Introduction

By the standards of mainland Greece, Sparta and Athens were enormous states. While the great majority of poleis had a territory of no more than 200 km2, Attika covered some 2,500 km2 and Lakonia twice that, and after the conquest of Messenia Sparta commanded some 8,500 km2. In both cases the historical polis was a product of a process of aggregation in very early times: the Athenians attributed the political unification of Attika to their mythical king Theseus and celebrated it annually in the festival of the Synoikia, while the amalgamation of villages to form the Spartan polis was symbolized by her unique dual kingship. The abundance of resources in land and manpower which both enjoyed meant that neither followed the typical pattern of expansion through overseas settlement in the archaic period. In the late eighth century, Sparta annexed neighbouring Messenia by virtue of her superior manpower (according to later tradition (Plutarch Lykourgos 8), her lawgiver Lykour-gos established a citizen body of 9,000), and her one major colony at Taras (modern Taranto) in 706 was principally a safety valve for social tensions.

At Athens, signs of overseas activity appear later: by the end of the seventh century, she was involved in a protracted struggle with her neighbour Megara for control of the island of Salamis, which implies a degree of pressure on land, and the establishment of footholds on the Hellespont at Sigeion and Elaious before 600 perhaps indicates that frustration locally turned her energies outward. The choice of a site that could control the Black Sea approaches also hints at an interest in trade: it is unlikely that Athens had already developed her later dependence on imported corn, but Solon’s regulation of trade in cereals implies that there may well have been problems of supply. It is also possible that an ideology of territorial expansion developed at an early date, since the Ephebic Oath sworn by all Athenians on entering manhood (R&O 88), which though only attested in the fourth century may well go back to an early date and is echoed in Athenian funeral orations (Siewert 1977), includes an undertaking to maintain and if possible increase the ancestral territory. We may note that territorial friction continued over the northern border between Attika and Boiotia, particularly at Oropos, throughout the classical period.

How far we can describe such overseas expansion at this date as ‘foreign policy’ is a moot point; the orthodox picture of colonial settlements as initiatives of a given polis has recently been called into question (Osborne 1998), and the literary sources are scanty and, in the case of the struggle between Sparta and Messenia, contaminated by romanticized myth-making under the influence of later events. However, inasmuch as both Spartan and Athenian troops fought to acquire and defend their new possessions, there is a clear sense of a community engagement with external relations and of a consensus over community interest. Elsewhere we can detect the beginnings of diplomacy in the religious associations called Amphiktyonies (amphiktyon = ‘dweller around’), groupings of communities around a common sanctuary. Athens belonged to two such affiliations: one, the Kalaurian Amphiktyony, made up of states around the Saronic Gulf (plus Boiotian Orchomenos) and centred on a sanctuary of Poseidon on the island of Poros, and the other the influential Delphic Amphiktyony, though this had originally had its centre at the sanctuary of Demeter at Anthela, near Thermopylai. These associations formed regional networks with a potential for religious and, by extension, political influence, though this did not preclude squabbles between members, as events in the reign of Philip II proved. At Delphi, Athens held one of the two seats for lonians, a reflection of her status as the metropolis (mother-city) of the Ionian Greeks, particularly in Asia Minor. This bond of kinship, marked by shared features such as tribe-names and the festival of the Apatouria which Thucydides mentions (2.15.4) as well as dialect, runs as a thread through Athenian foreign policy, for example in a persistent interest in Delos, the centre of a Cycladic network where the lonians gathered at the festival of Delian Apollo. The Athenians twice demonstrated their concern with the island by ‘purifying’ it, first in the time of Peisistratos and again during the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 3.104), and they remained perennially concerned with Delos in the fourth century (R&O 28). On a grander scale, the sentimental bond of kinship was evidently a factor in Athenian decisions to intervene in the Ionian Revolt and to take on the protection of the Asian Greeks in 478. Strictly speaking, these were divided into lonians, Dorians and Aeo-lians, each with their own regional grouping and ethnic - particularly linguistic - identity, but Athenian foreign policy here and elsewhere was never ethnically exclusive, just as it was pragmatic over constitutional arrangements. This was helped by a tendency to extend the reference of the title ‘lonians’ to refer to the Greeks of Asia Minor at large as well as the specific ethnic group, which allowed a degree of equivocation as to the nature of the Athenian alliance.

By contrast, neither of the Dorian seats at Delphi was occupied by Sparta: one belonged to the Dorian metropolis (i. e., the region in central Greece called Doris), while the other rotated among the ‘Dorians of the [north-west] Peloponnese’, notably Argos. Sparta could probably exercise influence indirectly, through the former; in the mid-fifth century, she unsuccessfully tried to change arrangements at Delphi by military force (the so-called ‘Second Sacred War’), but when the Peloponnesian War broke out, Apollo’s oracle at Delphi favoured Sparta - another reason for Athens to cultivate

Delian Apollo. Competition for primacy among Dorian cities and the presence of non-Dorians such as the Arkadians and Achaians in the Peloponnese may explain why in the mid-sixth century Sparta purportedly acquired the bones of Orestes from Tegea as the basis of a broader claim to rule the whole Peloponnese as Achaians (Hdt. 1.67-8, 5.72). However, in the fifth century the growing polarity between Athens and Sparta sharpened the ethnic opposition between Dorians under Spartan leadership and lon-ians headed by Athens: the Spartan dedication after the battle of Tanagra in 457 celebrated victory over ‘Argives, Athenians and lonians’ (Fornara 80), and Thucydides treats ethnicity as a natural basis for alliances in the Sicilian expedition while noting how other factors might cut across it (7.57-8, cf. 3.86). The relationship between the various Greek ethnic subdivisions had been exploited in support of claims to preeminence through the construction and manipulation of competing genealogies of their eponymous ancestors and of the other heroes. The process is most clearly visible in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Heroines of the early sixth century (Fowler 1998), but the ending of Euripides’ Ion (first produced c. 413) shows that such propaganda was still viable in the classical period. The relationships between heroes could also be manipulated and exploited in the service of ‘kinship diplomacy’ (Jones 1999: esp. 1-49; Mitchell 1997: 23-8), the appeal to purported familial ties which might create a bond of sympathy. Here the wide-ranging travels of Herakles, especially in the western Mediterranean, were an asset to Dorians (Malkin 1994).