The Spartan Regime_ Its Character, Origins, and Grand Strategy - Paul Anthony Rahe

Paıdeía 17

The men with whom we made our journey, when we left

Windy Erineos for the broad isle of Pelops.

For the Heraclid kings and their Dorian followers, the Eurotas valley was pre-

cisely what Israel had been for Moses and the Jews of the Exodus. Laconia was

a fertile and well-watered territory ripe for the taking. Like Canaan, as de-

scribed in Deuteronomy, it was “a good land, a land of brooks of water, of

fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and

barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil, olive, and

honey.”^36 The Eurotas valley was all this and more. For a people reared on

Tyrtaeus, Laconia was nothing less than the promised land.

In another passage, almost certainly drawn from the same work, Tyrtaeus

attributed Sparta’s political order not to human action, but to the intervention

of the gods, tracing its origins to advice sought from the oracle of Apollo. Of

a trip undertaken to Delphi by Sparta’s two kings, the poet wrote,

Having listened to Phoebus, they carried home from Pytho

Oracles of the god and words certain of fulfillment:

“To rule in council is reserved for the god-honored kings,

To whom the lovely city of Sparta is entrusted as a care.

It is reserved also for the gérontas, men elder in birth.

Then the commoners, making reply with straightforward decrees,

Shall speak and accomplish all that is noble and just,

Not giving to the city a counsel that is crooked.

So shall victory and power attend the multitude of the dēˆmos.

For thus has Phoebus spoken of these things to the pólıs.”^37

By trusting in the authority of Tyrtaeus, the Spartans could rest assured that

they had the same divine sanction for the organization of their community

that they possessed for their acquisition of the southeastern Peloponnesus.

Tyrtaeus’ poetry was evidently wide ranging. In one of the small handful

of surviving fragments, he celebrated Sparta’s original conquest of Messenia;

in two others, he alluded to the fate suffered by her helots. The members of

this servile class were not simply men “distressed with great burdens like asses,

carrying to their masters under painful necessity half of all the fruit that the

fields bear.” They suffered insult in addition to injury, for they were forced

“themselves (and their bedfellows likewise) to mourn for their masters” when

one such encountered “the sad fate of death.”^38 The poet presumably had more

to say on the subject. He may even have gone on to describe the manner in

which the Spartans ritually reinforced the boundary between master and ser-