What If Everything You Know About Ancient History Is Wrong?

Around the middle of the 6th century BC, a blacksmith in the Greek town of Tigeia was digging a well in his courtyard when he hit a coffin.

It was 7 cubits long, a little over 10 feet, and he didn't believe men had ever been bigger than they were in his own day.

Despite this, he opened it to check, and the body inside ran the full length of the box.

He measured it and shoveled the dirt back in.

Sometime later those bones were lying in the marketplace of Sparta, under the name of a Homeric hero.

This is the tale of how the Spartans allegedly stole the bones of Orestes and used his heroic aura to dominate ancient Greece.

The only detailed account comes from Herodotus, in the first book of his histories, written roughly a century after the events.

He tells it to explain why Croesus, the king of Lydia, went shopping for the strongest ally in Greece and settled on Sparta, because for a long time Sparta hadn't looked like much of a bet.

Under two earlier kings, Leon and Hegesicles, the Spartans had won every war they fought except the one against Tigeia, the Arcadian town sitting just north of their border.

Sparta had already swallowed neighboring Messenia and reduced its people to helots, state-owned serfs who farmed the land for their masters, and the plan for Tigeia was essentially the same.

The Spartans asked the oracle at Delphi whether they could take all of Arcadia, and the priestess told them that was too much to ask, since Arcadia was full of tough men.

She would, however, give them tegea to walk upon, and its fine plane to measure out with a rope.

But if you're familiar with the oracle at Delphi, you know that oftentimes these riddles can be interpreted in two distinctly different ways.

The Spartans heard what they wanted to hear, and they marched north carrying fetters for the prisoners they expected to take, lost the battle, and ended up wearing those fetters themselves.

They were working the Tygian plain in chains and measuring it with the rope, exactly as the Oracle had promised.

Herodotus says the fetters were still hanging in Tygeia's temple of Athena Alea in his day.

Some six centuries later, the travel writer Pausanias found them hanging there too, minus the ones that had rusted away, appearing to confirm this narrative.

So Sparta, defeated, went back to Delphi and asked which god it needed to win over, and the answer was that they had to bring home the bones of Orestes, son of Agamemnon.

Every Greek knew the name.

Agamemnon had commanded the army at Troy and was cut down by his wife, Cletomenestra, when he got home.

Orestes avenged him by slaying his own mother, and the Furies hounded him across Greece for it.

Nobody in Sparta had any idea where he was buried.

They searched, gave up, and sent to Delphi a third time.

The reply was a riddle once again, that Orestes lay in a level place in Arcadian Tigea, where two winds blew under strong compulsion, where stroke answered stroke and woe lay upon woe.

Bring him home, the priestess said, and Sparta would be master of Tigea.