122 Conclusion
erable scale. As we have seen, its dictates go a long way toward explaining the
Spartans’ aversion to commerce; their practice of infanticide; their provision
for every citizen of an equal allotment of land and of servants to work it; the
city’s sumptuary laws; their sharing of slaves, horses, and hounds; their intense
piety; the subjection of their male offspring to an elaborate system of educa-
tion and indoctrination; their use of music and poetry to instill a civic spirit;
their practice of pederasty; the rigors and discipline to which they habitually
subjected themselves; and, of course, their constant preparation for war. It
accounts as well for the articulation over time within Lacedaemon of a mixed
regime graced with elaborate balances and checks. To sustain their dominion
in Laconia and Messenia and to maintain the helots in bondage, the Spartans
had to eschew faction; foster among themselves the same opinions, passions,
and interests; and employ—above all, in times of strain—procedures, recog-
nized as fair and just, by which to reach a stable political consensus consistent
with the dictates of prudence.
Not surprisingly, this grand strategy had serious consequences for Lace-
daemon’s posture in the international sphere as well. The Spartans’ perch was
precarious. The Corinthian leader who compared their polity with a stream
was right. Rivers really do grow in strength as other streams empty into them,
and the like could be said of the Lacedaemonians: “There, in the place where
they emerge, they are alone; but as they continue and gather cities under their
control, they become more numerous and harder to fight.”^5 Even when their
population was at its height, the Spartans were few in number, and the ter-
ritory they ruled was comparatively vast. The underlings they exploited were
astonishingly numerous and apt to be rebellious. In Messenia, if not also in
Laconia, the helots saw themselves as a people in bondage, and geography did
not favor the haughty men who kept them in that condition. The Spartans
could look to the períoıkoı for support, and this they did. But the latter were
not all that numerous, and it was never entirely certain that they could be re-
lied on. They, too, had to be overawed. In the long run, the Spartans could not
sustain their way of life if they did not recruit allies outside their stronghold
in the southern Peloponnesus.
As we have seen, it took the Lacedaemonians some time to sort out in full
the implications of their position. Early on, at least, trial and error governed
their approach to the formulation of policy. But by the middle of the sixth
century, Chilon and others had come to recognize that, if their compatriots
did not find some way to leverage the manpower of their neighbors, they would