Part II
It is not by speech-making that the Laconian pólıs is fortified.
But whenever mutinous Ares falls upon an army,
Counsel rules, and the hand performs the deed.
ION OF CHIOS
IT is an open question whether the authorities at Lacedaemon would have been able to persuade the assembly of the Spartiates to go to war with Athens over the Athenians’ mistreatment of the Thasians. There certainly would have been fierce objections raised. Had they persuaded their compatriots, however, and had they been able to rally the support of the communities within the Spartan alliance, there is nothing that would have prevented them from marching into Attica. It is perfectly possible that the Athenians would then have sallied forth from behind the walls of the city and those of the Peiraeus to defend their farmland. That would have been suicidal. But it was the natural thing to do. It is also conceivable that Sparta’s intervention would have prompted a rebellion on the part of those of Athens’ allies in the Delian League that still had fleets. Athens in 465 was anything but impregnable. The policy persistently pursued by Cimon presupposed Spartan goodwill.
In practice, however, this scenario is pure speculation and the question posed, academic—for the possibility never really presented itself. In 465/4, probably in the winter—after Themistocles had fled, after the Thasians had made their appeal, after the authorities at Sparta had made their pledge, but before the campaigning season when they would have rallied the members of their Peloponnesian alliance and mounted an invasion of Attica—a cataclysm took place which, for a time at least, altered everything.
Greece is subject to seismic upheavals, and the southern reaches of the Peloponnesus are in this particular especially vulnerable. In this case, we do not know the precise date or even the month. All that we know is that, before the Lacedaemonians could come to the support of Thasos, a series of earthquakes struck Laconia. The epicenter appears to have been near the constitutive villages of Lacedaemon. We are told that, at Sparta, these earthquakes left only five houses standing, that twenty thousand Lacedaemonians were killed, and that more than half of the adult male Spartiates (the full citizens of Lacedaemon) lost their lives—and we have excellent reason to believe that many more died in battling the revolt of the helots and the rebellion of the períoıkoı in Thouria and Aethaea, which followed fast on this event.1 Some scholars regard the ancient testimony as exaggerated. There is one sign, however, that this is not the case: the Spartans in desperation actually asked for assistance; and, as we shall see in due course, ample assistance they received.2
There are two other pieces of evidence that bear on Sparta’s straitened circumstances at this time. The first has to do with Argos’ close neighbor Mycenae. Thanks to the Spartan victory over the Argives at Sepeia in 494, this small city was independent at the time of the Persian Wars, as we have seen. For some time thereafter, she asserted and managed to retain control over the most prestigious cult site in the Argive plain, the Temple of Hera—which lay considerably closer to Mycenae than it did to Argos. We are told that, at some point subsequent to the withdrawal of the Mede, the Argives—fearing that the entire Argolid would eventually come under Mycenaean sway—attacked and defeated the Mycenaeans in battle; then besieged, conquered, and razed their town before selling most of its inhabitants into slavery. This they did not do entirely on their own. At least initially, when they had to meet the Mycenaeans in the field, they drew support from the Tegeans, whom they had earlier supported at the battle of Tegea. They are also said to have received aid from the citizens of Cleonae in the northern Argeia, which was a rival to Mycenae in asserting a right to control the Nemean Games.
It is the timetable that tells the tale. Diodorus relates the story of Argos’ war against Mycenae immediately after describing the earthquake at Sparta and the helot revolt. Then, no doubt following Ephorus, he expressly relates the two sets of events—explaining that the Argives seized on Lacedaemon’s travails as an opportunity for the elimination of a local rival that looked to Sparta for support, and asserting that they were correct in their calculations: for the earthquake and the struggles subsequent to it made it impossible for the Lacedaemonians to send a relief expedition.3
The second piece of evidence for Sparta’s distress at this time is that, quite soon after Mycenae’s initial defeat, the Lacedaemonians fought another contest against the Tegeans—this one at a place named Dipaea—and that they fought it in circumstances suggesting on their part a severe shortage of manpower. Herodotus does not mention the Argives as having taken part in this particular battle.4 This could conceivably be an oversight on his part, but it is also possible—and, indeed, likely—that they were pouring all of their energies into the ongoing siege at Mycenae. It is also conceivable that at this time they were involved in a war with their near neighbor Tiryns. For, when Herodotus reports that—after the sons of the Argives massacred by Cleomenes and the Spartans in 494 came of age—they drove out the doûloı who had been admitted to the citizen body in the aftermath of that battle, he adds that those who had been expelled then seized Tiryns and that, after a time, a conflict of some duration and difficulty erupted between “the sons of the slain” who remained in control in Argos and the doûloı who had found refuge at Tiryns.
We do not know precisely when this struggle with Tiryns took place, but there is reason to suspect that Lacedaemon may have been the instigator—for it was very much in the interest of the Spartans that the Argives be preoccupied at this time, and Herodotus reports that the war erupted when a seer named Kleandros from Phigaleia in southwestern Arcadia on the border of Messenia induced the Tirynthians to launch an attack. If, at this time, the Argives missed a golden opportunity to strike a blow at Lacedaemon, as Herodotus’ failure to mention them in connection with the battle of Dipaea strongly suggests, there must have been some development that precluded their participation. It was not until about 460 that they appear to have been in a position to turn their attention and energy to other matters.5
In the Argives’ stead, however, others joined the fray. When speaking of the battle of Tegea, Herodotus has nothing to say about any of the Arcadians apart from the Tegeans. When, however, he goes on to allude to the battle of Dipaea, which is the next conflict in a chronologically arranged list of Spartan victories in this period that he quickly reels off, he reports that this time the Tegeans had the support of all of their fellow Arcadians—apart from the Mantineians.6 When considered in a geopolitical light, the composition of this coalition is revealing, as is the exclusion of the Mantineians: for it suggests that the Spartans intervened in Arcadia for two disparate reasons.
Map 8. The Argolid within the Peloponnesus
Dipaea was located in central Arcadia—well to the south and a bit to the west of Arcadian Orchomenos—in the upper Hellison valley. Its strategic significance stemmed from the fact that it lay directly west across the mountains from the fertile highland plain in eastern Arcadia dominated by Tegea in the south and Mantineia in the north. To reach Dipaea from Laconia, one must first follow the wagon road running up the Eurotas River north-northwest along the eastern flanks of the Taygetus massif toward the sizable highland plateau situated north of Taygetus where—on the banks of the Hellison River, a century after the battle of Dipaea—the Arcadian League and its allies would found the city of Megalopolis as a check on the power of Lacedaemon. From this well-watered region, one must then proceed north-northeast through Zoitia past Trikolonoi and into central Arcadia or make one’s way directly up the exceedingly narrow and difficult Hellison gorge.
The Lacedaemonians could not stand idly by while Tegea asserted her control over south-central Arcadia—for through the southernmost reaches of that district, as we have already had occasion to note, ran a strategically vital wagon road which stretched like an umbilical cord between the Spartan heartland on the Eurotas in Laconia and Lacedaemon’s rich holdings along the Pamisos in Messenia. Nor can the Spartans have relished the prospect that Mantineia, the one pólıs of consequence in the strategically vital region of Arcadia still loyal to them, would succumb to pressure from her neighbors—especially, since that one city was the sole obstacle to the unification of Arcadia and its emergence as a regional power with considerable heft. The Lacedaemonians resembled other hegemonic powers in this particular. To rule, they had to divide.
The army that ended up in Dipaea must have initially paused en route to reassert Spartan hegemony over the south-central Arcadian plateau, over Parrhasia to the west, and Phigaleia in the Neda river valley even further to the west—all of which bordered on northern Messenia. Then, it must have retraced its steps back to what would eventually become the Megalopolitan plain; and from there, by one of the two routes mentioned, it must have headed north-northeast to Dipaea with an eye to approaching Mantineia from the west via one of the two passes across Mount Maenalum. By means of this roundabout route, the Spartans could sidestep Tegea, which straddled the direct wagon road leading north from Lacedaemon via Caryae to Mantineia, and avoid thereby a provocation certain to eventuate in a second military confrontation with that formidable Arcadian pólıs—this time on terms likely to be less favorable to Lacedaemon.7
This elaborate evasive maneuver did not, however, fully work as planned. As was only natural, the Tegeans got wind of Sparta’s incursion into Arcadia; and, with the help of their fellow Arcadians, they set an ambush and surprised the Lacedaemonians—either when the latter were en route north-northeast from the Megalopolitan valley; or more likely, given the location of Tegea and the time prerequisite for gathering support from the rest of Arcadia, later when the Lacedaemonians were making their way home.
Whether Tegea’s success in rallying the other Arcadians should be taken as an indication that there was a formal Arcadian confederacy in the 460s is a matter in dispute. Tegea had no civic coinage until much later in the century, but Arcadian coins were issued on a very substantial scale in the post–Persian War period by three separate mints—with three-obol coins on the Aeginetan standard being predominant. Whether these were produced by a religious amphictyony in connection with a religious festival, as some scholars suspect, or by a political confederacy intent on paying its hoplites the standard three-obol daily allowance, as others with considerable force argue, we cannot be certain. The only thing of which we can be fully confident is that in the classical period, whenever Pan-Arcadian patriotism flared up, it had an anti-Spartan slant.8
To this information, the Athenian orator Isocrates adds one other tidbit suggestive of the dire predicament in which the Lacedaemonians found themselves at this time. The Spartans, he reports, were deployed at Dipaea in a single line. If this means what it seems to mean, we must suppose that they fought in that battle on their own—perhaps with the support of those among their períoıkoı who remained loyal, but certainly without the assistance of any of their Peloponnesian allies—and that, in extending their line to match that of the Tegeans and their fellow Arcadians, the Lacedaemonians were stretched so thin that their phalanx was but one file deep.9 If so, the number of Spartiates had, indeed, been drastically reduced by the earthquakes and their initial conflict with the helots of Laconia.
Lacedaemon’s survival may well have been at stake at Dipaea. Had the Argives been present in force on this occasion, the Spartans would almost certainly have been overwhelmed, and such a defeat would have opened the way for a consolidation of Tegean control over all of Arcadia and for an Arcadian-Argive intervention in Messenia that would have tipped the balance against the Lacedaemonians. But win, on this occasion, the Spartans did, and they did so against all odds, leaving Tegea’s alliance in a shambles and Tegea herself chastened. This was by no means the final chapter in this story, however—for, as long as the Argives were on the warpath and Tegea remained in unfriendly hands, south-central and southwestern Arcadia were apt to remain in play.
None of the surviving sources discusses at any length the events that shook the Peloponnesus in this period. None of them has anything to say regarding their impact on the subsequent calculations of the Spartans and the Athenians. But the lack of evidence that these events influenced such calculations cannot in a case like this be taken as evidence that this crisis was inconsequential—for, although we are very poorly informed concerning this period, we do know this: cataclysms are not soon forgotten, and there was much to be gleaned from reflection on these developments. They surely brought home to the Lacedaemonians in a dramatic and painful fashion the vulnerability of their polity. The process of dissolution that Themistocles and the regent Pausanias had initiated did not quickly come to an end—not even when they were both eliminated from the scene. Instead, it came to a crescendo shortly thereafter, and Sparta was repeatedly borne to the very edge of the abyss.
Nor should we assume that the Athenians paid no attention. Themistocles had had supporters at Athens. Some of them had lost their lives at the battle of Tegea. Those who survived that clash of arms must have followed subsequent developments in the Peloponnesus with keen interest. These developments can only have heightened their admiration for the strategic genius who had diagnosed the fragility of the Spartan alliance, recognized just how vulnerable Lacedaemon was, and very nearly brought that polity to its knees; and this realization must also have intensified their regret that his compatriots had not wholeheartedly supported Athens’ Odysseus in his Peloponnesian venture. By the time that the critics of Cimon’s policy had come to power in that city, however, the opportunity that Themistocles had attempted to seize had vanished. Their aim was to recover the occasione that had been squandered, as we shall soon see.