132 Appendix 1
are known to have had Spartan fathers, and the navarch Callicratidas, who
probably did, were the half-breeds, the sons of helot mothers.^24
To the story of the earthquakes and their consequences, we can add that,
in their aftermath, there was a helot revolt that caught the Lacedaemonians
flat-footed (Thuc. 1.101.2–3, 128.1, 2.27.2, 3.54.5, 4.56.2; Diod. 11.63–64). We
also hear of an isolated group of three hundred infantrymen being massacred,
who may have been Spartans; and there was major battle near Mount Ithome
that may well have eventuated in a considerable loss of Spartiate lives (Hdt.
9.35, 64).
It is striking that in the early 450s—when the Lacedaemonians led a Pelo-
ponnesian army of ten thousand hoplites against the Phocians who were at-
tacking Doris, which the Spartans considered their ancestral homeland—they
could manage to send with the ten thousand only fifteen hundred Lacedaemo-
nian hoplites (Thuc. 1.107.2). If this force was entirely Spartiate and constituted
two-thirds of the levy, as appears to have been the norm for such expeditions,
and if we suppose that the three hundred hıppeîs guarding the regent Nico-
medes son of Cleombrotus were not included in Thucydides’ count, there
were in that year not many more than two thousand five hundred fifty adult
male Spartiates left—and it cannot have helped the situation that the battle
against the Athenians at Tanagra, which followed, was hard fought and that
the Spartans and their allies (as well as the Athenians) suffered heavy losses
(Thuc. 1.107.3–108.2). If, on the other hand, the Lacedaemonian contingent
was evenly divided between Spartiates and períoıkoı, as it had been at Plataea,
and if the seven hundred fifty Spartan hoplites sent constituted two-thirds of
the levy, there would have been about fifteen hundred adult male Spartiates left.
The sudden character of this plunge in population is also strikingly visible
on the ground. Prior to the 465, Lacedaemon appears to have suffered from
overpopulation. Aristotle was told that there had once been as many as ten
thousand Spartans (Pol. 1270a34–39); and, although he intimates a measure
of skepticism about this number, there are reasons to suspect that his infor-
mant was, in fact, correct. There is certainly evidence for land hunger in sixth-
century Lacedaemon. Early in that century, when the Spartans made a con-
certed attempt to conquer Tegea, their aim was to divide the territory among
their citizens and make helots of the Arcadians (Hdt. 1.66). Moreover, as I
point out in Chapter 4—after the Lacedaemonians decided to abandon the
attempt at further expansion, to reach an accommodation with the Tegeans,
and draw them into an alliance—there is archaeological evidence for internal