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Updated: June 28, 2025
But finding them armed and well prepared, they retired into the towns and openly made war with them, gaining over a number of the Laconians of the country districts; while at the same time the Messenians, also, made an attack upon the Spartans, who therefore despatched Periclidas to Athens to solicit succor, of whom Aristophanes says in mockery that he came and
The Achaeans, although by this arrangement they gained the accession of the free Laconians as well as Argos, were yet far from content; they had expected that the dreaded and hated Nabis would be superseded, that the emigrants would be brought back, and that the Achaean symmachy would be extended to the whole Peloponnesus.
Nabis attacked Gythium, one of the towns of the free Laconians that by the last treaty had been annexed to the Achaean league, and took it; but the experienced -strategus- of the Achaeans, Philopoemen, defeated him at the Barbosthenian mountains, and the tyrant brought back barely a fourth part of his army to his capital, in which Philopoemen shut him up.
Fists!” The fate of the Oriental was forgotten in the storm of patriotic fury that followed. Fortunately no one had a weapon. Half a dozen burly Laconians precipitated themselves without concert or order upon the athlete. He was hidden a moment in the rush of flapping gowns and tossing arms. Then like a rock out of the angry sea shone his golden head, as he shook off the attack.
Only the Thespians—let their names not be forgotten—chose to share the Laconians’ glory and their doom and took their stand behind the line of Leonidas. With them stood also the Thebans, but compulsion held them, and they tarried merely to desert and pawn their honour for their lives. More couriers. Hydarnes’s van was in sight of Alpeni now.
Before them spread the whole host of the Barbarian as far as the eye could reach,—a tossing sea of golden shields, scarlet surcoats, silver lance-heads,—awaiting with its human billows to engulf them. The Laconians halted just beyond bow shot. The line locked tighter. Instinctively every man pressed closer to his comrade.
Soon the leader of the scouts came galloping, leaped down and salaamed to the general. “Let my Lord’s liver find peace. All is even as our friends declared. The enemy have in part fled far away. The Athenians halt on a foot-hill of the mountain. The Laconians sit in companies on the ground, waiting their division that will not retreat. Let my Lord charge, and glory waits for Eran!”
Thus Sparta, formed deliberately on a barbarian pattern, remained faithful to it, without change, without decay, while its intellectual rival was the victim of successive revolutions. At length its power was broken externally by the Theban Epaminondas; and by the restoration of Messenia, the insurrection of the Laconians, and the emancipation of the Helots.
The towns on the Laconian coast were given to the Spartan emigrants, and this new community, who named themselves the "free Laconians" in contrast to the monarchically governed Spartans, were directed to enter the Achaean league.
These constituted that stern and terrible authority which had gradually, and from unknown beginnings, assumed a kind of tyranny over the descendants of Hercules themselves. They were the representatives of the Spartan people, elected without reference to rank or wealth, and possessing jurisdiction not only over the Helots and Laconians, but over most of the magistrates.
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