[In the following essay, Forrest chronicles the period of early expansion in Spartan power over the Peloponnesian region of Laconia from the tenth to eight centuries b.c.]

The Sparta which was founded in the tenth century was not a city like those of the rest of Greece; ‘if Sparta was deserted’, wrote Thucydides, ‘and only its temples and its ground plan left, future generations would never believe that its power had matched its reputation … without any urban unity, made up as it is of distinct villages in the old style, its effect would be trivial’. On us the effect is baffling—how many villages were there? How related to each other? Did they grow up together or were some later settlements?

Four were enclosed by a wall in Hellenistic times—Pitana, Mesoa, Limnai and Konooura—grouped west, south and east of the low hill which served as an Akropolis, filling the angle between the Eurotas and its tributary, the modern Magoula. It may be that there had never been more. If any had priority it would be Pitana and Mesoa, close to the Akropolis where the earliest pottery has been found. A story of early quarrelling between the pairs over the temple of Artemis Orthia (founded after 900 in Limnai by the Eurotas) would be consistent with the idea that Limnai and Konooura were later foundations; so would the existence of two royal houses in one community.

The story said that these two houses were related. But this cannot be true. Each had a separate burial place, Agiads by the Akropolis, almost certainly in Pitana, Eurypontids to the east in Limnai or Konooura and, besides, the Agiads were known as the senior house. The institution itself (in this form unparalleled in Greece and, as far as I know, elsewhere) and Agiad seniority demand some less fanciful explanation than the Spartans themselves offered—that the throne was shared by Aristodemos' twins, the elder being determined by a study of the order in which Aristodemos' queen had bathed her babies. Such an explanation could be found in the admission of Eurypontids and their followers in the eastern villages to an already established Spartan state. Indeed two highly suspicious names appear in the upper reaches of the Eurypontid genealogy, Prytanis (‘President’) and Eunomos (‘Law-abiding’), easy inventions to make the two lines match. Delete them and the Eurypontids will begin in the middle of the ninth century, not far from the date of the earliest pottery from Limnai and the Orthia sanctuary.

There are other questions. What happened to the chiefs of the other villages? Were there ever four or more kings? Herodotos remarks that his ‘Minyans’ demanded at one point to share the kingship so the idea is not absurd. But all this must be left dark. By 800 b.c. at the latest there was a united state of at least four villages, ruled by at least two kings.

Arguments from survivals in later Sparta and by analogy from other states in Greece, Dorian and non-Dorian, can establish a fairly clear picture of the society they controlled. Beneath the king was an aristocracy, a handful of men in each of the villages—generals in war, priests, judges and royal advisers in peacetime—each one of them ruling his own household and other lesser households, a kind of pyramid including men from every level of society. Inside each pyramid there would be clear distinctions of what we should call class; to take the extremes, between members of the leading family and slaves, but words we are likely to choose to describe these distinctions, free farmers, labourers, serfs or the like, have acquired their meanings in a world in which legal definition is taken for granted and where the relationship described is usually between a man and his fellows or a man and society as a whole; in a primitive aristocratic state it is between a man and those above him, and at the earliest stages it exists de facto rather than de iure. Any modern class terms are likely to be misleading, except perhaps the basic ones, ‘free’ and ‘slave’, though even there it would be hard to say exactly what we mean by ‘free’.

This pattern was repeated, with substantial variations of detail, throughout Greece, and words were coined for the units, the pyramids, which formed it; the commonest, ‘phratry’, is used in one late source, perhaps correctly, of Sparta. There some elements of primitive phratry life, communal education for the young and the communal life of the adult males, were retained long after they had been lost elsewhere (they also survived in the comparatively isolated Dorian communities of Krete), long enough to have been described, and what we therefore know of them (to be discussed below) gives a valuable, though still only a very partial, glimpse of the complete hold that the early phratry organisation must have had on every department of everyday life.

Inside the phratry the unit was the family; above it stood the tribe, of which in Sparta there were three, the Hylleis, Pamphyloi and Dymanes, and since the same three names are found wherever Dorians appear, the distinction must have grown up in their original common home. From there it may have travelled naturally or it may have been artificially recreated in every new settlement, but in either case, if Sparta's villages were once independent of each other, it seems likely that each would have contained elements, i.e. phratries, of all three tribes, so that any Spartan would be a member of a tribe with fellow-members in the other villages and at the same time a member of a phratry, exclusively rooted in his own village. After the unification he would fight, if he was rich enough to arm and train himself, in his national tribal regiment, but the tribal regiment would be composed of units based on the villages, the phratries. This double criterion is of vital importance in the story of how Spartans slowly came to develop their idea of the ‘citizen’.

In Athens and elsewhere the word citizen acquired its content in contrast to the slave (and of course the foreigner). In Sparta slaves played no part but there were other politically depressed classes who offered no less of a contrast—roughly the whole population of Laconia and Messenia outside Sparta itself and its immediate environs, a population divided in later centuries into two very different groups, perioikoi and helots. The perioikos was a citizen of the internally largely autonomous communities of which there was a fair number in the more distant parts of Laconia and Messenia, most of them on the coast, a few inland nearer Sparta. As such he had whatever rights his city might accord him and, as an individual, theoretically no obligations to Sparta; as such he could be rich or poor, aristocrat, farmer, artisan or merchant. But his city did have obligations, to provide troops for Sparta's wars, to accept any decisions that Sparta might take for them; its authority was entirely restricted to matters of local administration and even there some Spartan interference is attested (there was a Spartan magistrate in perioikic Kythera during the fifth century and under certain circumstances Spartan officials could put perioikoi to death without a trial). Still, the politically unambitious perioikos could be a happy man.

It is less easy to picture a happy helot. The word itself is probably derived from the root Hel- implying seizure or capture and the vast majority of first generation helots must have owed their position to the common Greek practice of enslaving a defeated enemy. But there the similarity ends. Elsewhere, in general, a slave was the property of his master; the helot belonged to the Spartan state, assigned by the state to an individual master but not disposable by him. Again elsewhere the slave could frequently acquire his freedom; except in extraordinary circumstances the helot could not. Thus he was at once freer and more constrained than his fellows in the rest of Greece. Indeed with an absentee landlord, as all Spartans were, the life of many may not in practice have been much different from that of poorer peasants elsewhere. But although this freedom and comparative prosperity might lessen the urge to revolt, their numbers, the permanence of the breed, and their national identity (most were of Messenian origin) made them an ever present menace to Sparta's security.

But these are descriptions of the perioikos and helot of classical Sparta; for the creation of the classes we must look back to the years of Sparta's first expansion in Laconia. Here there were fewer urban centres down to about 750 than there had been in the thirteenth century. But the population had grown since 1200 and some villages, even towns, must have appeared to house it. It would be no surprise if Sparta, in the richest part of the plain, developed faster than the rest, nor, since it shared that plain with well-established Amyklai, five miles to the south, if its first attempts at expansion were to the north. To ninth-century kings Pausanias ascribes campaigns in Kynouria, over the north end of Parnon; more plausibly to Archelaos and Charillos (together in the second quarter of the eighth) the annexation of the area towards the headwaters of the Eurotas. But much more important is the first move southwards ‘in the reign of Teleklos … not long before the Messenian War’, i.e. between about 750 and 740. Then Pharis, Geronthrai and Amyklai were seized—the first two without a struggle, Amyklai after a desperate siege—probably the only three centres of any importance north of the ridge which divides Sparta from the sea.

For Pharis and Geronthrai we have only Pausanias' story: the towns were taken, their people fled, we are not told where, and Spartans occupied Geronthrai as colonists. But Sparta and Amyklai had long been neighbours; their relations were no doubt complicated in fact—from the tangled tradition they are unrecoverable. Pausanias again is straightforward; siege, capture, expulsion, once for all in Teleklos' reign. But other sources tell other stories, of Amyklaian collaboration with the first Dorian invaders, of subjection by these invaders, of subjection followed by later revolt, of Amyklaians in flight to Krete, Kypros and elsewhere. It can only be said that stories of early conflict or contact could have been invented to fit the general belief in an instantaneous Dorian subjugation of Laconia, whereas no comparable doubt attaches to the tale of an eighth-century war. Since others besides Pausanias admit a longish period of Amyklaian co-existence with Sparta, that much may be taken as firm; to trust his precise date for the final showdown is more venturesome but it makes a reasonable story. Amyklai, then, would have been captured around 750 and, once captured, was not treated like the more distant Pharis or Geronthrai; together with any inhabitants who remained it was incorporated into the Spartan state.

As mistress of the upper Eurotas valley Sparta could expand in any of four directions; northwards into the Arkadian hills; across Parnon into Kynouria where she would have to face a tough Dorian rival in Argos whose influence already extended southwards along the coast as far as Malea and the island of Kythera; southwards to the sea where again she might meet Argos; or into Messenia, the richest prize of all. She chose Messenia and, still in Teleklos' reign, colonists were sent across Taygetos to three sites in the Nedon valley; a little later, about 740, Teleklos was murdered, by Messenians the Spartans said, and this became one excuse for a full-scale war of annexation which introduced Sparta for the first time to the wider Greek world and, more significantly, to the problems which were to govern her history for centuries to come.

But first to end the story of Laconia. With the capture of Amyklai Spartan influence must have spread quickly southwards, peacefully perhaps, for there is no record of a campaign against any of the coastal cities except Helos at the north-east corner of the Gulf which had Argive backing. This was reduced by force in (Pausanias again) the reign of King Alkamenes, c. 740 to c. 700, and here a new feature appears—the people of Helos suffered the same fate as the Messenians suffered (c. 715), they were enslaved as Helots (some Greek scholars saw here the origin of the name).

It may only be coincidence that stories of colonisation, to Geronthrai and the Nedon valley, or of incorporation (Amyklai) should be followed after 740 by these two cases of enslavement, but it could mark a readily intelligible change of policy. The Eurotas valley north of Amyklai contained under fifty square miles of cultivable ground, enough for two thousand families or so with their dependents, but hardly enough to meet the needs of that expansion of population which more settled conditions were bringing to the whole of Greece; small wonder if Spartans were ready to abandon Sparta for new fields in conquered territory even if it meant becoming a Geronthriate or a Nedonian. So Romans in the early second century were ready to lose their citizenship in exchange for membership of a Latin colony. But just as Roman citizenship gradually came to mean more than a few acres in the Po valley (no Latin colonies were sent out after 183), so when Sparta's first desperate need for land was satisfied (Teleklos' activity must have nearly doubled her territory) the motive for further expansion became greed, not hunger, and the greed could only be satisfied by remaining a Spartan—Geronthriates would not be given land in Messenia. Moreover there is a limit to the amount of land one man can work; for her new acres Sparta needed not only Spartan owners but a non-Spartan labour force. Hence, I would guess, the treatment meted out to the men of Helos and Messenia, not necessarily new treatment—there may well have been men in Laconia before 715 who found themselves bound to Sparta in a helot-like relationship—but newly applied on a wide scale to solve a new economic problem.

Meanwhile colonisation had set the pattern for the development of the perioikic cities. Had Geronthrai prospered famously we might one day have seen a perioikic Sparta, but it was Sparta which prospered and this superiority, coupled with the natural authority of a mother-city, would soon reduce the colonies to complete obedience. And so, as the Spartan gradually won greater influence in the government of his own city, he also won an indirect voice in the control of perioikoi; whatever domestic political power the Geronthriate might win, he would still have no say in the government of Sparta.

It must be added, however, that many perioikic cities were not in origin colonies. In the course of her expansion Sparta must often have found it to her advantage to come to terms with, rather than destroy other Dorian or non-Dorian communities; in some cases the agreement may have been as between equals, in others Spartan superiority may have been recognised from the start; either way these ‘allies’ will soon have found themselves on the same path as the colonists to complete subjection. Then again, once the relationship had developed naturally for colonist or ally it soon became, like Latinitas in Italy, a status that could be artificially formalised and deliberately bestowed. In later times Sparta could create a perioikic city by decree as and when it suited her.

Bibliography

Early Greek aristocratic society: M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1954); more briefly my Emergence of Greek Democracy (1966) ch. II; A. Andrewes, Hermes 89 (1961) 129 ff.

Amyklai: F. Kiechle, Lakonien und Sparta (1963) chs. I.4 and II.1.

Perioikoi: J. A. O. Larsen, Pauly-Wissowa Real-Enzyklopaedie s.v.; F. Gschitzner, Abhängige Orte (1958) 61 ff.

Helots: D. Lotze, Μεταξὺ ἐλευθέρων καὶ δούλων (1959).