The First Clash (14 page)

As the cities of ancient Greece rose out of the Greek dark ages, populations soon began outstripping food supplies. Most cities addressed this problem by dispatching colonies to unpopulated lands. Sparta, however, eschewed colonies in favor of policy or military expansion, with the aim of subduing the entire Peloponnesus to its will.
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Early Spartan conquests came from pushing the Argives back from the upper Eurotas valley and subjecting the local Laconian population to helot (serf) status. This early Spartan-Argive war was the start of a rivalry that was to plague the Peloponnesus for centuries afterward. Unsatisfied with this addition of Argive land, Sparta began to covet the fertile soil of Messenia in the southwestern Peloponnesus. Spartan soldiers first marched into Messenia in about 743 BC, but after that almost nothing is known but legends.
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According to the Spartans, the dispute began during a celebration at the Temple of Artemis, in which both Spartans and Messenians were participating. In the midst of the Dance of the Spartan Virgins, some Messenian youth rushed the women and possibly tried to make off with them. When the Spartan king, Teleclus, tried to protect the virgins, he was murdered. The Messenians have a different version. In their telling, Teleclus had disguised fifty Spartan soldiers, armed with daggers, as virgins and was trying to sneak them into their territory. When the plot was discovered, Teleclus was killed in the ensuing scuffle. Still, war did not break out until Spartan anger was unleashed by a distinguished Messenian Olympic hero named Polychares, who took it upon himself to kill any Spartan who came his way as revenge for a Spartan having killed his son and stolen his cattle herd. This story probably reflects distant and long-lost tales of a period of intense border raids that could have easily escalated into all-out war.

For the next twenty years, the First Messenian War raged. The Messenians, although they may have won a few battles, were rarely a match for the Spartans in the field. They were, however, able to withstand interminable sieges behind their city walls and in their mountain fortresses, particularly Ithome. After enduring a number of frustrating setbacks, some decisive event occurred of which no source offers an explanation. All that is recorded is that in the twentieth year of the war, the fighting ended and the Messenians passed into servitude. As part of the peace settlement, the Messenians were forced to swear oaths that they would never rebel against Sparta and half of their agricultural produce would be delivered to Sparta as annual tribute. The Spartan general and poet Tyrtaeus records:

For almost forty years, the Messenians endured the degradation of helot status. But in 685 BC, they revolted.
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The Spartans advanced without proper preparations and were beaten in an indecisive battle. However, the Messenians took advantage of the Spartan retreat and raided Sparta. Here, they added insult to injury by offering a captured Spartan shield, rather than one of their own, at the Temple of Athena, deep within Spartan territory. In the midst of this crisis a new Spartan general, Tyrtaeus, came to the fore.
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Although the Spartans suffered one more reverse at the Battle of Boar’s Grave, in the third year of the war, Tyrtaeus turned the tide and defeated the Messenians, along with a number of their Peloponnesian allies, at the Battle of the Great Foss (Great Trench).

Tyrtaeus, besides being a general of formidable talent, was also a poet. In fact, he was the Kipling of his time, and his poems inspired the Spartans to one more supreme effort. When as a result of this crisis Sparta had transformed itself into the warrior state of popular imagination, the evening mess began with the singing of the holy paean, after which each member of the mess recited verses of Tyrtaeus’s poetry. In one of the surviving texts, we find the ideal that motivated a Spartan army at war:

After reducing half the Peloponnesus to helotry, the Spartans found it much more difficult to conquer the cities of the northern Peloponnesus. After a generation of continuous war, Sparta took a different tack. If it could not conquer the northern cities, then binding them into an alliance with Sparta as the dominant member was the next best option. For the war-weary northern cities, joining Sparta in a military alliance probably seemed a small price to pay if their political independence was assured. However, not every city in the Peloponnesus joined the alliance; most notably, the powerful city of Argos remained unswervingly anti-Spartan and was always outside of what became known as the Peloponnesian League.
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The Peloponnesian League is probably best viewed as a loose network of perpetual bilateral alliances. Each of the members swore to subordinate its foreign policy to the will of Sparta and to come to Sparta’s aid in time of war. However, Sparta did not make any similar promise in return. So while Sparta could call on any member of the league in the event it went to war, none of the other members could make a similar claim on Sparta. In return, the members of the league supposedly received Sparta’s protection, not least from Argos, which was viewed to be as avaricious in its demands on other Peloponnesian cities as Sparta was. The league had no permanent institutions, and the only time representatives of each city met as a body was when the Spartans called an assembly. Moreover, although every member had only one vote, Sparta appears to have controlled the votes of many of the smaller towns.
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In any event, there was nothing in any of the league’s agreements that enjoined Sparta to accept the dictates of the congress. Similarly, some of the major cities in the league, such as Corinth, maintained a large measure of independence. Later, Corinth’s independent streak was to cause the Spartans considerable embarrassment in their military and diplomatic engagements with Athens in the years leading up to the Battle of Marathon. In fact, in the next century Corinth started a major war against its former colony of Corcyra without Spartan permission, starting the ruinous Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.

Still, even with the Peloponnesian League behind it, Sparta did not feel secure. Argos, its perpetual enemy, remained much too powerful for
Sparta’s liking. The start of the new round of Spartan-Argive enmity is lost to us and can be accounted for only as the natural result of two rising powers within a restricted geographic zone. With its frontiers at peace as a result of the advent of the Peloponnesian League, and the Messenian helots apparently docile, in about 545 BC, Sparta marched into southern Argos and claimed the fertile plain of Thyrea. Instead of engaging in a full-scale battle for the territory, both sides agreed to decide the issue by letting three hundred selected champions meet and fight to the death. The Battle of the 300 Champions took place in roughly 544 BC, and when it was over two Argives and one Spartan were left alive.
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The two Argives, showing no great desire to close with and finish the dangerous Spartan, declared victory by virtue of their superior numbers and returned to Argos. The remaining Spartan then turned to stripping the Argive dead of their arms and armor and used the collection to build a victory monument on the battlefield. He then proclaimed himself and Sparta the victor on the grounds that he alone remained on and held the field of battle. With both sides claiming victory, a general battle was inevitable. When it took place, Argos was decisively defeated and did not rise again as a power for a generation.
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It is difficult to underestimate the effects this almost continuous warfare had on Spartan society. Prior to the Messenian conquest and its subsequent revolts, Sparta was similar to any other Greek city and there was no reason to suspect it would develop into a warrior state. But after the conquest of Messenia and the reduction of that populace to helotry, the Spartans were relieved of all economic responsibilities. The helots were forced to till this land, and set amounts of the produce were delivered to Spartan landowners. After these payments were made, the helots were permitted to keep any excess produce.

Although the helots were not slaves in the traditional sense of that word, the conditions of their lives were harsh. As a result, they were always ready to revolt whenever presented an opportunity. To counter this threat, Sparta was forced to maintain a constant high state of war preparation, which was possible only because its men no longer had to till fields or harvest crops. The state also created the
krypteia
, a secret police that enlisted the best of Sparta’s youth. These young men were sent into the countryside with a writ to kill any helot they deemed a threat to Sparta or good order. To relieve these young men of the burden of “blood guilt” for these institutionalized murders, each year Sparta ritually declared war on
the helots. Despite these precautions, revolts remained a regular occurrence and were typically repressed with unrestrained violence. This domestic situation resulted in the adoption of an extremely conservative policy when dealing with affairs outside of the Peloponnesus. So although the Spartans possessed the most feared and effective army in the Greek world, the continuous threat of a helot revolt made them supremely reluctant to send that army far from the Peloponnesus for any lengthy period.

As the Spartans were relieved of the necessity of earning a living, they were free to dedicate all their energy to affairs of state, and the state’s primary affair was war. Spartan society and its institutions were relegated to the job of producing warriors, and every citizen was a soldier. Men performed this duty by fighting as hoplites in the battle line, while women performed it by rearing future soldiers. From the moment of birth, a person’s worth was decided by his or her fitness to perform these sacred duties. Any infant found physically wanting was left exposed on Mount Taygetus to die of exposure or to be consumed by wild beasts. At the tender age of seven, boys were taken from their mothers and placed into the
agoge
(the upbringing).
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Here a youth passed the next decade in brutal training designed to inure him to any hardship, create an unwavering discipline in the battle line, and push him repeatedly to the edge of human endurance.

At age eighteen (or twenty), a Spartan graduated from training and took his place in a “mess” as a full-fledged Spartan soldier. Selection to a mess was by vote, and a single no vote by any mess member was enough to blackball a candidate from that particular mess. If a Spartan was refused admittance to every mess, he was excluded from Spartan society. For recent graduates of the
agoge
, membership in a mess did not end their trial period. For the next decade they lived in barracks with their companions, and if any of them married, they could see their wives only during short, furtive visits. Only at age thirty did a Spartan become a
homoioi
, a peer.
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And only at this point did he receive the privileges of full citizenship and earn the right to live in his own home. As one Athenian later said, “The Spartan’s life is so unendurable that it is no wonder he throws it away lightly in battle.”
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This Spartan discipline extended itself to the women. They were expected to be physically strong, able to bear many children, and imbued with the Spartan spirit. In his
Sayings of Spartan Women
, Plutarch gives some indications of what that spirit meant:

In most of Greece, the state of women was not far above chattel. In Athens, for instance, upon reaching puberty a girl would be locked away until marriage. Afterward, she would be kept out of the public as much as possible, and her husband would consider it a mortal insult to hear her discussed by any man outside of the immediate family. By contrast, in Sparta girls were encouraged to participate in physical exercise, often doing so nude and in contests with the boys. Spartan girls were fed much better than girls anywhere else in Greece and were even taught to read and write, a practice other Greeks ridiculed. Menander, an Athenian, quipped: “Teaching women to read and write? What a terrible thing to do! Like feeding a vile snake more poison.”
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Spartan women were also allowed to own property, were expected to speak their minds on public issues, and had the right to take another husband if the first was gone too long at war. Furthermore, when her husband was away, a Spartan wife was expected to look after her husband’s property and protect it with any violence required, a job they were uniquely prepared for by both training and temperament. From the evidence still extant, one could easily get the impression that the only thing more dangerous then fighting the men of Sparta was fighting the women of Sparta.