Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/436

 420 HISTORY OF GREECE. at the Lead of a body of his countrymen, is said to have ren- dered essential service to the Spartans in the conquest of the Achaeans of Amyklte ; and the brave resistance of the latter was commemorated by a monument erected to Zeus Tropoeus, at Sparta, which was still to be seen in the time of Pausanias. 1 The Achasans of Pharis and Geronthrse, alarmed by the fate of Amyklse, are said to have surrendered their towns with little or no resistance : after which the inhabitants of all the three cities, either wholly or in part, went into exile beyond sea, giving place to colonists from Sparta. 2 From this time forward, according to Pausanias, Amyklse continued as a village. 3 But as the Amy- klrean hoplites constituted a valuable portion of the Spartan army, it must have been numbered among the cities of the Periceki, as one of the hundred; 4 the distinction between a dependent city and a village not being very strictly drawn. The festival of the Hyacinthia, celebrated at the great temple of the Amyklaean Apollo, was among the most solemn and venerated in the Spartan calendar. It was in the time of Alkamenes, the son of Teleklus, that the Spartans conquered Helus, a maritime town on the left bank of the Eurotas, and reduced its inhabitants to bondage, from whose name, 5 according to various authors, the general title Helots, belonging to all the serfs of Laconia, was derived. But of the conquest of the other towns of Laconia, Gytheium, Akriae, Therapnae, etc., or of the eastern land on the coast of the Argolic gulf, including Brasite and Epidaurus Limera, or the island of Kythera, all which at one time belonged to the Argeian confederacy, we have no accounts. Scanty as our information is, it just enables us to make out a progressive increase of force and dominion on the part of the Spartans, resulting from the organization of Lykurgus. Of this ./Egeids to Amyklse with the original Herakleid conquest of Peloponnesus. (Notae Criticse ad Pindar. Pyth. v. 74, p. 479.) 1 Pausan. iii. 2, 6 ; iii. 12, 7. * Pausan. iii. 22, 5. 8 Pansan. iii. 19, 5. 4 Xenoph. Ilellcn. iv. 5, 11. b Pansan. iii. 2, 7 ; iii. 20. 6. Strabo, viii. p. 363. If it be true, as Pausanias states, that the Argeians aided Helus to resist. their assistance must probably have been given by sea ; perhaps from Epi- daurns Limera, or Prasise. when they formed part of the Argeian federation