The export of an unwanted group, the…

The export of an unwanted group, the Partheniai ("sons of virgins"), is one consequence of Sparta’s wholesale conquest of Messenia.

These are the sons of unmarried Spartan women and Perioeci (free men, but not citizens of Sparta), procreated during the absence in Messenia of the Spartan warrior elite.

These out-of-wedlock unions were permitted extraordinarily by the Spartans to increase the prospective number of soldiers (only the citizens of Sparta could become soldiers) during the bloody Messenian wars, but later they were retroactively nullified, and the sons were then obliged to leave Greece forever.

Phalanthus, the Parthenian leader, goes to Delphi to consult the oracle: the puzzling answer designates the harbor of Taranto in southern Italy as the new home of the exiles.

A still more important consequence of the conquest of Messenia, “good to plow and good to hoe” as the poet Tyrtaeus put it, is the acquisition of a large tract of fertile land and the creation of a permanently servile labor force.