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Δημάρητον: third entrance of Demaratos, and scene with Xerxes (cp. cc. 101-4 and 209—not reckoning the notice in c. 3, which hardly belongs to the actual story of the war). This is the last of three great scenes, or dialogues, with Xerxes, Artemisia taking the place of the Spartan in Bk. 8 mutatis mutandis, even as he has supplanted Artabanos. (But cp. further c. 239 infra, and 8. 65.)
τῇ ἀληθείῃ, ‘by the course of events’ (not ‘by the truth of your statements’). Facts have verified the Spartan's predictions, and Xerxes is prepared to trust him as an ἀνὴρ ἀγαθος. No doubt his truthfulness was the virtue primarily illustrated; cp. c. 101.
ἀπέβη οὔτω, ‘went off accordingly,’ have occurred, just as you predicted.
πόλιες πολλαί: referring to the ‘Perioikoi’ who are included in Λακεδαιμόνιοι (if not the Helots to boot), and contrasted with Σπάρτη. Strabo 362 gives 30 as the number for his own day, and the conventional 100 for antiquity: ἔξω γὰρ τῆς Σπάρτης αἱ λοιπαὶ πολίχναι τινές εἰσι περὶ τριἀκοντα τὸν ἀριθμόν: τὸ δὲ παλαιὸν ἑκατόμπολίν φασιν αὐτὴν καλεῖσθαι. Very few townships in Lakonia proper attain to historical renown, or even mention. Pausanias 3. 21. 6 gives a list of eighteen free states for his own time, and mentions that the Eleutherolakones had numbered twentyfour πόλεις (in the time of Augustus); other towns were subject to Sparta. (Stein mentions that the number of known names is about sixty; Clinton, Fasti Hell. ii.3 (1841) pp. 491 ff., actually gives them all.)
ἐν τῇ Λακεδαίμονι: sc. χώρᾳ. Λακεδαίμων is an adjective; cp. 6. 56 and c. 220 supra (perhaps meaning originally ‘hollow,’ κοῖλος, the vale, of Eurotas; cp. L. & S. sub v.).
Σπάρτη πόλις. ‘Spárta,’ notwithstanding the accent, must originally have meant ‘the sown-land,’ the most cultivated portion of the Eurotas valley, where the city itself was situate. Sparta was never ‘a fenced city’; being still, even in Thucydides' day, οὔτε ξυνοικισθείσης πόλεως οὔτε ἱεροῖς καὶ κατασκευαῖς πολυτελέσι χρησαμένης, κατὰ κώμας δὲ τῷ παλαιῷ τῆς Ἑλλἀδος τρόπῳ οἰκισθείσης (1. 10. 2): eminently then a πόλις ἀνδρῶν— for ‘stone walls do not a—city—make’; but the ἄνδρες ἐνοικοῦντες ἔδω, as Sparta perpetually witnessed, and the best Greeks themselves saw; cp. 8. 61. 7 infra. ἀνδρῶν ὀκτακισχιλίων μάλιστα. The figure 8000 is obviously a round number. It represents here the total sum of adult citizens for 480 B.C. It may represent Hdt.'s estimate for his own time; cp. 5. 97. It accords with the army-list for Plataiai, to whieh Sparta furnishes 5000 citizen-soldiers (cp. 9. 10, 28) on the assumption that the levy πανδημί is to be reckoned at two-thirds (Thuc. 2. 10. 2); that figure thereimplies a total of 7500-8000 citizens. Beloch, Bevolkerung 131 ff., has challenged this figure, and rejected the belief in a material reduction of the total number of Spartan citizens during the fifth and fourth centuries. He takes 2500-3000 as a constant maximum for the Spartiate militia; he thinks the 5000 Spartans at Plataiai include 2500 Perioikoi; he regards all higher estimates as exaggerations; the supposed diminution in the number of citizens he explains as itself an exaggerated inference from the growth of the class of Spartan ‘inferiors’ (ὑπομείονες) by transfers from the class of ‘Peers’ (ὅμοιοι). Thus, to take an extreme case, he sees the ‘Peers’ in the 700 Spartans of Plutarch, Agis 5, although Plutarch adds καὶ τούτων ἴσως ἑκατὸν ἦσαν οἱ γῆν κεκτημένοι καὶ κλῆρον. Could a Spartiate be a ‘Peer’ without possessing a κλῆρος? Beloch's analysis of the data for the Peloponnesian war and the subsequent periods is illuminative; but his reduction of the Spartan totals to 3000 or less, and his denials of any serious reduction in the number during the fifth and fourth centuries, are not convincing. The only express text which supports his contention is Isokrates, Panath. 286 (§ 255), where the rhetor reduces the original militia of Sparta to 2000 men, for rhetorical purposes: the passage, however, implies a larger figure for the writer's own day. The following considerations are adverse to Beloch's theory:— (i.) The strong tradition of higher figures, in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plutarch. （a) Would Hdt. have assigned 8000 citizen soldiers to Sparta, if such a total was from three to four times too large? The Spartans may have been as discreet in warfare as the Japanese, but the Greek world could hardly have blundered so grossly as to acquiesce in a trebled estimate. Nor is Demaratos dramatically ‘pulling the king's leg’ on this occasion to make sport for Hdt.'s audience: the Plataian army-list would refute that suggestion. （b) Aristotle, Pol 2. 9. 16=1270 A, records a tradition that the Spaitans had once numbered 10,000. The figure is obviously conventional, but it is not irrational, and it stands quite out of relation to 2000-3000. （c) Plutarch's 9000 (Lyk. 8) no doubt represents a theory in the days of Agis IV. (cp. Grote, ii. 314), but a theory may be good or bad. As the number of κλῆροι in a Lykourgean land-assignation the figure is no doubt unhistoric; as a regulative maximum for Sparta's citizens it may deserve more respect. Beloch admits that Agis and Kleomenes III. raised the number of citizens to 4500, some 1500 above his own normal maximum for the fifth and fourth centuries. Sparta never had so many citizens as in the decadence! (ii.) The position achieved by Sparta in Lakonia, in Peloponnese, in Hellas, coupled with her political constitution which restricted the franchise to the Spartiatai, would be inexplicable on the supposition that the privileged few numbered only some 3000 men. (iii.) The evidence for a great and growing reduction in the numbers of Spartan citizens cannot be explained as merely the reflexion of the relative and changing numbers of ‘Peers’ and ‘Inferiors,’ both alike accounted Spartan citizens. Moreover, the losses experienced in the fifth and fourth centuries (notably by the earthquake and Helot rising in 464 B.C., and by the emancipation of Messenia in 370 B.C.) go far to explain a reduction in the actual numbers of Spartiates, to say nothing of natural decline in a close aristocracy, never reinforced or recruited ab extra. It is unnecessary here to discuss the cognate question concerning the whole census for Lakonia, the figures for which must in large part be inferred from the total for the citizen body: enough if reason has been shown for a pause and further retractation of the whole evidences available, before discarding the Herodotean figures for the Herodotean period. Aristotle's verdict that the land could have supported 1500 cavalry and 30,000 hoplites (Pol. 2. 9. 16= 1270 A) should be carefully considered.
ὅμοιοι, possibly used with a suggestion of its technical force at Spaita; cp. preceding note.
ἔχεις, ‘hast hold of’; cp. ἔχειν= γνῶναι 6. 52 (Stein).
τὰς διεξόδους τῶν βουλευμάτων, ‘the ins and outs of their plans’ (Blakesley); cp. 3. 156.
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