130 Appendix 1
(Hdt. 7.202, 205.2, 223.2–225.3, 229–33, 9.71.2–4), Lacedaemon was able to
send an army outside the Peloponnesus to Plataea made up of two-thirds of
the surviving adult male Spartiates, in which there were five thousand Spar-
tans (9.10). Sixty-one years later, in 418, at a time of desperation, the Spartans
dispatched an even greater proportion of their available manpower—five-
sixths this time, rather than two-thirds—to fight nearer home at Mantineia
(Thuc. 5.64.2–3). If Thucydides’ figures for the size of the Lacedaemonian
army at Mantineia (5.68) are to be believed and if, as we have reason to expect,
Spartans made up roughly the same proportion (ca. 41 percent) in the lóchoı
deployed as they apparently had in the force chosen a few years earlier by lot
from those units to occupy Sphacteria (4.8.9, 38.5),^19 the city was, six decades
after Plataea, able to field fewer than fifteen hundred full citizens in the lóchoı
and another three hundred hıppeîs as the king’s bodyguard and had an adult
male citizen body of no more than twenty-one hundred.
It is, of course, possible that Thucydides is in error, and many scholars
have argued that the number of lóchoı present and, therefore, the number of
men in the army proper should be doubled.^20 Their incredulity is understand-
able, but, given the evident pride animating Thucydides’ claim to have pene-
trated the veil of secrecy concealing such matters at Lacedaemon and to have
achieved precision concerning this matter, the argument they advance is hard
to swallow. Realizing this, another scholar has suggested that the Spartiates
and the períoıkoı were brigaded separately at Mantineia, as they had been at
Plataea, and that Thucydides erred only in failing to report the presence of the
latter.^21 This, too, seems a stretch. It is contrary to what seems to have been the
case at Sphacteria, and it requires that we suppose Thucydides careless in his
description of the Lacedaemonian force as a whole. On either hypothesis,
however, the number of Spartans in the army at Mantineia will have been
roughly thirty-three hundred and the number of full citizens just over thirty-
nine hundred. Forty-seven years thereafter, in 371, in the army dispatched to
Leuctra, there were only seven hundred Spartans (Xen. Hell. 6.4.15). They
constituted two-thirds of Lacedaemon’s available citizen manpower (6.1.1),
which accords well with Aristotle’s claim (Pol. 1270a31–33) that, in his time,
twenty or so years thereafter, there were fewer than one thousand Spartans.
How, one might ask, can this development be explained without resort to the
species of analysis provided by Aristotle? How can it be explained if, in the
sixth and fifth centuries, there was a communal or quasi-communal system
of land tenure in place alongside the system of private property?