Hello, χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 24, “Won’t You Be My Ally? The Expansion of Spartan Power in the Peloponnese.” I’m Scott Emmons.

 In the last few episodes, we’ve been focused mainly on Athens. We looked at Solon’s frustrated attempt to bring peace and stability to the city, followed by a period that really was more stable, but at the cost of an autocratic regime that ultimately had to be overthrown. Those events cover most of the 6th century BCE, down to 510. In this episode, we’re going to backtrack and head southwest to see what’s happening in Sparta and the Peloponnese during the same period. And what we see there is a series of military victories that put Sparta at the head of a multi-state alliance. 

 We don’t have a very detailed picture of how that alliance developed. Herodotus gives us accounts of a few major events, and those can be supplemented with later authors like Pausanias and Plutarch, and also with archaeological evidence. But Herodotus is our main source, and that means we can expect colorful narratives. We have to allow for a certain amount of embellishment. Remember, Herodotus had to rely on stories that had been told and retold for over a century before he put them into his history. And a lot of those stories conflict with one another. Imagine if you were trying to reconstruct the history of the battle of the Little Bighorn, and you interviewed a descendant of General Custer, then you interviewed a descendant of Sitting Bull. That’s the kind of thing Herodotus was up against.  So I’ll tell the stories as we have them, and not everything will stand up to scrutiny, but the general picture of Spartan expansion will be clear enough.

 To pick up where we left off, back in the 7th century BCE, Sparta fought two grueling wars to conquer the neighboring region of Messenia and reduce its population to helots. The historical record after that conquest is very sparse up until the middle of the 6th century, when we find Sparta moving aggressively to the north, against the region called Arcadia, and in particular the town of Tegea. If you look it up, you may be told it’s pronounced “TEE-jee-uh,” but I’m going to say “Tegea,” because it’s much closer to the original. So why go after Tegea? Well, there are some hints that the Arcadians may have aided the Messenians against Sparta in the second Messenian War. So there may be at least a pretext in that. But Tegea also has great strategic importance. Sparta controls Messenia to its west, but between those two regions, there’s a major mountain range, the Taygetos range, that acts as a barrier. If Spartans are going to and from Messenia, it’s much safer to go up north and turn west, avoiding the high mountains where Messenian rebels might hold the passes. Likewise, if Messenians are looking for someone to help them in a rebellion against the Spartans, Tegea will be one of the first places they’ll come to. So it’s clearly in Sparta’s best interest to dominate in this area.

 Sparta’s initial plan seems to have been to conquer Arcadia and turn the population into helots. It worked in Messenia, so why not here? Of course, the first thing they had to do was consult the Delphic oracle. And according to Herodotus, as translated by Andrea Purvis, this is the response they got. Quote:

 For Arcadia you ask me, you ask for much; I refuse to give it.

Eaters of acorns, and many of them, dwell in Arcadia,

And they will stop you. But not all will I grudge you;

Tegea I will give you, a dance floor to tread,

A beautiful plain to measure out with a line.

Unquote

 Eaters of acorns. What’s that about? The reference to acorn eaters is a kind of ancient Greek shorthand to describe primitive people who lived a hard life in rugged country like Arcadia. In fact, the Arcadians boasted that they’d lived in their country since before the creation of the moon. They weren’t going to roll over in the face of a Spartan invasion. So the Spartans weren’t going to get all of Arcadia, but the oracle was a lot more promising about Tegea. It virtually assured them that they’d conquer the town and its surrounding countryside. They were so confident that when they set out on the campaign, they loaded up their baggage train with chains and shackles to bind the Tegeans after defeating and enslaving them. 

 Well, by now I’m sure you know how risky it is to take a Delphic oracle at face value. The Spartans marched against Tegea and got their butts handed to them. Those who survived were clamped in the same shackles they’d brought with them to hold the Tegeans. To fulfill the oracle, their “dancing” was in the form of hard labor on Tegean farms, and they were measuring out the land, but for their new masters. Some of those shackles were dedicated at a local temple of Athena, and Herodotus tells us they were still hanging there in his day. Pausanias reports that in his time, about 600 years after Herodotus, the chains were still hanging there, minus the ones that had rusted away. 

 So the Spartans lost that war, but Tegea was too important to let it go at that. Herodotus doesn’t give a date for the so-called battle of the fetters, so we don’t know how long it took for Sparta to resume operations. But around the middle of the sixth century, under the kings Anaxandridas and Ariston, a new policy emerged that had an important religious dimension to it. The story is that they consulted Delphi, and this time they asked one of the standard questions that a state would put to the Pythia. What gods should they honor in order to have success against the Tegeans? And the answer came back that they needed to find the bones of the hero Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, and bring them back to Sparta. They had no idea where to look for the bones of Orestes, so they had to send a second delegation to ask for guidance. Of course, the oracle wasn’t going to give them Google Maps directions. That’s not the Delphic style. It answered with a riddle. Quote:

 There is a place called Tegea; it lies in Arcadia’s plain,

Where two winds blast by powerful force

And stroke meets counterstroke, woe lies upon woe,

The son of Agamemnon in this fertile earth lies.

Tegea’s guardian you will be when you have brought him home.

Unquote

 So the Spartans searched all around Tegea without much luck, until one of their officials, a man named Lichas, came upon a blacksmith’s forge. This blacksmith must have been doing something exceptional, because Lichas was very impressed, and he had to stop and watch the guy at work. This went on for a while, and then the blacksmith said, “If you think this is amazing, come out back with me and I’ll really show you something.” So he took him out into the courtyard and said, “I started digging a well here, and I came across a coffin seven cubits long!” The cubit, or in Greek the πηχυς, was a measurement based on the length of the forearm from the elbow to the fingertip. Without getting into the weeds about standard measurements and conversions, you can imagine that seven cubits meant a very big coffin. The blacksmith said he was skeptical that people had been as big as that back in the old days, but he opened it up and found an enormous skeleton inside. 

 At this point, the Spartan Lichas understood the solution to the oracle’s riddle. The winds were from the bellows in the forge, and the stroke and counterstroke were the hammer and anvil. Here were these bones of heroic size, and all of this was enough to show that he’d found the bones of Orestes. He reported back to Sparta, and they made a plan. They pretended to exile him on some charge or other, so he went back to the blacksmith and asked if he could rent a space in his courtyard. It took some persuading, but ultimately the blacksmith agreed. So Lichas took up residence there, and at some time when the owner wasn’t looking, he dug up the bones and took them back to Sparta. And as Herodotus tells it, from then on, the Spartans were victorious in all their battles against the Tegeans.

 Say what you like, Herodotus could spin a good yarn. Obviously, we can’t take all the details as fact. But the Bones of Orestes policy was very real and very important for Sparta. Who knows what they really took home with them? Some historians have conjectured that in cases like this, the ancients came across the bones of prehistoric animals and concluded that they were the remains of heroic age warriors. 

 That could be. But the real importance of retrieving the bones of Orestes lay in its value for propaganda and diplomacy. In some ways, it’s a “hearts and minds” initiative. Orestes, as the son of Agamemnon, belonged to the Trojan legend, or at least the aftermath of the Trojan war. And the heroes of that era were thought to be Achaeans, the Greeks who preceded the arrival of the Dorians. The Spartans were unquestionably Dorians. They spoke the Dorian dialect, they belonged to Dorian tribes, that’s just who they were. But they also wanted to identify with the heroes of Homeric legend. The Spartans essentially wanted to have it both ways. They couldn’t very well deny their Dorian identity, but they also claimed a strong connection with those legendary heroes. One of their most important religious shrines was dedicated to Helen and Menelaus. If they could claim Orestes as their own, they could reinforce that connection with the ancient Achaeans. And that would give them both prestige and maybe some common ground with non-Dorians living in the Peloponnese.  

 Well, however it happened, after the Spartans brought home the bones of Orestes, they got the upper hand at Tegea. And that seems like as good a place as any for a short break. Epic Greek History is both free and ad-free. On the other hand, it’s not free to produce. There are hosting fees, research materials, and expenses for recording equipment. If you’ve been following the podcast and would like to help support it, the one way to do that is by going to the website at www.epicgreekhistory.com and clicking on that “Support” button. There you’ll be given a choice of contribution levels starting at three dollars a month. Enough said about that. Let’s break for…

 [SFX: A Moment of Greek]

 The blacksmith in Herodotus’ story was amazed at the size of the coffin he’d discovered while digging his well. The word Herodotus uses is σορός, which could refer to any coffin or even an urn for cremated ashes. A more interesting word, specifically for a stone coffin, is “sarcophagus.” The “sarko-” root means “flesh,” and the “phagos” part refers to “eating.” So a sarcophagus is literally a flesh-eater. You might think, okay, it encloses a body, so in a metaphorical sense it’s eaten it. But it’s a little more involved than that. The term traces back to the phrase “λίθος σαρκοφάγος,” meaning “flesh-eating stone.” That referred to a particular type of limestone from the area around Troy. The Roman author Pliny the Elder, in his massive Natural History, reported that this limestone had the peculiar property of accelerating the decomposition of dead bodies. The word λίθος, “stone” eventually dropped out, and “sarcophagus” came to be just a fancy word for a stone coffin. And that’s today’s somewhat grisly moment of Greek!

 [SFX]

 Herodotus tells us that by the time the Spartans got control of Tegea, they’d conquered most of the Peloponnese. That’s not quite right, because they never conquered these areas in the same sense that they’d conquered Messenia. And there seems to be a shift in the way they treated cities they’d defeated. The way they marched into Tegea bringing shackles the first time suggests that they originally thought they’d take the city and enslave its population. As we’ve seen, that plan backfired. But after Sparta’s final victory, the result wasn’t a conquest but an alliance. One that favored Sparta, but still an alliance rather than total submission. We don’t know the terms of the settlement in any detail, but Plutarch, drawing on a lost work of Aristotle, reports a clause from an inscribed treaty between Sparta and Tegea. And it states that the Tegeans are to expel all Messenians from their country and not to make them “useful” in any way. There’s a lot of debate about what “useful” means in this context, and it’s not clear when this treaty was struck. But this fragment at least shows that the Messenians were top of mind for the Spartans. They were always concerned about the threat of a Messenian uprising, and that shaped their foreign policy.

 The solution at Tegea was important because it represented a different way for Sparta to expand its influence. If you conquer an area and subjugate its population, you have the problem of holding onto it. You need soldiers to stand guard and put down any uprisings. That means a financial cost to support operations. With an alliance, the Spartans can get military assistance when they need it, and they don’t need to expend the resources and take the risks that would be required if they were to completely take over Tegea. So over the course of the sixth century, Spartan power grows through the building of alliances. In a very broad way, it’s reminiscent of the way the early Roman Republic expanded by striking agreements with its neighbors, offering partial citizenship rights, and so on. 

To look at it from the other side, what does Tegea have to gain from this alliance? Obviously, it’s better to have Sparta as a friend than as an enemy. But Sparta isn’t the only Peloponnesian state that can cause trouble. Farther up north and east is the old city of Argos. You may recall that over a century earlier, the tyrant Pheidon had expanded Argive power to the extent that he could even commandeer the Olympic games. In those days Argos had decisively defeated a Spartan army at the battle of Hysiae. Well, in the mid-6th century, Argos wasn’t what it had been, but it was still a formidable power, and it never gave up on its dream of returning to its glory days. So a city like Tegea was caught in the middle between two larger states jockeying for power. It was probably inevitable that it would have to make a deal with one or the other. An alliance with Sparta would at least give the Tegeans some protection against Argive expansion.

 Tensions between Argos and Sparta eventually came to a head at a place called Thyrea at the north end of the region of Cynuria in the eastern Peloponnese. Cynuria had long been a bone of contention between the two states. There are some places that states just continually squabble over, the way Spain and the UK have had competing claims to Gibraltar or Hungary and Romania argue about who owns Transylvania. Cynuria has sometimes been called the Alsace-Lorraine of Greece. So the Spartans and the Argives have been quarreling over Cynuria for ages, and in about 545 BCE, Thyrea is the place where they’re going to throw down. 

 But according to our sources, this is no ordinary hoplite battle. Again, we’re back to story time with Herodotus. As he tells it, the Spartans seized the land, and the Argives marched out to defend what they considered their territory. Then, for whatever reason, the two states decided to settle their dispute with a battle of champions. Each side would pick 300 of its best men to fight it out, and the state with the winning team would be recognized as the victor and have control of the land. All the other men of fighting age were told to go home before the battle, so they wouldn’t be tempted to rush in and help their side if it ran into trouble. 

 So the battle raged all day, and the two sides were so evenly matched that by sundown, only three men were left alive — two Argives and one Spartan. The surviving Argives said, “That’s it, we win!” And they ran back to Argos to announce their victory. The Spartan stayed on the battlefield to strip the enemy corpses of their armor — which is what you did when you won a hoplite battle. You’d capture enemy armor and often dedicate it at a temple as a thank-offering for the victory. Well, the next day, the forces from both cities showed up, and each side claimed they’d won — the Argives because more of their men had survived, and the Spartans because their man had stayed at his post. They started to argue, things got heated, and before long the fight erupted into a full-scale battle. It was a bloody affair with a lot of deaths on both sides, but ultimately Sparta won and gained control of the territory. 

 Now, that version of events obviously raises some red flags. The battle of champions sounds like something out of Homer. Details like the exact number of 300 soldiers on each side sound like convenient narrative devices. The Roman historian Livy tells a similar story about a dispute between early Rome and the city of Alba Longa, where two sets of triplets from each side were chosen as champions. On the other hand, there’s no reason it couldn’t have happened just as Herodotus says it did. There’s even a rough parallel in a truly historical event called the Battle of the Clans at Perth in medieval Scotland, where 30 men on each side fought to settle a dispute. 

 If I had to choose, I think I’d have to side with most modern historians, who consider the battle of 600 mostly legend, maybe an earlier story that was grafted onto the historical narrative. Still, I suspect there must have been something different about this battle that grew into the story as we now have it. But whatever form it took, there certainly was a major conflict between Argos and Sparta at Thyrea, and Sparta won the day. The upshot is that Sparta now had control of almost all the east coast of the Peloponnese, including the island of Cythera just to the south. 

 That’ll take us to our second break. When we pick up again, we’ll look at the network of alliances that resulted from Sparta’s expansion. But now it’s time for…

 [SFX: Random facts!]

 At the end of Herodotus’ account of the Battle of Champions, he tells us that the Argives swore an oath that all their men would cut their hair short and their women would not wear gold until they regained Thyrea. The Spartans, on the other hand, decided that they would wear their hair long. Herodotus or whatever source he’s drawing on seems to be trying to explain a difference in customs between two Dorian states. Cutting the hair short and not wearing jewelry were standard expressions of grief. As for the Spartans with their long hair, that’s an old aristocratic tradition that they never gave up, even as many other Greek communities did. The Spartans were well known in the classical period for wearing their hair long and taking special care that it was properly dressed before going into battle. In Athens, long hair was an expression of aristocratic heritage, which often coincided with a sympathetic attitude toward the Spartans. And that’s today’s random fact.

 [SFX]

 We’ve looked at two specific conflicts of the sixth century where the Spartans got the upper hand. The broader picture is the gradual growth of Spartan power in the Peloponnese, not through subjugation but through alliances. Sparta was the first Greek state to build a large-scale network of subordinate allies to act as part of its military machine. Remember, Sparta was only one city, and the Spartiates, the full citizens who served as hoplites, made up only a small percentage of the population. They alone wouldn’t have been able to conduct the big military operations that they carried out later, in the late 5th and 4th centuries. So in the classical period, when we talk about Spartan armies, we’re usually talking about Spartan soldiers along with allied troops from other cities. 

The standard term that modern historians use for this alliance is the Peloponnesian League. It’s not a very precise term, because the league didn’t include all city-states in the Peloponnese, and it did include some that weren’t in the Peloponnese. Thebes is an obvious example. The Greeks themselves never called it the Peloponnesian League. They usually referred to it as “the Spartans and their allies.” But the term “Peloponnesian League” is so pervasive in modern treatments, I’m not going to buck the trend. If you do further reading in Greek history, that’s what you’re most likely to see. So, for the sake of consistency, Peloponnesian League it is.

 Now, I’m getting a little ahead of my timeline in talking about this, because the first joint expedition of Sparta with multiple allies doesn’t come until near the end of the sixth century. And I don’t want to talk about that now because I want to avoid spoilers for future episodes. So what I’m about to describe is the fully developed Peloponnesian League that ultimately developed from the gradual expansion I’ve been talking about.

 So how did the Peloponnesian League operate? When I first took Greek civilization as a college freshman nearly half a century ago, it was usually presented as a well-regulated organization of allied states that met regularly at Sparta. Decisions were made by a majority vote, but Sparta held the cards and could make sure the league voted the way it wanted. Each allied state took an oath, which was a common formula for an offensive and defensive alliance. The oath stated that the city entering the alliance would “have the same friends and enemies” as Sparta and would follow wherever it led.

 So that’s the old-school view, and a lot of it holds up. But over the last few decades, a more nuanced view has taken hold. That oath to have the same friends and enemies was certainly real, but we don’t know exactly when it became standard. A closer reading of the ancient texts suggests that the League met only when it needed to consider major military operations. Most importantly, there were several occasions when allied states refused to follow Spartan directives. We’ll see specific instances of that as events unfold. So the picture that’s emerged is one of a loose network of states, each one probably bound directly to Sparta by an oath, but one in which individual states had considerable freedom of action. In practice, those that could push back against Sparta were most likely the bigger, more powerful allies like Corinth and Thebes. Smaller cities, especially those closer to Sparta, would have had to toe the Spartan line.

 Well, as I said, the Peloponnesian League reaches its full development a bit later than the time I’ve been talking about. But by the middle of the sixth century, Sparta had already become the most powerful military state in mainland Greece. A good indication of that is the kind of attention it attracted from other states, both Greek and non-Greek. So I’d like to end this episode with a few examples of foreign powers recognizing Sparta’s special position and trying to build good relations with it.

The first of those is King Croesus of Lydia, whom we’ve met several times before. In fact, when Herodotus describes the rise of Spartan power, he does so in the context of Croesus’ preparations for war with the expanding Persian Empire. It’s a good example of how non-linear his narrative is. He tells how Croesus looked to Sparta for an alliance, and then he goes off on digressions about the war with Tegea and the battle of champions with Argos to explain how Sparta had become powerful enough for Croesus to take notice.

 Croesus took his time cultivating good relations with Sparta. When some Spartan envoys had come to the Lydian capital at Sardis to buy gold for a new statue of Apollo, Croesus said, “Oh, no charge. My gold is your gold!”  So the Spartans were honored by that and owed him a debt of gratitude. And when Croesus sent envoys asking for aid against Persia, they were happy to conclude an alliance. They even tried to reciprocate by sending Croesus a gift of a magnificent, highly crafted bronze mixing bowl, but somehow it never made it to Sardis and ended up in the temple of Hera on the island of Samos, just off the Lydian coast. Herodotus gives us a couple of accounts of how that happened. The Spartan story, he says, is that the Samian fleet attacked the boat carrying the bowl and stole it. The Samian version is that by the time the boat got across the Aegean, the Persians had already conquered Lydia, so the Spartans sold it to the Samians. In any case, the Spartans accepted an alliance with Croesus, but evidently they never sent troops. It may be that there just wasn’t enough time before King Cyrus of Persia steamrolled over Lydia. On the other hand, this would have been a major overseas operation of a kind that Sparta had never undertaken before, so there’s some doubt as to how much help they were really prepared to offer.

 Well, after Lydia fell, the Greek cities in the area had a problem. Croesus had been a fairly benign overlord for them. Now that he was out of the picture, they were worried about what the Persians might do to them. So they also approached the Spartans for help, but they were turned down. In Herodotus, it comes across as a typical example of an Ionian failure to read the room at Sparta. The envoy dresses in a fancy purple robe and gives a long oration, but the Spartans are unimpressed. There was probably a lot more to it than that. Here and in the case of Croesus, it’s helpful to remember that the Spartans were always cautious about sending troops on far-off ventures, because there was the constant threat of a Messenian revolt at home.

 But there is an early exception. Back on the island of Samos, a man named Polycrates seized power and set himself up as a tyrant and a sort of pirate lord. Polycrates is a fascinating character in his own right, and I think I think he deserves to be the subject of the next mid-month episode. In any case, a few prominent Samians who’d been exiled by Polycrates came to Sparta to ask for help overthrowing him. This is the occasion I mentioned in the earlier episode on Sparta, where the Samians didn’t get anywhere with their long, involved speech, so on their second try, they just showed an empty bag and said, “The bag needs flour.” And the Spartans in their literally laconic way said, “You didn’t need to say, ‘the bag,’ you could have just said, ‘Needs flour.’” But they agreed to send help, and they did. Corinth also joined the fight against Polycrates, but there’s no indication that this was a coordinated expedition of allies. 

Why did the Spartans send a force overseas this time? Herodotus offers several possibilities, one being that the Spartans were mad at the Samians for stealing that bronze bowl they’d sent to Croesus. Later authors from Aristotle on portray Sparta as always eager to put down tyranny, but there really aren’t very many instances of that in the historical record. One of my sources for this episode is Nigel Kennel’s book, Spartans: A New History, and he suggests that the leading men in Sparta had close family ties with Samian aristocrats. Well, for whatever reasons, the Spartans sent a force — and Herodotus tells us it was a large force — to besiege the city. They won a battle when the Samians sallied out to attack them, but after that, they didn’t make any progress with the siege. So after forty days, they went home. There was a rumor that Polycrates had bought them off, but it probably came down to a cost-benefit assessment. It would have been a huge commitment to maintain a long siege when there were so many more pressing matters at home. So this venture didn’t amount to much, but Herodotus doesn’t fail to point out that this was the first time the Spartans ever sent an army into Asia.

 Those incidents show that by the middle of the 6th century BCE, Sparta had gained a reputation as the most powerful state in Greece — so much so that when a Lydian king, the Greek cities of Anatolia, and Samian exiles needed military assistance, Sparta was the first place they went. You may remember that a Spartan force was instrumental in putting down the Pisistratid tyranny in Athens in 510 BCE. And we’ll see that in a few decades, when Greek cities have to band together against the Persian invasion, there’s no question that Sparta will be the strategic leader.

 And that concludes Episode 24. I hope you’ve enjoyed following the rise of Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or anything at all to add, I’ll be more than happy to hear from you. My email is scott@epicgreekhistory.com, or you can always comment on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.