Blackwell Reference Online

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Writing in the fifth century bc, Herodotus of Halicarnassus explains how the Lacedaemonians had been able to expel the Pisistratids from Athens. He says that the Athenian Alcmaeonids bribed the Pythia. She had persuaded the Spartans to take action against the Pisistratids, despite the ties of hospitality they maintained with Laconia, by repeatedly instructing them to do so. In recounting the event the historian notes that the Lacedaemonians “put considerations of the gods before considerations of men” (5.63; cf. also Pausanias 3.5.4). In context, Herodotus' judgment could be taken to indicate that Lacedaemonians had a religious sensibility superior to that of the other Greeks, in degree if not in kind. We do indeed possess a wealth of evidence, textual and archaeological, for Lacedaemonian religious practices. (The Spartans were a subset of the Lacedaemonians, namely the ones that came from Sparta itself, the principal city of Laconia. They controlled other free men, the “perioeci,” who lived in the area around the city and mobilized at the Spartans' command. In ancient sources the term “Lacedaemonians” is clearly often used to designate the Spartans, but it is preferable to preserve the terms employed in ancient texts. On the distinction between the Spartans and the Lacedaemonians, see Herodotus 7.234 and 9.70. In this instance, at 5.63, Herodotus says that the Lacedaemonians intervened ... log in or subscribe to read full text