Conquest 73
that the Amyclaeans were at some point admitted to Lacedaemon’s Spartiate
ruling order. On this question, the epigraphical evidence from the Roman pe-
riod is dispositive. The only issue in dispute is whether the Amyclaeans were
made “new citizens [neopólitaı],” as they are called in the pertinent inscrip-
tion, early on or quite late; and there is good reason to think the former pos-
sibility far more likely than the latter.^25
To begin with, such a supposition makes geopolitical sense. Amyclae was
too close to the administrative center of Lacedaemon and too well-situated on
fertile land in the Eurotas valley to have been left for long to its own devices.
Moreover, it would have been easy for the Spartans to incorporate such a com-
munity within the Lacedaemonian ruling order at or near the time of that
order’s inception when the situation was fluid and the grounds for inclusion
and exclusion had not yet been clearly defined. Later on, pride on the part of
the members of that august ruling order would have been an almost insuper-
able obstacle. Furthermore, if, in the archaic and classical periods, the Amyc-
laeans had been classed as períoıkoı and not Spartíataı, it would also be hard
to explain why we hear so much about their history and customary conduct
from figures such as Pindar, Xenophon, and Aristotle. None of the communi-
ties known to be composed of períoıkoı receives any attention of this sort on
any scale, whereas Amyclae is actually mentioned more often by fifth- and
fourth-century writers than any of the Spartiate villages located about the
Lacedaemonian acropolis apart from Pitana. Indeed, the three other villages
in that locale listed by the geographer Pausanias and visible in the inscriptions
of the Roman period are not mentioned by any classical or Hellenistic source.
Moreover, when Athens and Sparta ratified the ill-fated Peace of Nicias in 421,
it was not on their acropolis that the Lacedaemonians chose to have the in-
scription set up recording its terms. It was at Amyclae.^26
Regarding the evidence for early Sparta, there is yet another complication
requiring attention. Herodotus’ lists of the ancestors of the Agiad Leonidas and
of his Eurypontid colleague the younger Leotychidas are suspiciously equal in
length. We are evidently meant to believe the impossible: that the number of
generations separating each from Heracles was precisely the same. Moreover,
two of the names near the beginning of Herodotus’ list of the Eurypontids—
Prytanis (“Presiding Officer”) and Eunomos (“Well-Ordered by Law”)—have
an abstract quality, which has led scholars to wonder whether they might not
be interpolations meant to sustain the presumption that, from the outset,
Sparta was a single community with two kings. It is, they suggest, more likely