Abstract
At 9.85 Herodotus states that after the Battle of Plataia, the Lakedaimonians buried their dead in three separate graves: one for the ἱρέες, one for the rest of the Spartiates, and one for helots. Taken together with 9.71, this passage suggests that all of the Spartiates decorated for bravery at Plataia were priests, which seems prima facie improbable. The interpretive challenges presented by 9.85 have been the subject of lively scholarly debate since the eighteenth century because this passage potentially provides important evidence for Spartiates’ funerary, religious, and educational customs. With an eye to facilitating future research, this article offers a detailed conspectus of the extensive collection of relevant scholarship and, in part by drawing upon evidence from the archaeological excavations of the Tomb of the Lakedaimonians in the Kerameikos, identifies one reading, which involves athetizing part of 9.85, as the preferred interpretive approach.
Highlights
One might wonder, could it be that a group representing 1% of the total number of the Spartiates at Plataia produced 100% of the Spartiates decorated for bravery?
To return to one of our starting points, one of the two major problems with Herodotus’ account of Plataia is that it implies that a group representing 1% of the total number of Spartiates produced 100% of the Spartiates decorated for bravery
It is conceivable that the eirenes within each of the smaller units in the Lakedaimonian army were frequently stationed in the front ranks of the units to which they belonged and that, because this was the case at Plataia, they distinguished themselves in battle
Summary
‘The passage has evoked much comment’.1 This terse observation from R.F. Willetts’ 1980 article ‘Herodotus IX 85, 1-2’ is an aptly laconic description of what might justifiably be called an impressively large body. When there was some dispute about who was the bravest, those Spartiates who were present gave as their judgment that Aristodemos was but that he had openly wanted to die to redress the dishonor that lay on him, and that the great deeds he did that day were those of a man crazy and leaving his rank, but that Poseidonios was not seeking death in his bravery and so he was much the better man of the two. They may have urged this out of mere jealousy.
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