Spartan Mora regiments at Battle of Plataea

[Paralus]

How do you view the issue of the Karneia limiting the mobilisation of the full regular army?

I won’t answer for Paullus Scipio “and other scholars”. In any case the Karneia was – ostensibly – the reason for the limited call up for Thermopylae. The Hyakinthia was the festival involved with the army of Plataea.

Herodotus, after the Athenians depart to Salamis, relates them sending envoys to Sparta to “upbraid” the Lacedaemonians for their lackadaisical attitude. His phraseology (9.7.1) indicates that the Hyakinthia was simply a nice cover story and that the real reason for their failure to move was the incomplete Isthmus wall:

The Lacedaemonians were at this time celebrating the festival of Hyacinthus, and their chief concern was to give the god his due; moreover, the wall which they were building on the Isthmus was by now getting its battlements.

Herodotus seems to write from an Athenian perspective – it is due to the Athenian ships that Greece is saved; the other Greeks are always pictured as wanting to run away and the Spartans are forever awaiting the supposed wall. Xenophon, in his description of the destroyed Spartan mora in the Corinthian war, makes it absolutely clear that had the army marched out prior to the Hyakinthia, the Amyklaeans will have had to return for the festival. It likely was no “cover story”.

The wall has always been a source of fascination. It seems to take forever to build and is possibly not ever finished (though Kleombrotus, after an eclipse, leads away from the Isthmus the "army that built the wall"). One never hears of it in the constant to-ing and fro-ing of Athens and Corinth afterwards. Diodorus gives the beginning and end points but, if this is correct, it is situated south of the “slipway” the ancients used to transport ships across the Isthmus. At 9.12.1 there is the infamous Argive “courier” who makes his way to Mardonius to inform him of the fact the Spartans have mobilised: he, seemingly, finds no wall. Perhaps it was finished and deserted?