Reply #37: A nameless Spartan

[sofa king]

During the Peloponnesian War, the Spartan king Agis II was disgraced for failing to destroy the Argives when he had the chance. He was saddled with an oversight committee that second-guessed his every move.

In 418 B.C. the Spartans invaded Mantinea and found the Argive army parked on a hill, in a very good position, which Agis rashly decided to assault anyway. According to Thucydides, 5.65:

"The Lacedaemonians (Spartans) at once advanced against them, and came on within a stone's throw or javelin's cast, when one of the older men, seeing the enemy's position to be a strong one, hallooed to Agis that he was minded to cure one evil with another; meaning that he wished to make amends for his retreat, which had been so much blamed, from Argos, by his present untimely precipitation."

Now admittedly, the Spartans were assholes second perhaps only to the Athenians whom they were fighting, attempting to destroy democracy in Greece and fighting under the hypocritical slogan "freedom for the Greeks" while eighty percent of those under Spartan control were effectively enslaved. But that one old warrior deserves credit for saving a lot of lives that day, regardless of the eventual result. (And it's worth noting that the result reverberates to this day, with the PNAC using Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War as their model for irresponsible statecraft. Right now, Dick Cheney is trying to cure one evil with another by invading Iran.)