But would it? In a death struggle between a king and the Ephorate, which side would Apollo and his priesthood back? This was not a question that the Spartans, with their deep-seated fear of constitutional upheaval, much cared to ponder. Nor did they expect to have to: Sparta was a city governed, in the final reckoning, not by kings or ephors, but by custom, and by the inimitable character of her people. To the quality they most universally prized the Spartans gave the name “sophrosyne”: soundness of mind, moderation, prudence, self-restraint. Great though the powers of a king or an ephor might be, both were steeled, as Spartan citizens, not to push them to the limits. “For it is always your nature,” as a Corinthian would one day complain, “to do less than you could have done, and to hold back from heading where your judgement might otherwise lead you.”56 But such criticism could be taken by the Spartans as commendation. Sophrosyne in everything: the spirit of revolution in Lacedaemon had been well tamed. Just as a warrior was subsumed within the discipline of the phalanx, so were the ephor and the king within the state: no selfishness, no running amok, no sudden lurching from the ranks.
Then, in 520 BC55 a new king came to the throne. He laid claim to power as he would wield it, ruthlessly, and touched by scandal. Even before his birth, Cleomenes had been entangled in a snarl of shocking rumors. His father, the king, unable to impregnate his much-beloved first wife, had been ordered by the ephors to divorce her and take a second; but the king, although reluctant to defy the Ephorate openly, opted instead to practice bigamy. No sooner had his new bed-partner borne him Cleomenes than his original wife, to everyone’s astonishment, outdid her rival and delivered three sons in quick succession. Since she was the king’s niece as well as his beloved, this, unsurprisingly, had left Cleomenes much resented by his father. The king, flaunting his favoritism, had pointedly named the eldest of Cleomenes’ half-brothers Dorieus—“the Dorian”—and then entered him for the agoge, which the prince had duly passed with flying colors. Posing simultaneously as legitimate heir and man of the people, Dorieus had put the hapless Cleomenes, his unwanted elder brother, thoroughly in the shade. “Everyone ranked him first of all the youths of his generation. And Dorieus himself had little doubt that his many qualities would serve to win his father’s throne.”56
But the Spartans were nothing if not a legalistic people, and Cleomenes retained first claim on the kingship. No sooner was his father dead than he moved to seize the throne. Dorieus, for all his flash and popularity, found himself outmaneuvered. Cleomenes, tightening his grip upon power, next looked to drive his half-brother out of Sparta altogether. Dorieus’ exile, when it came, might have been dressed up as an exotic foreign mission, but there could be no disguising the scale of his defeat. Sparta had proved too small for both brothers. Nor would there be any comeback for the increasingly shiftless Dorieus. After an abortive attempt to found a colony in Africa, he ended up a mercenary in Sicily, where he fell in an obscure and inglorious scuffle. Cleomenes, back in Sparta, could henceforward reign secure.
All the same, the circumstances of his accession would continue to cast their shadows. Perfectly aware that many of his countrymen regarded him as at best semi-legitimate, Cleomenes chose to respond with bravura and defiance. Not for him the sober traditionalism expected of a Spartan king. Nor, just as pertinently, the caution. Whether out of a desire to prove himself to his detractors, out of scorn for their limited horizons, or because, shrewd and quick-witted, he believed that he was serving his city’s best interests, Cleomenes had resolved from the very beginning to throw his weight around. The ease with which he had dispatched Dorieus suggested that this might prove considerable. For the first time since the Lycurgan revolution, a king sat on the throne of Sparta who was determined to test his prerogatives to the full.
All of which promised turbulent times ahead for the Spartans. It also threatened cities far distant from the confines of Lacedaemon. A strongman in charge of Greece’s deadliest war machine was an alarming prospect for the whole of the Peloponnese—and beyond. In 519 BC, barely a year after his accession, Cleomenes led an army across the Isthmus. It was a menacing—and, as time would prove, portentous—statement of intent. The new king was not to be bounded by the limits of his backyard, and already, so early in his reign, his attentions were fixed firmly on central Greece: on Delphi, where the priests were soon embroiled in bribery and scandal; on Boeotia, the great cattle-rearing plain dominated by Thebes but also dotted with smaller cities, resentful of Theban bullying and offering any interloper plenty of scope for making mischief; and on Attica, the strategically vital region of hills and farmland through which the main isthmus road passed as it wound north. On Attica, and the city of Athens, more than anywhere, indeed. For Athens was a growing power—and so a potential threat. She had to be neutered. Cleomenes, though sometimes impulsive, could hardly be counted a maverick just because he had developed a taste for preemptive force.
Yet tremors were starting to build deeper than he, or indeed anyone, could sense. Cleomenes’ meddling in Athenian politics would help precipitate a political earthquake. It would be the most far-reaching upheaval in a Greek city since the time of Lycurgus himself. Its aftershocks would be felt, not only throughout Greece but also, rippling across the Aegean, eastward into the empire of the Persians. Even, though far distant, within the chanceries of Darius himself.
Revolution was coming to Athens—and war to the whole world.
4
ATHENS
Earth-Born
In Greece, a city was hardly a city without a bizarre foundation myth. The Spartans were far from alone in obsessing about their roots. With the anxiety of people who were always looking over their shoulders at rivals, concerned to pull rank, to put down others, to claim pre-eminence, Greeks in cities everywhere told tall stories about their past. Some were taller than others. The Argives, for instance, although Dorian, like the Spartans, and therefore similarly able to claim the bloodline of Heracles, were hardly the people to rest content with the same pedigree as their hated neighbors. Even as they were being repeatedly bested by the Spartans on the battlefield, their genealogical fantasies grew increasingly bombastic. It was an Argive woman, they boasted, who had been the ancestress of the Egyptians, the Arabs and a host of other peoples. In fact, there was barely a nation in the world that did not possess some blood link to Argos—or so the Argives liked to claim.
Extravagant pretensions of this order were not the only way to put the Spartans in their place. The citizens of Tegea, for instance, whose history boasted few famous names, could still afford to sneer at their fearsome neighbors as parvenus—for they, unlike the Dorians, had always lived in the Peloponnese. Deep roots, among the Greeks, were a sure source of prestige. The Argives, not content with swanking about their glitzy overseas connections, boasted that they, too, were natives of their homeland, and always had been. Their Dorian ancestry, which might have been thought to render this assertion problematic, was cheerfully ignored. Logic was rarely a feature of the Greeks’ foundation myths. In the Peloponnese, particularly, where there were any number of competing traditions, claims swirled amid counterclaims, and the past might easily be adapted on the hoof.