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24 Lysias, In Defence of Mantitheus, 16.17.
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25 Thucydides, 1.10.
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26 The Iliad, 21.470. Her shrine by the Eurotas was originally dedicated to an obscure goddess named Ortheia. The Spartans worshipped Artemis there as Artemis Ortheia, probably from the sixth century BC, although the name is not attested before the Roman period.
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27 The masks date from the seventh and particularly the sixth centuries BC.
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28 Pindar, quoted by Plutarch, Lycurgus, 21.
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29 According to Plato, only the elderly were permitted to criticize aspects of the state. See Laws, 634d–e.
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30 Pindar, quoted by Plutarch, Lycurgus, 21.
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31 Xenophon, The Constitution of the Spartans, 10.3.
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32 Plutarch, Lycurgus, 16.
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33 Ibykos, Fragment 58.
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34 Plutarch, Lycurgus, 14.
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35 Herodotus, 6.61.
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36 The king was Charilaus, but since he was supposed to have lived in the eighth century, before the Lycurgan revolution, the saying is surely apocryphal. It was recorded by Plutarch, and is grouped in his Sayings of the Spartans.
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37 Plutarch, Lycurgus, 16.
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38 It is only fair to point out that both these details derive from late sources, Aelian and Athenaeus (both c. second century AD), respectively.
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39 The precise origins of this practice are obscure—some scholars date it to as late as the fifth century BC.
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40 Xenophon, The Constitution of the Spartans, 2.9.
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41 There is an ambiguity here in the sources. It is claimed that Spartans married in secret, but how a bride could keep her new status a secret when she had just been cropped is unclear. In Sparta, it was only married women who were veiled in public.
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42 Critias, 88B37 D-K.
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43 Herodotus, 7.105.
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44 Tyrtaeus, Fragment 2.
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45 Homeric Hymns, 3.214–15.
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46 When precisely this occurred is unclear. The story that the Pythia had originally been a young girl was much repeated, but all the writers of the classical period took it for granted that she was old. The state of our knowledge of the history of archaic Greece being so patchy, it is perfectly possible that she always had been.
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47 Homeric Hymns, 3.538.
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48 The so-called Sacred War is traditionally dated 595–591 BC. There is an eeriness about the details as they are found in the sources that has suggested to some historians that the entire episode may be legendary.
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49 Pausanias, 10.5.
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50 Ibid., 10.4.
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51 Heraclitus, quoted by Plutarch, Why the Pythia No Longer Prophesies in Verse, 404E.
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52 The Odyssey, 17.323–4.
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53 Plutarch, Agis, 11.
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54 Thucydides, 1.70.
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55 The date is approximate. Cleomenes was certainly king by 519 BC, at the latest.
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56 Herodotus, 5.42.
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IV Athens
1 From Pericles’ famous funeral speech (Thucydides, 2.36). The sentiments here derive from the golden age of Athenian self-confidence, in the mid-fifth century BC, but the Athenians’ belief that they were earth-born seems to be genuinely ancient, and can be traced, albeit vaguely, at least as far back as Homer.
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2 From the Acharnes Stele, a copy of the oath sworn by the ephebes, young Athenians who were obliged by the city to undergo two years’ military training. The formal nature of such a program was a fourth-century BC innovation, but the words of the oath are traditional, and date back at least to the time of the Persian Wars.
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3 The precise name of the Athenians’ earliest hero is beset by one of those confusions so typical of archaic Greek history. The Athenians of the late fifth century called him Erichthonius, and identified Erechtheus with his grandson. The close similarity of the two names and the fact that “Erechtheus” is much the older one, however, strongly suggest that grandfather and grandson were originally one and the same. A further layer of confusion comes from the fact that Cecrops, another Athenian king, and sometimes held to be Erechtheus’ son, was also earth-born and snake-tailed. Erechtheus himself long continued to be worshipped as a god on the Acropolis. His legend is a further fragment of evidence that the Athenian belief in their own earth-born status was ancient. As Shapiro (p. 102) has pointed out, “Generally, myths involving the legendary Kings of Attika are genuinely old.”
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4 The Iliad, 2.549–51.
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5 Herodotus, 7.161.
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6 The question of when Attica was formally unified, so that the citizens of communities beyond Athens came to be identified as “Athenian,” has never been answered definitively. Orthodox opinion would accept that the process was completed, at the latest, by the end of the seventh century BC, although Greg Anderson, in a brilliant if controversial book, has argued that it was completed only by 500 BC, as part of the reforms that also helped establish the democracy.
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7 The evidence for the backward-looking nature of Athenian exceptionalism during the seventh century BC derives principally from archaeology. See Morris (1987), in particular.
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8 Sappho, 58.25.
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9 Ibid., 1–13.