Is there actually something interesting by Isocrates? I’m as shocked as you.
It’s a show-piece. Here’s the setup: Imagine you’re the king of Sparta (one of the kings, if you have to be finicky) and you’ve just been rolled by a Thebes-led coalition of people who hate you. On top of everything else, they’re now demanding that you surrender Messene, which has been, like, your top source of peasant-slaves for the last four centuries. They’d like to rebuild it as a polis, which is going to cause you all kinds of problems.
This is Isocrates’ jam. For form’s sake, he makes all the usual complaints about how Sparta totally has a just title to Messene (why? Because the Spartans put its royal line back in power after the demos rose up five hundred years ago, and naturally the kings just gave the city to Sparta out of gratitude. Funny how, in Spartan myth/history, people are constantly giving Sparta things) and how the Thebans are such hypocrites for wanting to resettle Messene after having ruined Plataea. Obviously, it’s necessary for Isocrates to point out that the helots hate freedom and won’t even know what to do with it when they get it, so they’ll just end up asking Sparta to run their shit again anyhow.
None of this really gets to the point at issue, which is that Sparta has to choose between giving up Messene and getting destroyed by the rest of the Greeks. That’s a practical problem that no amount of talking about justice is going to solve. So here’s where Isocrates comes up with something so brilliantly wacky that you can’t help but think he might have been as smart as everyone in antiquity thought he was. He says, hey! Why don’t we just abandon the city, send all the wives and kids abroad, and go pillage the rest of Greece! We’ll be eating their lunch every day, and since we won’t have a city to attack anymore (because we pillaged it ourselves) they won’t be able to do anything about it. Fight us with an army of their own? Come on, we’re Sparta – we’re basically invincible, never mind how Thebes just beat our ass down.
Obviously – Isocrates being an Athenian – this idea owes something to what Athens did when the Mede came down. They sent their wives and children to the islands, then abandoned the city and spent most of the rest of the War on board their ships (or camped on the beach, if you’re particular). Archidamus’ plan is pretty much just a Spartan version of that.
Still, it taps into this deep-seated (I think) Greek fantasy about being able to do without the polis. Everyone loves being part of a political community, but the polis is kind of a hostage to fortune, just sitting there waiting to get sacked. People worry about this, a lot. At best, if someone sacks your city, everyone ends up a refugee; at worst, the adult males get killed and everyone else gets enslaved. Escape in advance seems like an attractive alternative. That’s why Herodotus, after calling the Scythians the most ignorant people in the world, says they’ve got one discovery which is most wise: they know how to live without walls and cities and all that, so it’s impossible to capture them.