118 Politics and Geopolitics
had something to do with the outcome, for the woman that the king ended up
marrying was none other than Chilon’s niece or second cousin.^56
Anaxandridas’ son by this second wife was his successor Cleomenes; and
later, when the latter in turn was king, he involved himself in an effort to
duplicate at Athens Chilon’s feat in suppressing tyranny at Sicyon. Moreover,
when a priest tried to bar him on ethnic grounds from entering a temple on
the Athenian acropolis, Cleomenes forced his way in, asserting that he was not
himself a Dorian, but an Achaean.^57
There is additional evidence pertinent to the shift in Spartan policy. After
the birth of this Cleomenes, Anaxandridas’ hitherto barren first wife unex-
pectedly bore him first one son and then two others. The Agiad king seized
upon the arrival of the firstborn of these as an occasion in which to signal his
opposition to the diplomatic revolution that Chilon appears to have initiated
and that his own son by Chilon’s kinswoman would later seek to extend, and
he did so by the simple expedient of naming the infant Dorieus—“the Dorian.”
It is telling that—a few decades thereafter, when Cleomenes was king— another
figure in the Peloponnesus, almost certainly a Spartan, is recorded as having
named his son Philachaios—“Friend of the Achaean”—for this says much about
the ideological divide opened up at Lacedaemon over this question.^58
That so radical a shift in policy should initially produce such a divide
makes good sense. There is, moreover, reason to suspect that it had, at least in
the short term, untoward domestic consequences. In the wake of her recon-
quest of Messenia, Lacedaemon’s citizen population appears to have grown
dramatically; and, in time, the number of Spartiates apparently came to ex-
ceed the number of available allotments. It is only on this presumption that
Sparta’s astonishing aggressiveness is fully intelligible. Lacedaemon’s aim had
not just been to seize the Tegean plain. The Spartans had brought with them
fetters. Their goal was to reduce the population of Tegea to servitude; and, to
Spartiates who were bereft, they evidently intended to distribute allotments
of land and helots to work it. To befriend the Tegeans, then, was not just to
renounce territorial claims. It was to leave in the lurch those among the citi-
zens’ sons who had been shorted in life’s lottery. This must have left some at
Sparta exceedingly discontent, and it is worth asking whether something
might not have been done by way of compensation on behalf of Spartiate off-
spring left by the city unprovided.
As it happens, in the immediate aftermath of this abrupt change in Spar-
tan foreign policy, there is clear-cut archaeological evidence for internal mi-