Panic bred a truly extraordinary solution. Revolution came to Lacedaemon. The Spartan people, despairing of their future, were somehow persuaded to forget their time-honored class differences and submit to a majestic yet murderous experiment in social engineering. But how, precisely—and at whose instigation? The Spartans themselves, enthusiasts for dramatic tales of ancient heroes, were hardly the type of people to attribute their new order to anonymous social forces. Surely it could only have been the work of some visionary sage? Soon enough, a name, “Lycurgus,” began to be floated. Barely a century after the establishment of eunomia in Sparta, and this mysterious figure had been definitively hailed as its architect. By and large, it was agreed that he had been a Heraclid grandee, uncle to a Spartan king, no less, and possessed of the sternest temperament, “high-principled and fair.”12 Such, however, were the limits of his biographers’ consensus. Even oracles confessed that they were baffled as to whether Lycurgus was “human or a god”—although their inclination was, on balance, to believe the sage divine.13 The Spartans shared this opinion: a temple was raised in the great man’s honor, and his purported reform program increasingly located back in the mists of time, giving it, like the Heraclid bloodline, a pedigree as venerable as it was bogus. Control the past, and you control the future: as radical an act of surgery as had ever been attempted by a state upon itself was soon being represented as the essence of its traditions. Lycurgus, it would later be claimed, “moved and gratified by the beauty and loftiness of his legislation, now that it was completed and implemented, had longed to make it immortal and unbudging, for all time—or at least so far as could be achieved by human foresight.”14 The Spartans, by reverencing him, and possibly by fabricating him as well, had duly fulfilled his dream. Revolution, as they were the first people in history to discover, could best be buttressed if it was transfigured into myth.
The sense of strangeness that had long haunted the Spartans now came to animate the structures of their state. They had become, it appeared to the men of other cities, both more and less than human. Lycurgus was said to have been divine, and yet he had worn the aspect of a beast, of something feral, as well as that of a god. “He who brings into being the works of a wolf”: this, portentous and menacing, was the literal meaning of his name. No longer, under the constitution established by Lycurgus, were the Spartans to be counted as predators upon their own kind, the rich upon the poor, the Heraclids upon the farmers, but rather as hunters in a single deadly pack. Every citizen, be he aristocrat or peasant, was to be subsumed within its ranks. Henceforward, even “the very wealthy were to adopt a lifestyle that was as much as possible like that of the ordinary run of people.”15 Merciless and universal discipline was to teach every Spartan, from the moment of his birth, that conformity was all. The citizen would assume his place in society; the hoplite would assume his place in a line of battle. There he would be obliged to remain for the length of his life, “his feet set firmly apart, biting on his lip, taking a stand against his foe”16—with only death to redeem him from his duty. Indeed, Lycurgus, it was said, in a supreme illustration of what a citizen owed the state, had gone so far as to commit suicide, hoping by such a gesture that he might educate his people. “For it was his reasoning that even a statesman’s end should be of some value to society, by setting it an example both virtuous and practical—and so it was that he starved himself to death.”17
A grim philosophy, to be sure. Yet, self-denying though it might appear, it was valued by the Spartans precisely for the freedoms that it gave them. That their city had become a barracks and their whole society an immense phalanx braced for war reflected not coercion but rather a hard-wrought class consensus. The balance it struck between the rich and the poor was delicate. The Heraclids, although they had ceded sovereignty to the people, and also a seeming equality, nevertheless preserved their wealth, their estates, and much of their power. The poorer classes, initiated into the ranks of an elite and peerless army, gained a status they had hitherto been denied—and material security to boot. No more sordid scratching around for them, trying to make a living out of farming or trade. A warrior had no business with mending shoes, or sawing wood, or making pans. Such activities were best left to the citizens of other communities in Lacedaemon, the “perioikoi,” or “about-dwellers,” as they were dismissively labeled, second-rate men denied the rights of a full and tested Spartan.
Only one source of wealth, to the true soldier, could be counted worthy of his rank. Gratifyingly, for a people once haunted by land-hunger, the conquest of Messenia had provided ample scope for the aristocracy to be generous with their spoils. Hazy though the precise details are, it appears likely that one of the key policies of the Lycurgan reform program had been the partitioning of much of Messenia into allotments for the poor.18 Not that any member of the master race ever farmed these grants in person: it was out of the question for a Spartan warrior to toil and sweat in a field. That was the function of the conquered Messenians. The Spartans, even prior to the crossing of Taygetos, had displayed a peculiar genius for the exploitation of vanquished foes. Their whole history bore witness to it. Learned scholars, curious about the name—“helots”—that the Spartans gave their wretched underclass, derived it from Helos, a town in Lacedaemon, conquered in the very earliest days of their expansion.19 What had first been practiced on one side of the Taygetos range was refined and perfected on the other: a whole population was reduced to serfdom. The Messenians, laboring “like asses suffering under heavy loads,”20 found themselves having to shoulder the full weight of Spartan greatness.
And no sooner had the conquerors found themselves growing rich off their helots than they began to cast around for more. By the early sixth century BC, with the west successfully pacified, the focus of their ambitions was inevitably turning north. There, however, blocking the path of empire, loomed a menacing rival. Argos, a city less than forty miles from the Lacedaemonian frontier, was a power just as restless and arrogant as Sparta, and had claims on southern Greece that were, if anything, more impressive. While the Spartans boasted of Menelaus as their forebear, the Argives could cite an even more celebrated figure, his elder brother Agamemnon, master of golden Mycenae, and commander in chief of the Greeks at Troy. Mycenae herself, although no longer the seat of kings, was still to be found, albeit a crumbled shell of her former greatness, huddled between ravines to the north of the plain of Argos. The Argives, despite taking regular pains to crush even the slightest hint of independence from her, had eagerly adopted her ancient pretensions. These, in the endless propaganda war waged by every Greek city, were certainly not to be sniffed at. Agamemnon, after all, had ruled as heir to his grandfather, the hero Pelops, an ivory-shouldered adventurer who had given his name to the entire peninsula which formed the south of Greece. Why, then, in any struggle for the mastery of “Pelops’ island”—“Peloponnesos” in Greek—should the Argives be content with second place? Surely Argos, not Sparta, should reign as the mistress of the Peloponnese?