Note 641 — Chapter VI · LAWS AND DISCIPLINE OF LYKURGUS AT SPARTA.

M. Kopstadt (in the learned Dissertation which I have before alluded to, De Rerum Laconicarum Constitutionis Lycurgeæ Origine et Indole, cap. ii. p. 31) controverts this position respecting the Periœki. He appears to understand it in a sense which my words hardly present,—at least, a sense which I did not intend them to present: as if the majority of inhabitants in each of the hundred Periœkic towns were Dorians,—“ut per centum Laconiæ oppida distributi ubique majorem incolarum numerum efficerent,” (p. 32.) I meant only to affirm that some of the Periœkic towns, such as Amyklæ, were wholly, or almost wholly, Dorian; many others of them partially Dorian. But what may have been the comparative numbers (probably different in each town) of Dorian and non-Dorian inhabitants,—there are no means of determining. M. Kopstadt (p. 35) admits that Amyklæ, Pharis, and Geronthræ, were Periœkic towns peopled by Dorians; and if this be true, it negatives the general maxim on the faith of which he contradicts what I affirm: his maxim is—“nunquam Dorienses à Doriensibus nisi bello victi erant, civitate æquoque jure privati sunt,” (p. 31.) It is very unsafe to lay down such large positions respecting a supposed uniformity of Dorian rules and practice. The high authority of O. Müller has been extremely misleading in this respect.

It is plain that Herodotus (compare his expression, viii. 73 and i. 145) conceived all the free inhabitants of Laconia not as Achæans, but as Dorians. He believes in the story of the legend, that the Achæans, driven out of Laconia by the invading Dorians and Herakleidæ, occupied the territory in the north-west of Peloponnesus which was afterwards called Achæa,—expelling from it the Ionians. Whatever may be the truth about this legendary statement,—and whatever may have been the original proportions of Dorians and Achæans in Laconia,—these two races had (in the fifth century B. C.) become confounded in one undistinguishable ethnical and political aggregate called Laconian, or Lacedæmonian,—comprising both Spartans and Periœki, though with very unequal political franchises, and very material differences in individual training and habits. The case was different in Thessaly, where the Thessalians held in dependence Magnêtes, Perrhæbi, and Achæans: the separate nationality of these latter was never lost.