ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War the Greek world looked to Sparta as liberator (Thuc. ii.8).
Sparta, a small city on the River Eurotas (see map 1), at this time controlled a larger continuous stretch of land than any other single Greek city: in fact, most of the southern Peloponnese. Lakonia proper, the territory of the city of 'Lakedaimon', i.e. Sparta, included the large and fertile district between the Parnon mountain range to the east and that ofTaygetos to the west. But since the eighth century the Spartans had also ruled Messenia, the western half of the southern Peloponnese, beyond Taygetos, an even larger and more fertile district. The subjugated population of Messenia tilled the land as serfs, helots. The helots are directly responsible for Spartan military supremacy in Greece: a great revolt (the Second Messenian War) in the seventh century caused Sparta to impose on her citizens a strict military discipline, the agoge. This gave her primacy in the Peloponnese and a reputation for invincibility beyond: in Diodorus of Sicily's universal history, only three of the remarkable human phenomena of Greek history are regularly called invincible, aniketos. They are Alexander the Great; the Silver Shields (a Macedonian corps d' elite of the early hellenistic period); and the Spartans up to the date of their defeat at the hands of the Thebans at Leuktra in 371. The other word habitually used by Diodorus (reflecting Ephorus; cp. ML 95 and Lys. xxxiii.7) for pre-Leuktra Sparta as a physical entity is aporthetos, unravaged, and that was true (and most unusual for a Greek polis). This was partly thanks to Sparta's protected geographi cal position. Invincible and unravaged, Sparta was the natural power to be invoked by the Greek world as liberator in 431.
