27. The Badass General Who Invented Basic Battlefield Tactics
Millennia before William T. Sherman, war broke out in 378 BC between the ancient Greek city states of Thebes and Sparta. The Thebans had their work cut out for them. Other Greek city states staffed their phalanxes with citizen-soldiers – civilians who temporarily took up arms in wartime. By contrast, Sparta’s citizens were professional soldiers. They began to prepare for a lifelong martial career at age seven in a brutal military academy and spent the rest of their lives training for war. Sparta could afford that because of massive slavery. It conquered its Messenian neighbors in the eighth century BC, then turned the entire Messenian population into state slaves known as Helots.
To control the Helots, who outnumbered the Spartans ten to one, Sparta became a military state and society. It also became a police state, with a secret security force known as the Krypteia that terrorized the Helots, and killed any who seemed restive or showed leadership potential. It was lebensraum writ small – the Nazis actually drew upon Sparta when they planned their conquest of Eastern Europe: the locals were to be enslaved to toil for the “Master Race”. The deck seemed to be stacked overwhelmingly in favor of the Spartans, but fortunately for the Thebans, they had a badass general, Epaminondas (died 362 BC). As seen below, he countered Spartan superiority by inventing basic battlefield maneuver tactics.
