Politics and Geopolitics 103
over, in the early sixth century, when called upon to arbitrate a dispute be-
tween Athens and Megara over Salamis, the Lacedaemonians appointed five
commissioners; later in that century, when a colony was dispatched from
Lacedaemon, it was given five co-founders; and in the late fifth century, when
they decided to stage a trial of sorts at Plataea, the Spartans appointed a panel
of five judges. In short, in these latter days, there were as many ephors, lóchoı,
and agathoergoí at Lacedaemon as there were villages of Spartiates, and, at
least on the occasions mentioned, there were precisely as many arbitrators,
colonial co-founders, and judges.^15
Because it is repeated over and over again, this numerical correspondence
is highly suggestive. Elsewhere—in Corinth, on Samos, at Eretria on the is-
land of Euboea, in Athens, at Cyrene in Libya, and, on the outskirts of Magna
Graecia, in early Rome—we find evidence of there having been in the archaic
period what we would now call “tribal reforms,” in which a citizen’s political
identity ceased to be rooted in his membership in ancient kinship corpora-
tions of an aristocratic cast, such as the traditional Dorian tribes, and came
to be based on the accident of his residence in a particular locale; and the
magisterial boards and, at least in some cases, the army were recast to fit the
new political reality. Where such reforms took place, they appear to have been
aimed at reducing deference to the well-born and at promoting a measure of
political equality.^16
If some such shift took place at Sparta and if it also involved the transfor-
mation of an aristocratic magistracy, created as a restraint on the city’s two
kings, into a democratic magistracy, it is most likely to have taken place in the
wake of the introduction of hoplite warfare—for elsewhere, as we have seen,
this development appears to have given rise to tyrannies based on popular
resentment of a privileged aristocratic order that had outlived its raison d’être
as an instrument for community defense. There is, moreover, as we have also
seen, reason to suppose that some sort of political and social reform occurred
at Lacedaemon in connection with that city’s hoplite reform and that this
transformation coincided with the reorganization of the Carneia and the es-
tablishment of the Gymnopaidiai that took place on the occasion of the visits
to Sparta of the poets Terpander of Lesbos and Thaletas of Gortyn.
The Eurypontid king Theopompus, who is said to have been succeeded by
his grandson, appears to have lived an exceedingly long life—marked, at its
end, we must suspect, by the emergence of the hoplite phalanx. We have it on
good authority that he was already king at the end of the First Messenian War