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Chapter 4

Politics and Geopolitics

Rich in lovely fruit,

Irrigated by a myriad of streams and springs,

And well furnished with good pasture for cattle and sheep,

Neither bitter and stormy in the windy blasts of winter

Nor, on the contrary, rendered excessively hot by the four-horsed chariot of the sun...

Possessed of an excellence greater than can be expressed in words: Messenia.

—Euripides

W

hen asked about the origins of their political regime and of the

way of life associated with it, Spartans in and after the fifth cen-

tury had a ready answer. It was all, they said, the work of a law-

giver named Lycurgus. When asked who this eminent personage was and

when he lived, however, they were unsure. Someone at Lacedaemon told

Herodotus that this sage lived in the time of the Agiad king Leobatas, for this

is what he reports. Earlier, the poet Simonides had claimed that Lycurgus was

the uncle of the Eurypontid king Charillos, who appears to have lived two or

three generations after Leobatas in the middle of the eighth century; and, in

due course, Aristotle—who is known to have penned (or at least commis-

sioned) something like one hundred fifty-eight treatises charting the history

and the character, when fully developed, of the various political regimes in

Hellas—seconded Simonides’ assertion. Hieronymus of Rhodes and others

alluded to but not named by Aristotle and Plutarch made the lawgiver a con-

temporary of Terpander of Lesbos and Thaletas of Gortyn, the inspirational

poets who twice visited Sparta—for the Carneia in 676 and to help found the

Gymnopaidiai in 668.^1

This is one source of confusion. There is another. Much of what Lycurgus

is said to have done the Spartans attributed to others as well. Lycurgus and the

Eurypontid king Theopompus are both credited with having established the

ephorate.^2 Lycurgus and the Agiad king Polydorus are both said to have been

responsible for the system of public land allotments.^3 The Great Rhetra, which