Politics and Geopolitics 115
on dividing its farmland into allotments and on reducing its population to
the status of helots—approached, as was their wont, the Delphic oracle for
support, their search for assurance was frustrated. Arcadia by Apollo they
were denied. But Tegea, within the confines of that region, they were not
begrudged—or so it seemed. There the Pythia offered them a dance floor to
tread upon and a lovely plain to measure with a line. What they did not
know—and learned only when they showed up for battle with fetters for the
purposing of enslaving the Tegeans—was that they were destined to lose that
battle and that some of them would subsequently wear those fetters while
laboring on that beautiful plain themselves.^44
Thereafter, Herodotus and Pausanias tell us, the Spartans consulted the
oracle at Delphi a second time to ask what god they needed to propitiate be-
fore they could defeat the Tegeans. On this occasion, they were instructed to
bring the bones of Orestes son of Agamemnon back to Sparta; and, when they
asked where these were to be found, they were given an enigmatic oracle, di-
recting them to Tegea—where, they were told, that city’s heroic guardian was
lodged. It was, Herodotus adds, Lichas, one of the agathoergoí, who found and
retrieved the bones. From then on, in their battles with Tegea, the Spartans are
said to have been victorious, and much of the Peloponnesus soon came under
their sway.^45
We do not know precisely when the Spartans suffered defeat in the Battle
of the Fetters. Herodotus reports, however, that, in the reign of Leon and He-
gesicles early in the sixth century, the Lacedaemonians were successful in all
of their endeavors except in those against the Tegeans; and he then goes on to
tell us that it was during the reign of Anaxandridas and Ariston in and before
the mid-540s, when Croesus neared the end of his reign in Lydia, that they
secured their hegemony within the Peloponnesus.^46
Sparta could not have accomplished this had she not altered her policy.
The initial spadework seems, however, to have been done not in Sparta but in
Argos. The Argive king Meltas, who lived in the late seventh and early sixth
centuries, seems to have been involved in the contests between Sparta and
Tegea, for he is credited with having fought a difficult war against Lacedae-
mon alongside Argos’ Arcadian allies, for whom he regained some territory
hitherto lost. Although this won him gratitude in Arcadia, the losses that they
suffered did not please the Argives, who drove him from Argos—whence, in
telling fashion, he fled for protection to his beneficiaries in Tegea.^47
This seems to have provided Sparta with an opening, and Lichas’ purported