Answer by Matthew A. Sears
Herodotus, on the one hand, thinks Sparta is an indispensable ally since in his account it is unlikely the Battle of Plataea, the final decisive battle of the Persian invasion of Greece, would have been a Greek victory. In his evaluation of that battle, Herodotus says that the Spartans excelled all in bravery (9.71) and took on the strongest part of the Persian force. That said, Herodotus does say that the Athenians were most responsible for victory in the war as a whole, especially because of Athens’ fleet at the Battle of Salamis. He admits that this opinion will be unpopular, which suggests that most other Greeks thought that the Spartans were the most important member of the anti-Persian alliance (7.139).
On the other hand, Herodotus points out that on many occasions the Spartans were hesitant allies at best, and often outright unreliable. For example, the Spartans only sent their army to Plataea and gave up on the idea of hiding behind the Isthmus of Corinth after the Athenians – whose city had been burned twice in two years – reminded the Spartans of the generous terms the Persians now offered in exchange for Athenians giving up the fight (9.6-9). The Spartans, thus, took to the field out of fear of Athenian defection rather than concern for the allies that had borne the brunt of the war. The historian J. F. Lazenby, in his book The Defence of Greece, 490-479 BC (Warminster, 1993) aptly entitles his chapter about Sparta’s dallying while allied cities were repeatedly sacked by the Persians “With Friends Like These”. I think Herodotus would agree.
Even at Sparta’s supposed finest hour, the last stand of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae, Herodotus says they were acting selfishly rather than in the interests of their allies. While most Greeks thought that the Spartan king Leonidas sent away the other Greek allies out of concern for their survival once the defensive position at Thermopylae was about to surrounded by the Persians, Herodotus expresses the opinion that Leonidas was really worried that the allies’ spirit was not in it. More revealingly, Herodotus says that Leonidas wanted the Spartans to win glory alone, rather than share it with thousands of their fellow Greeks (7.220). Regardless of how one interprets the strategic and tactical factors at play in that famous battle – there has been a lot of disagreement on this point – hording all the glory for oneself is not the mark of a good ally. To be sure, Herodotus does commend the Spartans for their bravery and does not chastise Leonidas explicitly for this decision. Being concerned for one’s own glory above all other considerations is in line with how Homeric heroes approached war in the Iliad, after all.
To complicate things even further, not being too eager to join with fellow Greeks against the Persians could be a mark of good sense. When the Ionians were seeking help from the mainland for their rebellion against the Persian Empire, the Spartan king, heeding the advice of his daughter, Gorgo (the future wife of Leonidas, turned them away, preferring instead to stay out of it, 5.49-51). By contrast, Herodotus called the ships the Athenians happily sent to aid the Ionian effort “the beginning of evils for both Greeks and barbarians”, seeing as they led directly to the Battle of Marathon and the Persian invasion of Greece (5.97).
For a general treatment of how Herodotus understood relations between the Greek states, see P. Stadter, “Herodotus and the cities of mainland Greece,” in C. Dewald and J. Marincola (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, Cambridge, 2006, 242-256. For the idea that Herodotus wanted to warn his audience against trusting in the Spartans as reliable champions of freedom, see P. Stadter, “Speaking to the deaf: Herodotus, his audience, and the Spartans at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War,” Histos 6 (2012): 1-14.
Herodotus Helpline 