31 Sparta and the Ionians (§§152-153.2)

Ιonians completed, Ηerodotus returns to the narrative: in a unified effort, the Ionians and Aeolians send to Sparta for help, appointing a Phocaean, Pythermus, to speak for all. To attract as much attention as possible to himself, Pythermus dons a purple cloak before addressing a great audience of Spartans. The Spartans do not offer any help. The passage is strange. As How and Wells point out (i. 125), Pythermus’s appeal is not made to the proper authorities (king or counsel) but to the people; the commentators conclude therefore that the story is unhistorical and that the purpose is to contrast Spartan simplicity with Ionian luxury. The explanation is not complete or satisfactory. Why does Herodotus want this contrast just here? And is a purple cloak enough to draw the contrast? Nor does the theory explain why Pythermus addresses the whole people. I would suggest that Herodotus intends here to flatter the Spartans. They let it be known by their rejection of the embassy that they are not swept off their feet by the razzle-dazzle of purple speakers. The strangeness continues. Although the Spartans refuse to offer any help to the Ionians, they send a ship to Phocaea and then send their most important man, Locrines, to declare to Cyrus that the Spartans will not allow Cyrus to injure any Greek city: ‘We Lacedaemonians will not allow you to do so.”

Now why do the Spartans, having refused to help the Ionians, send so belligerent and threatening a message to Cyrus? I think that the historian is showing that while the Spartans do not want to seem influenced by the Ionian’s purple, they do want to protect Greece. He may also have a narrative purpose: in the same general context Cyrus discusses truth-telling. It is possible as well that Herodotus wants an excuse to introduce the concept of bargaining and prevaricating, for these concepts will figure in the description of the Spartans as well as in the next story about the rebellion of Sardis.

When the Spartan Lacrines has made his bold speech, Cyrus asks who these Spartans are, and when he finds out, he exclaims:

I never yet feared men who have a place set apart in the midst of their cities where they gather to cheat one another and exchange oaths, which they break. If I continue my health, it will not be the sufferings of the lonians that they will have at their tongues’ ends, but something nearer home.

This remark, the historian reports, was directed to all Greeks, because they buy and sell in marketplaces. It seems clear that Cyrus’s words are a response to what he has learned about the Spartans. It might do well to recall that later on, before the Battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes too asks about the Spartans, and then Demaratus tells him of their awesome military skill and of their habit of combing their hair before battle. Xerxes reacts with disbelief about the Spartans’ military skill. What is reported here about the Spartans has nothing to do with their military skill, though one might very well expect such an assessment to be reported to Cyrus in the bellicose context. Instead, it is the marketplace, a habit of life associated with all Greeks, that Cyrus learns. In view of the king’s remarks, it is clear that marketplaces are considered centers of cheating and lying. One might ask how the Persians engaged in trade without marketplaces. Aristotle (Politics 1257a20) gives us a bit of guidance:

Now it is evident that within the association at its first stage (I mean the household) retail trade had no function at all; but it arose within a higher association [i.e., the village], in which there were many separate members (i.e., households]; these had to get things which they needed by an exchange of different articles, a form of barter which is still used among barbarian nations. (Tr. Apostle)

The assumption of moral superiority on Cyrus’s part seems to result from the absence of market tactics that Cyrus believed the Greeks to have employed. How the Persians acquired their possessions Herodotus does not discuss. It is odd, perhaps, that Cyrus would be told or would single out this quality of the Greeks for scorn. Some pungency is added for the reader from the fact that the Spartans have lied or at least have not been completely candid about their plans. Perhaps, then, there is some evidence for the belief about the effects of markets on morality.