Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/380

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

364 HISTORY OF GREECK. and the community to which he belonged received their orders only from Sparta, having no political sphere of their own, and nc share in determining the movements of the Spartan authorities. In the island of Kythera, 1 which formed one of .the Pericekic townships, a Spartan bailiff resided as administrator. But whether the same was the case with others, we cannot affirm : nor is it safe to reason from one of these townships to all, there may have been considerable differences in the mode of dealing with one and another. For they were spread through the whole of ' Laconia, some near and some distant from Sparta : the free inhabi- tants of Amyklas must have been Perireki, as well as those of Ky- thera, Thuria, JEtheia, or Aulon : nor can we presume that the feeling on the part of the Spartan authorities towards all of them was the same. Between the Spartans and their neighbors, the numerous Perireki of Amyklae, there must have subsisted a degree of intercourse and mutual relation in which the more distant Periceki did not partake, besides, that both the religious edifices and the festivals of Amyklre were most reverentially adopted by the Spartans and exalted into a national dignity : and we seem to perceive, on some occasions, a degree of consideration manifested for the Amyklsean hoplites, 2 such as perhaps other Periocki might not have obtained. The class-name, Perioeki, 3 circum- Mr. Clinton (Fast. Hellen. ii. p. 401) has collected the names of above sixty out of the one hundred. 1 Thucyd. iv. 53. 1 Xenophon, Hellen. iv. 5, 11; Herod, ix. 7; Thucyd. v. 18-23. TheAmyk- lacan festival of the Hyacinthia, and the Amyklasan temple of Apollo, seem to stand foremost in the mind of the Spartan authorities. VTOI KOI ol kyyvrara ruv irepioiKuv (Thucyd. iv. 8), who are ready before the rest, and march against the Athenians at Pylus, probably include the Amyklseans. Laconia generally is called by Thucydides (iii. 16) as the irepiotKif of Sparta. 3 The word mpioiKot is sometimes used to signify simply " surrounding neighbor states," in its natural geographical sense: see Thucyd. i. 17, and Aristot. Polit. ii. 7, 1. But the more usual employment of it is, to mean, the unprivileged or less privileged members of the same political aggregate living without the city in contrast with the full-privileged burghers who lived within it. Aristotle uses it to signify, in Krete, the class corresponding to the Lacedaemonian Helots (Pol. ii. 7, 3) : there did not exist in Krete any class corresponding to the Lacedaemonian Periceki. In Krete, there were not two stages of infe-