[715] Thucyd. iv, 128-132. Some lines of the comic poet Hermippus are preserved (in the Φορμοφόροι, Meineke, Fragm. p. 407) respecting Sitalkês and Perdikkas. Among the presents brought home by Dionysus in his voyage, there is numbered “the itch from Sitalkês, intended for the Lacedæmonians, and many shiploads of lies from Perdikkas.” Καὶ παρὰ Περδίκκου ψεύδη ναυσὶν πάνυ πολλαῖς.
[716] Thucyd. iv, 132.
[717] Thucyd. iv, 132. Καὶ τῶν ἡβώντων αὐτῶν παρανόμως ἄνδρας ἐξῆγον ἐκ Σπάρτης, ὥστε τῶν πόλεων ἄρχοντας καθιστάναι καὶ μὴ τοῖς ἐντυχοῦσιν ἐπιτρέπειν.
Most of the commentators translate ἡβώντων, “young men,” which is not the usual meaning of the word: it signifies, “men of military age,” which includes both young and middle-aged. If we compare iv, 132 with iii, 36, v, 32, and v, 116, we shall see that ἡβῶντες really has this larger meaning: compare also μέχρι ἥβης (ii, 46), which means, “until the age of military service commenced.”
It is not therefore necessary to suppose that the men taken out by Ischagoras were very young, for example that they were below the age of thirty, as Manso, O. Müller, and Göller would have us believe. It is enough that they were within the limits of the military age, both ways.
Considering the extraordinary reverence paid to old age at Sparta, it is by no means wonderful that old men should have been thought exclusively fitted for such commands, in the ancient customs and constitution.
The extensive operations, however, in which Sparta became involved through the Peloponnesian war, would render it impossible to maintain such a maxim in practice: but at this moment, the step was still recognized as a departure from a received maxim, and is characterized as such by Thucydidês under the term παρανόμως.
I explain τοῖς ἐντυχοῦσιν to refer to the case of men not Spartans being named to these posts: see in reference to this point, the stress which Brasidas lays on the fact that Klearidas was a Spartan, Thucyd. v, 9.
[718] Thucyd. iv, 135.
[719] Thucyd. ii, 5; iv, 133; Pausan. ii, 17, 7; iii, 5, 6. Hellanikus (a contemporary of Thucydidês, but somewhat older, coming in point of age between him and Herodotus) had framed a chronological series of these priestesses of Hêrê, with a history of past events belonging to the supposed times of each. And such was the Pan-Hellenic importance of the temple at this time, that Thucydidês, when he describes accurately the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, tells us, as one of his indications of time, that Chrysis had then been forty-eight years priestess at the Heræum. To employ the series of Olympic prize-runners and Olympiads as a continuous distribution of time, was a practice which had not yet got footing.