A New Reading of the Damonon Stele

This book offers a new reading of one of the most important inscriptions from ancient Sparta, the Damonon stele. That inscription records victories that two Spartans, Damonon and his son Enymakratidas, won in the late fifth century BCE in equestrian and athletic competitions at religious festivals in and around Sparta. Scholars have repeatedly turned their attention to the Damonon stele because it offers invaluable insight into multiple facets of Spartan society. The inscription is commonly understood as cataloging dozens of victories won in the four-horse chariot race as well as other victories won in the horse-race and in footraces of various lengths. Careful study of the wording and structure of the inscription and relevant comparanda suggests that the most of Damonon's victories were actually won in the kalpe, a contest for mares in which the rider dismounted and ran alongside his horse in the final part of the race. Three fragmentary terracotta votive plaques found in the excavations at the shrine of Agamemnon and Alexandra at Amyklai show that the competitions in the kalpe were held near Sparta in Damonon's time. The re-interpretation of the Damonon stele proposed here has important ramifications, along multiple axes, for our understanding of both ancient Greek horse-racing and ancient Lakedaimon. Among other things, we are given a rare glimpse of the Lakedaimonian state at work. We see a Lakedaimon that is evolving rapidly in response to emergent military imperatives and Lakedaimonians who are ready, willing, and able to make swift, well-designed changes to the structure of religious festivals, and to manipulate gender expectations, in order to alter the structure of status competition and patterns of conspicuous consumption. Those changes, and the thought processes behind them, reveal a considerable level of complexity in Lakedaimonian thinking about their own social and political institutions and customs. That would not be surprising if manifested in Athens, but it contrasts sharply with the persistent picture of Lakedaimonians as unsophisticated and of Lakedaimon as a staid, conservative place with a static sociopolitical system. Indeed, the capacity of the Lakedaimonian state to make rapid, incremental changes that were in harmony with the overall structure of its sociopolitical system may well have been a key element in Lakedaimon's unusual stability.