Politics and Geopolitics 119
gration within Laconia on a considerable scale. It was in the mid-sixth century
that individual farmsteads, villas, and hamlets first appeared in districts hith-
erto unsettled, located on the margins of the Spartan plain and elsewhere in
Laconia.^59
Moreover, four decades subsequent to Chilon’s ephorate—some years
after Anaxandridas had died and Cleomenes had been chosen as his successor
in preference to Dorieus—the latter was given the authority to found a colony,
and there appears to have been no shortage of Spartiates willing to join the
living embodiment of the old “Dorian” policy in this intrinsically risky en-
de avor.^60 The change in Sparta’s posture with regard to her neighbors appears
to have had as its consequence not only the emergence of new settlements in
the hinterland of Laconia but also a colonial enterprise reminiscent of the one
mounted in 706 by the so-called Partheníaı.
In retrospect—whatever misgivings Anaxandridas and the land-hungry
among his compatriots may have harbored—no one can gainsay the wisdom
of or the grand strategic vision underpinning Sparta’s new policy. For, if ever
there was a satiated power, Lacedaemon was it. When the Spartans first in-
vaded the upper Pamisos valley, they may well have had only booty in mind.
When, however, they set out to recover that land in the wake of the seventh-
century Messenian revolt, they were committing themselves to a monumental
quest. There were never more than nine or ten thousand Spartiates. Messenia
was, by Greek standards, vast; and there were no natural barriers within the
region favorable to permanently sequestering a part of it. To reconquer and
then retain the Stenyklaros plain, the Spartans discovered that they had to
seize and administer Messenia in its entirety. Given the number of helots that
they had to police, the fact that in Messenia these helots saw themselves as a
people in bondage, and the overall geopolitical situation, the Spartans could
not hope to hold the region indefinitely unless they could find a way to turn
their fellow Peloponnesians—the Arcadians, first of all—into faithful allies.
The old “Dorian” policy of conquest and enslavement would no longer do.
Lacedaemon did not have and would never have the manpower with which to
pursue it. The “Achaean” policy of overthrowing tyranny, of sponsoring oligar-
chy, and providing protection in return for allegiance was for Sparta the only
way forward; and, when implemented, it turned out to be a phenomenal suc-
cess. For, by this means, the Lacedaemonians managed to draw into alliance
every major city in the Peloponnesus apart from Argos;^61 and an elaborate
system of cart roads, built on a single gauge with an eye to linking the ancient