Hi everyone. Welcome to another ancient warfare answers, your weekly dose of ancient warfare.

With me, Murray Darm, I'm the assistant editor of Ancient Warfare magazine.

And today we're going to be answering a question about oligantropia, which is a fabulous word to say.

You should practice it now. It comes from Aristotle.

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Now, today's question is about oligantropia.

Now, if you don't know what oligantropia is, it is a phrase coined by Aristotle in the politics about the decline in Spartan manpower.

And it's something that the ancients recognized, well, the Athenians, not sure that the Spartans did.

And so the actual question is the number of Spartan soldiers declined

from its height of 10,000 to less than 2,000 around its defeat by Thebes due in part to

increasing economic concentration and the resulting decline in the number of soldiers able to pay

their mess contributions. Did Spartan society recognize this decline as a problem and were

their efforts to reverse this trend? If there were, why did they fail? That's from James O'Keefe.

Hello, James. Well, the first thing is, the Spartans, as far as we know, don't seem to have recognized this as an issue.

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