Writing in the fifth century BC, Herodotus of Halicarnassus explains how the Lacedaemonians had been able to expel the Pisistratids from Athens. He says that the Athenian Alcmaeonids bribed the Pythia. She had persuaded the Spartans to take action against the Pisistratids, despite the ties of hospitality they maintained with Laconia, by repeatedly instructing them to do so. In recounting the event the historian notes that the Lacedaemonians ‘‘put considerations of the gods before considerations of men’’ (5.63; cf. also Pausanias 3.5.4). In context, Herodotus’ judgment could be taken to indicate that Lacedaemonians had a religious sensibility superior to that of the other Greeks, in degree if not in kind. We do indeed possess a wealth of evidence, textual and archaeological, for Lacedaemonian religious practices. (The Spartans were a subset of the Lacedaemonians, namely the ones that came from Sparta itself, the principal city of Laconia. They controlled other free men, the ‘‘perioeci,’’ who lived in the area around the city and mobilized at the Spartans’ command. In ancient sources the term ‘‘Lacedaemonians’’ is clearly often used to designate the Spartans, but it is preferable to preserve the terms employed in ancient texts. On the distinction between the Spartans and the Lacedaemonians, see Herodotus 7.234 and 9.70. In this instance, at 5.63, Herodotus says that the Lacedaemonians intervened in Athens as a result of the consultations made at Delphi by the Spartans. )
Evidence for the Spartans’ religious beliefs and practices is quite plentiful, albeit thinly spread. It is provided principally by the historians of the classical period, Herodotus (ca. 484-420 BC), Thucydides (ca. 460-400 BC) and Xenophon (ca. 430-354 BC), and by two authors of the second century AD, Plutarch (ca. AD 50-120) and especially Pausanias Periegetes ‘‘the Traveler’’ (whose floruit was ca. AD 160-180). Plutarch and Pausanias cite earlier authors and can combine information bearing on the practices of the archaic and classical periods with material from the hellenistic or Roman periods. Since the beginning of the twentieth century a number of Greek and British excavations have brought artifacts and inscriptions to light (see Cartledge 1998:46-7); admittedly, these are typically quite late, from the Roman period. Several Laconian cups from the sixth century BC, which have sometimes been discovered outside Laconia itself, also provide insights into the Laconian religious imagination (Pipili 1987; Stibbe 1972, 2004).
It seems that the figures of the Spartan pantheon and the cult practices of Laconia did not differ in fundamentals from those familiar from elsewhere in the Greek world. In this chapter we will first look at the ways in which the gods presided over and intervened in the full range of human activities. Then we will consider the fashion in which the whole structure of daily life was sacralized, and finally we will investigate how the dead could be put to the service of the living.
World History
