I have described in the last two chapters, as far as our imperfect evidence permits, how Sparta came into possession both of the southern portion of Laconia along the course of the Eurotas down to its mouth, and of the Messenian territory westward. Her progress towards Arcadia and Argolis is now to be sketched, so as to conduct her to that position which she occupied during the reign of Peisistratus at Athens, or about 560–540 B.C.,—a time when she had reached the maximum of her territorial possessions, and when she was confessedly the commanding state in Hellas.

The central region of Peloponnesus, called Arcadia, had never received any immigrants from without; its autochthonous inhabitants—a strong and hardy race of mountaineers, the most numerous Hellenic tribe in the peninsula, and the constant hive for mercenary troops—were among the rudest and poorest of Greeks, retaining for the longest period their original subdivision into a number of petty hill-villages, each independent of the other; and the union of all who bore the Arcadian name (though they had some common sacrifices, such as the festival of the Lykeean Zeus, of Despoina, daughter of Poseidôn and Dêmêtêr, and of Artemis Hyrania) was more loose and ineffective than that of Greeks generally, either in or out of Peloponnesus. The Arcadian villagers were usually denominated by the names of regions, coincident with certain ethnical subdivisions—the Azānes, the Parrhasii, the Mænalii (adjoining Mount Mænalus), the Eutrêsii, the Ægytse, the Skiritæ, &c.

Though the particular persons and events, chronicled in the legendary poems of Greece, are not to be regarded as belonging to the province of real history, those poems are nevertheless full of instruction as pictures of life and manners. And the very same circumstances, which divest their composers of all credibility as historians, render them so much the more valuable as unconscious expositors of their own contemporary society. While professedly describing an uncertified past, their combinations are involuntarily borrowed from the surrounding present: for among communities, such as those of the primitive Greeks, without books, without means of extended travel, without acquaintance with foreign languages and habits, the imagination even of highly gifted men was naturallv enslaved by the circumstances around them to a far greater degree than in the later days of Solôn or Herodotus; insomuch that the characters which they conceived and the scenes which they described would for that reason bear a stronger generic resemblance to the realities of their own time and locality. Nor was the poetry of that age addressed to lettered and critical auditors, watchful to detect plagiarism, sated with simple imagery, and requiring something of novelty or peculiarity in every fresh production. To captivate their emotions, it was sufficient to depict with genius and fervour the more obvious manifestations of human adventure or suffering, and to idealise that type of society, both private and public, with which the hearers around were familiar.