The Spartans, certainly, had profited from the location of their city. That they had been left free to indulge their taste for class warfare had owed almost everything to geography. Lacedaemon, the territory in the remote reaches of southern Greece which their city dominated, was framed all around by formidable natural bulwarks: to the east and south, the sea; to the north, gray, forbidding hills; to the west, savage and immense, the mountain of Taygetos, its five claw-like peaks streaked with snow even in the heat of summer. Behind such frontiers a city might easily bring itself to the point of ruin, and still remain undisturbed.
But behind such frontiers it might equally evolve and metamorphose. The Spartans, like the Persians, had originally been a tribal monarchy, with a state that had its roots in an ancient nomadic past. Sparta itself, despite its venerable name, was little more than an agglomeration of four villages, founded on what had previously been an almost virgin site. Certainly it owed nothing to the original Sparta, the Sparta of Helen and Menelaus. Impressively though the couple’s tomb loomed over the Lacedaemonian plain, the shrine bore witness not to continuity but to the very opposite: a brutal rupture with the past. Hillocks of buried rubble surrounded it, all that remained of a long-abandoned palace, perhaps one that had been occupied by Helen and Menelaus themselves; and yet, around 1200 BC, it and all the other great buildings of Lacedaemon had been sacked and burned to the ground. Why, and by whom, had rapidly been forgotten: the ruin had been too total for the memory to be preserved. Centuries had passed. Gradually, the void left by the collapse of Menelaus’ kingdom had been filled by newcomers from the north, wandering tribes who would be known much later as the Dorians, in proud contradistinction to the vanquished native Greeks.7 Yet the Dorians too were Greek, and far from oblivious to their adopted homeland’s golden past. Indeed, it would be said of them that there was no nation more devoted “to tales of the age of heroes, of the ancient beginnings of cities, and of anything that related to far-off times.”8 The settlers, intrigued by Lacedaemon’s pedigree, began to appropriate it to themselves. Around 700 BC, for instance, roughly when the Medes and Persians were putting down their own roots in the distant Zagros, the fortuitous identification of Helen’s tomb was first made. Even more sensationally, the Spartan elite also began to manufacture an ancestry for itself that stretched far beyond the reign of Menelaus, back to the greatest hero of them all, Heracles, slayer of monsters and son of Zeus, the king of the gods. What had been an invasion by the Dorians’ distant ancestors could now be presented as a return; what had been won by conquest as a patrimony. The leading Spartans called themselves “Heraclids”—and they laid claim, as the heirs of Heracles, not only to Lacedaemon but to the dominion of much of Greece.
All of which, of course, was profoundly alarming for their neighbors. By 700 BC, the Spartans had already achieved the startling feat of crossing the most intimidating of their natural frontiers, the Taygetos range, and launching a war of annexation in the land of Messenia that lay beyond it to the west. The “broad dancing-grounds” to be found there, “good for ploughing, good for growing fruit,”9 were more fertile even than those of Lacedaemon, and although the Messenians too could lay claim to Dorian ancestry, the Spartans savagely demonstrated their disdain for any possible ties of kinship by the brutality of their assault, and by the implacability of their resolve. A territory as extensive as Messenia was not easily subdued, but the Spartans, keeping grimly to their objective, had continued for decades to wash its fields and groves with blood. The Messenians’ submission, when it came at last, was total. Victory had taken their conquerors more than a century to force.
Such an enslavement of one Greek people by another was wholly without precedent. It established the Spartans not only as the richest people in Greece, but as a prodigy, a mutant race, unnerving and unique. As far as the Spartans themselves were concerned, this aura of mystery was merely their due. Where else in a world long since decayed from the golden age of heroes could a bloodline be traced back to the king of the gods himself? Brutally pragmatic in the ends to which they put their superstitions, the Spartans believed in them devoutly all the same. They knew themselves shadowed, in everything they did, by the whims of the divine. Offend the gods, and all might be lost; attend to their wishes, and Sparta’s greatness would surely be secured. So it was that she had been able, in the end, to subdue Messenia. And so it was, in the teeth of that interminable campaign, that she had also been able to redeem herself from an even greater crisis, a near-fatal social meltdown, and emerge from it, astonishingly, as the model of eunomia.
This choice—between reform or ruin—was one that the Heraclids had long sought to postpone. The conquest of Messenia, however, far from putting off the hour of reckoning, had served only to hasten it. Victory, although it brought Sparta great wealth, had done little to ease the miseries of the poor. Indeed, by concentrating even greater resources in the hands of the aristocracy, it had threatened to exacerbate them. Perhaps, had the circumstances of the Spartan upper classes corresponded to those of their counterparts in far-off Media, they could have afforded to ignore the impoverishment of their fellow citizens, their cries for redistribution of land, and all their “seditions against the realm.”10 But Sparta was not Media—and a great revolution in military affairs, one that had begun to surge and swell across the whole of Greece, was at that very moment threatening to sink the Heraclids.
For it was not cavalry—prancing, expensive, indelibly upper class—that had won Messenia for Sparta. Rather, the victory had gone to plodding foot soldiers, citizens of farming stock, men who may not have had the resources to afford horses but who could still supply themselves with arms and armor; and in particular with hopla, circular shields of a radically new design, a meter high and wide, and faced with bronze across their wood. A line of hoplon-holders—“hoplites”—advancing in a phalanx, protected as well, perhaps, by bronze helmets and cuirasses, and bristling with spears, was potentially a devastating offensive weapon; and the Spartans, in the course of the Messenian War, had been given every opportunity to experiment with this radical and lethal new form of warfare. Yet it was not easily waged. A particular breed of man was required to make it succeed. Every hoplon, if it were to serve its purpose, had to offer protection to its neighbor as well as its holder—so that the line of a phalanx, as it advanced toward an enemy, risked being cut to pieces on any show of social division.
“Keep together,” exhorted a Spartan battle hymn, “hold the line, do not give in to alarm, or disgraceful rout.”11 A cry for discipline aimed at hoplites of every class. What, after all, would be the fate of even the most blue-blooded Heraclid in battle if he could not trust his flank to his neighbor, the humble farmer? And what, even more pressingly, would be the fate of Sparta herself if the farmer could no longer afford his expensive shield? Ruin—as sure and violent as the hatreds of Messenia. The Spartan establishment, having grown fat on the lower classes, suddenly found itself, in the very hour of victory, staring catastrophe in the face. No longer, by the middle of the seventh century, could civic cohesion be regarded merely as an idle aspiration of down-at-heel farmers. It had become, even for the Heraclids, a matter of life and death.