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ἱρὸν εἱσάμενοι. Pausanias (iii. 16. 5) adds οἷα δὴ θεῷ; this is implied in ἱρόν; a hero had only a τέμενος or a ἡρῷον; Frazer (P. ii. 153-4) gives the differences; the ἡρῷον faced west not east, and ἐναγίζειν (not θύειν) is used for the sacrifices in it, i. e. the worship was chthonian, not celestial. Ἀρκάδων. The earlier Arcadian war is important as a turningpoint in the policy of the Lacedaemonians; the stubborn resistance of the highlanders of Central Peloponnese made them give up attempting complete conquest (which they had carried out in Messenia), and be content with a hegemony over dependent allies. Pausanias (iii. 7. 3 et al.) puts this war in the time of Charilaus (884-824); but it really belongs to the beginning of the sixth century (65. 1).
The Arcadians were considered (probably rightly, cf. the survival of the Iberian Basques in the Pyrenees) as of the race of the aboriginal Pelasgians (viii. 73. 1 n.); hence the epithet ‘acorneating’, which implies a primitive civilization (cf. Lucr. v. 939) before the days of agriculture. Cf. the epithet προσέληνοι, Plut. Mor. 282; Quaes. Rom. 76; Schol. ad Arist. Nub. 398. Tegea lay in the southern part of the great eastern plain of Arcadia. Being surrounded with hills (Frazer, P. iv. 422), it is compared to an ὀρχήστρα: so Epaminondas called the Boeotian plain ὀρχήστρα πολέμου (Plut. Mor. 193 E; Apoph. Imper. 18). σχοίνῳ. The reference to allotments is proof of land assignment as an early Spartan institution. The later story that the land was divided equally by Lycurgus (cf. Plut. Lyc. 8) is a manifest fiction; but the poem of Tyrtaeus, quoted by Aristotle (Pol. v. 7. 4, 1307 A 2), refers to the fact that ἠξίουν ἀνάδαστον ποιεῖν τὴν χώραν. Early Sparta, like early Rome, had agrarian troubles, and solved them in the same way—at the expense of its neighbours.
κίβδηλος: properly of false coin; used by H. especially of oracles (cf. 75. 2; v. 91. 2). There is a double meaning in the ‘juggling’ oracle (cf. Macbeth, v. 8. 19-20: ‘And be these juggling fiends no more believed That palter with us in a double sense’); ὀρχήσασθαι might be referred either to the ‘dance’ of triumph or to ὄρχος, a ‘row of vines’, and so to slave labour. Again the land might be ‘measured’ (διαμετρήσασθαι) by the Lacedaemonians as conquerors or as captives.
πέδας. No doubt the ‘temple of Athena Alea’ was the source of the story; Pausanias (viii. 47. 2) saw the fetters there in the second century A. D. For the ‘fetters’ as evidence of Lacedaemonian overconfidence cf. similar story of Armada (but see Froude, xii. 380). For this temple cf. H. ix. 70. 3; it was burned in 395 B.C. (Paus. viii. 45), but restored on a magnificent scale with sculptures by Scopas, Frazer, P. iv. 425-6. For the name ‘Alea’ cf. Farnell, C. G. S. i. 274.
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