could no longer afford his expensive shield? Ruin—as sure and violent as the hatreds of Messenia. The Spartan establishment, having grown fat on the lower classes, suddenly found itself, in the very hour of victory, staring catastrophe in the face. No longer, by the middle of the seventh century, could civic cohesion be regarded merely as an idle aspiration of down-at-heel farmers. It had become, even for the Heraclids, a matter of life and death.
