There is considerable resemblance between the alleged behavior of Kresphontês on first settling at Stenyklêrus, and that of Eurysthenês and Proklês at Sparta,—so far as we gather from statements alike meagre and uncertified, resting on the authority of Ephorus. Both are said to have tried to place the preëxisting inhabitants of the country on a level with their own Dorian bands; both provoked discontents and incurred obloquy, with their contemporaries as well as with posterity, by the attempt; nor did either permanently succeed. Kresphontês was forced to concentrate all his Dorians in Stenyklêrus, while after all, the discontents ended in his violent death. And Agis, the son of Eurysthenês, is said to have reversed all the liberal tentatives of his father, so as to bring the whole of Laconia into subjection and dependence on the Dorians at Sparta, with the single exception of Amyklæ. So odious to the Spartan Dorians was the conduct of Eurysthenês, that they refused to acknowledge him as their œkist, and conferred that honor upon Agis; the two lines of kings being called Agiads and Eurypontids, instead of Eurystheneids and Prokleids.[557] We see in these statements the same tone of mind as that which pervades the Panathenaic oration of Isokratês, the master of Ephorus,—the facts of an unknown period, so colored as to suit an idéal of haughty Dorian exclusiveness.
Again, as Eurysthenês and Proklês appear, in the picture of Ephorus, to carry their authority at once over the whole of Laconia, so too does Kresphontês over the whole of Messenia,—over the entire south-western region of Peloponnesus, westward of Mount Taygetus and Cape Tænarus, and southward of the river Neda. He sends an envoy to Pylus and Rhium, the western and southern portions of the south-western promontory of Peloponnesus, treating the entire territory as if it were one sovereignty, and inviting the inhabitants to submit under equal laws.[558] But it has already been observed, that this supposed oneness and indivisibility is not less uncertified in regard to Messenia than in regard to Laconia. How large a proportion of the former territory these kings of Stenyklêrus may have ruled, we have no means of determining, but there were certainly portions of it which they did not rule,—not merely during the reign of Têleklus at Sparta, but still later, during the first Messenian war. For not only are we informed that Têleklus established three townships, Poiêessa, Echeiæ,[559] and Tragium, near the Messenian gulf, and on the course of the river Nedon, but we read also a farther matter of evidence in the roll of Olympic victors. Every competitor for the prize at one of these great festivals was always entered as member of some autonomous Hellenic community, which constituted his title to approach the lists; if successful, he was proclaimed with the name of the community to which he belonged. Now during the first ten Olympiads, seven winners are proclaimed as Messenians; in the 11th Olympiad, we find the name of Oxythemis Korônæus,—Oxythemis, not of Korôneia in Bœotia, but of Korônê in the western bend of the Messenian gulf,[560] some miles on the right bank of the Pamisus, and a considerable distance to the north of the modern Coron. Now if Korônê had then been comprehended in Messenia, Oxythemis would have been proclaimed as a Messenian, like the seven winners who preceded him; and the fact of his being proclaimed as a Korônæan, proves that Korônê was then an independent community, not under the dominion of the Dorians of Stenyklêrus. It seems clear, therefore, that the latter did not reign over the whole territory commonly known as Messenia, though we are unable to assign the proportion of it which they actually possessed.
The Olympic festival, in its origin doubtless a privilege of the neighboring Pisatans, seems to have derived its great and gradually expanding importance from the Ætolo-Eleian settlement in Peloponnesus, combined with the Dorians of Laconia and Messenia. Lykurgus of Sparta, and Iphitus of Elis, are alleged to have joined their efforts for the purpose of establishing both the sanctity of the Olympic truce and the inviolability of the Eleian territory. Hence, though this tale is not to be construed as matter of fact, we may see that the Lacedæmonians regarded the Olympic games as a portion of their own antiquities. Moreover, it is certain, both that the dignity of the festival increased simultaneously with their ascendency,[561] and that their peculiar fashions were very early introduced into the practice of the Olympic competitors. Probably, the three bands of coöperating invaders, Ætolians and Spartan and Messenian Dorians, may have adopted this festival as a periodical renovation of mutual union and fraternity; from which cause the games became an attractive centre for the western portion of Peloponnesus, before they were much frequented by people from the eastern, or still more from extra-Peloponnesian Hellas. For it cannot be altogether accidental, when we read the names of the first twelve proclaimed Olympic victors (occupying nearly half a century from 776 B. C. downwards), to find that seven of them are Messenians, three Eleians, one from Dymê, in Achaia, and one from Korônê; while after the 12th Olympiad, Corinthians and Megarians and Epidaurians begin to occur; later still, extra-Peloponnesian victors. We may reasonably infer from hence that the Olympic ceremonies were at this early period chiefly frequented by visitors and competitors from the western regions of Peloponnesus, and that the affluence to them, from the more distant parts of the Hellenic world, did not become considerable until the first Messenian war had closed.
Having thus set forth the conjectures, to which our very scanty knowledge points, respecting the first establishment of the Ætolian and Dorian settlements in Elis, Laconia, and Messenia, connected as they are with the steadily increasing dignity and frequentation of the Olympic festival, I proceed, in the next chapter, to that memorable circumstance which both determined the character, and brought about the political ascendency, of the Spartans separately: I mean, the laws and discipline of Lykurgus.
Of the preëxisting inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia, whom we are accustomed to call Achæans and Pylians, so little is known, that we cannot at all measure the difference between them and their Dorian invaders, either in dialect, in habits, or in intelligence. There appear no traces of any difference of dialect among the various parts of the population of Laconia: the Messenian allies of Athens, in the Peloponnesian war, speak the same dialect as the Helots, and the same also as the Ambrakiotic colonists from Corinth: all Doric.[562] Nor are we to suppose that the Doric dialect was at all peculiar to the people called Dorians. As far as can be made out by the evidence of Inscriptions, it seems to have been the dialect of the Phokians, Delphians, Lokrians, Ætolians, and Achæans of Phthiôtis: with respect to the latter, the Inscriptions of Thaumaki, in Achæa Phthiôtis, afford a proof the more curious and the more cogent of native dialect, because the Phthiôts were both immediate neighbors and subjects of the Thessalians, who spoke a variety of the Æolic. So, too, within Peloponnesus, we find evidences of Doric dialect among the Achæans in the north of Peloponnesus,—the Dryopic inhabitants of Hermionê,[563]—and the Eleuthero-Lacones, or Laconian townships (compounded of Periœki and Helots), emancipated by the Romans in the second century B. C. Concerning the speech of that population whom the invading Dorians found in Laconia, we have no means of judging: the presumption would rather be that it did not differ materially from the Doric. Thucydidês designates the Corinthians, whom the invading Dorians attacked from the hill Solygeius, as being Æolians, and Strabo speaks both of the Achæans as an Æolic nation, and of the Æolic dialect as having been originally preponderant in Peloponnesus.[564] But we do not readily see what means of information either of these authors possessed respecting the speech of a time which must have been four centuries anterior even to Thucydidês.
Of that which is called the Æolic dialect there are three marked and distinguishable varieties,—the Lesbian, the Thessalian, and the Bœotian; the Thessalian forming a mean term between the other two. Ahrens has shown that the ancient grammatical critics are accustomed to affirm peculiarities, as belonging to the Æolic dialect generally, which in truth belong only to the Lesbian variety of it, or to the poems of Alkæus and Sappho, which these critics attentively studied. Lesbian Æolic, Thessalian Æolic, and Bœotian Æolic, are all different: and if, abstracting from these differences, we confine our attention to that which is common to all three, we shall find little to distinguish this abstract Æolic from the abstract Doric, or that which is common to the many varieties of the Doric dialect.[565] These two are sisters, presenting, both of them, more or less the Latin side of the Greek language, while the relationship of either of them to the Attic and Ionic is more distant. Now it seems that, putting aside Attica, the speech of all Greece,[566] from Perrhæbia and Mount Olympus to Cape Malea and Cape Akritas, consisted of different varieties, either of the Doric or of the Æolic dialect; this being true (as far as we are able to judge) not less of the aboriginal Arcadians than of the rest. The Laconian dialect contained more specialties of its own, and approached nearer to the Æolic and to the Eleian, than any other variety of the Dorian: it stands at the extreme of what has been classified as the strict Dorian,—that is, the farthest removed from Ionic and Attic. The Kretan towns manifest also a strict Dorism; as well as the Lacedæmonian colony of Tarentum, and, seemingly, most of the Italiotic Greeks, though some of them are called Achæan colonies. Most of the other varieties of the Doric dialect (Phokian, Lokrian, Delphian, Achæan of Phthiôtis) exhibit a form departing less widely from the Ionic and Attic: Argos, and the towns in the Argolic peninsula, seem to form a stepping-stone between the two.
These positions represent the little which can be known respecting those varieties of Grecian speech which are not known to us by written works. The little presumption which can be raised upon them favors the belief that the Dorian invaders of Laconia and Messenia found there a dialect little different from that which they brought with them,—a conclusion which it is the more necessary to state distinctly, since the work of O. Müller has caused an exaggerated estimate to be formed of the distinctive peculiarities whereby Dorism was parted off from the rest of Hellas.
CHAPTER VI.
LAWS AND DISCIPLINE OF LYKURGUS AT SPARTA.
Plutarch begins his biography of Lykurgus with the following ominous words:—