Persian Fire (16 page)

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 rinks 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 pa is. Such activities were best left to the citizens of other communities in Lacedaemon, the
'perioikoi',
or 'about-dwellers', as they were dismissively labelled, 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 programme 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 practised on one side of the Taygetos range was refined and perfected on the other: a whole population was reduced to serfdom. The Messenians, labouring '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'Pelop's island' —
'Peloponnesos'
in Greek — should the Argives be content with second place? Surely Argos, not Sparta, should reign as the mistress of the Peloponnese?

As far back as 669
be,
during the earliest days of the Lycurgan revolution, the Argives had not merely countered the first assault upon their territory by the Spartans' new citizen army, but annihilated it. Half a century later, the Spartans were still struggling to impose themselves on states even immediately over their frontier. Taking the road north, after crossing a range of barren hills, the traveller from Lacedaemon would descend into a fertile expanse of fields and olive groves, the territory of Tegea, a city with the misfortune to lie midway between Argos and Sparta. To the Spartans, in particular, the richness of Tegea's farmland was an intolerable provocation, and in the early years of the sixth century, looking to seize it for themselves and turn the Tegeans into helots, they unleashed a full-scale war of annexation. The invaders, encouraged by an oracle's assurance that they would soon be 'dancing upon the plain of Tegea',
¹
were sublimely confident of victory — so much so that they even brought surveying equipment with them and fetters for their new serfs. The oracle, however, had deluded them: their invasion was defeated, and the only dancing done by the Spartans was beneath the whip, as toiling prisoners-of-war, shackled by the chains they themselves had brought from Sparta.

This delivered such a blow to the Spartans' self-confidence that it forced an abrupt and decisive shift in their foreign policy. It had begun to dawn on them that the goal of reducing the whole of the Peloponnese to helotage was monstrously over-ambitious — and that hegemony could take a multitude of forms. There was no question that the Tegeans had to be brought to heel; perhaps, though, where naked oppression had failed, intimidation and force of prestige might yet succeed? The Spartans, employing their customary blend of low cunning and religiosity, duly dispatched a delegation to Tegea under cover of a truce. News had reached them of a strange find in a blacksmith's yard, the spine of what appeared to be a monstrous skeleton. The Spartans, sensing a possible propaganda coup, wished to stake this startling discovery for themselves. The prize was duly dug up, smuggled home, shown off, then reinterred. The skeleton, it was revealed, had belonged to none other than — a blast of trumpets! — Agamemnon's son. An identification more calculated to infuriate the Argives could not, of course, have been imagined; and yet the fanfare made over it by the Spartans had a far more calculated aim. The bones might have been stolen from Tegea, but Sparta, by enshrining them within her soil, was offering a public reassurance to others in the Peloponnese that she valued and respected their ancient traditions. No longer, as she had done in Messenia, was she aiming to trample them in the dirt. Cities which had demonstrated that they would rather fight to the death than be reduced to helotage could now submit to Sparta without fear of total ruin. Indeed, the Spartans hinted, it might even bring them some perks. To a Peloponnese long racked by rival hatreds, not to mention the menaces of Argos, Sparta offered the order of a protection racket, at least. Worse fates might be imagined. In 550
bc
, just a few decades after her victory at the Battle of the Chains, Tegea entered into a league established and controlled by her fearsome neighbour.

Other cities soon followed. Like Tegea, they were wooed and reassured into submission. Spartan bone-hunters toured the remotest reaches of the Peloponnese, prospecting for the remains of further heroes, and having, in a landscape studded with the fossils of Pleistocene mammoths, considerable success. Not that the Spartans, in their ambition to forge a great league of subordinate cities, were content to rely on palaeontology alone. Even as they promoted themselves as the guardians of their neighbours' mythic past, so they remained true to the ideals of the wolf-pack, to the practice of terror and total war. The early defeats inflicted on their newly reformed army, far from denting their faith in the Lycurgan system, had only steeled them to perfect it. One century on, the transformation of their society into a killing machine had given the Spartans a rare and sanguinary mystique. To the hoplites of other cities, the wealthy elites whose armour, every season, would be brought out of haylofts and dusted down, and whose tendency, in best amateur spirit, was to regard warfare as a ritual, if often lethal, sport, the prospect of meeting the Spartans in battle was a dreadful one. That an entire city could mobilise itself was alarming enough; that the main object of its citizens was to meet and annihilate anyone who stood up to them was terrifying. Many non-Spartan hoplites, rather than test themselves against such an adversary, preferred simply to run away.

And the Spartans themselves, masters of psychological as well as every other form of warfare, knew precisely how to turn their enemies' blood to ice. From far off, the advance of their phalanx would be heralded by the shrilling of high-pitched pipes, and the earth would shake with the rhythm of their slow and metronomic approach. Then, as they emerged through the dust of battle, a dazzling 'wall of bronze and scarlet'
²²
would appear, for it was the practice of the Spartans to burnish their shields until they glittered, and to wear, supposedly on the personal prescription of Lycurgus himself, brilliant cloaks dyed the colour of fresh blood.
¹¹
Above the slow-step of their marching, chilling battle-hymns to ancient heroes would be raised, until officers, their distinctive horsehair crests running from ear to ear, would yell out a command and the phalanx would cease its paean. Immediately, upon the silence, a blast of trumpets would rend the air. The hoplites would quicken their pace, lower their spears — then start to run. Not necessarily, however, in a single mass: the wings might advance separately, like the horns of a bull, to turn the enemy flanks. The discipline required for such a manoeuvre, far beyond the ambitions, let alone the abilities, of amateur troops, served as grim testimony to the Spartans' addiction to drill. Such proficiency, to the hoplites of other cities, seemed almost like cheating. No dishonour, then, to acknowledge the greatness of a city that gave its men such training and such devastating skills. It was, everyone agreed, 'a terrible thing to fight the Spartans'.
²⁴

By the early 540s
bc
, when Croesus, the King of Lydia, was advised by an oracle to seek out 'the most powerful of the Greek cities' as an ally in his looming war against the Persians, he had little hesitation in approaching Sparta. No greater tribute to her prestige could have been paid — nor a more direct snub to Argos. Indeed, with the friendship of a king as rich and powerful as Croesus, and with Tegea and much of the rest of the Peloponnese subordinated, it appeared to the Spartans that the time had finally come for a reckoning with the old enemy. Around 546
bc,
even as the Lydian Empire was succumbing to Cyrus, the Spartans advanced, not to the aid of Croesus, as they were bound to do by the terms of their alliance, but directly against Argos. The Argives, harking back to an earlier age, immediately proposed a tournament, a clash between three hundred champions from their own city and three hundred of the invaders. The Spartans, ever enthusiasts for the example provided by tales of ancient heroism, agreed. At the end of the day, three men were left standing: two Argives and a solitary Spartan. The Argives, believing themselves the victors, duly returned to their city in triumph — leaving their adversary, blood-drenched but still very much alive, to accuse them of abandoning the battlefield, and to claim the triumph for himself. When the Argives disputed this in tones of high indignation, the Spartan's countrymen were there to back their champion up: meeting the enemy the next day with the full complement of their invasion force, they won a crushing victory. Strategically vital swaths of the Argive frontier were permanently annexed to Lacedaemon, and the Argives themselves, shaving their heads as a mark of their prostration, were left crippled for a generation. Even as the shears were getting to work in Argos, the Spartans were taking a precisely opposite vow: they would grow their hair long evermore, and wear oiled tresses, like red cloaks, as a mark of who they were.

It was in the midst of their celebrations, however, that news reached the Spartans of Croesus' fall. Their failure to live up to the terms of their alliance with the King of Lydia was an evident humiliation. Worse was to follow. Still unwilling to commit troops beyond the Aegean, Sparta dispatched instead only a small embassy, which duly met with Cyrus and was subjected to his celebrated put-down: 'Who are the Spartans?' The Persians, certainly, had little cause to care. The lesson was sobering. Although Sparta appeared a colossus to the Greeks, in Asia she barely registered as a name, still less a power. Why should she?

Compared to the fantastical scale of Cyrus' dominion, all the Peloponnese was but an insignificant dot.

But the time would come when the Spartans would fling the Persians' mockery back in their teeth. 'Who are the Spartans?' This question, asked in scorn, could just as well be asked in fear. Shielded behind their mountain frontiers, self-sufficient, xenophobic and suspicious, the Spartans took but never gave, spied but never revealed. Alone among the people of Greece, they made no attempt to distinguish between Greeks and non-Greeks, condemning all non-Spartans as 'foreigners', and periodically expelling any found in their city. To their neighbours, at any rate, the wolf-lords of Lacedaemon were a source of obsessive fascination and fear. The riddle they posed their neighbours, like Cyrus' question, afforded no ready answers. The truth was veiled by fantasy, the reality by mirage. Ever conscious of the value of terror, the Spartans perfectly understood that it would diminish them to have the heart plucked out of their mystery. For in their mystery lay their dread.