3. Representations of Power before and after Thucydides

Thucydidean scholars have traditionally viewed the natural rule of the strong as an idea characteristic of fifth-century sophistic thought and have treated its appearances in Thucydides as a reflection of contemporary interests. This is, to a large extent, true—we can see in the Clouds of Aristophanes, as well as in the Thrasymachos of Plato’s Republic and the Kallikles of Plato’s Gorgias, that the sophists were seen to have had a particular interest in the rule of the strong and to have given systematic expression to this notion. But in equating the rule of the strong with natural law, the fifth-century sophists were developing an idea that appears already in the earliest surviving Greek texts. Although Thucydides was immersed in the ideas of his time and his work is scarcely conceivable except as a product of the later fifth century, it is important to keep in mind the complex roots that connect even the most radical fifth-century thought with traditional Greek culture.

Consider, for example, a famous scene in the Iliad, important not only for its pathos but because as a meditation on the rule of the strong, it points toward Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue. At the height of his rampage across the battlefield and as the Iliad builds to the climactic killing of Hektor, Achilles encounters the unfortunate Lykaon, a son of the Trojan king Priam. Achilles had taken Lykaon prisoner a few weeks before, and the young man had only recently made his way back home. We hear that “for eleven days he delighted his heart among his friends, but on the twelfth day a god cast him back into the hands of Achilles” (Il. 21.45–47). The desperate Lykaon begs for his life but elicits instead an emotionally complex but chilling reply:

Fool (nêpie), do not offer ransom to me, and do not make speeches. [100] Until Patroklos met his day of fate, even till then was it more pleasing to me to spare the Trojans, and many I took alive and sold overseas; but now there is not one that shall escape death, whoever before the walls of Ilios a god shall deliver into my hands—[105] not one among all the Trojans, and least of all among the sons of Priam. No, friend (phile), you too die—but why do you weep thus? Patroklos also died, who was better far than you. And do you not see what manner of man I am, how handsome and how tall? A good man was my father, and a goddess the mother that bore me; yet over me too hang death and mighty fate. [110] There shall come a dawn or eve or midday, when my life too shall some man take in battle, whether he strikes me with cast of the spear or with an arrow from the string.

Lykaon is nêpios—a harsh adjective applicable to infants and to profoundly foolish adults—but he is also philos—the standard term for “dear” or “friend.” Achilles’ tone is elusive. Is he sarcastic? His malicious treatment of Lykaon’s corpse a few lines later gives credence to such a reading, but Achilles’ speech has struck many readers as oddly detached, as if Achilles’ rage had reached such a level that he had progressed beyond personalized emotion and become an almost mechanical engine of death.

Achilles’ speech is also interesting because it articulates an odd justification for his unnecessary brutality. All human beings are subject to death. Patroklos is dead, and Achilles soon will die. Both men are superior to the insignificant Lykaon, and, for this reason, Achilles implies that Lykaon should accept his own death, indeed he should not even weep at his own imminent extinction. The strong are not only superior to the weak but deserve to expect more out of life. Patroklos and Achilles, by nature of their physical force, are more worthy human beings, and it is unreasonable for Lykaon to hope for life when his betters expect death. At the same time, death waits for all, the mighty and the feeble alike. If Lykaon faces death in battle, the same fate as Patroklos or Achilles, then he has no reason to complain. Achilles does not deserve reproach for killing Lykaon, because someone else will, in turn, kill Achilles. Death becomes a gift that passes in a classic chain of indirect reciprocity. Not all reciprocal exchange is direct. On the battlefield of Troy, Patroklos, Achilles, and Lykaon all ultimately receive death as a final gift. Great as Achilles is, the “gift” of death that he bestows upon Lykaon will soon be his. The stroke of Achilles’ sword renders killer and victim peers.^[1]

A similar episode appears in Works and Days where Hesiod represents himself as challenging his rapacious brother Perses:

And now I will tell a fable for princes, since they themselves understand. Thus said the hawk to the nightingale with speckled neck as he carried her high up among the clouds, gripped fast in his talons, [205] and she, pierced by his crooked talons, cried pitifully. To her he spoke disdainfully: “Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger (areiôn) than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, songstress as you are. And if I please, I will make my meal of you, or let you go. [210] He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger (kreissôn), for he does not win and suffers pain besides his shame.” So said the swiftly flying hawk, the long-winged bird.

Hesiod’s Hawk anticipates the basic position of such hard, sophist-trained men as Plato’s Kallikles and Thrasymachos, who argue that might makes right. Already here, in one of the earliest surviving texts of Greek literature, we see expressed the idea that the strong naturally rule the weak and that the weak should therefore accede to their own destruction.

Achilles’ remarks and Hesiod’s story of the Hawk and the Nightingale are important, for they both demonstrate that many of the ideas that seem most “modern” in Thucydides appear in the earliest surviving Greek texts, composed perhaps two centuries before Thucydides wrote his History. When Thucydides’ Athenians threaten to massacre the people of Mytilene or actually carry out this threat upon the Melians, their act reflects an increasing brutalization of the conflict in Greece. Thucydides’ accounts of the plague at Athens and of the civil strife at Corcyra both argue that moral collapse was progressive, rapid, and extreme, but we must never forget that we can trace the roots of such hard ideas from the start of Greek literature.

At the same time, however, we must also retain a sense of proportion. If there were always Greeks ready to assert the natural rule of the strong, there were always others to argue the opposite side (and, of course, plenty of individuals would doubtless adapt their views to their current advantage). Tyrants, peasants, and aristocrats all occupied very different subject positions, and no doubt many aristocrats, driven into exile by a ruthless tyrant, later, on driving that tyrant out of power, developed a very different attitude toward the use of force. With hundreds of independent city-states, all vying for prestige, the archaic Greek world was a complex, querulous environment in which many very different parties advanced distinct positions and sought to appropriate traditional values to their own ends. In speaking of archaic Greece, it is particularly important not to assume a single, completely unified set of values or even to suppose that groups that shared common vocabulary (e.g., sôphrosunê, dikê, aretê) endowed these terms with the same values—Thucydides, in fact, was particularly sensitive to such semantic warfare (see, for example, Thuc. 3.82.4).

Nevertheless, diversity need not be static—the same ideas do become more or less prominent. There are fascist elements in all the contemporary industrialized democracies, but the Nazi element of 1990 Germany, while disturbing, was very different from that of 1938. Hesiod, for example, does not leave his tale of the Hawk and the Nightingale without context. He continues by casting it into a different light than the isolated passage above might suggest:

But you, Perses, listen to right and do not foster violence; for violence is bad for a poor man. [215] Even the prosperous man cannot easily bear its burden but is weighed down under it when he has fallen into delusion. The better path is to go by on the other side toward Justice; for Justice beats Outrage when she comes at length to the end of the race. But only when he has suffered does the fool learn this. For Oath keeps pace with wrong judgments. [220] There is a noise when Justice is being dragged in the way where those who devour bribes and give sentence with crooked judgments take her. And she, wrapped in mist, follows to the city and haunts of the people, weeping, and bringing mischief to humanity, even to such as have driven her forth in that they did not deal straightly with her.

For Hesiod, the Hawk’s case is not self-evident. The poet goes on to warn that such ruthless self-assertion is dangerous for the powerful as well as for the weak, and to argue that dikê, justice, ultimately serves the interests of all parties. Hesiod thus makes it clear that the Hawk has no monopoly on discourse but espouses only one position in a larger conversation.

The archaic Greek world was remarkable in large measure because it managed to construct a shared political practice in which city-states did not follow the example of Achilles or Hesiod’s Hawk. Virtually all Greeks understood the logic of force—the Iliad, after all, captivated the imaginations of archaic and classical Greeks in a way that few texts, religious or otherwise, have matched. Nevertheless, during the century that preceded the Persian Wars, virtually no Greek city-state conquered another. Conflicts pursued limited goals, and no single polis was able to accumulate a preponderant level of power. Leadership had far more to do with hegemony and moral authority than domination and the threat of overwhelming physical violence.

Inscribing the Limits of Authority: The Hegemony of Herodotus’s Spartans

Herodotus provides our first detailed picture of Spartan leadership, but his account, closely studied as it has been, is even more revealing because of its form, its silences, and its assumptions than because of its tantalizingly sketchy content. Herodotus’s model of Spartan authority is a thick text that inscribes within itself an idealized set of rules for leadership in the archaic Greek world. Even as he presents a flattering (and probably anachronistic) account of Sparta’s prestige in the mid-sixth century, he embeds in his account strict conditions that limit and contain Sparta’s position. He defines a Sparta for which too much power and autonomy would, paradoxically, endanger its preeminence. In praising Sparta, Herodotus establishes standards that constrain Spartan behavior. His introduction is thus both a panegyric and a cautionary tale.

Herodotus does not flesh out for us the harsh, philistine Sparta on which Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle dwell,^[2] but his Spartans throughout the Histories differ from their fellow Greeks. At the opening of the two major segments of the Histories, books 1 and 5, Herodotus draws a schematic overview of Athens and Sparta. In the first of these, Herodotus represents his material from a typically oblique perspective, offering us the account of Sparta as the Lydian Kroisos perceived it. The two sketches at 1.59–64 and 65–68 encapsulate the leading states of fifth-century Greece two generations before Xerxes’ invasion.

Herodotus’s language is often suggestive, but one particular term in this passage has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention and shaped perceptions of Herodotus’s first account of Sparta. At 1.68.6, Herodotus remarks that by the time Kroisos made his inquiries in the middle of the sixth century “the greater part of the Peloponnese had been subjected by them.” Herodotus’s choice of language (a form of the verb katastrephô, “to subjugate, conquer”) is harsh and has caused some embarrassment. Kroisos, for example, “subjected (katestrepsato) the Greeks to the payment of tribute” (Hdt. 1.6.2; cf. also 1.27.1), and the term reappears sixty-five times in Herodotus to describe one group subduing another. The commentators W. W. How and J. Wells remark that Herodotus is “exaggerating,” though they seem more concerned with the extent rather than the intensity of Spartan control. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix argues that the term would be “fully justified” if Sparta’s allies “were obliged to follow Sparta into war at her bidding.” ^[3] More recently, Kurt Raaflaub suggests that the term is a piece of Athenian anti-Spartan propaganda, which sought to portray the Peloponnesian League as analogous to the Athenian empire.^[4]

In fact, the verb katastrephô is indeed harsh. Herodotus is, in this passage, altering his historical voice, moving from a general view (which brings with it a certain vocabulary) to another, more jaundiced perspective that we may associate with the more cynical, all-knowing historian. The same shift from softened, euphemized language to blunter and harsher rhetoric happens earlier on in book 1. At 1.13, Herodotus quotes in indirect discourse an exchange between Gyges and the Delphic oracle. In this passage, he follows the terminology that the participants, we are to suppose, themselves used, and he uses derivatives of basileus, the word for a legitimate king, five times in a single paragraph. When he then goes on to speak of Gyges’ dynasty in more generalized language (Hdt. 1.14), he shifts from basileus to turannos, the term for one who exercises power by force rather than by legitimate right.

If the term katastrephô implies that Sparta had harshly subjected the greater portion of the Peloponnese to its will, then Herodotus’s “glib generalization” ^[5] renders ironic the main point of the previous chapters and clashes with the presentation of Spartan authority elsewhere in the Histories. Taken as a whole, Herodotus’s account of Sparta at 1.65–68 is as remarkable for its silences and for the limits it sets as it is for its contents and its celebration of Spartan power.

First, Herodotus, in this programmatic introduction of Sparta, is silent on two major subjects: the Messenian wars and the helots. This silence is not neutral but conveys a sharp message. The Spartan way of life depended upon the direct control of land within Lakonia and Messenia. Sparta reduced many of the original inhabitants in those districts to the level of “helots,” serfs whose labor supported the Spartans. The Lakonian helots had been serfs from time immemorial, but the Spartan conquest of Messene was recent enough that Tyrtaios could give it a permanent (if still somewhat sketchy) place in the poetic record of Greece. The Messenians never forgot that they had been free, and Herodotus several times mentions war with them as a recent event (Hdt. 9.35.2, 64.2) or an ongoing possibility (5.49.8). Likewise, Herodotus elsewhere takes helotage for granted and makes no attempt to minimize its role. We might have expected any description of Sparta’s rise to power to have included these two phenomena, the heroized struggle to conquer Messene and the somewhat peculiar institution of helotage.^[6]

At 1.65–68, however, where Herodotus sketches the rise of Spartan power, he includes neither the Messenian wars nor helotage in his initial overview of Spartan power and its origins—not a specific judgment, perhaps, but suggestive. He does, however, go on, as we will see, to situate Sparta’s final rise to prominence at the point when it ceased expanding and reducing its Greek neighbors to slavery. In Herodotus’s model, Sparta achieves its dominant position only when it no longer seeks to dominate others. He complements the silence on Spartan conquest and subjugation of free Greeks with pointed anecdotes from which we may draw our own conclusions.

Second, Herodotus provides us with only a brief description of Lykourgos and his reforms at Sparta. He recalls an earlier time when the Spartans had been the “most ill-governed (Hdt. 1.65.2: kakonomôtatoi) of nearly all the Hellenes.” This term for “ill-governed,” kako-nomos, is powerful, for it is the adjectival opposite of the noun eu-nomia, “good government,” the quality that in later times all—even the unenthusiastic Thucydides^[7] —conceded as distinguishing Sparta more than any other state. The term “government” is inadequate: “both eunomia and kakonomos characterize a whole way of life, not only (or perhaps not at all) a form of constitution.” ^[8]

According to Herodotus, however, this early disorder at Sparta had two dimensions. On the one hand, disorder reigned internally among the Spartans themselves (Hdt. 1.65.2: kata spheas autous), but from the outset, Herodotus refuses to define the Spartans in isolation or to focus his attention on strictly internal matters. When Herodotus paints the dismal situation at Sparta, he combines internal lack of eunomia with the fact that the Spartans were also “unsociable to strangers” (xeinoisi aprosmiktoi). The second feature is significant. Many of our other sources stress the secrecy and xenophobia of the Spartan state,^[9] but here at any rate Herodotus implies that the Spartans improved not simply because they adopted a new internal order but because they became better able to associate with members of other Greek states. No Greek polis exists in isolation. Even Sparta must establish itself, according to Herodotus, by its dealings with others.

According to Herodotus, Sparta develops in two separate stages, each of which receives from Delphi a legitimating oracle: the greatest sanctuary in the Greek world sanctions both Lykourgos’s reforms and the superiority that the Spartans later asserted over the Tegeans. The structure of Herodotus 1.65–69 is typically Herodotean, jumping chronologically backward and forward. The chronology is susceptible to various interpretations, but the narrative seems to proceed as follows. We first learn that in Kroisos’s time the Spartans “had escaped their great troubles and were already superior to the Tegeans in warfare” (1.65.1), and Lykourgos was the man who had brought them out of this disordered escape (the verb describing their escape, it might be noted, is in the perfect rather than the aorist and thus emphasizes that the escape took place in the past but remains in effect during the present).

From the “present” of his narrative (in this case, the time of Kroisos, roughly a century before Herodotus was writing), Herodotus moves back into distant times and discusses the reforms of Lykourgos. The emphasis of this description is remarkable and has caused many scholars, anxious for early information about Sparta, to grind their teeth in frustration. On the one hand, at 1.65.4 Herodotus summarily alludes to some of the basic institutions attributed in his day to the Lykourgan reforms: the military organization, the ephorate, and the gerousia, a council of elders. He does not, however, explain what any of these institutions are, and he dismisses them within a single sentence. On the other hand, Herodotus devotes more than two sections (1.65.2–4) to Lykourgos’s visit to Delphi and to the unexpected oracle, which Herodotus quotes, that attributed to Lykourgos a more than mortal status. Herodotus then includes alternate traditions: that the Pythia herself gave Lykourgos the new way of life or that Lykourgos introduced it from Crete. After his death, we learn (1.66.1), the Spartans established a sacred precinct (hieron) for Lykourgos where they revere him greatly (sebontai megalôs: a strong expression, since the verb sebô implies worship rather than simple honor).^[10] The precise source of his reforms and their details are, however, less prominent in the narrative than the initial confrontation of Lykourgos and the oracle. The allusion to Lykourgos’s ongoing cult concludes this part of the Spartan logos.

Herodotus’s emphasis on the trip to Delphi and the cult of Lykourgos is tendentious and imposes on Spartan prestige limits and conditions foreign to the later account in Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans. Xenophon puts far less relative emphasis on this: he praises the sanction of Delphi only in a brief section, and Delphi ratifies, rather than inspires, the reforms (Lak. Pol. 8.5). Herodotus’s narrative, by contrast, gives cursory attention to the substance, and reinforces instead the legitimacy, of Lykourgos’s reforms. Herodotus expresses little interest in Lykourgos’s reforms as a set of laws and practices pursued within the Spartan state. He takes much greater care to establish the personal authority of Lykourgos and the official sanction that he and his reforms received from the Panhellenic oracle of Delphi. Thus Lykourgos was not successful in reforming Sparta simply because his institutions were better, but because he had received the advice and support of Delphi, a Panhellenic institution far beyond Spartan control. The Lykourgan reforms are not an autonomous system whereby self-contained Spartans produce power in their isolated city-state. They received their initial origin and legitimacy from a wider Greek society.

Third, once Lykourgos’s reforms are in place, Herodotus moves on to a further and distinct stage of his story. Lykourgos’s reforms do not by themselves produce Spartan preeminence in warfare. Important as Lykourgos may have been and however much he was revered, he alone did not make Sparta the leading state in Greece. Herodotus has already referred to an intermediate stage in Spartan development, when the Spartans were successful in the rest of their wars, meeting disaster against the Tegeans alone (Hdt. 1.65.1). Once again, Herodotus chooses a remarkable starting point. Blessed with good land and large numbers, the Spartans “were not content to keep quiet but disdainfully concluded that they were stronger than the Arkadians” (1.66.1). Although, as we noted above, Herodotus does not, in this passage, even mention the bitter warfare in which the Spartans ultimately enslaved the Messenians, a Greek people who never forgot and ultimately regained their independence, Herodotus does show himself acutely sensitive to the prospect of Sparta enslaving Arkadian Greeks. There is nothing to be done for the Messenian helots, as far as Herodotus is concerned, but the historian refuses to praise Sparta for the conquest of free Greeks (he does not even acknowledge this loss of freedom at 1.6.3). But Herodotus need not rely upon silence alone to make his point. By fixing the historical gaze upon Tegea, the narrative illustrates what it will and will not praise. The story of Sparta and Tegea firmly establishes the fact that Spartan conquests of Greek states were a thing of the past. Spartan preeminence is, in fact, contingent on the shift from expansionism. Herodotus describes Spartan preeminence in warfare by defining the limitations of this preeminence.

The story of Sparta and Tegea, like that of Lykourgos, begins outside of the Peloponnese, at the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The Spartans consult the god about their prospects of conquering all of Arkadia (Hdt. 1.66.1). (We might note that aggression against landlocked, mountainous Arkadia was never a good idea. The closest classical Greek to that disclosed in the Bronze Age Mycenaean Linear B tablets are the dialects of Arkadia, the mountainous center of the Peloponnese, and of Kypros, the most distant margin of the Greek world. Arkadia seems to have survived as a backward but defiant fortress of the Mycenaean people, who once dominated the Peloponnese.^[11] The prospects for subjugating Arkadia were therefore from the outset not encouraging.) The answering oracle limits Sparta’s immediate ambitions but seems to endorse warfare against Tegea.You ask me for Arkadia? You ask too much; I grant it not.
There are many men in Arkadia, eaters of acorns,
Who will hinder you. But I grudge you not.
I will give you Tegea to beat with your feet in dancing,
And its fair plain to measure with a rope.

“Measuring the land of Tegea with a rope” sent a strong message. Greek colonists from any polis would initially divide up the new land among themselves, and the oracle seemingly promised Sparta that it would be able to appropriate the territory of the Tegeans and divide it among its citizens. The Spartans naturally assumed that the god had given them his sanction to treat the Tegeans in the same way as they had treated the Messenians. The Spartans happily focused their attentions on Tegea and marched off to war carrying with them the chains with which they planned to enslave the Tegeans.

The oracle, however, proved to be kibdêlos (Hdt. 1.66.3), what we might now term “fool’s gold,” for its true interpretation was hardly favorable to Sparta. The Tegeans defeated the Spartans and made them wear the chains that they had brought with them (66.4). The would-be conquerors measured out the fields of the Tegeans by working on them as prisoners. The chains themselves were preserved and hung in the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, where, Herodotus tells us, they could still be seen in his own day.

Warfare between Sparta and Tegea continued off and on for some time (Hdt. 1.67.1; note that Herodotus specifies at 1.68.1 that there happened to be free association between Spartans and Tegeans at this period). This warfare seems, however, to have fallen squarely into the inconclusive, limited conflicts that Thucydides at 1.17 and Aristagoras at Herodotus 5.49.8 both treat so dismissively. Nevertheless, during this period, the Tegeans always defeated the Spartans in war (Hdt. 1.67.2). Ultimately, the Spartans asked Delphi which god they should honor in order to achieve military supremacy over the Tegeans. The oracle (which Herodotus quotes at 67.4) tells them that if they physically bring the bones of Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, to their own country, they will get the upper hand in their dealings with Tegea.

But if Apollo’s oracle predicts that Sparta will, if the bones of Orestes are located, prevail in its struggle with Tegea, the god does not promise conquest or even domination. Sparta is to become epitarrhothos of Tegea, and the term sets precise limits on Sparta’s success. Epitarrhothos appears seven times in Homer, always to describe a god championing a hero. The divine patron can be anonymous (e.g., Il. 11.366, 20.453; Od. 24.182) or known (Athena as patron of Diomedes at Il. 5.808, 828; Zeus as patron of the Trojans at Il. 17.339; Poseidon and Athena as patrons of Achilles at Il. 21.289). The epitarrhothos is thus clearly superior to the hero and serves as his patron, but the relationship does not degrade the subordinate member nor detract from the valor of his acts. Rather, when Athena becomes Diomedes’ epitarrhothos, she boasts that he will even be able to confront the god Ares (Il. 5.826–833). The epitarrhothos provides support that allows the hero to earn glory. The epitarrhothos is the senior partner in a reciprocal relationship that enhances the prestige of both members.

As the epitarrhothos of Tegea, Sparta was therefore not to be the conqueror but the senior partner in a relationship that both sides valued. The two states clearly had their quarrels—even in the fifth century, Sparta had to fight both Tegea and Argos, its two most powerful rivals in the Peloponnese (Hdt. 9.35.2)—but Tegea enjoyed a special relationship with its neighbor to the south. According to Herodotus, the Spartans always made a point of giving the Tegeans the opposite wing, the most honorable place in the line of battle after their own (9.26.1). The Athenians manage to supplant the Tegeans at Plataia (9.28.1), but their successful argument deserves comment. Both the Tegeans and the Athenians base their claims on deeds from both ancient and modern times (9.26.1: kaina kai palaia parapherontes erga; 9.27.1: palaia kai kaina), but the Athenians end their speech with a gracious acknowledgment of Spartan preeminence:

Yet seeing that this is no time to engage in stasis about our place in the battle, we are ready to obey you, men of Lakedaimon, and take whatever place and face whatever enemy you think fitting. Wherever you set us, we will strive to be valiant men (chrêstos). Command us then, knowing that we will obey.

The Athenians’ generosity and willingness to accept Spartan authority wins resounding Spartan approval, and the Athenians supplant the Tegeans in the place of highest honor among the allies. Nevertheless, the Spartans do not dismiss the Tegeans out of hand (9.28.3) but set the Tegeans next to themselves in line of battle (timês heneka kai aretês), on account of their “excellence” (aretê) and to show them “honor” (timê).

Nor was this respect one-sided: the Tegeans seem not to have nursed bitter hostility or spent their time looking for an opportunity to pay Sparta back for haughty behavior. Sixty years later, when Spartan prestige was at a low ebb and key Greek states were seeking to found a new alliance, representatives of Corinth and Argos asked Tegea to abandon its ties to Sparta. They attached great importance to Tegea’s actions, for if Tegea deserted Sparta, then the entire alliance, it seemed at the time, would crumble (Thuc. 5.32.3). Offered the chance to deal a savage blow to Sparta, the Tegeans refused to take any action against Spartan interests (5.32.4). Tegean constancy was a powerful gesture and weakened Corinth’s resolve. When, subsequently, word reached Sparta from its friends at Tegea that the city might defect to the Argive alliance, the Spartans, often scorned for their caution and slowness,^[12] launched a rapid and unprecedented expedition with all their available forces to secure their support at Tegea (5.64). Ultimately, the Tegeans stood side by side with their Spartan allies and helped them restore their prestige at the battle of Mantinea (5.71.2).

The relationship between Sparta and Tegea seems to have been the cornerstone and grand paradigm for Sparta’s relationship with its other allies. Tegea largely accepted Sparta’s superiority, and each state publicly dramatized its respect for the other with gestures before third parties such as the Greeks demonstrated at Plataia and the delegations from Argos and Corinth showed. So long as the relationship between Tegea and Sparta retained a strong element of reciprocity, the rest of Hellas could look to at least one case in which Spartan superiority did not mean domination or degradation to the junior partner. Athens, by contrast, could, at the start of the Peloponnesian War, still point to Chios and Lesbos as similar examples, but these islands were the exception in that they were allies, not tribute-paying subjects, of Athens.^[13] Herodotus, on the other hand, focuses on Tegea because Tegea, though unusual in the degree of honor that it received from Sparta, was a more general prototype for which Spartan allies could strive.

Herodotus thus circumscribes Spartan power, demarcating its magnitude and limits alike. In the end, Sparta achieved military superiority over Tegea (Hdt. 1.68.6), the only state that it previously could not defeat (1.65.1). But military superiority over the other Greek states (at least taken individually) did not lead to further Spartan conquest. Spartan expansion was limited to disputed border regions such as Thyrea, which lay between Argos and Sparta. Aristagoras was at least partially correct when he derided Spartan warfare as futile (5.49.8), but such limited goals opened up a space within which other states could safely concede to Sparta its leading position. Since the number of Spartans was finite and since they did not rely upon developed financial mechanisms to support a partially mercenary force analogous to the Athenian navy, the Spartans were, for their part, unable to assert domination much beyond their existing borders. The limits with which Herodotus defined Sparta were, in fact, essential to the existence of Spartan power. Herodotus proved remarkably clear-sighted, for the Spartans proved clumsy imperialists and, used to the subtle devices of hegemony, were, after succeeding the Athenians, unable to master the very different mechanisms of domination.

Xenophon’s Self-Fashioning Spartans

If we wish to assess the change in historical attitudes after Herodotus, we might consider Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans. Many forces contributed to a new paradigm for the analysis of international affairs, but Thucydides’ particular influence on Xenophon is explicit and pervasive. Xenophon’s Hellenika literally picks up where Thucydides’ unfinished narrative breaks off—it is perhaps the only major history that begins with the words “After these things” (meta de tauta). This peculiar mannerism not only offers a seamless connection to Thucydides’ broken text but is a gesture of profound respect for Thucydides’ achievement and an endorsement for his (rather than Herodotus’s) program of history. Xenophon is our most detailed classical source for Spartan customs and society, but we must be cautious in using Xenophon to analyze Thucydides, for Xenophon accepts many of the intellectual assumptions that seem first to take written form in Thucydides and that polemically oppose ideas present in Herodotus.

The concluding sections of the Hellenika, however, allow us to gauge even more closely the degree to which Xenophon follows Thucydides rather than Herodotus. For all his overt conservatism, Xenophon takes as assumptions ideas that, if expressed in clear language, would have called the Greeks of his grandfather’s generation to arms. Xenophon, for example, gives up his history in apparent despair after the battle of Mantinea in 362, a half-century after its opening in 411:

When these things had taken place, the opposite of what all believed would happen was brought to pass. For since nearly all the people of Greece had come together and formed themselves in opposing lines, there was no one who did not suppose that if a battle were fought, those who proved victorious would exercise rule (archê) and those who were defeated would be their subjects (hupêkooi); but the deity (theos) so ordered it that both parties set up a trophy as though victorious and neither tried to hinder those who set them up, that both gave back the dead under a truce as though victorious, and both received back their dead under a truce as though defeated, and that while each party claimed to be victorious, [27] neither was found to be any better off, as regards either additional territory or city or rule (archê), than before the battle took place; but there was even more confusion (akrisia) and disorder (tarachê) in Greece after the battle than before.

Thus far be it written by me; the events after these will perhaps be the concern of another.

When Xenophon expresses gloom at the indecisive nature of the battle, he inscribes in his narrative an assumption that would have shocked the Greeks of the early fifth century. Before the Persian Wars, the hundreds of petty Greek city-states maintained, wherever at all possible, the claim that they were free and autonomous. The subjection of the Greek states in the east to Kroisos and then to Persia was unprecedented (Hdt. 1.6.3)—an aberration and, in the eyes of the other Greeks, a disgrace. Even those states that were in some measure subordinate to others sought to frame the hierarchical relationship in some less opprobrious form: they were apoikoi and thus owed their mother-city filial respect, or they were friends who owed their benefactors a debt of honor. Open and unambiguous domination was degrading—a relationship dangerous for both sides, since the disgrace would exert constant pressure on the subordinates to revolt, as the Ionians did against Persia, with disastrous consequences.

Xenophon, however, comes to his analysis of Mantinea with an entirely different assumption. More than a century had elapsed since Plataia, and, in that time, one Greek polis or another had exercised domination over a group of weaker states. Even the Peloponnesian War had begun because many Greek states objected to Athenian rule and wished to restore the ancient freedoms that all Greeks had enjoyed. It was ironic that Sparta would, after the Athenian empire was crushed, simply take Athens’s place, and Sparta’s rule was correspondingly short-lived. Before the battle of Mantinea, the Greeks had—if we are to believe Xenophon—assumed that one state or another would become the dominant power. The battle was not fought over freedom versus slavery (as speakers in Herodotus or Thucydides so often claim was the issue in their wars), but over which power would predominate. The matter-of-fact way in which Xenophon describes the universal malaise after the battle of Mantinea is a gauge of the degree to which the situation has changed. The situation that Xenophon describes after Mantinea, from Xenophon’s point of view, violates the expectations and even the hopes of all who participated. Xenophon implies that the Greeks had not only expected but had desired some preeminent power to emerge. Thus indecisiveness and the lack of a dominant power bring nothing but “confusion” (akrisia) and “disorder” (tarachê). The production of freedom (eleutheria) and independence (autonomia) does not even warrant mention in Xenophon’s account. It is almost as if Xenophon had retold the Greek victories at Salamis and Plataia as a tragedy because they prevented Xerxes from bringing order to Hellas.

Thus even as Xenophon, with his aside to the theos, points backward to Herodotus (rather than to Thucydides, for whom things divine were of little interest),^[14] he shows that the logic of Thucydides had shaped his own view of history. Already in the Archaeology, Thucydides showed that he had no use for the system of quarrelsome city-states—predominant archê needed to contain these small and selfish entities.

This complex mixture of the traditional and the modern subtly shapes Xenophon’s other works and colors his account of Spartan customs. Even as Xenophon seeks in his idealizing text to recuperate Sparta’s pristine glory, he cannot even frame his project in terms that would have made sense to the earlier generation in which he situates his vanished Sparta. He has lost touch with the earlier Greek world in which Spartan preeminence was able to flourish.

An Athenian aristocrat and longtime admirer of Sparta, Xenophon began his fourth-century description of Sparta with a self-consciously casual remark: “It occurred to me one day that Sparta, though among the most thinly populated of states, was evidently the most powerful (dunatôtatê) and most celebrated (onomastotatê) city in Greece; and I fell to wondering how this could have happened. But when I considered the institutions of the Spartans (ta epitêdeumata tôn Spartiatôn), I wondered no longer” (Lak. Pol. 1.1). He goes on to provide us with the most detailed picture of Spartan society that has come down to us from antiquity. He tells us how children are begotten (chap. 2) and how children, once born, are raised (3–4). He praises the common messes at which the elite homoioi, “peers,” the small group of full Spartan citizens, took their meals (5). He approvingly claims that Spartans share children, servants, and goods (6), reject moneymaking (7), obey the laws more rigorously than any other Greeks (8), impose terrible social sanctions upon cowardice (9), and provide an environment in which even the old must aggressively pursue virtue (10). But his analysis of Spartan success is, at least when compared with what we see in Herodotus, as untraditional and distinct as the assumptions about the battle of Mantinea are from hopes of the Corinthians, Mytileneans, and Melians in Thucydides.

For all of Xenophon’s interest in and admiration for the personal habits of the Spartans, the practice of warfare constitutes a single, almost Aristotelian goal that unifies and gives meaning to everything in the Spartan state. Women go through vigorous physical training (Lak. Pol. 1.4), and sex between husband and wife is restricted so that sexual encounters should be more passionate and produce stronger offspring (1.5). Thus Sparta, we hear, succeeded in producing children that exceeded all others in size and strength (1.10). The growing Spartans toughen themselves throughout their upbringing. They go barefoot because Lykourgos thought that this would allow them to climb hills and steep inclines more easily (2.3). Spartan children wear a single garment, winter and summer, so that they may learn to endure extremes of temperature (2.4), and, for all their exertions, they must get by on a limited ration that leaves them always hungry (2.5) and renders them lean (2.6). The state fosters constant rivalry and competition between young men (4.3–5), and they engage in casual fistfights with whomever they meet (4.6). Older men must continue their physical training so that they may serve in the army as effectively as the young, and, to ward off physical decline, Lykourgos’s middle-aged Spartans scampered through the hills and dales of Lakonia hunting (4.7). Lykourgos felt that, left to themselves, many would take their ease, and so imposed physical activity upon all and established a system that produced the healthiest and most physically accomplished men in all Greece (5.8–9). Above all, where other Greeks jealously proclaim their independence from any authority, civil or otherwise, the Spartans revere and take pride in obedience and submission, and even the most important men run, rather than walk, to answer any call (8.1–2). Cowardice leads to systematic and permanent social death (9.3–6).

All of these customs serve conscious purposes, and Xenophon’s Sparta is a functionalist’s paradise. Courage is not only admirable but practical—courageous fighters suffer fewer casualties than cowards (Lak. Pol. 9.2). Physical conditioning and habits of obedience make the Spartan army an instrument that can maneuver quickly and strike hard (chaps. 11–12). All practices within the Spartan state converge: birth, education, and daily life all strengthen the arms and shoulders that will support the heavy shields, spears, and swords of the frontline Spartan hoplites. In the end, Sparta has the greatest reputation (onoma; cf. onomastotatê at 1.1) because it has the greatest material force (dunamis; cf. dunatôtatê at 1.1). Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between the moral leadership of “hegemony” and the physical power of “domination” applies well to Xenophon’s analysis. The extraordinarily methodical pursuit of masculine virtue and the unparalleled subordination of self and family to the state carry to a unique degree tendencies that drew wide admiration in the Greek world, and thus gave the traditional Sparta a claim to moral leadership.

But Xenophon’s description of Spartan authority is so teleological and pragmatic that, for him, Spartan moral leadership derives from and is secondary to Sparta’s ability to project power. Xenophon is, in fact, not really interested in ta epitêdeumata of the Spartans for their own sake, as embodying some set of moral values, but because they are an efficient tool for some further purpose. When provoked, the Spartans can march out and crush any roughly equivalent force of Greeks. Physical toughness makes better soldiers. Obedience allows the Spartans as a group to master group tactics. Courage reduces casualties. Xenophon’s analysis renders Spartan prestige conditional on the pragmatic deeds of warfare. The excellences of Spartan life are not praised for their own sakes, but because they allow Spartans to strike faster, harder, longer. Sparta exercises both hegemony and domination, but the two qualities are not equal. Domination produces hegemony. The force of Spartan arms sanctions the Spartan way of life. “The central fact about Sparta,” as one historian has recently put it, “was indeed, as Xenophon saw, her way of life, her epitêdeumata ”;^[15] yet although Spartan moral excellence may reflect the claims with which Xenophon opens his history, it does not reflect the assumptions that actually shaped his text. Sparta’s deeds gave this way of life its meaning.

Xenophon’s analysis of Spartan power follows Thucydides. Toward the end of the Archaeology, for example, Thucydides offers a simple explanation for Spartan leadership against the Persians: “When tremendous danger loomed near, the Spartans, because they were preeminent with respect to power (dunamis), served as leaders of the Greeks who had jointly undertaken war” (Thuc. 1.18.1). Typically for Thucydides, strength is the dominant factor. As elsewhere in Thucydides, a calculus of force designates that the strong lead and the weaker follow in pursuit of their own advantage.^[16] Spartan power, by an almost mechanical process, leads to Spartan leadership. In this judgment, Thucydides reveals a fundamental and pervasive interpretive habit that shapes his view of history and that informs such later work as Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans. In classic Marxist terminology, we might say that for Thucydides the base inevitably dominates the superstructure.

The problem for Thucydides—and for Xenophon—is that Spartan preeminence was possible precisely because power alone did not ensure leadership (otherwise, for example, Gelon of Syracuse might well have led Greece against Xerxes). “Such authority as derived from the Spartan preeminence was ultimately extralegal, however much it was validated and objectified by the Spartans’ leadership of the Peloponnesian league,” ^[17] but Thucydides seems never to have been comfortable with such a deliberately vague and unquantifiable position. According to Thucydides’ view of history, Athens should have defeated Sparta, and Thucydides never provided a definitive explanation for why things turned out as they did.

Xenophon, too, is sensitive to the problems of his account and openly recognizes the gulf between Spartan power of his day and its previous prestige. But he is less sensitive to symbolic power than Herodotus. He deals with this problem by mythologizing the Spartans of an earlier generation. He concedes that his picture of Sparta is idealized—toward the end of his account (Lak. Pol. 14), he hearkens back to an earlier (and, conveniently, extinct) Spartan purity. The Spartans of the mid-fourth century had fallen from the virtue of their forefathers and thus occupied a less commanding position. But Spartan decadence was not less problematic than the inadequate assumptions that shaped Xenophon’s analysis. For all his emphasis on Spartan customs, Xenophon remains too utilitarian in outlook. Sparta had “the most power and greatest reputation in Hellas” (1.1) because the Spartan way of life produced better soldiers. The Spartan way of life is like a steam engine—valuable because of the power it could generate, a tool whose value flows from its effects. If Xenophon was uneasy, he may have sensed that his account was inadequate, but not suspected that the problem lay with the questions that he thought to put.

In the sixth and fifth centuries, Sparta enjoyed its position because it was simultaneously powerful and not too powerful. Kyros became preeminent because he conquered the great nations of the Near East. Sparta, as we saw, became preeminent because it could not even conquer Tegea. Spartan power was important not because it set off a chain of conquests, but because it legitimated the moral claims of the Spartan lifestyle. The Spartans occupied a position midway between the Great King—who had a good chance of slaughtering anyone who stood in his way—and Panhellenic athletic stars—admired for outstanding success in contests that conferred great prestige (and a platform for political advancement to a string of men from Kylon to Alkibiades) but no legal power. Writing in the fourth century, Xenophon simply could not imagine the position that the Spartans occupied a hundred years before. Herodotus, by contrast, provides nothing like the detail that we find in Xenophon, but the brief description in Herodotus of Sparta’s rise to power gives us a better picture of Sparta’s status in the late archaic period than Xenophon’s idealizing “Once upon a time.” For Herodotus, hegemony far outweighed domination, and all the aspects of his narrative—its content, its emphases, and its omissions—combined to provide an account of Spartan power that is, like that of Xenophon, prescriptive. But where Xenophon reconstructs an idealized previous Sparta, to which his contemporary Spartans might aspire, Herodotus frames present Spartan preeminence in terms that, in fact, set conditions for Spartan authority. Herodotus’s Sparta is the leading city in Hellas not because it crushes its enemies, but because its power is limited and because it does not seek to take full advantage of such power as it does have.

Thucydides had little use for such socially conditioned leadership. The middle-sized states that come to grief—Corcyra, Corinth, Mytilene, Plataia, and Melos, to name only the most prominent—all assume that reputation or social values can exert a decisive influence on the great powers. In this, Thucydides’ narrative does not contradict Herodotus but presents a world in which the conditions have changed. The Athenian empire, and its concomitant power, had no real Greek precedent, and the rise of Athens allowed Sparta to command from its frightened allies a new degree of obedience and submission.

But if Thucydides rejected many of the fictions by which poleis of the archaic period tended to shape their affairs, he nevertheless understood them thoroughly. His critique was so powerful that, from Xenophon onward, readers have accepted most tendentious assumptions as if they reflected a set of transcendent laws governing international affairs. We cannot, however, blame Thucydides for this. He carefully sketches the traditional values of the Greek elite. It is the glare of his own idiosyncratic analyses that has generally pushed the other elements into obscurity. In the next chapters we will explore the complex relationship that Thucydides establishes between his own assumptions and those prominent in the late archaic period.

Notes