Yet the strength of Sparta and its league was in some ways a chimera. At the war’s outbreak the allied Peloponnesian force could not be projected by sea. It was certainly not sustained through real economic power. Sparta started out with no capital, few ships, and almost no cavalry or light-armed troops. Under the regimented totalitarian system founded by the mythical ancestor Lycurgus, civic virtue, not economic efficiency or individualism, mattered.
