Conquest 89
istocracies. Their power he traces to the military predominance of men on
horseback, and he cites as examples Chalcis and Eretria, which were located at
opposite ends of the Lelantine plain on the island of Euboea. In these cities, he
reports, there had existed in the archaic period equestrian ruling orders com-
posed of men who were respectively called Hıppobótaı or “Horse-Breeders”
and Hıppeîs.^56
These Euboean cities were by no means peculiar. There is evidence sug-
gesting that, early on, Thebes as well was governed by those who bred horses.
In his Antigone, which is set in the distant past, Sophocles describes her tell-
ingly as a city “rejoicing in her many chariots,” which was renowned for their
beauty. Thebes’ heritage in this particular long remained a source of commu-
nal pride. In the late fifth century, the city fielded an elite hoplite unit strik-
ingly similar to Lacedaemon’s hıppeîs, which bore an anachronistic, telltale
title: “the charioteers and footmen.” Situated in Boeotia on a broad plain suited
to cavalry and even perhaps to chariot warfare, Thebes was governed, as late
as 479, by an exceedingly narrow aristocracy whose equestrian character can
hardly be in doubt.^57
Aristotle’s testimony suggests that, when the royal bodyguard was first
formed, Sparta’s army was made up of aristocratic champions who ordinarily
went off to war mounted on chariots or on steeds and then, like the chari-
ot-borne warriors depicted so vividly in the Iliad, dismounted to fight, not
primarily with thrusting spears but with javelins and swords.^58 It was, we must
suppose, with an army of this sort that Archelaos and Charillos, Teleklos,
Nikandros and Alcamenes, Theopompus,, and their colleagues first estab-
lished Sparta’s hegemony throughout Laconia and over the Stenyklaros plain
in Messenia.
Homer, in fact, provides a template by which we can understand the prac-
tices customary in early Greece by dint of which raiders from one community
could extract from another such community one-half of the harvest gathered
by its citizens, as the aristocrats of Lacedaemon reportedly did from Messene
each year. Whether this took place at harvest time; in the fall, after the ephors,
upon taking office, had in ritual fashion legitimized a raid by declaring war;
or in a less orderly way we cannot say.^59 It is, however, we must suspect, their
preeminence on the field of the sword in these early days that explains the
existence at Sparta in later times of an equestrian aristocracy, possessing pri-
vate property in abundance, which was accorded privileged access to high
office as members of the gerousía.