42 Polıteía
Spartiates commanded troops, but only a king or his regent could normally
lead out the Spartan army and the forces of the Peloponnesian League. Prior
to the fifth century and, apparently, for a few years after its beginning, the two
basıleîs ordinarily shared the command; and when acting in concert, they
could reportedly wage war against any territory they wished. It was a sacrilege
for a Spartiate to resist their authority to do so. As hereditary generals and
priests with life tenure, the Agiad and Eurypontid kings stood out from the
ranks.^17
In the strict sense, the two kings were not Spartiates at all. Envoys sent
on missions abroad could claim to represent two entities at the same time:
“the Lacedaemonians and the Heraclids from Sparta.”^18 Tradition taught that
the Spartiates were Lacedaemonians precisely because they were adherents of
men who traced their ancestry back to Heracles, the son of Zeus. The Athe-
nians and the Arcadians might think of themselves as autochthonous: “always
possessed of the same land,” and even “born from the earth.”^19 But the Spar-
tans were acutely aware that they were interlopers in the Peloponnesus, that
they had invaded and seized Laconia by force, and that their servants—the
“old helots” of the province—were descended from the original Achaean stock,
which had ruled Lacedaemon in the epoch described by Homer. As Dorians,
the Spartans had no legitimate place in what was, in fact, an alien land. The
righteousness of their cause and its continued success were founded on the
quasi-feudal relationship binding the citizens to their two kings. For the first
Dorians to call themselves Spartans had purportedly been among the follow-
ers of the male lineal descendants of the old Achaean prince Heracles, whose
sons were thought to have inherited from their illustrious father and to have
passed on to their offspring the right to rule Argos in particular and the Pelo-
ponnesus more generally. As long as their basıleîs were Heraclids, the Spartans
of later times could rest confident in the legitimacy of their tenure in Laconia
and in the support of the gods. But if they expelled their charismatic kings or
countenanced an illegitimate succession, they could expect to suffer the fate
which the gods had reserved for their Dorian neighbors in Messenia. The
Spartans justified their conquest of that province and their reduction of its
inhabitants to a servile condition on the grounds that the Dorians of Messenia
had extinguished their own claim to the land when they drove out their Her-
aclid king. That province’s Spartan conquerors had merely reasserted Heraclid
control.^20