Reading through Devereaux, part five of seven discusses the ultimate failure of the Spartan constitution.
Sparta rewarded the Spartiates, and not just the male Spartiates. The top Spartiates were linked with the royals, the Agiads and Eurypontids - of which the latter were somewhat B-list, although unlike Shoguns still considered kings. As Spartiate numbers declined, the available land remained the same; Devereaux pins the 464 BC earthquake as the greatest tipping-point, a near-literal windfall for those Spartiates who survived. For those who didn't survive, the government inherited their lands - which meant, the kings did.
The obvious answer to the problems of elite underpopulation is to grant royal land to the poorer Spartiates and mixed-ethnic Spartans, if they've proven themselves loyal. In practice the kings instead handed out the occasional bribe when they needed ephors to vote them more wealth.
Those chexun'balances, clearly, weren't working from the late fifth-century on. And then the Spartans started to lose wars. Some of this was papered over, during the Pelopponesian Wars, on account that their foil the Athenaians also had a dysfunctional polity. As they always say, when you're fleeing a bear, you don't outrun the bear; you outrun the poor sucker next to you. And maybe call in some Persians to pepper that sucker with arrows whilst you're running.
That didn't work against Epaminondas. Sparta ended up a theme-park for visiting sadists.
Over the third century, first Agis IV stumbled upon the solution: to promote more Spartiates. Against him, the gerousia demonstrated that The System Worked, stopping Agis' bid and putting Agis on a course to the gallows. Cleomenes III, two decades later, simply made himself a tyrant, which seemed to work, but, by then, the kingdom of Macedon owned most of Greece, and weren't having that. This looks a lot like what the Gracchi tried to do, except in reverse; in Sparta, the reforming kings tried moderation first and dictatorship second.
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