I have succeeded thus far in confining my notice of the ‘Great Rhetra’ to a single, oblique reference. For if anything justifies the description of the study of early Sparta as ‘intellectual gymnastics’ (Ehrenberg 1973, 389), it is surely this document of some fifty words preserved for us by Plutarch (Lyk. 6), over which more scholarly ink has been spilt than over any other Greek text of comparable length. None the less, for two main reasons, the ‘Great Rhetra’ must now be pulled out from under the carpet, dusted off and, if only briefly, held up to the light of historical scrutiny. First, it represents in kernel the political solution which has been precisely characterized by Andrewes (1956, ch. 6) as the ‘Spartan alternative to tyranny’. Second, it was the attainment of internal political equilibrium at an early date which, as Thucydides (1.18.1) saw, enabled the Spartans to intervene in the affairs of other states—and, we might add, to control their own Perioikoi and Helots in the manner analysed in the next chapter. Two questions, however, remain to be answered: at how early a date was this triumphantly successful solution devised and acted upon, and to what problems did it offer a solution?
Two overlapping and mutually reinforcing aspects of the ‘Spartan mirage’ have played havoc with our evidence for early Spartan political history. The first in point of time and significance was the ‘Lykourgos legend’, which held that Sparta was the paradigm of a state owing all its institutions to the legislative enactments of a single lawgiver—in this case to the wondrously omniprovident Lykourgos, for whom dates ranging (in our terms) from the twelfth to the eighth centuries were offered. The second distorting aspect of the ‘mirage’ was the theory of the ‘mixed constitution’, developed perhaps in the fifth century but not apparently applied to Sparta until the fourth (Rawson 1969, 10). This theory contended that the best, because most stable, form of state was either one which combined ingredients from each of the basic constitutional types (monarchy, aristocracy/oligarchy, democracy) in a harmonious whole (the ‘pudding’ version) or one in which the different elements acted as checks and balances to each other (the ‘seesaw’ version). The combined effect—and, no doubt, the object—of the ‘Lykourgos legend’ and the
Figure 76 Archaic sites in Lakonia and Messenia
Theory of the ‘mixed constitution’ was to suggest that Sparta had achieved an internal political equilibrium considerably earlier than could in fact have been the case. Indeed, the devoutly pro-Spartan Athenian exile Xenophon could even, by making Lykourgos contemporary with the (Return of the) Herakleidai (Lak. Pol. 10.8), contrive to suggest that there had never been stasis or civil strife on the political plane in Sparta since the Dorian foundation.
Happily for us, however, not all of our sources were equally persuaded of the truth of every aspect of the ‘mirage’, and Xenophon’s optimistic and partisan view was eccentric. Even Plutarch was unable to keep stasis (civil strife) out of his biography—or rather hagiography—of the lawgiver (Lyk. 5.4f.). More instructive, though, are the sources who were not a party to the mirage. Herodotus (1.65.2) went so far as to say that before Lykourgos’ reforms Sparta had suffered the worst kakonomia (lawlessness) of any Greek state, while Thucydides (1.18. 1), without mentioning Lykourgos by name, agreed for once with Herodotus that there had been stasis followed by eunomia (orderliness). (I shall bring out the significance of these antonyms presently.) But perhaps the most impressive testimony of all is that of Aristotle (Pol. 1306b29-1307a4), who knew of no fewer than five potentially revolutionary situations in Sparta between the late eighth and early fourth centuries. Had it not been for what Thucydides (5.68.2) calls the ‘secretiveness’ of the Spartan state, he might conceivably have learnt of more. It is no accident that two of these—the Partheniai affair and a demand for the redistribution of land, both cited in Chapter 8—fell in the reigns of Theopompos and Polydoros.
The Eurypontid Theopompos and the Agiad Polydoros, who reigned jointly during roughly the first quarter of the seventh century, are the first two individuals known to us as distinct personalities in Spartan history. We need not of course accept all the elaborated details of their reigns, but it was certainly remembered in Sparta that they had played active and decisive roles, and the general tenor of their rule has perhaps been accurately enough conveyed. Theopompos was known to Tyrtaios (fr. 5.1f.) as the general who led the Spartans to victory in the ‘First’ Messenian War. In much later authors, the first known being Aristotle (Pol. 1313a26f.), he displaced the Lykourgos of Herodotus (1.65.5) as creator of the Ephorate. This innovation was represented as a major concession to non - or rather anti-monarchist sentiment and allegedly justified by its author as a pragmatic device to ensure the monarchy’s perpetuation. The original purpose and functions of the office are in fact by no means clear, but it seems likely that it did not from the start possess the extensive executive, judicial and administrative powers symbolized by the oaths exchanged monthly between kings and Ephors in the fourth century (Xen. Lak. Pol. 15.7). At any rate, there was no place for the Ephorate in the ‘Great Rhetra’ (below).
The evidence for the career of Polydoros is of a more unambiguously inflammatory character, but the chief difficulty in assessing its value is that
Polydoros was looked back to as, or transmogrified into, a prototype by revolutionary Spartan monarchs of the third century (when, perhaps, his supposed image was first employed as the official state seal). Thus he was alleged to have espoused the cause of the ordinary Spartan and to have initiated some form of land-distribution, only to be murdered for his reformist pains by a disgruntled noble called Polemarchos (Paus. 3.3.3). In reality, his populist politics are unlikely to have been ideologically motivated or even wholly altruistic, although it is open to argument how far they were dictated by reason of state (the Argos crisis) or concern for his personal position as king, which was perhaps being undermined in Sparta as elsewhere by the jealous non-royal nobility. But whatever the motivation, the defeat at Hysiai in 669—if indeed Polydoros was the defeated general—would have added weight to the opposition, and it is to be assumed that Polydoros’ schemes were robbed of fruition by his death. This, at any rate, is how I would explain the demand for land-redistribution recorded by Tyrtaios.
Two events, however, could have served to breathe fresh life into the Polydoran corpse, the revolt of the Messenian Helots and the establishment of tyrannies on either side of the Isthmus of Corinth c.650. These, I suggest, provided the context in which the ‘Great Rhetra’ was either produced or—if the whole document and not just the appended clause (4) is to be attributed to Theopompos and Polydoros—acted upon. The text may be translated thus:
Having established a cult of Syllanian Zeus and Athena, having done the ‘tribing and obing’, and having established a Gerousia of thirty members including the kings, (1) season in season out they are to hold Apellai between Babyka and Knakion; (2) the Gerousia is both to introduce proposals and to stand aloof; (3) the damos is to have power to (in Plutarch’s gloss on a badly garbled Doric phrase) ‘give a decisive verdict’; (4) but if the damos speaks crookedly, the Gerousia and kings are to be removers.
At a moment of supreme crisis at home and abroad this formula offered something, politically, to all the contending groups. As a result of its enactment the monarchy survived, though with diminished power. The Gerousia (Senate), which included the two kings ex officio, became the supreme political organ in effect, but its membership was limited numerically and (except for the kings) formally subjected to the constraint of public election though not to public accountability. The non-aristocratic damos was granted political recognition, indeed formal sovereignty, but its power of initiative was effectively bridled. Such a reform might well have been characterized as the institution of eunomia, and it is to be noted that towards the end of the seventh century Alkman (fr. 64) made Eunomia the sister of Fortune and Persuasion and the daughter of Foresight. Finally, the authority of Apollo (the ‘Great Rhetra’ was represented as a Delphic oracle) and the prestige of Theopompos and Polydoros was invoked to provide the necessary cement of loyalty.
No less important, however, than what the ‘Great Rhetra’ (to us opaquely) states was what it left unsaid. The exclusion of the Ephorate was presumably due to its relative unimportance at this date or, what Tyrtaios’ paraphrase of the document (fr. 4) implies, to the stress placed by official propaganda on the traditional hierarchy with the kings at the top of the political pyramid. Second, and yet more important, provision must have been made for the redistribution of land in a separate initiative, perhaps in the form of a reward offered for success against the now revolted Messenians. (I cannot agree with Chrimes 1949, 424 that ‘having obed the obes’ implies a redistribution of land.) Thus the carrot of land-allotments in Messenia for the poor, together with the stick of the likely consequences of defeat for all Spartans alike, would have helped to ensure that success was achieved. By tying citizen-rights to the exploitation through Helot labour-power of the land distributed in kleroi (allotments), Sparta created the first (and only) all-hoplite citizen army, truly a ‘new model’. The elite order of Homoioi (‘Peers’) came into being.
Eventual victory in the ‘Second’ Messenian War and the spread of Spartan control to all south-west Peloponnese gave Spartan society an enormous fillip. The second half of the seventh century witnessed the apogee of Lakonian ivory-carving, when the products of Spartan workshops achieved an extraordinarily wide distribution in the Greek world—to Tegea, the Argive Heraion and Perachora within the Peloponnese; to Athens and Pherai beyond the Isthmus of Corinth; to the islands of Delos, Siphnos, Chios, Samos and Rhodes; and even to Taucheira in north Africa. In the first half of the sixth century, however, the quantity (and quality) of ivory artefacts dedicated at the Orthia sanctuary fell off sharply, and ivory was to some extent replaced by bone as the medium of fine carving (apart, that is, from carving in wood, which is attested in the literary sources but naturally has not survived the Lakonian soil and climate). Since this phenomenon was not confined to Lakonia, it has been suggested that the trade in ivory tusks may have been interrupted by the fall of Phoenician Tyre to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 573; the Syrian port of Al Mina on the Orontes, where actual tusks have been excavated, may also have been destroyed about this time.
The leading position occupied by ivory-work in Lakonian craftsmanship was assumed by the bronzesmiths, but not apparently much before the sixth century, when they produced a series of fine hammered and cast vessels, also widely disseminated. Contemporary with the apogee of ivory-carving was the slow metamorphosis of the Lakonian pottery from a ‘third-rate and unpretentious’ fabric into a full-blown orientalizing black-figure style by c.625. By the end of the century work of good quality and lively conception was being not only dedicated in Sparta but exported as far as Sparta’s south Italian colony, Taras. The two delightful cups from Grave 285 at Taranto with their interior designs of sea-fish betray a maritime interest that is also evident from the well-known ivory of c. 625 depicting a warship and, not least, from the poems of the contemporary Alkman (Huxley 1962, 108 n. 124). The latter represents perhaps the jewel in the crown of Spartan high culture.
It was not, however, by sea that the Spartans chose to extend the long arm of their suzerainty. With Messenia under their belt one might have expected them to complete the unfinished business of the Thyreatis or at least to absorb the east Parnon foreland politically. The power of Argos, after all, was not what it had been under Pheidon or at the time of the battle of Hysiai (if these two were chronologically distinct). Instead, however, Sparta seems to have elected to repeat the Messenian trick in Arkadia. There were, it is true, grounds for representing the aggression as a ‘just war’: the Arkadian king Aristokrates (of Orchomenos or Trapezous), who was the grandfather of the wife of Periander tyrant of Corinth, had fought on the wrong side in the ‘Second’ Messenian War; and traditionally Sparta had been defeated at Phigaleia, again in south-west Arkadia, in 659 (Paus. 8.39.3). Moreover, Arkadia offered to Messenian refugees a natural haven, if not a continuing incitement to revolt.
However, the Spartan objective was apparently not merely to punish and neutralize Arkadia but to turn the Tegeans, the nearest Arkadians to Sparta with desirable land, into Helots and the Tegeate plain into kleroi. This at least is the inference to be drawn from the story as preserved in our earliest source, Herodotus (1.66), who describes the overconfident Spartans (trusting, typically, in a Delphic oracle) as marching on Tegea with chains to shackle the future Helots and with measuring-rods to parcel out the plain. With true dramatic irony the Spartans, defeated in battle, ended up working the Tegeans’ land as war-captives bound in their own chains. A century or more later Herodotus was purportedly shown the very chains hanging as a trophy in the temple of Athena Alea; indeed, they were still on display more than seven centuries later—or so the cicerone assured Pausanias (3.7.3; 8.47.2). So unsuccessful in fact may have been the Spartans’ Arkadian venture that the ‘Battle of the Fetters’ was not perhaps their only defeat here in the first half of the sixth century. Combining scattered references in later sources to regions further to the south-west than the Tegeate plain, Forrest (1968, 73-5) has suggested that Sparta may also have been frustrated in an attempt to annex the Megalopolis plain.
However this may be, it is doubtful whether the defeat or defeats were as severe as Herodotus’ Arkadian informants liked to think. For, as Herodotus himself put it (1.65.1), though with infuriating vagueness, the Spartans under the Agiad Leon and the Eurypontid Agasikles (c. 575-560) were successful ‘in all their other wars’. I have already remarked in Chapter 8 that the construction of the second temple of Orthia at Sparta c. 570 is probably to be interpreted in the light of this comment. We might add that the second quarter of the sixth century was also the heyday of the Lakonian painted pottery, which was exported as far north as Olbia in south Russia, as far west as Ampurias in north-east Spain and as far south as Naukratis in Egypt, with especially heavy concentrations occurring at Taras, Taucheira and Samos. However, the only ‘other’ war that we may fairly confidently assign to their reign is the struggle for the control of Olympia, in which Sparta helped Elis oust the local Pisatan dynasty (possibly in 572).
Our general ignorance of Spartan foreign policy at this time is particularly disheartening in view of another highly controversial statement of Herodotus (1.68.6), that in the next generation, under kings Anaxandridas and Ariston, Sparta had already ‘subjugated most of the Peloponnese’. The context of this statement is the request by king Croesus of Lydia for an alliance with Sparta against the rising power of Persia following Sparta’s eventual triumph over Tegea (below). The alliance was granted and sealed, in suitably archaic fashion, by a prestation. Croesus had previously donated Lydian gold to the Spartans, who used it to face the statue of Apollo at Amyklai. Now in return Croesus was sent—though he did not receive—an elaborate bronze bowl, presumably fashioned by Lakonian craftsmen and perhaps of the type of the stupendous bowl buried with a Celtic princess at Vix in France c. 500. Thus by c. 550, according to Herodotus, Sparta had extended its control from the southern two fifths of the Peloponnese to at least one of the remaining three, so that its strength was such as to attract the notice of a foreign, if philhellene, potentate. Yet all we learn from Herodotus of this sea-change in Lakonian affairs is contained in his considerably mythical story of the transfer of the bones of Orestes from Tegea to Sparta, whereafter, he says, Sparta proved superior to Tegea in battle (1.67f.). There is no mention of other military exploits, and the significance of the recovery of the relics is restricted by him to the military sphere. Ancient and modern scholarship has done rather better than the Halikarnassian.
It is of course hazardous to correct Herodotus from later sources, but it is reasonable to supplement him in such matters as diplomatics and constitutional history in which he displays distressingly little interest. It is not therefore surprising that he should have omitted to mention the stele set up ‘on the (banks of the) Alpheios’, which recorded the pledge of the Tegeans to Sparta not to make the Messenians ‘useful’, i. e. give them citizen-rights in Tegea (Jacoby 1944). We owe our knowledge of this stele proximately to Plutarch (Mor. 292B), ultimately to Aristotle (fr. 592 Rose); but unfortunately we know little more than its existence (Bengtson 1975, no. 112). The very place at which it was erected has been disputed, some (like Beloch) arguing that it was at Olympia, where the gods could act as witnesses and guarantors, others believing that it was on the borders of Spartan and Tegeate territory. What does seem probable is that the document inscribed on the stele should be distinguished from the treaty of military alliance concluded between Sparta and Tegea, which was among the earliest (the first may have been with
Elis) of those unequal alliances by which Sparta built up its commanding position in the Peloponnese.
As for the recovery of Orestes’ bones from Tegea, and perhaps also those of his son Teisamenos from Achaia (Paus. 7.1.3), this symbolized and emphasized the shift in Spartan policy from aggression to peaceful coexistence, from ‘Helotization’ to diplomatic subordination. The Spartans could now give preponderant emphasis in their propaganda to their claim to be the legitimate successors to the ‘Achaean’ rulers of the Peloponnese and even represent themselves as champions of all Hellas. The poet Stesichoros (West 1969, 148) lent his voice to the change of policy; and it may have been about 550 that Agamemnon, brother of Menelaos and father of Orestes, began to be worshipped as a hero at Amyklai. If any one Spartan was chiefly responsible for the new direction, he may have been Chilon, eponymous Ephor C.556 and one of the ‘Seven Sages’ of ancient Greece, to whom may also be given some of the credit for elevating the status of the Ephorate (cf. Diog. Laert. 1.68). A tantalizing fragment of a sixth-century relief bearing the name of [Ch]ilon found at Sparta is perhaps to be associated with the much later report (Paus. 3.16.4) that the Spartans established a hero-cult to Chilon.
Tegea, then, had been ‘subjugated’ through a quintessentially Spartan combination of magic, military might and diplomacy. But what about the rest of the Peloponnese, and in particular Corinth and Argos? Corinth was certainly allied to Sparta on some basis by c.525, when the two states undertook a major naval expedition against Polykrates tyrant of Samos (below); but we know little or nothing of relations between the two states before that date. The alleged Corinthian aid to Sparta in the ‘Second’ Messenian War is doubtful, and the statement (Plut. Mor. 859D) that Sparta terminated the Kypselid tyranny at Corinth is incorrect either in fact or in MS. transmission. There is nothing very surprising about this. Distance and an accident of geography had prescribed different and separate destinies for the two Dorian states down to the seventh, if not the sixth, century. However, once Sparta became involved with Argos and concerned about communication into and out of the Peloponnese, Corinth was bound to become of particular importance. If there is anything to Herodotus’ statement that Sparta had ‘subjugated most of the Peloponnese’ by c. 550, then it is possible that Corinth was received into alliance following Sparta’s deposition of Aischines, last of the Orthagorid tyrants of Sikyon, in c.556. However, the evidence for this latter transaction is extremely suspect, partly because Sparta acquired a reputation as a tyrant-slayer, partly because the sources—a second-century papyrus perhaps transcribing Ephorus (FGrHist 105F1) and Plutarch (Mor. 859D)—are unreliable and far removed in time. Its date too is uncertain (some prefer c. 510), but c.556 receives some support from the mention by the papyrus of Chilon as acting in a military capacity with king Anaxandridas.
We are rather better informed on relations between Sparta and Argos. Not, that is, that we hear directly of any contact between them after the battle of
Hysiai down to the struggle for the Thyreatis in the mid-sixth century; but Sparta’s resettlement of the exiles from Argive Nauplia at Messenian Mothone (Paus. 4.35.2) probably belongs to the late seventh century (Huxley 1962, 59f.). However, the ‘Battle of the Champions’ in c.545 caught the imagination of Herodotus (1.82)—and indeed remained indelibly stamped on the consciousness both of the Argives, who actually proposed a return match on the same terms in 420 (Thuc. 5.41.2), and of the Spartans, who took to wearing ‘Thyreatic crowns’ at the Gymnopaidiai (Sosibios, FGrHist 595F5); possible representations of these crowns appear in two bronze figurines found at Amyklai and Kosmas (Perioikic Glympeis or Glyppia).
According to Herodotus, the Spartans had in fact seized the Thyreatis before the ritualistic battle, but he unfortunately omits to say how long before. This is important for the history of Lakonia, because for Herodotus it was only after Argos had been comprehensively defeated in the full-scale engagement subsequent to the ‘Battle of the Champions’ that Argos was deprived of the territory east of Parnon to the south of the Thyreatis, the eastern seaboard of the Malea peninsula and the island of Kythera. If we rule Herodotus’ testimony to such an Argive ‘empire’ out of court, as I think we should, then we must admit that we have no direct literary witness to the process whereby Sparta completed the enlargement of Lakonia. To be strictly accurate, a reference to it has been detected in the second-century papyrus cited above, but this is too fragmentary to illuminate the nature of the process or to fix the date of its completion. There is, however, a little indirect evidence—archaeological and epigraphical as well as literary—which may be thought relevant.
For the Thyreatis itself there is nothing known between, on the one hand, Spartan campaigns and the ‘Geometric’ pottery of the late eighth or early seventh century and, on the other, a handful of bronzes (one inscribed) and a stone head of the last third of the sixth century. But this sixth-century material is wholly Lakonian, which suggests either that the alleged ‘Dorianizing’ of Kynouria by the Argives (Hdt. 8.73.3) had not been a process affecting high culture or that the Argive veneer was stripped off remarkably soon after c.545.
As for the east Parnon foreland, there are only two sites which merit consideration. The first, Prasiai, was cited in the previous chapter as originally an independent member of the Kalaureian Amphiktyony, whose role therein was later assumed by Sparta. If Kelly (1976, 74) is right in dating the foundation of the Amphiktyony to the mid-seventh century, this would of course support his view that Argos was not in control of the foreland at this time. We need not, however, follow him in thinking that Sparta’s involvement in the Amphiktyony began only after the defeat of Argos in c.545. At any rate, the only Archaic finds from the site of which we may speak with confidence—a four-sided bone seal of the seventh century and a fine bronze mirror with a handle in the form of a draped woman of the late sixth—are both of Spartan manufacture. The other site, the sanctuary of Apollo Tyritas, lay north of Prasiai on the coast near the modern Tsakonian village of Tyros. Controlled twentieth-century excavations followed tardily on the illicit diggings of the nineteenth, but although nothing of the foundations of the temple was discovered, a handful of architectural fragments indicated that the earliest version was built around 600. What is particularly interesting is that the disc akroterion which surmounted the pediment is of undoubtedly Spartan type (used in at least six other Lakonian sanctuaries, as well as at Bassai and Olympia) and that all the inscribed dedications (none, though, certainly earlier than 545) are in the Lakonian local script.
The sole site on the east coast of the Malea peninsula for which there is archaeological evidence prior to the fifth century is Epidauros Limera, but even this is hardly revealing. An island gem of the seventh century is reported to have been found here, suggesting Aegean contacts; and a fine handle from a bronze hydria made at Sparta in the sixth century has turned up at nearby Monemvasia. Let us therefore move swiftly on to Kythera. Such cultural connections with the Argolis as the island may betray before 650 disappear completely thereafter. A striking, if crudely executed, bronze figurine of a draped woman datable c.630 reminds me somewhat of the ‘Menelaion Goddess’ (Chapter 8), although its most recent publisher, J. N.Coldstream (Coldstream and Huxley 1972, 271), thinks rather of Crete. There then ensues an archaeological and epigraphical gap of a century or so. To the last third of the sixth century belong, for example, a marble lion, which perhaps served as a grave-marker; a bronze figurine of a draped woman dedicated, presumably to Aphrodite, by one Klearisia; and a fine bronze head of a youth. Only the latter reveals strong affinity with the Lakonian mainland, and the quasi-Lakonian lettering of an inscription from Kastri bearing the single word ‘Malos’ (c. 525-400) confirms that down to the fifth century Kythera stood somewhat apart from cultural developments in the rest of Lakonia. Its political position, however, is another matter—a salutary reminder that material artefacts do not yield straightforward political conclusions.
To conclude this discussion, I do not believe it is possible at present to say when Sparta absorbed the east Parnon foreland politically into the polis of Lakedaimon. The same goes for the east coast of the Malea peninsula and Kythera. The testimony of Herodotus, however, when we have subtracted the element due to Argive propaganda, almost proves that the process had been completed by c. 540. Kelly (1976, 74f., 87) has argued that Sparta would not have moved to annex the Thyreatis until after it had established its superiority securely over Tegea, since the route from the Eurotas valley to the Thyreatis passes uncomfortably close to Tegeate territory. This may well be so, but geography alone cannot exclude a priori the possibility that the territory south of the Thyreatis had been absorbed politically, as it had undoubtedly been influenced culturally, by Sparta at an earlier date. On balance, though, I am inclined to think that this incorporation, like the favourable accommodation with Tegea, belongs to the reign of Anaxandridas and Ariston (c. 550-520) rather than to the ‘other wars’ of their immediate predecessors.
The only external event of the joint reign of Anaxandridas and Ariston related by Herodotus (3.39.1, 44-8.1, 54-8)—although, as with the battles for the Thyreatis, he does not introduce the kings into his narrative—is the naval expedition to Samos in c. 525. This was undertaken ostensibly to restore some Samian aristocrats but perhaps had longer-range, anti-Persian ends in view. Sparta, as already noted, was aided by Corinth, who may have provided the bulk of the ‘large’ (Hdt. 3.54.1) fleet. Sparta, however, was perhaps not a complete stranger to naval activity. One of the five Archaic regiments of Sparta was called Ploas, which may mean ‘Seafarers’ (Burn 1960, 275). We have already cited the depiction of a warship at Sparta before 600. The far-flung export of Lakonian pottery between c.575 and 550 suggests nautical skill at least on the part of some Perioikoi. The alliance with Croesus, moreover, seems to indicate a Spartan preparedness to undertake an expedition by sea c.550, even if in the event only a token penteconter actually reached Asia Minor (Hdt. 1.152f.). Finally, the incorporation and control of the eastern seaboard of Lakonia and of Kythera presumably involved the use of a fleet. However that may be, an expedition of the kind undertaken in c.525 certainly implies military co-operation of some nature between the Spartans and Perioikoi, for all naval muster-stations or ports in Lakonia were located in Perioikic territory (Chapter 10). We are not told where the fleet sailed from, but there was presumably a harbour of sorts at Tainaron in c.600, when Arion of Methymna landed there (Hdt. 1.24.6), and we hear of fleets at anchor off Gytheion, Las and Messenian Asine in the fifth century.
We should not, however, distort the perspective. In 480 Sparta contributed a paltry ten ships to the Hellenic fleet at Artemision (Hdt. 8.1.2); and the series of Lakonian bronze figurines of hoplite infantrymen, which belong principally to the third quarter of the sixth century, confirms that the expedition to Samos was an exceptional undertaking. (I consider the alleged Spartan ‘thalassocracy’ of 517-515 below.) Most important of all, though, the naval expedition was also both costly and unsuccessful. Hence perhaps Sparta’s failure to seize the opportunity to become the dominant naval power of mainland Greece before Themistokles persuaded the Athenians in the 480s that their future lay on the sea (Thuc. 1.93.3f.).
Regrettably, our main source for the period c. 525-480, Herodotus, was less impressed by this momentous failure than by the outcome of Anaxandridas’ marital irregularities (5.39f., esp. 40.2). His eldest son and successor, Kleomenes I, was undoubtedly the most powerful Spartan king since Polydoros, and his like was not to reappear until the Eurypontid Agesilaos II. But Herodotus’ impressionistic and distorted account of his reign makes it abundantly clear that his information was derived overwhelmingly from hostile informants—the descendants, we may surmise, of Kleomenes’ half-brothers (Dorieus, Leonidas and Kleombrotos) and those of the Eurypontid colleague whose deposition he engineered in c.491 (Damaratos). For Kleomenes himself failed to leave behind a son and heir, and, although his daughter Gorgo was married to Leonidas, in the pages of Herodotus she serves merely to show her father up rather than to vindicate his sullied reputation. Moreover, the one man whose descendants would have been most likely to give Herodotus a favourable account, Latychidas (Damaratos’ cousin and replacement), had died a disgraced exile (Hdt. 6.72). The extent of Herodotus’ bias against Kleomenes may be gauged from the fact that he is prepared to present a highly sympathetic picture of a proven ‘medizer’ (Damaratos) and an unsuccessful colonizer (Dorieus). To add to our problems, there are also major chronological difficulties in his account. Thus, since Herodotus provides us with practically all our information on Kleomenes, it is impossible for us to reconstruct with confidence the main lines of his—and so, in the main, Sparta’s—domestic and foreign policy in the late sixth and early fifth centuries.
I labour Herodotus’ inadequacies because the reign of Kleomenes was crucial not only for Lakonian but for all Greek history and as such demands the closest possible scrutiny. In the course of it Sparta became firmly established as supreme in the Peloponnese and a leader of the Greek world generally, through the control of what we call the ‘Peloponnesian League’ and the crushing of Argos. Athens, in spite of and to an extent because of Kleomenes’ best efforts, became a democracy (the world’s first) and later, this time with the backing of Kleomenes, set its face successfully against Persian expansion. Finally, and more parochially, it was in Kleomenes’ reign that the peculiar system of Perioikoi and Helots elaborated over the centuries underwent its first real testing on a wider stage. Since space forbids me to deal in detail with the reign as a whole, I shall concentrate on these three main issues.
A. H.M. Jones opens his history of Sparta (1967) by remarking that ‘the Spartans had short memories’. As an illustration he cites Herodotus’ picture of Kleomenes: ‘on a simple point of fact he says that his reign was short (5.48), while from the information he gives it appears that he must have ruled for nearly thirty years.’ Kleomenes was certainly on the throne in c. 517, when the Samian Maiandrios unsuccessfully appealed to him to eject the proPersian puppet Syloson (Hdt. 3.148), and he may have acceded before 519, the date given by Thucydides (3. 68.5) for the alliance between Plataia and Athens. For, according to Herodotus (6.108.2-4), it was ‘the Spartans’, then coincidentally in the vicinity (Megarid) under the leadership of Kleomenes, who had advised the Plataians to seek this alliance, in order to make trouble for the Athenians. But the Athenians were not of course obliged to ally themselves to Plataia, and Herodotus’ explanation looks anachronistic: for the real sufferers from such an alliance would have been the Thebans, whose claim to control all Boiotia was thereby undermined. If the Spartans were really in the Megarid to procure an alliance for themselves with Megara in 519 (Bum 1960, 265) this would be a further reason for their wanting to keep Athens—with whose rulers, the Peisistratids, they were apparently then on good terms (below)—well disposed; for Athens and Megara were traditional enemies. On the other hand, should Athens and Sparta fall out, a possibility not to be overlooked given Athens’ increasing power and its hostility to Megara and Aigina (also perhaps already allied to Sparta), then Thebes would be likely to take Sparta’s side anyway. Herodotus does not attribute the advice given to Plataia specifically to Kleomenes, but such a masterstroke of diplomacy would not be inappropriate for a descendant of Chilon (the family-tree is plausibly reconstructed in Huxley 1962, 149).
The words with which Kleomenes reportedly resisted the arguments and bribes of Maiandrios are consistent with Sparta’s claim to the hegemony of the Peloponnese, even if they are in fact the invention of Herodotus: ‘it was better for Sparta that the Samian stranger should be removed from the Peloponnese’ (not just Lakedaimon). However, according to Eusebius (Chronikon I, 225 Schoene), or the source upon which the good bishop drew, it was just about this time that Sparta was enjoying a period of ‘thalassocracy’, i. e. 517-515. The reliability of the ‘thalassocracy list’ is highly questionable, at least in all its details (Jeffery 1976, 253f.), and attempts to explain the Spartan ‘thalassocracy’ in terms of its alleged deposition of Lygdamis, tyrant of Naxos (Plut. Mor. 859D), involve postulating a naval expedition nearly as far as the one to Samos which Sparta simultaneously declined to undertake. In fact, Lygdamis is more likely to have been deposed during the expedition to Samos of c. 525.
If therefore the attribution of a ‘thalassocracy’ to Sparta has any justification, or explanation, a more likely one is to be found in the activities of Dorieus in the central Mediterranean, unsuccessful though these ultimately proved. According to an ingenious emendation of Pausanias 3.16.4f., proposed by Edgar Lobel, Dorieus took with him to the west men from Perioikic Anthana in the Thyreatis (modern Meligou?), a community whose existence is otherwise first recorded by Thucydides (5.41.2). The entry in the sixth-century AD lexicon of Stephanos of Byzantion under ‘Anthana’ states that Kleomenes flayed alive the eponymous hero of the place and wrote oracles on his skin. This evidence is hardly impeccable, but it is possible that Dorieus was attempting to play on discontent in this recently Perioikized region in order to bolster his frustrated claim to the Agiad throne. As we shall see, however, there is no discernible trace of Perioikic discontent in the Thyreatis twenty years later.
The next major episode in Kleomenes’ turbulent career concerned relations between Sparta (and its allies) and Peisistratid Athens. Herodotus goes out of his way to stress that prior to the outbreak of actual warfare Sparta had been on friendly terms with Athens’ tyrant rulers (5. 63.2; 90.1; 91.2) and that it was Spartan religiosity, in the form of unquestioning obedience to the injunctions of Delphic Apollo, which prompted the change of heart. However, if one thing is clear about Kleomenes’ career, it is his remarkably flexible, not to say unorthodox, attitude to religion. A man who in 491 could bribe the Delphic priesthood itself (he more or less admitted his guilt by his flight from Sparta) was surely not one to be over-impressed by Delphic commands— unless they coincided with his own views. Thus the modern suggestion that the Peisistratid Hippias’ medism was the cause of Spartan hostility may be more than a ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’ explanation. Interestingly, the first Spartan expedition to unseat Hippias travelled to Attika by sea. It was led in C.512 by one Anchimolios or Anchimolos, possibly the first Spartan navarch (Sealey 1976, 339), presumably in Perioikic bottoms and perhaps with Perioikic marines. The expedition, however, was an unmitigated disaster, and its admiral was killed. About two years later the Spartans sent a larger force, this time by land and under the command of Kleomenes (Hdt. 5.64f.). But even this was successful only through the chance capture of the children of the Peisistratids.
The status of Athens after the overthrow and expulsion of Hippias, who duly went over to the Persians, is unclear. There is no ancient evidence for the modern suggestion that it became a subordinate ally of Sparta on similar terms to those allies who later formed the ‘Peloponnesian League’. On the other hand, the head of the Alkmaionid family, Kleisthenes, and 700 other families did leave Athens after Kleomenes’ personal intervention in c. 508 with a lack of fuss surprising if Athens was in no way bound to Sparta (Hdt. 5.70; 72.1). This, however, marked the end of Kleomenes’ success. However much he may have been impelled originally by anti-Persian sentiment, his predilection for the Athenian noble and would-be tyrant Isagoras (or, so rumour had it, for Isagoras’ wife) proved scarcely politic, his imprisonment in Athens scarcely flattering. The democratic reforms sponsored by Kleisthenes (508/7) might well have been passed anyway, but the speed and smoothness with which they were adopted and implemented owed much to the hostility of the Athenian assembly towards Kleomenes’ political schemes.
Thus it was specifically to avenge himself upon the Athenian demos, according to Herodotus (5.74.1), that Kleomenes in c. 506 mounted the largest Spartan expedition against Athens so far. It comprised all Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies, the Boiotians (Thebes and its allies), and the Chalkidians of Euboia, as well as the Spartans (including presumably Perioikic hoplites) themselves. Yet this invasion of Attika too was a complete failure, largely because Damaratos and the Corinthians abandoned Kleomenes before the fighting began. It was not, however, a wholly unproductive failure. The reputations of Sparta and Kleomenes were heavily tarnished, but the law subsequently passed by the Spartan assembly that only one king should command on campaign prevented a recurrence of the fatal disagreement in Attika between Kleomenes and Damaratos. (One thinks, for example, of the situation in 403.) Perhaps more important still, a couple of years or so later (c.504?) a rudimentary formula for collective decision-making was put into operation and the ‘Peloponnesian League’ more or less properly so called was born, destined for an active life of nearly a century and a half.
To put it another way, the allies of Sparta had won a collective right of veto denied to the Perioikic towns, whose relations with Sparta in other respects provided both the precedent and the model for the series of individual, unequal alliances Sparta had built up in the Peloponnese and outside (Megara, Thebes, Aigina) since around the middle of the sixth century. (I shall return to this point in the next chapter.) We are very poorly informed on the dates at which Sparta had contracted its various alliances, and we know virtually nothing of the obligations and rights of members of the ‘League’ before the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, our most extensive source is the Athenian Xenophon writing in the 350s, who witnessed and recorded its demise. It may, however, be worth briefly summarizing here what we do know, for there do not seem to have been any momentous innovations between 500 and the 380s (Chapter 13), and it was as leader of the ‘League’ that Sparta became the automatic choice as leader of the Greek resistance to Persia in 481.
The ‘League’ was known simply as ‘the Lakedaimonians and their allies’. Its members were all officially autonomous allies of Sparta, though Sparta in practice took care to ensure that they were mostly controlled by pro-Spartan oligarchies of birth or wealth. In peacetime wars were permitted between members, but if one was attacked by a non-member Sparta was bound to come to its aid ‘with all strength in accordance with its ability’. The clause binding the ally to ‘follow the Spartans whithersoever they may lead’, wherein lay the ally’s formal subordination, was modified in practice after C.504 to mean that, if the Spartan assembly voted to go to war, its decision had to be ratified by a majority decision of a ‘League’ Congress, in which each ally regardless of size had one vote. If the decision for war was ratified, Sparta levied the ‘League’ army, decided where the combined force was to muster, contributed the commander-in-chief (normally a king) and provided officers to levy the allied contingents. Peace, like war, was subject to a majority vote, but an individual member might claim exemption on the grounds of a prior religious obligation. Finally, there was possibly contained in each individual treaty a clause binding the ally to provide Sparta with assistance in the event of a Helot revolt.
The purpose for which the first ‘Peloponnesian League’ Congress was convened in c.504 was to debate the Spartan proposal (not ascribed by Herodotus specifically to Kleomenes) to reinstate Hippias as tyrant of Athens (Hdt. 5.90-3). This proposal is important for two reasons. First, it destroys the myth of Sparta’s principled opposition to tyranny. Second, perhaps for the first but certainly not the last time, Corinth led a majority of allies to reject a Spartan decision. Hence, with the Athenian question temporarily shelved, the next major episode in Kleomenes’ reign involved Sparta’s attitude to the Ionian revolt envisaged by Aristagoras (tyrant of Miletus) about 500. This time Kleomenes’ resolve to resist bribery needed stiffening—or so Herodotus was told—by his eight-year-old daughter Gorgo, which may mean that Kleomenes was in fact inclined to support Aristagoras. Scholarly opinion is rather sharply divided over the wisdom of Kleomenes’ refusal. But the Delphic Oracle, which had been ‘medizing’ since c. 540, was in no doubt that Aristagoras’ designs were misguided—if, as I think we should, we accept as genuine the unique double oracle delivered to the Argives and, in their absence, the Milesians (Hdt. 6.19; 77). A possible occasion for its delivery was when Aristagoras was in Sparta canvassing support; Argos would naturally have been interested in the transaction.
Usually, however, the oracle is regarded as post eventum, the conjoint doom prophesied for Argos and Miletos arising from the coincidence of their disastrous defeats in 494—the former at the hands of Sparta, the latter inflicted by the Persians or rather their Phoenician fleet. But if the double oracle is genuine, then of course we have no sure way of dating Kleomenes’ massively successful campaign against Argos. In Herodotus (6.75.3.82) the episode is allowed to float freely in time. On balance I prefer a date late in Kleomenes’ reign, after rather than before the Athens affair of c.512-504. But I leave open the question whether Sparta’s aim was simply to nullify its major rival for Peloponnesian hegemony or also in the process to remove a possible source of aid and comfort to an invading Persian army (Tomlinson 1972, 96).
In sharp contrast to the invasion of Attika in c. 506, the Argos campaign was a purely Spartan affair. For Herodotus describes Kleomenes’ army as ‘Spartiatai’, by which, if he was being precise (but see Westlake 1977, 100), he meant citizens of Sparta as opposed to the Perioikoi (a mixed force should have been called ‘Lakedaimonioi’). We are not told exactly how large the force was, but it numbered above 2,000 since the 1,000 troops retained by Kleomenes after the main engagement in the Argolis constituted a minority of the total (Hdt.6. 81). They were accompanied by Helots, perhaps one for each hoplite, whose function was to carry their masters’ armour and look after their other needs. The route taken to the Thyreatis from Sparta was presumably the one used in reverse by Epameinondas in 370 (Chapter 13), past Sellasia through the Kleissoura pass and the bed of the Sarandapotamos to the territory of Tegea, rather than the more difficult route over north Parnon via Arachova, Ay. Petros, Xirokambi and Ay. Ioannis to Astros. Herodotus, however, provides no geographical indications until the Spartans reached the River Erasinos, well into Argive territory, to whose god Kleomenes duly sacrificed. Since the omens were inauspicious—or perhaps more prosaically, since the narrow passage between mountains and sea was blocked by the Argives—Kleomenes withdrew to the Thyreatis and took ship for the Argolis. Again, we are given no geographical indications for the point of embarkation, but the bay of Astros alone provides suitable anchorage. This must have been the port of ancient Thyrea, a settlement which, though frequently mentioned by Pausanias, cannot be precisely located. Of the possible sites in the area only Ay. Triada, some three kilometres inland to the south-west of Cape Astros, suits the information of Thucydides (4.57.1) that Thyrea lay ten stades inland. Presumably, therefore, the Perioikoi of Thyrea provided at least some of the ships to transport the Spartan troops, but we learn from Herodotus (6.92.1) that Aigina and Sikyon also lent naval assistance, either further transports or warships to convoy them.
Kleomenes was careful to land well to the east of Argos at Nauplia (robbed of its separate political existence perhaps a century earlier: see above) and in the territory of Tiryns, which was also subject to Argos. The pitched battle took place at Sepeia near Tiryns, and the Spartans won; but by far the majority of the Argive force, to the (surely exaggerated) number of
6,000, took refuge in a sacred grove nearby. Then in what Tomlinson (1972, 94) has rightly called an ‘un-Greek’ act of treachery and sacrilege, some fifty of the Argives were lured out of the grove by Kleomenes and killed, while the rest were burned to death in the grove itself. The fire, however, was applied by Helots, presumably to absolve the Spartans themselves technically from any possible taint of ritual pollution. Kleomenes then dismissed the majority of his army and, instead of marching on Argos, proceeded to the Argive Heraion, possibly (a suggestion of A. Blakeway) to parley with the men of Mykenai. On being refused permission by the priest to sacrifice to Hera, Kleomenes had the man whipped—again by Helots.
The consequences of the Sepeia campaign made themselves felt during the Persian invasion of 480-479. Argos itself preserved a spineless neutrality, while Tiryns and Mykenai, briefly independent again, sent hoplites to Thermopylai (the Mykenaians only) and Plataia. Their names were duly inscribed on the Serpent Column erected at Delphi. But between Sepeia and Plataia a very great deal had happened. The defeat of the lonians in 494 paved the way for Persian intervention in first Thrace then the southern Greek mainland. The envoys sent by the Great King in c.492 to demand earth and water (the customary tokens of submission to Persia) were rejected without ceremony by both Sparta and Athens, but they were received treacherously by Aigina. Athens, threatened with the use of Aigina as a base by the Persian fleet, appealed to Sparta. It is not entirely clear that Aigina was already a member of the ‘Peloponnesian League’ (I personally believe it was), but Kleomenes’ response to the appeal of his former opponents and to the medism of Aigina was unambiguous and unhesitating, according to the account of Herodotus (6.48-51; 61.1; 64-67.1; 73). He went in person to Aigina and demanded hostages as a guarantee of Aigina’s loyalty, only to be rebuffed—perhaps on a technicality on which Damaratos, hostile to Kleomenes since at least c. 506, had advised the leading Aiginetans to insist (but see Carlier 1977, 78f.).
Kleomenes now stretched his cavalier attitude to religion to the limit—or rather beyond it: for he bribed the Delphic Oracle to pronounce Damaratos a bastard and so had him deposed. Most Greeks, Herodotus (6.75.3) says, imputed Kleomenes’ gruesome end (below) to this sacrilege, and the pious Herodotus naturally could hardly have approved such an action. But even he, despite the hostile sources he used, explicitly remarked of Kleomenes’ first intervention in Aigina that he was ‘striving for the common good of Hellas’ (6.61.1). We of course may feel free to apply this comment to the sequel also, in which Kleomenes returned to Aigina with his new co-king Latychidas and not only extracted the required hostages (the ten most powerful and wealthy Aiginetan aristocrats) but actually handed them over to their bitterest enemies, the Athenians. Nothing was better calculated to prevent Aiginetan medism, and, when the Persian fleet sacked Eretria and landed in Attika in 490, Aiginetan aid to Persia was conspicuous by its absence.
Had Kleomenes died after handing over the hostages, he might not have received quite so sweeping a ‘damnatio memoriae’ at Sparta. Damaratos, after all, did go over to the Persian side in 491, and it is doubtful whether those in authority at Sparta at the time thought so highly of him as Herodotus did, despite his prestigious victory in the four-horse chariot-race at Olympia in about 500 (Ste. Croix 1972, 355 n. 5). (Damaratos’ direct descendants were excluded from the Eurypontid throne thereafter until the elevation of Nabis in the late third century.) Besides, the Spartans themselves rather curiously ascribed Kleomenes’ mode of death to his habit of taking wine neat (Hdt.
6.84.1), not to his tampering with the Delphic Oracle. However, when Kleomenes’ sacrilege became known in Sparta, he at any rate feared for his throne (or his life) and withdrew from Sparta.
According to the manuscripts of Hdt. 6.74.1, Kleomenes went to Thessaly (Forrest 1968, 91, says to the Aleuadai of Larissa, though on what authority I do not know). But the emendation of ‘Thessalia’ to ‘Sellasia’ (proposed by D. Hereward) is attractive: Sellasia was the first Perioikic town Kleomenes would reach on his way north from Sparta. Sellasia, however, proved too close to Sparta for Kleomenes’ liking (or Thessaly proved too far), and he is next heard of in Arkadia engaged in the revolutionary activity of uniting the Arkadians against Sparta and binding them by the most awful oaths to follow him whithersoever he might lead them (Hdt. 6.74). Herodotus, typically, quickly loses interest in this small matter of royal revolution and, after spending the rest of his space on Arkadia in discussing a minor point of geography, goes on to describe Kleomenes’ recall and death. We, however, must fill out the picture.
Arkadia is an upland area of central Peloponnese, difficult of access and yet of crucial strategic importance. It was no coincidence that the historical dialect most akin to the language of the Linear B tablets should have been developed here nor that so many decisive battles were fought in the plain of Mantineia. For Sparta, once it had gained control of Messenia and pushed its frontier in the north-east as far as the northern boundary of the Thyreatis, Arkadia was the single most important area with which it had to deal. Its boundaries marched with those of the Messenians in the south-west and those of the Argives on the north-east, in other words, with those of Sparta’s most important internal and external enemies. It was through Arkadia that Sparta was bound to proceed in the event of war in central or northern Greece. Conversely, Arkadia served as a buffer-zone against any enemies who might be interested in invading Lakonia or Messenia. The full significance of the role of Arkadia was expressed soon after the battle of Leuktra in 371: Sparta’s Arkadian allies defected, taking with them the Perioikoi of the Belminatis, Skiritis and Karyatis on the northern frontier of Lakonia, and constituted themselves the Arkadian League (Tod 1948, no. 132); Epameinondas led the first-ever invasion of Lakonia since the ‘Dorian invasion’ of the Dark Ages and liberated the Messenian Helots; finally, the polis of Megalopolis was created out of forty Arkadian villages as a permanent watchdog on Messenian independence and a rival claimant to the Belminatis. It is only if we keep this longer perspective in view that the full import of Kleomenes’ behaviour in Arkadia in 491 can be grasped.
Kleomenes, however, may not have been responsible for uniting the Arkadians in the first place. Rather, he may have placed himself at the head of a ‘nationalist’ conspiracy, in much the same way as Catiline was forced to lead the Italians in 63. For Herodotus (5.49.8) makes Aristagoras in c. 500 refer to Spartan difficulties with the Arkadians, and it was just about then or perhaps ten or fifteen years later that the coinage bearing the legend ‘Arkadikon’ was first minted at Heraia. The propaganda significance of these coins cannot have escaped the Spartan authorities: the Arkadians were announcing that in some sense they wished to act and be treated as ‘the Arkadians’, whereas Sparta’s consistent policy towards their allies from the mid-sixth century onwards was (anticipating Rome) to divide and so rule. The really extraordinary and paradoxical thing, therefore, about Kleomenes’ behaviour was that the very same man who had been instrumental in keeping the Boiotians divided in 519 should also have been prepared to foster the unity of the Arkadians some thirty years later.
Herodotus does not explain this volte-face of Kleomenes, but I prefer to think of it as yet another instance of his political opportunism rather than as a sign of mental imbalance. In the words of Herodotus (6.75.1), however, Kleomenes had always been ‘slightly touched’; and on his return to Sparta he went stark staring mad. He took to poking his staff in the face of anyone he chanced to meet, until his relatives (one suspects his surviving halfbrothers) clapped him in the stocks. Here he persuaded his Helot guard to lend him his iron dagger (some Helots at least were trusted to carry offensive weapons in Sparta) and proceeded to butcher himself from the calves upwards. Such a suicide is not, I understand, unexampled in the psycho-analytical literature, but I prefer to follow the amateur detectives who suspect foul play on the part of the Spartan authorities. The case of the Maigrets would certainly be greatly strengthened if Sparta in 491 was faced with not only Arkadian dissidence but a revolt of the Messenian Helots to boot.
Such a revolt is not mentioned by Herodotus. He does, however, make Aristagoras (in the passage just referred to) describe the Messenians as ‘well-matched’ enemies of Sparta; and it has been argued that a Helot revolt makes a better explanation than an alleged religious scruple (Hdt. 6.106.3; 120) for Sparta’s failure to arrive at Marathon in time for the historic battle of 490. Moreover, about twenty years later a Spartan ruler (Pausanias the Regent) could plausibly be accused of conniving at a Helot revolt. However, the Spartans undoubtedly were monumentally superstitious (see above all Hdt. 6.82), and we should, I think, take a lot of convincing that Herodotus ignored, deliberately suppressed or was ignorant of so crucial an event in Spartan history. Since I have an open mind on the question, I shall simply set out the evidence and arguments that have been mustered in favour of its occurrence.
First, Plato (Laws 698DE) specifically states that there was a Messenian revolt at the time of Marathon. Second, if the so-called ‘Rhianos hypothesis’ (a tissue of interdependent conjectures without direct external corroboration) is correct, the war starring Aristomenes the Messenian and celebrated by Rhianos was a war fought in the early fifth century, not (as Paus. 4.15.2) the ‘Second’ Messenian War of the seventh. Third, a dedication of war-spoils at Olympia by the Spartans belongs epigraphically perhaps to the first, rather than the second, quarter of the fifth century (M/L no. 22). Pausanias (5.24.3) apparently knew that the inscription referred to spoils from the Messenians, but he wrongly believed it to have been inscribed at the time of the ‘Second’ or perhaps the ‘Third’ (the revolt of the 460s) Messenian War. Fourth, the bronze tripods wrought by the Lakonian Gitiadas (flor. c. 550) and the Aiginetan Kallon, which Pausanias (3.18.7f.) saw at Amyklai, cannot both have commemorated the same Spartan victory over the Messenians, let alone a victory in the ‘Second’ Messenian War; but that of Kallon, who is known to have been active at Athens in the 480s, could have commemorated a victory in the early fifth century. Fifth, the statue of Zeus made by the Argive sculptor Ageladas could not have been originally made for the Naupaktos Messenians, as Pausanias (4.33.2) was told, since Ageladas worked in the early years of the fifth century, not c.460 or later. It might, however, have been commissioned at a time when the Messenians were in a state of revolt. (A large dedication by the Messenians at Delphi in the first half of the fifth century is even more problematic: Jeffery 1961, 205.) Finally, Anaxilas, tyrant of Rhegion in the early fifth century, settled some Messenians at Zankle in north-east Sicily, according to Pausanias (4.23.6), who, however, wrongly dates Anaxilas to the seventh century by connecting the resettlement with the ‘Second’ Messenian War.
It should be obvious that singly none of these scraps of evidence is incontrovertible or even compelling; but taken together they do at least add up to an arguable case, though not an ‘overwhelming’ one, as J. F.Lazenby believe (MME 87). A Helot revolt in the 490s would have been the red light as far as Spartan expansion was concerned and a powerful argument for abandoning the extra-Peloponnesian adventures (as they may have seemed to the more conservative members of the Spartan ruling class) favoured by Kleomenes. As we shall see in Chapter 11, Sparta was considerably reluctant to commit large numbers of its troops north of the Isthmus of Corinth in the defence of Greece in 480-479, and one reason for this reluctance may well have been Helot disaffection.
World History
