The helot factor affected more than Sparta’s internal life. Again and again modifications were forced on Sparta in the sphere of foreign policy. The Spartans could not risk frequent military activity far from home, because this would entail leaving behind a large population of discontented helots (who outnumbered Spartans by seven to one). A solution, occasionally tried by adventurous Spartan commanders, was selective enfranchisement of helots. Yet this called for nerve that even the Spartans did not have: on one occasion 2,000 helots, who were promised freedom and were led garlanded round the temples, disappeared, and nobody ever found out what had happened to them. Some person or persons evidently had second thoughts. Xenophon, who was no enemy to Sparta, illuminated helot attitudes in his description of an episode called the “Kinadon affair,” which happened at the very beginning of the 4th century; it was suppressed with ruthless and effective speed. The leader Kinadon, according to Xenophon, said that the rebel groups, among whom helots are listed in first place, would have liked to eat the Spartans raw, and incidents such as this one explain why.
Attempts to minimize the importance of that episode as evidence for helot discontent should be firmly resisted. It is a question whether the tension should be seen as Messenian nationalism or as the expression of class struggle, but nationalism cannot be the whole story. One effect of the helot phenomenon was the brutalization of the Spartan elite itself. Spartan violence toward other Greeks, particularly taking the form of threats with or actual use of sticks (bakteriai), is attested with remarkable frequency in the sources, as is the resentment of such treatment by other Greeks. It seems that Spartans of the officer class had a habit of treating other Greeks like the helots by whom they were outnumbered and surrounded at home, and the implied insult and humiliation was deeply resented. The arrogant use of a nonmilitary weapon such as a stick actually added to the degradation. The Peloponnesian League
After the suppression of the Messenian revolt (perhaps not before 600), Sparta controlled much of the Peloponnese. In the 6th century it extended that control further, into Arcadia to the north, by diplomatic as well as by purely military means. On the diplomatic level, Sparta, the greatest of the Dorian states, deliberately played the anti-Dorian card in the mid-6th century in an attempt to win more allies. Sparta’s Dorianism was unacceptable to some of its still-independent neighbours, whose mythology remembered a time when the Peloponnese had been ruled by Achaean kings such as Atreus, Agamemnon, and his son Orestes (in a period modern scholars would call Mycenaean).
The central symbolic act recorded by tradition was the talismanic bringing home to Sparta of the bones of Orestes himself—a way for Sparta to claim that it was the successor of the old line of Atreus. The result was an alliance with Arcadian Tegea, which in turn inaugurated a network of such alliances, to which has been given the modern name of the Peloponnesian League. A valuable 5th-century inscription found in the 1970s concerning a community in Aetolia (north-central Greece) illuminated the obligations imposed by Sparta on its allies: above all, full military reciprocity—i.e., the requirement to defend Sparta when it was attacked, with similar guarantees offered by Sparta in return. Another, more obviously pragmatic, reason why Sparta attracted to itself allies in areas like Arcadia was surely fear of Argos. Archaic and Classical Argos never forgot the great age of Pheidon, and from time to time the Argives tried to reassert a claim to hegemony in mythical terms of their own. One way of doing so was to back the claim of the Pisatans (rather than the Eleans) to run the Olympic Games.
In the same period (the middle of the 6th century), Sparta drew on its enhanced prestige and popularity in the Peloponnese to take its antipathy to tyranny a stage further: a papyrus fragment of what looks like a lost history supports Plutarch’s statement that Sparta systematically deposed tyrants elsewhere in Greece—the tyrannies in Sicyon, Naxos, and perhaps even the Cypselid at Corinth (though this may be a confusion for a similarly named community called Cerinthus on Euboea).
The most famous deposition was Sparta’s forcible ending of the tyranny at Athens. Finally one must ask, however, what were Sparta’s motives for those interventions. Perhaps part of the motive was genuine ideological dislike of tyranny; Sparta was to exploit this role as late as 431, when it entered the great Peloponnesian War as would-be liberator of Greece from the new “tyranny” in Greece—namely, the Athenian empire. But that theory can be turned on its head: perhaps the Spartans retrojected their antipathy to tyranny into the Archaic period as a way of justifying their moral stance in the late 430s. Or Sparta may have been worried about the ambitions of Argos, with which certain tyrants, like the Athenian, had close connections. Or it may have longsightedly detected sympathy on the part of certain tyrants toward the growing power of Persia: it is true that Sparta made some kind of diplomatic arrangement with the threatened Lydian power of the Anatolian ruler Croesus not long before his defeat by Persia in 546.
If suspicion of Persia was behind the deposition of the tyrants, Sparta was inconsistent in carrying out its anti-Persian policy; it did not help Croesus in his final showdown with Persia, nor did it help anti-Persian elements on Samos, nor did it do much in the years immediately before the great Greek-Persian collision of 480–479 called the Persian War (it sent no help to the general rising of Ionia against Persia in 499 nor to Athens at the preliminary campaign of Marathon in 490). Inconsistency of diplomatic decision making on the part of Sparta is, however, always explicable for a reason already noticed—its helot problem. Athens The distinctiveness of Athens
Athens was also highly untypical in many respects, though perhaps what is most untypical about it is the relatively large amount of evidence available both about Athens as a city and imperial centre and about Attica, the territory surrounding and controlled by Athens. (That element presents a particular difficulty when one attempts to pass judgment on the issue of typicality versus untypicality in ancient and especially Archaic Greek history; it often is not known whether a given phenomenon is frequent or merely frequently attested. That kind of thing creates difficulties for what students of modern history call “exceptionalist” theories about particular states.) Even at Athens there is much that is not yet known; for instance, of the 139 villages, or demes, given a political definition by Cleisthenes in 508, only a handful have been properly excavated.
First, it is safe to say that Attica’s huge size and favourable configuration made it unusual by any standards among Greek poleis. Its territory was far larger than that of Corinth or Megara, whereas Boeotia, though in control of a comparable area, resorted to the federal principle as a way of imposing unity. Like Corinth but unlike Thebes (the greatest city of Classical Boeotia), Athens had a splendid acropolis (citadel) that had its own water supply, a natural advantage making for early political centralization. And Athens was protected by four mountain systems offering a first line of defense.
Second, Attica has a very long coastline jutting into the Aegean, a feature that invited it to become a maritime power (one may contrast it with Sparta, whose port of Gythion is far away to the south). That in turn was to compel Athens to import quantities of the ship-building timber it lacked, a major factor in Athenian imperial thinking. (It helps to explain its 5th-century interest in timber-rich Italy, Sicily, and Macedon.)
Third, although Attica was rich in certain natural resources, such as precious metal for coinage—the silver of the Laurium mines in the east of Attica—and marble for building, its soil, suitable though it is for olive growing, is thin by comparison with that of Thessaly or Boeotia. That meant that when Athens’s territory became more densely populated after the post-Mycenaean depopulation, which had affected all Greece, it had to look for outside sources of grain, and, to secure those sources, it had to act imperialistically. Some scholars have attempted to minimize Athens’s dependence on or need for outside sources of grain and to bring down the date at which it began to draw on the granaries of southern Russia via the Black Sea (as it definitely did in the 4th century). Certainly, there were fertile areas of Attica proper, for instance near Marathon, and at many periods Athens directly controlled some politically marginal but economically productive areas such as the Oropus district to the north or the island of Lemnos. A case can also be made for saying that if Athenians had been prepared to eat less wheat and more barley, Athens could have fed itself. Real needs, however, are sometimes less important than perceived needs, and for the understanding of Athenian imperial actions it is more important that its politicians believed (even if modern statisticians would say they were wrong) that internal sources of grain must be endlessly supplemented from abroad. Nor is it entirely plausible to dissociate Athens’s 7th-century acquisition of Sigeum from the provisioning possibilities of the Black Sea region.