Part I

Yokefellows

Many are the things that took place at that time in connection with that war that someone could mention with disguised malice while leveling an accusation against Hellas. For one would not be speaking correctly if one were to assert that Hellas defended itself. On the contrary, had the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians not made common cause in warding off the enslavement then on the march, all of the nations and peoples of Greece would in all likelihood be mixed up with one another, and there would be barbarians dispersed throughout Hellas and Greeks in barbarian lands, just like the peoples subject to Persia’s tyranny who dwell in the present time carried from one place to another and herded about, miserably scattered in the manner of seeds.

PLATO

THE battles of Plataea and Mycale are said to have taken place on the same day—27 or 28 August 479. When the dust settled, the supreme allied commander in each of the two theaters, a Spartan in each case, did what the immediate situation required.

In Boeotia, in the first ten days following the Greek massacre of Mardonius’ Persian army, Pausanias son of Cleombrotus arranged for the burial of the dead and for the collection of booty. He made provision for the prisoners of war. He sacrificed to the gods; and, before distributing the booty, he set aside three-tenths of it for expenditure on dedications to Olympian Zeus, Poseidon, and Apollo. When a woman from the island of Cos, who had been the concubine of one of Xerxes’ cousins, approached him as a suppliant, claiming to be the daughter of one of his guest-friends [xénoı], he treated her with kindness and apt consideration, sending her to Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, as she asked. When a leading figure from that island suggested that he mutilate the corpse of Mardonius as Xerxes had mutilated that of Leonidas after Thermopylae, Pausanias demurred. And when the Mantineians and Eleans appeared, weeks after the other Peloponnesians had joined the Hellenic forces and too late to be of any use, he sent them back home in disgrace.¹

Figure 1. Marble torso of helmeted Spartan hoplite, fifth century B.C. (Archaeological Museum of Sparta, Greece. Photographer: Ticinese, Wikimedia Commons; Published 2019 under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported).

At some point in this brief stretch of time—in the presence of all of the allies within the Hellenic coalition—the Spartan regent formally returned to the Plataeans, who resided in southwestern Boeotia, both their city and their land. On this occasion, he solemnly acknowledged their right to reside there and govern themselves by their own customs and laws, pledging in an oath to which all subscribed that no one would be allowed to march against them unjustly for the purpose of their enslavement, and promising that, if this happened, all of the allies then present would to the extent of their power come to the Plataeans’ defense.²

Once these pressing matters were settled, the son of Cleombrotus called a formal meeting of the Greeks to consider what was to be done with the Thebans. It was September, and the normal campaigning season had come to an end. Everyone involved was no doubt eager to return home. But something had to be done, nonetheless. They could not very well leave the Plataeans and the surviving Thespians undefended and at the mercy of the Medizers in charge of their openly hostile neighbor. Moreover, in the late 480s, when the Hellenic League was founded, its members had sworn to confiscate the lands of those communities which had joined the Persians without being compelled to do so, to sell their populations into slavery, and pay from the proceeds a tithe to Apollo at Delphi—and there is evidence suggesting that they may have reiterated this pledge in an oath taken not long before the recent battle.³

In the case of Thebes, however, there were reasons for hesitation. At that time, the city was not a democracy or even a broad-based oligarchy. She was governed by an exceedingly narrow clique. Moreover, although that clique had given earth and water when invited by Xerxes’ emissaries to engage in that act of symbolic submission, it was an open question whether the city as such had medized willingly or only when compelled. After all, four hundred Thebans had volunteered to fight at Thermopylae; and, whatever its members’ predilections may have been, the city’s ruling order had not prevented them from showing up. The leading members of the Hellenic League were also, as it happened, members of an ancient body, called the Amphictyonic League, which was charged with looking after the temple of Apollo in Delphi and that of Artemis in Anthele near Thermopylae—and Thebes was a member as well. As such, they were pledged never to destroy another member or cut her off from fresh water, even in time of war.⁴ It was up to the commanders conferring with Pausanias to judge how they should proceed.

In the event, in 479, Pausanias and his fellow commanders decided to demand of the Thebans only that they surrender those from among their compatriots who were most closely associated with the Mede. If the authorities at Thebes refused, they resolved to seize and destroy their city. To this end, on the eleventh day after the great battle, the Hellenes marched on Thebes and presented their demand. When it was rejected, they began ravaging the territory of the Thebans, and they initiated a siege. The terms on offer were generous, and the allied army was formidable. In fact, never in classical Greek history, before or after, was so great a host assembled. In time, the Thebans came to realize that their situation was dire and that resistance was futile. After twenty days, one of the principal Medizers suggested to his compatriots that they offer the Hellenes as compensation a sum of money from the public treasury. If the Hellenes refused this as a settlement, he indicated a willingness to turn himself over for judgment and suggested that his colleagues do the same.

Map 1. Mainland Greece and the Islands Nearby

It was the latter course that was followed in the end. All of the leading Medizers—apart from the most prominent in their number, who managed to slip out of Thebes and effect an escape—handed themselves over to Pausanias. When it was learned that their chief had fled, his sons were seized and brought before the allied commander. But he deemed it an injustice to hold a man’s offspring responsible for the misdeeds of their father, and so he ordered their release.

The Medizers were, we are told, confident that, if there was a trial, they could evade punishment by a resort to bribery. Pausanias anticipated this danger; and, after dismissing the allied army and sending everyone home, he carted his Theban captives off to Corinth and saw to their execution himself.⁵ Though still in his twenties, the son of Cleombrotus proved to be judicious, and he handled himself throughout with dignity, magnanimity, grace, and dispatch.

If there was anything in the man’s conduct at this time that might have seemed odd or in any way inappropriate, it was what he did after inspecting the tent of Xerxes, which had been left behind for Mardonius’ use. For, on this occasion, Pausanias asked the Persian commander’s cooks to prepare a meal of the sort that they customarily prepared for their master. And when they brought out the couches and tables of silver and gold with their expensive coverings and laid out for all to see a great and sumptuous feast, he asked his own servants to prepare a meal of the sort customarily consumed in Lacedaemon. Then, collapsing in laughter, he summoned the commanders of the various civic contingents within his army; and, pointing to the two meals, he said, “Men of Hellas, I have assembled you for this purpose—to show you the mindlessness of the Persian leader Mardonius, who, having a mode of living like this, came against us to deprive us of the dreary mode of living we possess.”⁶ Although one may doubt whether anyone at the time gave much thought to what these remarks revealed about the temptations to which Cleombrotus’ young son was subject, in later years—for reasons that will soon become evident—there would be those who recognized in this event a portent of troubles to come.

Pausanias had been chosen to command the Lacedaemonians at Plataea as a consequence of his status as uncle of and regent for the boy-king Pleistarchus, the child to whom Gorgo, daughter of the Agiad king Cleomenes, had given birth not long after marrying her father’s half-brother and heir Leonidas.⁷ His success at Plataea had given Pausanias a measure of prestige that he would not otherwise have attained. But it did not alter the fact that he was not himself a king. He was, in fact, nothing more than a stand-in—destined to be superseded when Pleistarchus came of age—and everyone knew it, including, of course, Pausanias himself.

In exercising the powers associated with the kingship, Pausanias was not alone. Sparta was a constitutional monarchy of sorts; and, among other things, this polity was distinguished by the fact that in it there reigned not one, but two charismatic kings—both of whom traced back to the hero Heracles their lineage and their right to hold sway both in Messenia and in what we now call Laconia. To be precise, in addition to the Agiads, there was at Lacedaemon another royal family, that of the Eurypontids; and Leotychidas son of Menares, who held the Eurypontid kingship, had been dispatched in 479 to command the Hellenic fleet in the Aegean. His victory over the Persians at Mycale on the Anatolian coast brought to him as well both honor and renown. But it did not confer on him anything like the prestige that Pausanias had garnered—for Mycale was a sideshow in comparison with Plataea, and at Mycale the Spartans had played a secondary, supporting role. Nonetheless, the son of Menares was king in his own right, and this weighed heavily. In the Peloponnesus, as Dorians, the Spartans were recognized by all as interlopers. If, this fact notwithstanding, their dominion was considered meet and just, it was, as the Lacedaemonians readily acknowledged, solely because they were the followers of men who had inherited a rightful claim to Lacedaemon from Heracles, the laborious and long-suffering son of Zeus.⁸

After Plataea, it was for the most part obvious what Pausanias should do. There were major decisions to be thrashed out. But these required rumination; and, apart from the adjudication of matters regarding Thebes, they did not have to be made on the spot. In this particular, however, the situation in the Aegean in the immediate wake of the battle of Mycale was of a different character. Certain questions had to be confronted then and there, and their disposition had broad implications. In particular, Leotychidas and the other commanders, including Athens’ admiral Xanthippus son of Ariphron, had to determine what should be done with the Aeolian and Ionian Greeks and their Dorian neighbors to the south—especially, the Hellenes residing on the large and fertile islands lying just off the Anatolian coast. For the Lacedaemonians and the vast majority of their Peloponnesian allies, this question posed a real dilemma.

Apart from the Corinthians, those within the Peloponnesus closely allied with Lacedaemon were landlubbers. They had learned the hard way an uncomfortable truth—that one could not prevent the Persians from launching assaults on mainland Greece if one left them in control of the sea. Ionia, however, they regarded as a land far away of which they knew little or nothing. The Samians, the Chians, and the citizens of Mytilene, Methymna, and the three other independent towns on the island of Lesbos were clamoring for admission into the Hellenic League. The Lacedaemonians were reluctant to make a permanent commitment to defend them against the Mede, and the same was almost certainly true for all or nearly all of their Peloponnesian allies. The war was over, and they had won. They all passionately wanted to go home and tend their farms—and none were more eager to bring the campaign to an end than the Spartans, who had peculiar reasons all their own for eschewing entangling alliances overseas.

Lacedaemonian Predilections

The citizens of Lacedaemon were all gentlemen of a sort. They did not work with their hands. They did not themselves farm. They relied, instead, on the labor of a servile population called helots. There was private property in land at Lacedaemon. Of this there can be no doubt. But we also have it on good authority that there was publicly held land and that an allotment carved out of this land and helots to work it were set aside for every member of the ruling order who was in good standing; and, though many scholars are incredulous, there is no good reason to reject the ancient reports. This system of provision left the Spartiates, who constituted Lacedaemon’s juridically defined ruling order, free to devote their lives to exercise, to military training, to athletic contests, to music and the dance, to horseracing, hunting, dining together, and other gentlemanly pursuits.⁹

Theirs was a life of great privilege, which made them the envy of Greece. But with privilege, at Sparta, came heavy responsibilities—and danger besides. The helots greatly outnumbered their masters—perhaps by as much as a margin of seven to one, as the ancient literary evidence suggests; perhaps by a smaller ratio, as some modern scholars believe; but certainly by a lot. Those in Messenia—to the west across Mount Taygetus from the Eurotas valley, where the Spartans resided—regarded themselves and were regarded by outsiders as a people in bondage, and they sometimes rose up in revolt. Even in what we today call Laconia, it is fair to say, the helots lay in wait for a disaster to strike their masters. So, at least, we are informed by Aristotle.¹⁰

There appears to have been a helot revolt of some sort in 490 at about the time that the Persians had arrived at Marathon, and the Lacedaemonians, who lived in fear of another, were prepared to be extremely ruthless in their treatment of this servile class. Indeed, if Thucydides is to be believed, there was a time in which the Lacedaemonians, fearing the youthful vigor and the numerical superiority of the helots, issued a proclamation, inviting those in their number who regarded themselves as having demonstrated the greatest excellence in the city’s wars to present themselves for judgment so that they could be freed. From among those who came forward, they then selected the two thousand they thought most likely to be formidable; and, after these men had celebrated their good fortune, they were made to disappear.

Thucydides does not specify the occasion, and many suggestions have been advanced by scholars. It is, however, tempting to suppose that, after the rebellion of 490 and the battle of Plataea in 479, the Spartans were especially nervous. And it is easy to imagine that they systematically culled from their helot population at this time the most manly of those who—as they marched from Lacedaemon through the Peloponnesus, the Megarid, and Attica into Boeotia; sojourned there for an extended period; and then marched back—had witnessed the freedom everywhere accorded their fellow Hellenes.¹¹

In times of trouble, the Spartans could, of course, turn for help to their fellow Lacedaemonians—the períoıkoı or “dwellers-about” who lived in villages or towns scattered about the margins of Laconia and Messenia. These Lacedaemonians, who may have been as numerous as were the Spartiates themselves, were not part of the ruling order at Lacedaemon. But, within their localities, they were self-governing, and at least some of them led a life of leisure and counted in their own right as gentlemen or kaloì k’agathoí, “men beautiful (or noble) and good (which is to say, brave).” Lacedaemon’s períoıkoı were loyal to the Spartiates, who provided them with protection and support. But they, too, harbored resentment; and, as the Spartans were reminded from time to time, they, too, were capable of revolt.¹²

At this time, Lacedaemon’s rulers could also look to their allies within the Peloponnesus. The league that they had pieced together in the course of the sixth century was a real achievement. There had been wartime alliances in the past, but theirs was something new—a standing alliance system aimed solely at defense—and the circumstances in which it was forged deserve a glance, for they cast considerable light on the character of the league and on the role that it played in the calculations of the Spartans.

It was in the late eighth century that the Lacedaemonians first conquered the upper Pamisos valley in Messenia. There was a rebellion some two generations thereafter, and it was supported by the Arcadians, who lived to the north of Laconia and Messenia, as well as by the Argives, further afield in the northeast. With the latter, the Spartans had a long-standing dispute over the fertile district of Cynouria, which lay between Mount Parnon and the Aegean along the eastern coast of the Peloponnesus north-northeast of the Eurotas valley and directly south of the Argolid.

After putting down this seventh-century Messenian revolt and gradually extending their control to the entirety of Messenia, the Spartans fought a series of unsuccessful battles for the purpose of conquering the Arcadians. Then, at some point in the first half of the sixth century when the Argives and the Arcadians fell out and an opening presented itself, the Lacedaemonians did an about-face, abandoned the quest to extend their dominion, formed an alliance with the various cities in Arcadia, and ostentatiously associated themselves with the cause of liberty by toppling tyrannies throughout the Peloponnesus and replacing these populist regimes with broad-based oligarchies. To those who became their allies, the rulers of Lacedaemon offered protection, and in return they expected support should the helots of Messenia, those of Laconia, or both in tandem rise up in revolt. An elaborate system of carriage roads, built on a single gauge with an eye to linking the ancient political communities of that great peninsula, survives in fragments to this day as mute testimony to Lacedaemon’s achievement as the hegemon of this alliance.¹³

The threat that the ruling order at Lacedaemon faced was formidable and permanent, and the grand strategy gradually worked out by the Spartans in response was all-encompassing. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, its dictates go a long way toward explaining the Spartans’ aversion to commerce; their practice of infanticide; their provision to every citizen of an equal allotment of land and of servants to work it; the sumptuary laws they adopted; their sharing of slaves, horses, and hounds; their intense piety; the subjection of their male offspring to an elaborate system of education and indoctrination; their use of music and poetry to instill a civic spirit; their practice of pedagogic pederasty; the rigors and discipline to which they habitually subjected themselves; and, of course, their constant preparation for war. It accounts as well for the articulation over time within Lacedaemon of a mixed regime graced with elaborate balances and checks. To sustain their dominion in Laconia and Messenia and to maintain the helots in bondage, the Spartans had to nourish within their ranks courage, discipline, determination, solidarity, and communal devotion. And to this end, they had to eschew faction; foster among themselves the same opinions, passions, and interests; and employ (above all, in times of great strain) procedures—recognized as fair and just and thought of as sanctioned by the gods—by which to reach a stable political consensus consistent with the dictates of prudence.¹⁴

At all costs, the Spartans also had to maintain the alliance system they had established within the Peloponnesus for the purpose of keeping the helots down, the Arcadians in, and the Argives out. In all other respects, however, Lacedaemon was what Otto von Bismarck would later call “a saturated power.” All that she needed or wanted for the protection of her dominion and way of life was security for her hegemony within the Peloponnesus. If she erred with respect to matters in the world outside that great peninsular redoubt, she nearly always erred on the side of caution. This was her natural bias, for the Spartans had everything to lose and little to gain from risky adventures abroad. Prior to Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, as I have demonstrated in this volume’s predecessor, they watched and waited and did what they could do—unobtrusively without great risk of provocation—to delay, fend off, and otherwise thwart Persia’s approach. In 481, however, the time for attempting to appear as inoffensive as possible came to an abrupt end; and, when the Great King announced his intentions regarding Hellas by demanding earth and water from all and sundry, the Lacedaemonians pulled together an alliance and girded their loins for the struggle to come. The kaloì k’agathoí of Sparta were not about to allow their well-being to become dependent on the whims of a Near Eastern despot.¹⁵

Leotychidas and the Greeks of the East

This did not, however, mean that the Spartans were eager to take to the sea permanently and extend their dominion to the shores of Anatolia. It was one thing to follow up on the Hellenic victory at Salamis, destroy the remnants of the Great King’s fleet, and drive his navy out of the Aegean, as the forces commanded by Leotychidas had done. It was another for Lacedaemon to become a full-fledged maritime power, sustain her wartime hegemony of the Hellenes, and extend her sway to Thrace and the shores of Asia Minor, to the approaches to the Black Sea, and even perhaps to Cyprus opposite the Levantine coast.

Map 2. Anatolia, the Aegean, and Cyprus

When the Samians, the Chians, and the citizens of the five póleıs on the island of Lesbos came calling, Lacedaemon’s Eurypontid king was not entirely pleased. He owed his office to the Agiad king Cleomenes, who was prepared to assert Spartan hegemony outside the Peloponnesus in places such as Aegina, Attica, and central Greece but who had repeatedly refused to countenance Spartan intervention overseas;¹⁶ and he clearly shared the predilections of his late patron—as did most, but by no means all, of their compatriots. So, when approached by the Samians, the Chians, and the Lesbians, he and the other Peloponnesian leaders ventured a suggestion—that they be evacuated from the eastern Aegean and resettled on the lands of those who had medized in mainland Greece.

This was a canny proposal. It was consistent with the oath of vengeance taken by Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and the other cities that had joined the Hellenic League. It capitalized on the deep resentment directed both at the Argives, who had remained neutral in such a manner as to indicate that they favored the Mede, and at the Thebans and Thessalians who had—some with enthusiasm—embraced the cause of the Great King. If adopted, moreover, it promised to turn the Argeia, Boeotia, and Thessaly in central Greece into reliable dependencies of the eastern Greeks’ prospective Lacedaemonian patrons. But, of course, it was not at all welcome to the Ionians, who were peoples of the sea—possessed of a great fondness for the islands on which they lived and for the region thereabout. And it should not have been welcome to any of the Hellenes—for the evacuation of these islands would have had as its consequence a surrender to the Mede of the eastern Aegean—which he could, in time, have employed as a staging ground for yet another invasion of Greece.

Leotychidas’ suggestion was also not to the liking of the Athenians, who supplied more than half of the ships in his fleet and who had done most of the hard fighting at Mycale. They had no interest in making the Lacedaemonians masters of the Argeia within the Peloponnesus and of Boeotia and Thessaly to their north. In the waning years of the sixth century, the Spartans under the leadership of Leotychidas’ patron Cleomenes had intervened in Athenian affairs on four occasions—twice, at the invitation of Athens’ aristocratic Alcmeonid clan, to expel the offspring of the tyrant Peisistratus; again, to place in charge a narrow oligarchy made up of their clients; and a fourth time, in a vain and embarrassing attempt to restore Peisistratid rule.¹⁷ The Athenians had not fought the Persians for the purpose of strengthening Sparta’s hegemony within the Peloponnesus, of extending it to central Greece, and of subjecting themselves thereby to Lacedaemon.

Moreover, the Ionians were related to the Athenians—or, at least, thought they were. The Chians, the Samians, the Milesians, and their nearest neighbors spoke a dialect similar to Attic. They employed calendars almost identical to the one used at Athens. Their religious festivals were alike, and the Ionians traced their ancestry back to Attica. In antiquity, ethnicity may not have trumped all other concerns, but it nonetheless mattered a great deal.¹⁸ It would not have been honorable for the Athenians to acquiesce in a surrender of the homelands of those everyone supposed their kin.

The Athenians had another reason for concern as well. Already at this time, Athens appears to have been dependent on imported grain; and, for this commodity, her citizens looked chiefly to the Milesian colonies in Crimea and scattered elsewhere about the Black Sea.¹⁹ In consequence, they were eager to establish Hellenic control over the trade route running to the Euxine through the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Bosporus; and they were intent on seeing that this route remained open. The Hellenic victory at Salamis, in which the Athenians and their commander Themistocles had played so prominent a role, was still fresh in their minds. They were not afraid of Persia’s Great King. They had massacred his infantry at Marathon and Mycale. They had annihilated his navy at Salamis, and they saw no reason why they should not sweep his ships from the seas, defeat his soldiers again on land, and liberate the Greeks of the east from subjection.

Speaking on behalf of his compatriots, Xanthippus urged that the islanders be admitted to the Hellenic League, and he carried the day. Then, with Leotychidas in the lead, the Hellenes rowed up to the Hellespont to tear down the bridges built to enable Xerxes to lead his army from Asia to Europe, which they supposed then still intact. When they discovered that these bridges had been swept away by a storm, the Peloponnesians sailed home, which made good sense. It was September—a time of year when the weather is apt to be bad and certain to get much, much worse.

Xanthippus and the Athenians stayed on, nonetheless. For they were intent on recovering for Athens the fertile farmland in the Thracian Chersonnesus, where Miltiades and his predecessors in the Philaid clan had long held sway, and on securing for the Hellenes dominion over the Hellespont. They even wintered there in order to join with the islanders of Ionia and the Greek communities along the Hellespont that had already shaken off Persian rule in besieging and capturing from the Mede that strategic peninsula’s principal town Sestos, which commanded the narrows where Xerxes’ minions had bridged the Hellespont. In time, at Athens, Sestos would come to be known proverbially as “the dinner table of the Peiraeus,” which was by then the Athenians’ principal port.²⁰