Principles of Strategy in Action: The Theban Rise

Principles:

Improve the lot of those your enemy has oppressed.

Provide leadership where your enemy has failed to do so.

Understand the motives and desires of your allies.

After the Peloponnesian Wars, both Athens and Sparta were exhausted.  Sparta attempted to install oligarchies on their own model throughout Greece, without bothering to be in any way tactful or persuasive, or to realise that their allies had supported them because of Athenian meddling and Sparta’s history of minding its own business.  This naturally led to widespread discontent.

The city of Thebes at this time was becoming more democratic.  Sparta, accustomed to viewing democracy as a threat, immediately attempted to interfere, which only succeeded in creating a groundswell of democratic feeling in Thebes.  In response, the Thebans began to develop an army rivalling that of Sparta.

In the ensuing war, the Thebans under the general Epaminondus displayed a brilliant grasp of Sparta’s strategic failings.  They recognised that Sparta had a pattern of exposing its allies to greater risk than it was willing to take itself.  If you joined the Spartans in battle, you would end up facing the brunt of the enemy attack on the left wing while the Spartans on the right triumphed easily over the less formidable of the enemy troops, thus retaining their reputation for invincibility and conserving their numbers.  The Thebans, on the other hand, took the left wing position in their formation, ensuring that they would meet the Spartans directly, thus proving their willingness to lead from the front. 

Also, the Thebans realised that anyone who wanted to defeat Sparta had a tremendous potential ally within Sparta itself- the Helots.  The Helots were the descendants of the conquered Messenians, who had been subjugated to support the Spartan warrior class.  The Spartans had done nothing to assimilate the Helots into their society- indeed, every year they ritually declared war on the Helot population and routinely killed off any Helot who managed to gain any pre-eminence.  The Helots were only kept in check by the warrior skill of the small population of Spartan Equals, already severely depleted in numbers by the Peloponnesian Wars and were in no position to fight two wars at the same time. 

The Thebans did the logical thing, declaring that the Helots would be returned to the status of free Greeks like their Messenian ancestors.  The reaction was predictable and immediate, and from that moment, Sparta’s war became unwinnable and its economic foundation of slave labour was ripped out from under it.  It would spend the next several centuries as a kind of theme park for visitors wanting to gawp at what had once been the Mediterranean’s pre-eminent warrior culture.