116 Politics and Geopolitics
recovery of the bones of Orestes must be read as part of a diplomatic offen-
sive on Sparta’s part—especially since it appears that, at about the same time,
the Spartans claimed to have recovered from Achaea on the north coast of
the Peloponnesus the bones of Orestes’ son Teisamenos.^48 In this fashion, the
Spartans were asserting that their Heraclid kings—who were supposed to be
Achaeans on the Homeric model, we must remember, and not Dorians at
all—were the rightful heirs of Tyndareus, Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus,
Orestes, and Teisamenos and that, as such, they were the natural leaders of
those within the Peloponnesus who regarded themselves as the remnants of
Homer’s Achaeans, Danaans, and Argives.^49
In the process, the Spartans eventually had to renounce their quest to
enslave the Tegeans and to offer to defend them against the Argives, who had
in a dramatic manner driven out their own Heraclid king and repudiated their
traditional alliance with the Arcadians. In turn, the Tegeans had to agree not
only to cease making citizens of the Messenians who crossed the border in
search of asylum, as had been their custom, but also to expel these refugees
from their territory.^50
The treaty recording this pledge was inscribed on a stone slab set up on
the banks of the Alpheios River. We are not, however, informed whether this
monument was placed, as some scholars suppose, on the Spartan-Tegean
frontier where a river of that name ran east of Caryae or located, as others
suspect, considerably further west on the Alpheios where it ran between Or-
esthasion and Leuctron through the plain immediately to the north of Mes-
senia; and we do not know whether this strategically vital district in south-
western Arcadia had come under the control of Tegea in the years following
the Second Messenian War—though the concessions extracted at this time
from the citizens of that pólıs might be taken to imply as much.^51 Nor are we
told whether, at this time, the Tegeans made a formal commitment to come to
Lacedaemon’s aid should there be a helot revolt. But, in the circumstances, this
seems highly likely. Never for a moment did the Spartans lose sight of the
helot threat.^52
Reaching a settlement with Tegea was one dimension of Sparta’s new pol-
icy. There seems to have been another dimension as well. For at about the
same time—if not, in fact, a decade or two earlier—the Lacedaemonians began
presenting themselves to their neighbors as the stalwart friends of liberty and
as enemies to tyranny. We do not know precisely when the Spartans adopted
this posture and began their policy of ousting tyrants and sponsoring oligar-