72 Conquest
Were it not for his cautionary words, we would be inclined to judge on the
basis of the physical remains that Athens was a much greater power than it
actually was and that ancient Lacedaemon was politically inconsequential.^21
An absence of evidence—archaeological or literary—need not be evidence of
absence.
The supposition that the first Dorians in Laconia may initially have prac-
ticed transhumance has this virtue. It helps explain the cultural presumptions
that occasioned the Spartans’ describing in pastoral terms the institutions and
practices constituting their agōgē ́. It makes sense in similar fashion of the no-
madic, pastoral features evident in the cultic reenactment of the Dorian in-
vasion that took place every year during the festival of Apollo Carneios, and
it is consistent with the fact that, in our literary sources for early Sparta, cattle-
raiding looms large.^22
The Emergence of Lacedaemon
On one question, the archaeological evidence is dispositive. Dorian Lace-
daemon began to take shape in the decades following 950. At first, if the geog-
rapher Pausanias is to be trusted, the town of Sparta, insofar as there was one,
was constituted by the four villages—Pitana, Mesoa, Limnai, and Konosoura—
grouped about the Spartan acropolis which are mentioned in inscriptions of
the Roman period. The Agiad kings, recognized as the senior branch, were
buried in Pitana—where, as it happens, we have the earliest archaeological ev-
idence for settlement. Their Eurypontid colleagues appear to have had graves
and homes in Limnai—a once marshy area near the Eurotas, which appears to
have been settled some decades thereafter.^23
To this amalgam of four villages, a fifth was added quite early in the his-
tory of Lacedaemon. Of this, there can be little doubt—for, in his Polıteía of
the Lacedaemonians, Aristotle specifies that, at a certain point, the Spartan
army consisted of five regiments or lóchoı, which was no longer the case in and
after the late fifth century; and a passing comment in Herodotus makes it clear
that, at the time of the Persian Wars, each of these lóchoı was drawn from one
of the constituent villages of Lacedaemon.^24
The fifth village can hardly have been any place other than Amyclae, a
sizable settlement of great historical importance which was located on the
Spartan plain to the west of the Eurotas a few miles to the south of the Lace-
daemonian acropolis. No one, not even the most skeptical of scholars, doubts