Conquest 93
any hope of being able to defend themselves in the future. In history, there is
but one iron law. Changes in military technology and tactics that give to those
who introduce them a decisive advantage over their adversaries will soon be
adopted elsewhere.^67
Nor could the Spartiates evade the political consequences of this military
revolution. If they were to field hoplite armies, they had to make arrange-
ments to satisfy the needs and desires of the great body of men who served in
the phalanx. In antiquity, Laconia was sometimes described as “an acropolis
and guard-post for the entire Peloponnesus”—for it was, as Euripides tells us,
“ringed round by mountains, rough, and difficult for foes to enter.”^68 Had the
Spartans limited their sphere of control to that region—cut off as it was by
Mount Parnon to the east, Mount Taygetus to the west, and rugged hill coun-
try to the north—they might have been able to make do for a time with the
aristocratic way of war that they had inherited.
But this they did not do, and their decision in this particular had pro-
found consequences. Cynouria was easier to reach from Argos than from
Sparta. To assert their control over the coastal strip northeast of Mount Par-
non, the Spartans had to defy one geopolitical imperative. To maintain their
leverage over Messenia, to the west of Mount Taygetus, they had to defy an-
other. There was nothing natural about the little empire, amounting to nearly
3,300 square miles and constituting two-fifths of the Peloponnesus, that they
had carved out for themselves in the southernmost reaches of that great pen-
insula.^69 Sustaining it required a single-minded devotion to the common good
and artifice, skill, and discipline of the highest order.
We do not know precisely when the Spartans faced up to the implications
of the changes that had taken place. They may have begun doing so before the
battle of Hysiae. The festival of Apollo Carneios was reorganized seven years
before, in 676. We hear of a poet from Lesbos named Terpander visiting Sparta
on this occasion and of his performance at the Carneia of a poem tellingly
entitled Díkē—“Justice”—and it is easy to imagine that the reorganization of
such a festival as a celebration of justice might be occasioned by a populist
political and military reform that had just taken place.^70
But if, perchance, the Spartans had not yet come to grips with the conse-
quences inherent in their new situation, their loss to the Argives at Hysiae
seven years later will certainly have given them food for thought. It is likely
that the establishment in 668 of the festival of the Gymnopaidiai—in which
the poet Thaletas of Gortyn, who had been present with Terpander at the