Ebook: The Growth of Spartan Policy

The journal of Hellenic studies. – Cambridge, 1912. – v.
32. – р. 1-42.Несмотря на то, что это статья, мягко сказать, не новая, она продолжает оставаться важной. Она первая показала на основе раскопок храма Артемиды Орфии, что Спарта далеко не сначала Архаического периода стала тем сплошным венным лагерем, каким её обычно представляют. Эти выводы из анализа археологического материала до сих пор актуальны с одной стороны потому, что только на археологию и можно опираться, анализируя время перехода к «Ликурговой системе», с другой стороны потому, что в историографии, по крайней мере, русскоязычной, и сегодня далеко не всегда принимаются в расчёт эти данные.The relation of Sparta to the other Greek states in the early days of Greek history has been little examined and less understood. As a result two erroneous hypotheses have found their way into the stock-in-trade of the ancient historian. The first of these is that the development of Sparta was quite exceptional and unique among the Greek states; the second is that the foreign policy of Sparta was wholly opportunist, or, so far as a guiding principle can be traced, was mainly influenced by the domestic question of the helots.1
It is the object of this article to prove :
(I) That down to 550 Sparta underwent a political development closely analogous to that of the rest of Greece.
(2) That from 650 onwards for nearly a century and a half the foreign policy of Sparta was dominated primarily by one consideration, and that not the population question, which did not arise at all until the beginning of the fifth century and only became of supreme importance in the fourth, but rather the issue of a conflict between the kings and the ephors lasting in an acute form for over fifty years and in a milder degree for almost the whole of Spartan history. I shall attempt to shew that the vacillations in Spartan policy are due to the vagaries of the conflict, which was acute in the days of Cleomenes and Pausanias, as in the later reigns of Agis III. and Cleomenes III., but latent and smouldering from the end of the second Messenian War onwards.