The Spartan Regime_ Its Character, Origins, and Grand Strategy - Paul Anthony Rahe

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66 Conquest


not a substantial proportion of them are, in fact, at least distantly related by


blood. Time and time again, in recent years, DNA studies have shown that


particular peoples who claim a common ancestry are, in fact, for the most part


of common descent.^6 It is, moreover, as this suggests, a mistake to suppose that


oral traditions having to do with the foundation of communities and the great


crises they weather are apt to die out quickly.^7


More can be said of particular pertinence to Hellas. For the Greeks were


peculiar. Among them, as the Homeric epics both testify and preach, remem-


brance loomed large. In Mycenaean and post-Mycenaean Greece, manners


and mores were aristocratic; and, in and before the classical period, Greeks of


rank—the Spartans above all others—were obsessed both with genealogy and


with the tales told concerning the foundation of the communities in which


they and others lived. Like Arabs of similar stature today, the well-born in an-


cient Hellas regarded knowing who they and their neighbors were and whence


they all came as a matter of the highest importance.^8


Rarely, moreover, did the stewards of memory have anything like a fully


free hand. In ancient Hellas, there were constraints on the formation of tradi-


tion, and these were favorable to its veracity. In the archaic and classical peri-


ods, Greece was divided into something on the order of one thousand indepen-


dent, jealous, quarreling, often mutually hostile political communities—each


with its own ruling order, its own peculiar interests, its own civic religion, its


own agenda, and its own traditions.^9 Where Hellenic traditions are utterly


incompatible with one another, as is sometimes the case, we may be at a loss—


as Herodotus, the first to confront this problem, readily acknowledges he


sometimes was.^10 But where they coincide or overlap, where the ancestral lore


of one Greek community dovetails with that of one or more others, as is com-


monly the case, we would be ill-advised to dismiss its testimony out of hand—


for, most of the time, the only plausible reason for such a consensus is that, in


its rough outlines, the tradition happens to be true.


There is one more indication that Greek tradition deserves attention and


respect. Time and again, the hyperskepticism to which classical scholarship is


periodically prone has been belied by new discoveries. Heinrich Schliemann


may have lacked the intellectual sophistication possessed by those who dis-


missed his enterprise as a crackpot endeavor, but when he uncovered the ruins


of ancient Troy in Anatolia, of Mycenae and Tiryns in the Peloponnesus, and


of Orchomenos in Boeotia, he demonstrated that, with regard to the Greek


legends, naive credulity is more apt to bring one close to the truth than is a

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