The evident perfection of their constitution, to say nothing of the xenophobia that it inevitably encouraged, led most Spartans to regard the world beyond their borders with a mixture of suspicion and disdain. A series of foreign-policy disasters had served only to encourage them in their insularity. The humiliation of the snub by Cyrus had been followed, in 525 BC, by an even worse debacle, when a sea-borne expedition against Samos, a powerful island just off Persian-occupied Ionia, had been comprehensively repulsed. From that moment on, rather than risk further entanglements in the Aegean, most Spartans were content to turn their backs on eastern adventures. Better by far to consolidate their supremacy closer to home. Dispatch too many of their peerless fighting men overseas and what was to stop the helots rising up in sudden revolt? Not to mention their supposed allies. Keep them all on a tight leash, and Lacedaemon would be secure. Let the frontiers of the Peloponnese, then, serve the Spartans as their walls.
And yet Pelops’ island, despite its name, was not entirely “girt in by the sea.”44 Three days’ march north from Sparta stood the great merchant city of Corinth, and beyond it, over a narrow strip of land no wider than six miles, lay the cities and mountains of mainland Greece. The Spartans, Peloponnesian though they were, could hardly afford to behave as though this isthmus did not exist. It was not merely that some of the cities which lay north of it, celebrated ones such as Athens and Thebes, were themselves major players in the power games of Greece. Instincts of sentiment as well as of self-preservation were at stake. The Spartans, despite their attempts to present themselves as the heirs of Menelaus, were Dorians, after all. The mountainous country north of the Isthmus was their ancestral homeland. Once the isthmus road had passed first Athens and then Thebes, it was obliged by the peaks which hemmed in the lowlands to thread along the coastline, until, at its narrowest point, there was barely room for two wagons to travel side by side. This pass was named Thermopylae—a site with considerable resonance for the Spartans, for it was from the peak that loomed high above it to the west, Mount Oeta, that Heracles, having immolated himself upon a pyre, had ascended from the flames to join the gods in their home upon Mount Olympus. Just south of Oeta lay a region equally rich in significance, the plain of Doris, from which the Dorians traced their name. South in turn of Doris stood a further peak, Parnassus, ravine-gashed and precipitous; and then, on the far side of that mountain, the most sacred spot of all, a shrine holier to the Spartans than any in their own city, or indeed in all of Greece. At Delphi, the air was pure with prophecy. There, for nine months every year, the Lord Apollo was believed to have his dwelling. More than anywhere else in the world, it was where glimpses and revelations of the future might be uncovered. Deep within the oracle, the veil of time itself was rent.
That the Spartans should have had a particular admiration for Apollo was hardly surprising. Just as their ancestors had migrated to Lacedaemon, so the archer god had come to Delphi as an invader from the north. Leaving the halls of Olympus behind him, Apollo had traveled the world “with his far-shooting bow, searching for an oracle that might speak to mortal men.”45 He had found it where a monstrous python, bloated upon human prey, slumbered by a sweet-flowing, icy spring, its coils heaped against the sheer rock of Parnassus, while below it eagles soared over a lonely and dappled gorge. A single shot from his deadly bow had been sufficient to end the monster’s reign, and from that moment on it was Apollo who had ruled as lord of Delphi. Sprigs of laurel planted by the god served to purify the sanctuary. In time, men raised a temple there, out of boughs cut from the laurel bushes, it was said, and Apollo had uttered prophecies through the rustling of the leaves. Since the youth of the god, foundation had succeeded foundation. The second had been built of fern stalks, the third of wax and feathers, the fourth of bronze—for the history of Apollo’s oracle was a fabulous one, and marked by ceaseless change. In time, the laurel leaves themselves had fallen silent, and the god chose to speak instead through the ecstasies of a young priestess, the Pythia, in whose title could be heard an echo of Apollo’s long-rotted foe. Around 750 BC, when Delphi’s history first begins to emerge from myth, a temple of stone was raised. Shortly afterward, it appears, it was decided that only an old woman should be appointed to serve as the Pythia, although she was still, as a symbol of purity, obliged to wear a young girl’s dress.46 In 548 BC, the temple burned to the ground. Still, amid all this turmoil, the voice of Apollo spoke on.
There was no other oracle to compare with it. Indeed, such was the prestige of Delphi that it became, of all the many temples founded by the Greeks, the only one to be served by a body of full-time priests. While the notion of such a cadre would hardly have raised eyebrows amid the great temple bureaucracies of the East, it was, for the Greeks, a decided innovation. Travelers’ tales of the bizarre doings of Egyptian or Babylonian priests never ceased to amaze them. The news that in Persia only a Magus could preside over a sacrifice was greeted with particular astonishment. In Greece, anyone, even women, even slaves, could sacrifice. Only the Delphians, far removed in their mountain valley from all other possible forms of income, made a living from the proceeds of their shrine. “Guard my temple,” Apollo had instructed them, “receive the crowds of men.”47 The Delphians, obeying him, had lavishly cashed in. Other cities, far from begrudging the priests their professionalism, were happy to collude in it. The arrangement suited everyone. What better assurance could there be of the priests’ even-handedness than that they charged everyone the same flat fee? When rival factions turned to the oracle for adjudication, they needed to be able to trust the words of the god absolutely. No one could afford to see Delphi’s neutrality compromised. When, in 595 BC, the neighboring city of Crisa attempted to annex the oracle, the whole of Greece had been shocked into ruthless action.48 A great league of cities had marched to the god’s defense. The norms of civilized behavior, which banned chemical warfare as a crime against the gods, had been temporarily suspended: poison had been added to Crisa’s water supply, so that “the defenders were afflicted by violent bouts of diarrhea, and had to keep rushing from their positions.”49 The walls were stormed, the impious city wiped out. Centuries later, the plain on which Crisa had once stood remained barren and bare of trees, “as though laboring under a curse.”50
The terrifying lesson had been learned. Delphi was either an oracle for all the Greeks or it was nothing. Sacred flames rose eternally upon the public altar of the temple in illustration of precisely this truth: tended busily by priestesses, fed with pine and laurel wood, never permitted to go out, they blazed as the hearth fire of the whole of Greece. Yet even those who were not Greek might approach Apollo and hope for an answer. Delphi’s claims to holiness were on a truly global scale. In the beginning, it was said, when Zeus had first come into the kingdom of the universe, he had sought to measure the scale of his inheritance by releasing one eagle from the east and one from the west, and watching them fly, to locate the center of the world. The two birds had met at Delphi, and a great egg of rock, the “Navel Stone,”or Omphalos, still marked the spot. It was only natural, then, that the priests should have welcomed foreign supplicants as merely their temple’s due. When Croesus, for instance, faced with the growing threat of Persia, had sought divine guidance, he had sent messengers to all the world’s leading oracles, with instructions, on a given day, to ask what their master was doing back in Lydia. Only Delphi had provided the right answer: that Croesus was boiling up a lamb and tortoise casserole. From that moment on, the King of Lydia had become the oracle’s most generous patron. Unparalleled gifts of gold, mixing bowls, ingots and statues of lions had been sent to join the treasures that already cluttered the shadows of the temple. Apollo, in return, had offered Croesus foreign-policy advice. It had been upon the suggestion of the god, for example, that the King of Lydia had formed his alliance with the Spartans.
Not that this had saved him in the long run, of course. If Apollo’s advice often appeared clear, then it was not always so. “The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor keeps silent, but offers hints.”51 Those who misinterpreted the god, who failed to recognize the ambiguities which might haunt his pronouncements, who blundered into actions on the basis of what they wanted to believe, would invariably come to ruin. Croesus, having grown reliant upon Apollo’s counsel, had ultimately been deceived by his own vainglory and obtuseness into disaster. Pondering whether to attack Cyrus, he had consulted Delphi and received the answer that a mighty empire would fall if he did. Croesus had duly gone to war and seen his own empire fall.
When Apollo was accused of ingratitude toward his benefactor, his priests at Delphi retorted that the god, while he was unable to avert the course of destiny, had granted to Croesus three more years of prosperity than had been allotted him by Fate. This explanation was readily believed: kings had always been the favorites of the gods. Such was clear from the stories of ancient times, when the heroes had invariably possessed royal blood. But what was acceptable in legend had become, first to the aristocracies of the various Greek states and then to every class of citizen, increasingly offensive. The claim that one mortal might be privileged over his fellows did not, as in the East, serve to legitimize the concept of monarchy, but rather to tarnish it—for no Greek cared to imagine that he might naturally be a slave. “Only know the yoke of servitude,” it was said, “and Zeus, the thunderer, will rob you of half your virtue.”52 It was all very well, perhaps, for the servile peoples of the East to live like women with a despot’s foot upon their necks—but not for a freeborn Greek. Kings, unless safely confined to remote and effeminate lands, properly belonged in ancient poems. Only as a title awarded to certain priests did the rank, in some Greek cities, maintain a ghostly afterlife—for the intimacy which it had once been the privilege of royalty to share with the gods could not be lightly set aside, and venerable ceremonies might still depend upon it. Even as a priest, however, a “king” remained a figure of danger. The charisma natural to his title had to be scrupulously trammeled. No powers could be permitted him beyond the religious. Even his term of office, in a city such as Athens, was sternly limited to one year.
How extraordinary, then, it might be thought, that in Sparta, of all states, where the communal was everything, kingship should not merely have endured but been illuminated by a sacral, haunting glow. Other Spartans were homoioi—peers—but royalty was something more. As a boy a crown prince was exempted from the agoge. As commander in chief, a king led his countrymen into war. As head of state, he stood for no man in the city; nor was anyone permitted to touch him or even brush against him in public. Most eerie of all, and what truly set him apart from his countrymen, was his intimacy with the gods. Certainly, no mortal in the world could look for a closer relationship with the Delphic oracle than that enjoyed by a Spartan king. Each one, in an arrangement unparalleled in any other state, had two ambassadors, the “Pythians,” on permanent standby, ready upon a royal gesture to gallop north and put questions to Apollo. Such were the privileges of breeding. The kings were, after all, the distant relatives of Zeus.
Their countrymen, naturally, looked to benefit from such a bloodline. Respectful of royalty though they were, the Spartans did not indulge it out of a craven servility. Just the opposite. While other Greeks flinched from the mystique of kingship, the Spartans, with that blend of common sense and superstition so typical of all their policy, looked to exploit it for their own ends. If the kings had the ears of Apollo, then the state had the ruling of the kings. Like magnificent but captive predators, they were kept, in the strictest Spartan manner, under close and ceaseless watch. By each other; by the Gerousia; by the mass of the people. Even when, as was increasingly the case by the late sixth century BC, the kings were absent from the city on campaigns, the surveillance never slackened.
In fact, if anything, the screws began to tighten. As Spartan greatness flourished, and the opportunities for foreign adventures with it, a once insignificant magistracy, the Ephorate, began to operate as both inquisitor and guardian of the kings. Five in number, the ephors were elected annually from the whole assembly of citizens, and so could legitimately claim to represent the people. A king, although he might ignore their first and second summons, was obliged to rise and answer their third. This calling of royalty to account by the Ephorate, a ritual which would occur at least once a month, represented a piquant reversal of roles. In the beginning, it was said, the ephors had served the kings as their servants, but over the years, by a secretive and cunning process, they had advanced to become their masters’ shadows. Faceless in comparison to the kingship they may have been, and yet they too had unearthly powers. They would meet in darkness and trace the future in the sky. Should it be discovered there that a king was “an offender against the gods,”53 the ephors had the right to dismiss him from his throne. They could then take it upon themselves to do as the king himself traditionally did, and dispatch messengers to Delphi. The oracle, it was assumed, would confirm the judgment of the heavens.
But would it? In a death struggle between a king and the Ephorate, which side would Apollo and his priesthood back? This was not a question that the Spartans, with their deep-seated fear of constitutional upheaval, much cared to ponder. Nor did they expect to have to: Sparta was a city governed, in the final reckoning, not by kings or ephors, but by custom, and by the inimitable character of her people. To the quality they most universally prized the Spartans gave the name “sophrosyne”: soundness of mind, moderation, prudence, self-restraint. Great though the powers of a king or an ephor might be, both were steeled, as Spartan citizens, not to push them to the limits. “For it is always your nature,” as a Corinthian would one day complain, “to do less than you could have done, and to hold back from heading where your judgement might otherwise lead you.”56 But such criticism could be taken by the Spartans as commendation. Sophrosyne in everything: the spirit of revolution in Lacedaemon had been well tamed. Just as a warrior was subsumed within the discipline of the phalanx, so were the ephor and the king within the state: no selfishness, no running amok, no sudden lurching from the ranks.
Then, in 520 BC55 a new king came to the throne. He laid claim to power as he would wield it, ruthlessly, and touched by scandal. Even before his birth, Cleomenes had been entangled in a snarl of shocking rumors. His father, the king, unable to impregnate his much-beloved first wife, had been ordered by the ephors to divorce her and take a second; but the king, although reluctant to defy the Ephorate openly, opted instead to practice bigamy. No sooner had his new bed-partner borne him Cleomenes than his original wife, to everyone’s astonishment, outdid her rival and delivered three sons in quick succession. Since she was the king’s niece as well as his beloved, this, unsurprisingly, had left Cleomenes much resented by his father. The king, flaunting his favoritism, had pointedly named the eldest of Cleomenes’ half-brothers Dorieus—“the Dorian”—and then entered him for the agoge, which the prince had duly passed with flying colors. Posing simultaneously as legitimate heir and man of the people, Dorieus had put the hapless Cleomenes, his unwanted elder brother, thoroughly in the shade. “Everyone ranked him first of all the youths of his generation. And Dorieus himself had little doubt that his many qualities would serve to win his father’s throne.”56
But the Spartans were nothing if not a legalistic people, and Cleomenes retained first claim on the kingship. No sooner was his father dead than he moved to seize the throne. Dorieus, for all his flash and popularity, found himself outmaneuvered. Cleomenes, tightening his grip upon power, next looked to drive his half-brother out of Sparta altogether. Dorieus’ exile, when it came, might have been dressed up as an exotic foreign mission, but there could be no disguising the scale of his defeat. Sparta had proved too small for both brothers. Nor would there be any comeback for the increasingly shiftless Dorieus. After an abortive attempt to found a colony in Africa, he ended up a mercenary in Sicily, where he fell in an obscure and inglorious scuffle. Cleomenes, back in Sparta, could henceforward reign secure.
All the same, the circumstances of his accession would continue to cast their shadows. Perfectly aware that many of his countrymen regarded him as at best semi-legitimate, Cleomenes chose to respond with bravura and defiance. Not for him the sober traditionalism expected of a Spartan king. Nor, just as pertinently, the caution. Whether out of a desire to prove himself to his detractors, out of scorn for their limited horizons, or because, shrewd and quick-witted, he believed that he was serving his city’s best interests, Cleomenes had resolved from the very beginning to throw his weight around. The ease with which he had dispatched Dorieus suggested that this might prove considerable. For the first time since the Lycurgan revolution, a king sat on the throne of Sparta who was determined to test his prerogatives to the full.
All of which promised turbulent times ahead for the Spartans. It also threatened cities far distant from the confines of Lacedaemon. A strongman in charge of Greece’s deadliest war machine was an alarming prospect for the whole of the Peloponnese—and beyond. In 519 BC, barely a year after his accession, Cleomenes led an army across the Isthmus. It was a menacing—and, as time would prove, portentous—statement of intent. The new king was not to be bounded by the limits of his backyard, and already, so early in his reign, his attentions were fixed firmly on central Greece: on Delphi, where the priests were soon embroiled in bribery and scandal; on Boeotia, the great cattle-rearing plain dominated by Thebes but also dotted with smaller cities, resentful of Theban bullying and offering any interloper plenty of scope for making mischief; and on Attica, the strategically vital region of hills and farmland through which the main isthmus road passed as it wound north. On Attica, and the city of Athens, more than anywhere, indeed. For Athens was a growing power—and so a potential threat. She had to be neutered. Cleomenes, though sometimes impulsive, could hardly be counted a maverick just because he had developed a taste for preemptive force.
Yet tremors were starting to build deeper than he, or indeed anyone, could sense. Cleomenes’ meddling in Athenian politics would help precipitate a political earthquake. It would be the most far-reaching upheaval in a Greek city since the time of Lycurgus himself. Its aftershocks would be felt, not only throughout Greece but also, rippling across the Aegean, eastward into the empire of the Persians. Even, though far distant, within the chanceries of Darius himself.
Revolution was coming to Athens—and war to the whole world.