XXVI. End as of 9/27/95
a) Noble families keep their holdings, but the rest of the land (and the helots upon it) are divided among the full Spartiates (Homoioi)
b) One son got your lot, which you couldn't sell, more sons meant more land had to come from somewhere
(1) No surprise that Sparta is going to expand BUT
(2) The casualties involved in such expansion will also provide a corrective.
(3) Their involvements abroad, in later years, will in fact reduce their population of Spartiates to the breaking point.
1. Welcome to the world, newborn Spartan!:
2. First they slap you, then (paidonomos) the head of your family group (tribe) inspects you for defects. If such, exposure on Mt. Taygetus
3. At the age of 7, boys off to military school
a) Head shaved, one cloak, one reed mat, (you pull the reeds), one cold official bath a year and no Nintendo.
b) Barely fed--if you wanted more, steal it, but don't get caught or you'll be whipped
c) The whole idea was to make you physically fit and immune to physical hardship, hence, the Spartan boy
4. At 18-20, it gets hard...
a) Basic training, weapons training, the krypteia
b) Constant drill and a respect for your superiors either hammered or...ahem...otherwise gotten into you.
c) Spartan tactics were legendary--only their most famous was the feigned retreat, sudden reformation of the phalanx, and slaughter
d) Spartans WANTED to be recognized for what they were, terror, and all that.
e) Spartan troops wore long red cloaks, long oiled hair
f) The most feared shield insignia was just "L," for Lacedaemon.
5. At 20, you go into barracks and stay there until you're 30
a) You're liable for field service or garrison duty
b) Somehow, you're supposed to get married and began breeding soldiers, even though you don't get leave to spend time with your wife.
A. You went a long way, baby...
1. Your wife has been trained to keep the Helots at work and make sure that you get what you need to keep you in the field
2. As I mentioned, in order to breed strong little soldiers for Sparta, SHE's been undergoing gymnastic training, naked as you were, and Spartan sensitivity training (Shield, again)
3. Aristophanes, Lys. ll. 80-90 "Why dear, you look healthy enough to throttle an ox!"
4. Spartan women could go abroad, were trusted with the city when the men were gone, and could ignore their marriage vows if the city needed children.
B. Males get full citizenship at 30, but still eat every dinner at the phiditia/andreia
1. Food from your minimum quota off your helots
2. Main course: black soup, black bread, and both horrid
3. NO Luxury.
a) Rough clothing
b) No jewelry
c) "Corinthian ceiling" joke
4. Could not compete in any Olympic event where you had to admit defeat (boxing, pancrateion, wrestling).
5. No crime, since everyone had the same amount of property and the helots provided all you needed
6. Other Greeks thought that this system looked great-- from a distance. The Spartans themselves were notorious for being easy to corrupt with riches.
C. The Peloponnesian League: Defensive Imperialism
1. Having secured themselves within their borders, the Spartans set out to protect themselves from external intervention.
2. You can watch them drawing a line across the southernmost Peloponnese.
a) As Her. 1.66 points out, they were set to conquer Arcadia, whose hills offered a potential refuge for escaped Helots.
b) The Arcadian hills themselves were too difficult a war for the prospective returns
c) Tegea, however, controlled access into the region.
3. Sparta accordingly went after Tegea, helped by her secret service, the Agathoergoi (Her. 1.66-68).
4. Tegea seems to have fallen by the 550's, Her. 1.66- 67 says they had to resort to grave robbery to win (Orestes).
(1) Sparta's surrender terms are most revealing:
(2) Tegea had to provide soldiers to be killed in the stead of Spartiates
(3) Tegea would harbor no helots
5. I mentioned that the Argives had invented or dramatically improved close-order formation, and consequently was able to dominate her neighbors.
a) They'd defeated Sparta at Hysiae in 668
b) King Pheidon of Argos had helped commerce with a standardized system of weights and measures
c) Argos had gained immense prestige by being able to dictate the Pisonians, not the Eleans, would hold the Olympic games sometime after 572.
d) Sparta wanted Thyreatis to finish its line across the Southern Peloponnese
(1) Nice little case study for you idealists: let's settle it without a full war. Remember: War is the abandonment of philosophy
(2) 600/300, 2/1, failure
(3) Full-scale war, Spartan system now in place for at least three generation, Argos loses c. 550.
e) Phenomenon I very much want for you to consider: The Burden of History
(1) Argos had been great, but would never be that great again, but a lot of people would die trying to prove that. Cf. Great Britain--Falklands? N. Ireland?
(2) Sparta had wronged Argos, and could never feel safe in turning her back on Argos again: Sins of the fathers?
(3) Nations become obsessed with maintaining their greatness-- watch Sparta carefully, and look around you carefully.
(4) What goes around, comes around
D. Practically, the Spartans reaped what rewards their system allowed.
1. They were considered and conducted themselves as the premier military state in Greece
a) Even states as wealthy and powerful (at sea, at least) as Corinth fell under Sparta's hegemony.
b) Megara, caught between Corinth, Athens, and Aegina, was grateful for the "protection."
c) Sparta didn't ask for much, merely leadership of the League as a military unit
d) The League, in fact, could be paralyzed if too many states suddenly disagreed with Sparta
2. No other rivals
a) Athens--not yet
b) Thebes--disorganized but will bear watching...
c) Thessaly, Macedon--Phocis after the 1st Sacred War (590-589) is the cork in their bottles.
3. That story is to explain why the foreign king of Lydia sought alliance with them, and the Spartans could and did dictate to the other cities of Greece.
4. They had a weakness:
a) As I noted, they were never absolutely sure that their allies would stay allied, and there was always Argos, sharpening a knife...
b) They had to stay strong enough to keep the Helots down, so
c) Expansion risked more casualties than their system could sustain and
d) If they COULD be defeated, a large enough casualty list could and did break them (371)
5. But, they would accomplish a great deal first.
a) Sparta's penchant for interfering in the politics of other states was defensive: they couldn't afford to await attack (Athens)(Thu. 1.118).
b) They would have the confidence to warn Cyrus the Great, having conquered Lydia and the Median Empire, not to harm the Greek states of Asia--Cyrus: Who? (Her. 1.154)(Use again for Persian vs. Greek attitudes).
c) Final anecdote: The Spartan and the Argive
I. Application of Politcal Science: The Evolution of Athens: Here's where you get to apply what you've learned and see it documented
A. Yet again, Athens was off the beaten track and there was no (as far as we can tell) large Mycenean palace in the region
1. Accordingly, the Dorians didn't bother with the detour and...
2. The peninsula of Attica had no tradition of central organization.
3. The Athenians had their myths:
a) Good King Cecrops, half a serpent (meaning, Child of Earth) who judged the great contest between Athena and Poseidon for control of the city, vs. Woman's suffrage story--note the role of the archon Basileus and his wife in religion
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a) Good King Theseus, who federated the surrounding farm villages into the formal polis of Athens (sunoikia)
(1) See the Ath. Pol. and Plutarch besides Thu. 2.15-17, a very good passage for seeing how he thinks and reasons.
(2) Theseus was supposed to have resigned the kingship and reserved only his role as commander of the army, justification for the later office of Polemarch?
(3) Codrus was said to have sacrificed himself to save Athens and been too good to have a successor
b) Not much else--Catalog of Ships in the Iliad and a few other stories.
A. After the legends, we can see the usual pattern:
1. Powerful Medontid family overthrows royal family and puts Acastus into the archonship (regency)
2. Archons reigned for life, Medontid family (compare with Spartan gerusia)
3. Other families demand power: yearly archons from any of the big families
a) A very old association came via the four Ionian tribes
b) Archon, significantly, also meant the leaders and administrators of the clans, people connected to each other through family (homogalaktes) if nobles and traditional associations (orgeones/thiasotai) if not.
c) Within the clans, the phratriae, noble families traditionally associated in the worship of some local god. Since these controlled citizenship, the orgeones eventually got in.
B. As had been the case elsewhere, the landed families (eupatridae) enjoyed a period of dominance over the government
1. King at war and with foreigners (metics) surrogate: polemarch
2. King as judge (nearly same as Spartan kings) surrogate: Eponymous
3. King as priest surrogate Archon basileus
C. Real power over law in hands of family syndicate, again, here the Areopagus, named after the hill where it sat. What we know about it comes from historical times, when it was restricted to murder trials.
1. May have been composed of ex-archons
2. May have had the power to review the actions of the archons (dokimasia) and prosecute him if malfeasance found
D. Meanwhile, the city does reasonably well through the Dark Ages with its soil at least good for pots and its population pressure bled off by continuing Ionian colonization of Asia.
E. The upshot of THAT was that the same pressures that set up tyrannies later took longer to develop in Athens, and so we have them in the historical record.
1. The thesmothetae, 6 judges, were supposed to make sure that no one violated the traditional laws (thesmoi)
2. Cylon nonetheless tried a coup c. 632 with the support of Megarian tyrant Theagenes, see He. 5.71, Th. 1.126 and correct your syllabi.
a) Banishment of the Alcmaeonidae: revenge, jealousy, or forestalling another coup? Keep your eyes on these guys.
b) Megacles of the Alcmaeonid family and the individual aristocrats in authority (naucraroi) put it down HARD.
F. That didn't work: Next try, Draco the thesmothetes, c. 621:
1. Laws for those in power with property
a) Imprisonment or enslavement for debt
b) "Draconian" punishments for theft (ANECDOTE)
2. Sop to the lower orders
a) Distinguishing the murder laws
b) Establishment of a larger court, the ephetai--guard against an arbitrary judegement by a single hostile family?
G. What was tightening the screws?
1. Population was growing, which increased the value of land, both as a means of raising food or as a commodity
2. At the same time, trade picked up
a) You didn't just have to sell to your OWN colonies
b) Athens began to get a larger share of the pottery and oil trade at the expense of Corinth and Megara.
c) The war with Megara over Salamis c. 600 had opened the Piraeus as an overseas port.
3. All kinds of people were getting wealthy without land, and prices were going up just as new goods became availible.
4. The Rich needed to get richer just as the new middle classes wanted their share of power to protect their property. (The Intolerable Acts, Beard vs. Machiavelli)
a) And the poor get...shafted. The Hektemeroi
(1) Reasonable rent, actually (18% vs. Helot's 50%)
(2) Interdependant debt and purchase of seed, use of ox, etc.
b) The New Deal! Is change ALWAYS good?
(1) Enslavement of debtors thanks to Draco's law code (and hence his bad reputation)
(2) Sale of the valuable Athenians overseas
(3) Replacement with cheap foreign slaves, and conversion of land to cash crops and sales to Aegina and Megara.
(4) Even the other classes are suffering as the local food supply drops.
5. It's always a bad idea to put the screws to people too quickly (How to boil a frog). It came THAT close to civil war.
H. Unbinding arbitration: Solon, c. 594-3, as sole archon, another poet/war hero (if these parallels don't bother you, there's something wrong with you).
1. Salamis poem and anecdote: don't ever try to silence a poet. Here's where your Her. 1.29-33, 1.59-64 comes in.
2. Personally intelligent: Solon's motto
3. If you want to be a moderate, you'd better not mind if both sides hate you and you'd better have the courage of your convictions. Solon had the guts. Give 'em hell, Solly.
4. His program:
a) The food crisis (the most immediate): Exports restricted to olives and oil. That's a short-term measure.
b) The debt crisis:
(1) The Lower classes were demanding land redistribution, which would have given the upper classes no alternative but to fight and resulted in chaos.
(2) Solon cancelled all debts by canceling mortgages marked on border stones (horoi) and otherwise: the seisactheia.
(3) Tried to undo previous damage by buying back those who'd been sold abroad.
c) Encouragement of middle classes and tradesmen: No support to father if no trade taught
d) Some currency and measures reform
e) Social reform: pretended aristocracy to de facto aristocracy--the property system
(1) Good bye to all of Draco's laws but the homicide code
(2) Solon, Machiavelli and the Founding Fathers: Property's the standard, not birth--all offices open to all birth classes, but not all economic classes
(a) pentacosiomedimni (500+ bushels of grain)
(b) hippeis (300-500), lowest class to be archon
(c) zeugitae (200-300)
(d) thetes (<200)
(3) New aristocracy, with hope of social advancement and the linkage of political power with a stake in the decsisions (timocracy)
End as of 10/4/95