Sparta’s caste of citizen-soldiers, dedicated from childhood to military service, had once created armies that no force in the ancient world could withstand. But Sparta’s hegemony was broken forever at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C.E., by a Theban army under the command of Epaminondas. In his Politics, Aristotle says of Sparta’s humiliation by a second-rate Greek power that the city-state “sank under a single defeat; the want of men was their ruin.” Sparta once had ten thousand citizens, but by the middle of the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle reports, the number had shrunk to only one
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