Battle of Hysiae (669 BC)
| Battle of Hysiae | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
| Lacedaemon | Argos | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
| Pheidon II | |||||||
The Battle of Hysiae was fought between the forces of Sparta and those of Argos at Hysiae, a stronghold located to the southwest of Argos and east of Tegea, near the border with Sparta. The battle took place in around 669/8 BCE, during the rule of the Argive tyrant Pheidon II.
Battle
Conventional warfare during this time period would include the two armies meeting in an open field, but the Argives chose the city of Hysiae for reasons still unknown. By this time, the aspis,[1] a shield designed by the city of Argos, was already equipped with the Argive army, giving the Argive army another advantage over the Spartan army. It is presumed that the battle ensued inside the city of Argos, where the Spartan army was packed by the proto-phalanx invented perhaps by Pheidon, and where the army perished.[2]
Sources
This was the first Battle of Hysiae, not to be confused the second battle nearly 2 centuries later in 417 BC. IT is described by the ancient travel-writer Pausanias (2.24.7), who writes as follows
Here are common graves of the Argives who conquered the Lacedaemonians in battle at Hysiae. This fight took place, I discovered, when Peisistratus was archon at Athens, in the fourth year of the twenty-seventh Olympiad, in which the Athenian, Eurybotus, won the foot-race. On coming down to a lower level you reach the ruins of Hysiae, which once was a city in Argolis, and here it is that they say the Lacedaemonians suffered their reverse.— trans W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Omerod
The chronology of Pausanias would suggest that the battle was fought in 669/8 BCE. All that is known is that the Argives defeated the Lacedaemonians. Some (Andrewes) have suggested that this Argive defeat of Sparta occurred when Pheidon was king (or tyrant) of Argos, since Pheidon was famed for his military success and daring, but this remains conjectural. Some scholars (Kelly, Hall) have suggested that the first battle of Hysiae was invented by the Argives.
References
- ↑ Battle of Hyisiai.
But at Argos they made the aspis larger and tougher
- ↑ Battle of Hyisiai.
- A. Andrewes (1956), The Greek Tyrants
- Jonathan M. Hall (2007), A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200-479 BCE, pp. 145–154
- T. Kelly, "Did the Argives defeat the Spartans at Hysiai in 669 BCE?" American Journal of Philology 91 (1970) 31-42.
- R. Stillwell et al. (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites (Princeton, 1976)