Peloponnesian League
pel-uh-puh-NEE-zhun
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe alliance of Peloponnesian states under Spartan leadership, which the Greeks themselves called the Lacedaemonians and their allies.
Thucydides shows how it worked: Sparta put the question of war to its allies and they voted, and the vote was binding on all of them. Sparta led in the field but could not simply command.
It is the reason Sparta's decisions were never only Sparta's, and the reason a festival in Laconia could hold up an army that other cities were waiting on.
Sources
- Thuc. 1.119-125
- Thuc. 5.77-79
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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