After the Dorian conquest the three cities still continued to exist: Argos was the strongest of them, but Mycenæ acted independently of Argos so late as the year 480 B.C. in sending a contingent to fight against the Persians at Thermopylæ[50]. The great power of the Dorian monarchy was conspicuous in the reign of Pheidon, who at some time between 750 B.C. and 600 B.C. became so powerful that he was able to conduct an expedition from his own city in the east of the Peloponnesus to Olympia in the west and to deprive the Eleians by force of their prerogative of presiding over the Olympic festival[51]. He also established a hegemony or lordship over a number of Greek peoples in the neighbourhood of Argos, which had long been independent. The tradition of his conquest says simply that he "recovered the whole lot of Têmenus which had been broken up into many parts[52]." Têmenus, according to the legends of the Heracleids, was one of the leaders of the Dorians in their invasion of the Peloponnesus: and it seems that his "lot" must have included the tribes that lived at Cleonæ, Phlius, Sicyon, Epidaurus, Trœzen, and Ægina. Pheidon's conquest of these tribes was a remarkable achievement, since all of them were protected against Argos by mountain ranges or by sea: and it gave him such despotic authority over his own subjects at Argos that he is counted among the τύραννοι[53]. But it seems that he ought not, strictly speaking, to be reckoned among them, being unlike to the rest of them in two important particulars: first, that his despotic authority at Argos was no doubt necessary in order to enable Argos to keep control over the dependent peoples, and second, that it is not likely that he ever incurred the hatred of the people of Argos: for, if he had been hated by his own subjects, his power outside Argos must have promptly come to an end. After his time the power of the king at Argos ceased to be despotic, the neighbouring tribes recovered their independence, and the monarchy sank into obscurity, though it continued to exist so late as 480 B.C. when Greece was invaded by the Persians under Xerxes[54].
In Attica we can carry back our view not only to the age of the heroic monarchy but to the age which preceded it. The country, though it is, as we have seen, of small extent, and though it is not traversed by any continuous ranges of mountains, was originally peopled by a number of independent communities, each contained within a single village or small township: and it is probable that these little communities retained their independence till after the time of Homer; for Athens, which rose to greatness by subjugating them, is rarely mentioned in the Homeric poems, and never, I believe, in any passage which belongs to the poems as they were originally composed. In course of time however a powerful king arose at Athens, who succeeded in bringing the whole country under a single monarchy of the heroic type: and Thucydides tells us that in his own days the union of Attica under Athens was regularly celebrated at a public festival[55].
The Spartans, instead of having one king, had two kings and two royal families[56], so that their system of government may best be described as a dual heroic kingship. Of this government, and of the conquests made by the Spartans while they lived under it, I shall have more to say in the next chapter.
Of the other tribes in the prehistoric age we have no traditions: but Thucydides[57] says without hesitation concerning the early Greeks in general that their governments were "hereditary kingly governments with limited prerogatives": and the same view, which was shared by all the later Greeks, falls in with the little that is known of the Greek peoples in the first two or three centuries of their history.
It is clear from many indications that the monarchical part of the old tribal constitutions was necessary or especially useful to the primitive Greek peoples so long as they were employed in making conquests or settlements of new territory, and no longer. In the prehistoric age the Athenians and all the Dorian peoples were conquering peoples: and all of them made their conquests under the leadership of kings. In the next age, which came between the heroic period and the beginning of Greek history in the proper sense of the word, the great majority of the Greek peoples had ceased to acquire new territory within Greece and had also ceased or were ceasing to be monarchically governed: two peoples, the Spartans and the Argives, were exceptional both in continuing to make territorial conquests and in still living under kingly rule.
[CHAPTER IV.]
SPARTA.
The Spartans present so many peculiarities and are so unlike to any other people that I must divide what I have to say about them under separate heads. In regard to the Spartans before the Peloponnesian war I shall describe (I) their political surroundings, (II) their customs, (III) their constitution: for the period of the war and that which followed it, I shall give (IV) a general view of their commonwealth as it then stood.
I. The Spartans or Spartiatæ were the strongest and most warlike of those Dorian tribes who at some time after the time of Homer and yet long before the beginning of history migrated from the rocky valley of Doris in northern Greece and invaded the Peloponnesus. They subsequently lived in the unwalled city of Sparta as a small nation of conquerors surrounded by the two subject populations of the Periœci and the Helots, who peopled the country of Laconia. In 480 B.C., when the Spartans were at the height of their power, just after their king Leonidas and his three hundred had made their heroic defence at Thermopylæ, Xerxes asked Demaratus, who had once been king of Sparta but had been deposed, to tell him how many warriors remained to the Lacedæmonians and how many of them were as brave as the three hundred; Demaratus replied: "O king, the number of the Lacedæmonians is great and their cities are many: thou shalt know what thou desirest to learn. There is in Lacedæmon a city Sparta, of about eight thousand fighting men, and all these are like to those that fought at Thermopylæ: the other Lacedæmonians are not indeed equal to these, but yet they are brave[58]." As the Spartans of military age numbered eight thousand we may reckon that forty thousand was about the number of persons, including women and children, who belonged to Spartan families and formed the Spartan nation.