If we start with the assumption that they were 9,000 Homoioi in the Spartan army and assume this to be one fourth of the population, when we add 4,000 more for Helot laborers, we arrive at 40,000 people in Sparta that day. According to Diodorus “houses collapsed from their foundations and more than twenty thousand Lacedaemonians perished.” If close to being accurate this number suggests that half the people in Sparta were killed by the earthquake.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from: