Spartan Mora regiments at Battle of Plataea

[PMBardunias]

this whole subject of 'perioikoi …has baffled every famous scholar on the subject for over a hundred years....

This disuades me less than it probably should 8)

This passage has long puzzled scholars, since whether we are talking "eireis/priests" or "eirens/youngsters", it makes no sense for them to have been buried separately.

I too see no support for them being buried seperately. What would make the whole passage make sense and confirm much of our conjecture is if the word copied down as eireis or eirens was neither of those, but another that was meant to indicate Periokoi. A quick look at "Eir-" shows that there are many whose meaning could have been tied to a label for periokoi:

eire ,
1. assembly, place of assembly

eirxis , eôs, hê,
A. fencing in, IG12.94.8.

eirô1 [The Root is prob. !ser, cf. Lat. sero, serui, seira] to fasten together in rows, to string, êlektroisin eermenos a necklace strung with pieces of electron, Od.

I leave it to others with more knowledge of greek to hunt down possible words, but you can see how any of these could have their meanings co-opted to mean something in connection to "troops assembled from periokoi", "dwellers around-surrounding", or "men formed in ranks."

If the Spartiates stood the Tegeans to their immediate left were the perioici (and other subgroups – if in existence) on the far right? It might be more likely they formed the rear half of the “Lacedaemonian” phalanx.

Could be, or it could be that there were whole units of Spartiates alternating with Perioic units- I don't hink you can tell the difference form this quote. It begs the question of how best to from a phalanx from the three elements that were probably available to Lakedaimonians at the time: Spartiates, dis-/uninfranchised Spartans, and Perioci. We may be correct in assuming a quality gradient that follows in that order.

So how do you mix your elite troops with your less skilled troops. One obvious and attested way is to give a cutting edge to each file of a few men and finish them off with a file-closer, while packing the lesser men in ranks 3-7. This is suggested many times in sources. One problem with this is that the "half-file" leader and the man behind him should be elites as well if they were to ever find themselves doubled to the front, thus ranks 1,2,5,6, and 8 need to be elites! (That sentence was a gift to Paul for dragging him into this).

Another way is to keep your best men in discrete units and range them alongside lesser units. This might sound weak, but for evidence we need only look to the manner in which the Thebans pulled the Sacred band from all along the front of their phalanx and put them into their own unit. Now the whole reason for the Sacred band and the picked troops of other polies was to try an achieve the professionalism of Sparta, so we might expect their deployment to be influenced by Sparta as well. The question is whether they were following Sparta in spreading them like a veneer or following Sparta by bringing them into a single unit (Or both, with Spartans having a single all Spartan unit around the King that inspired the second deployment).

You'll notice I am not answering any of these questions, simply posing them.

For a good analogy to the many meanings of lakedaimonian, I would point you to the appelation "American." The term most commonly refers to Citizens of the USA, but just as rightly referes to anybody from the 2 major continents of the western hemisphere.