64

Chapter 3

Conquest

The immense literature about Roman law has been produced by excogitation

from a relatively small amount of evidence, of which a substantial part is sus-

pect because of interpolations. [John] Ducane had often wondered whether his

passion for the subject were not a kind of perversion. There are certain areas of

scholarship, early Greek history is one and Roman law is another, where the

scantiness of evidence sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a

game with very few pieces, where the skill of the player lies in complicating the

rules. The isolated and uneloquent fact must be exhibited within a tissue of

hypothesis subtle enough to make it speak, and it was the weaving of this tissue

which fascinated Ducane.

—Iris Murdoch

W

hat the novelist Iris Murdoch says, in passing, about Roman law

and early Greek history is especially true of early Sparta.^1 The

evidence for the origins of Lacedaemon, her constitution, way of

life, and grand strategy is not just scanty. Not seldom, it reflects a bias; and,

more often than not, the modern researcher is ill placed to discern the nature

of that bias and to fathom its depths. In effect, scholars find themselves in the

position of children eager to reconstruct a vast jigsaw puzzle—who are aware

that the great majority of the pieces are missing and that many of those which

have survived are broken, and who then discover, to their great dismay, that

their situation is complicated by yet another, perhaps even graver deficiency:

for they have not the vaguest notion what the puzzle would look like if they

actually managed to piece it together.

Some scholars argue that the surviving ancient literature touching on

early Greece in general and on Sparta in particular is worthless as evidence. It

reflects legends and traditions, and these, they say, are largely invented out of

whole cloth to serve the interests of those on whose behalf the stories are told.^2

This claim one must, I think, qualify. For what we know of traditions in other

places and times suggests that most of the time only a part of what is contained

therein is pure invention. If the interests of those responsible for passing on

such lore play a role, as on occasion they surely must, it is chiefly in helping to