed her relations with other com-
munities so pronounced and so glaring. Fear, the great equalizer, rendered the
Spartan regime conservative, stable, and—despite the presence of a wealthy,
landed aristocracy—socially harmonious. The Spartans were well aware of this
fact. As Plutarch remarks, they established a temple to Phóbos, not to ward off
panic in battle, but because they recognized that fear held the polity together.^24
The Spartans had to be friends: as members of a garrison community, they
desperately needed each other.
This awareness of need the Spartans magnified by sentiment. Because
piety was understood to be the foundation of patriotism, Spartans were from
an early age imbued with a fear of the gods so powerful that it distinguished
them from their fellow Greeks.^25 Plato had a better understanding of this than
anyone since. With the promotion of civic virtue in mind, he wrote, “One of
the finest of [Sparta’s] nómoı is the nómos that does not allow any of the young
to inquire which of the nómoı are finely made and which are not, but that