7
Molon labe (= ‘Come and have go if you think you’re hard enough!’)
King Leonidas of Sparta1
Sparta’s Development
Ancient Sparta (‘the Sown Land’?) has an awesome reputation for terrifying, violent, xenophobic totalitarianism. Thucydides rather prophetically compared it with Athens:
Suppose that the city of Sparta were to become deserted and that only the temples and foundations of buildings remained, I think that future generations would find it very difficult to believe that the place had really been as powerful as it was represented to be … Since … the city is not regularly planned and contains no temples or monuments of great magnificence, but is simply a collection of villages, its appearance would not come up to expectation. If, on the other hand, the same thing were to happen to Athens, one would conjecture … that the city had been twice as powerful as in fact it is.2
The cliché that ‘history is written by the winners’ simply does not apply to Sparta – its power took a while to grow. At some point in the post-Mycenaean period, four adjacent villages of Doric dialect speakers were founded in the fertile Eurotas valley in Lakonia in the south-east Peloponnese. The plain is surrounded by the imposing mountain ranges of Taygetos, Panion and Arcadia, and has a rugged coastline to the south; the natural strength of these frontiers negated the need for a city wall. Around 900 BCEthere was asynoecism (= ‘amalgamation’) of these villages into the single city of Sparta. The state became known as Lakedaimon, and its inhabitants as Lakedaimonians – ‘Spartans’ are really a specific sub-group, although in normal usage Lakedaimon/Lakedaimonians and Sparta/Spartans are interchangeable.
A century or so later, a fifth village was incorporated into the city, and by c.750 BCE Sparta had become the mistress of all Lakonia, reducing the non-Doric-speaking population to the status of helots (serfs), and making the other communities (the perioikoi = ‘dwellers round about’) politically subservient. As other Greek states were embarking on the colonizing movement, Sparta conquered Messenia – ‘good to plough and good to plant’3 – to the west and made the Messenians into helots.
Lakedaimon flourished, and so did its culture: the quality of its ceramics, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry was high, and there was widespread trade with the east. But in c.650 BCE the Messenians revolted, and Sparta found itself embroiled in a 17-year conflict. Inspired by the gritty verses of their great poet Tyrtaios, they won the war, (re-)enslaved the Messenians as helots, and divided the land into kleroi (‘allotments’) for the Spartiates (i.e. the true Spartans, as opposed to the perioikoi and helots), who were always a small and elite minority of the overall population.
The Spartan way of life thus altered dramatically. The new austerity, discipline, devotion to duty, diminishing foreign imports and signs of artistic decay are attributed to Lykourgos, who outlawed ‘all needless and superfluous arts’.4 However, the cultural sacrifice was counterbalanced by military success, and by around 550 BCE, Sparta had become the head of a loose confederacy of Peloponnesian states, which is known as the Peloponnesian League.
True Spartans, Helots and Perioikoi
The true Spartans called themselves the homoioi (‘the peers’), and they almost completely rejected economic activity. Xenophon says that at Sparta:
There is no point in making money even for the sake of clothes, since it is physical vitality which gives these men a distinctive appearance, not lavish dress. [Lykourgos] instituted currency of such a type that neither master nor servant could ever be unaware of a tiny amount coming into a house: indeed this would require much space and a wagon for transport.5
This was because the money was in the form of huge iron bars, not coins. The homoioi therefore depended on the perioikoi and the helots for their economic needs, while devoting themselves exclusively to military training. As a hereditary group of professional warriors, their main goal in life was to turn themselves into Greece’s finest soldiers. To be one of the homoioi you had to be the son of a Spartan father and mother; to have undergone the Spartan education; and to have been elected to a ‘mess-company’. Your dedication to the state was reciprocated by a grant of state-owned land in Lakonia or Messenia, which was worked by helots, whose body-shattering labours supported you throughout your life.
The mess-companies, which the Spartans called sysskania or pheiditia, each comprised fifteen members who would contribute barley-meal, wine, cheese and figs, plus a small amount of money for fish or meat. Boys would attend the messes, where they could hear political discussion, experience entertainments appropriate for free men and get used to joking without becoming obscene, as well as developing the very Spartan ability to take a joke. The procedure for vetting new members was rigorous, and any would-be entrant had to be elected unanimously.
By the time a Spartan was accepted into his mess-company he had already undergone the agoge (‘education system’). This was designed to produce instant obedience to authority, an ability to endure pain and hardship, and to instil courage. It was quite literally the survival of the fittest:
The father of a new-born child … brought it in his arms to a particular spot where the elders sat. If the baby proved well-built and sturdy they instructed the father to bring it up. But if it was puny and deformed, they despatched it to ‘the place of rejection’, a precipitous spot by Mount Taygetos.6
The first six years of a boy’s life were spent at home, brought up by his mother and a nurse. They trained him not to be fussy about his food, not to be scared of the dark or of being left alone, and not to cry or throw temper-tantrums. Then, at the age of seven, he left home to live in the barracks with other boys (paides) of the same age. Until they finished their education, they were under the control of a paidonomos (= ‘public guardian of education’), who had a group of young adults equipped with whips, who helped him deal with any misdemeanours. In fact, though, boys were under constant supervision, because every citizen had the right to discipline them.
At around the age of thirteen, Spartan boys were made to go barefoot all the time; they received one garment, which had to last for an entire year; they learned only the barest minimum of reading and writing; they cropped their hair; and they exercised naked: ‘their bodies were rough, and knew nothing of baths or oiling: only on a few days in the year did they experience such delights’.7 These hardy, athletic boys, who were predictably successful in the great athletic festivals, did their own housekeeping, plucked reeds by hand to make their beds, and only received small amounts of food. The thinking behind this was to make them better able to go without while they were on active service, but stealing to supplement their diet was acceptable – providing they weren’t caught.
Thieving was bad; incompetent thieving was unforgivable. This attitude is graphically illustrated by the story of the boy who had stolen a fox cub and had it concealed inside his cloak: to escape detection he was prepared to have his insides torn to shreds by the animal. Indeed Plutarch commented that, even in his day, Spartan youths practised stealing and were then seen to die from lashes they received at the altar of Artemis Orthia. This particular bizarre endurance test/initiation ritual is mentioned by authors of the Roman period who speak of a ceremony where youths were flogged at the altar, although for the Classical period we hear that:
after making it a matter of honour for them to snatch as many cheeses as possible from Orthia, [Lykourgos] commanded the others to whip them, wishing to demonstrate thereby that a short period of pain may be compensated by the enjoyment of long-lasting prestige.8
Plutarch informs us that at around this age the boys were courted by lovers from among the older men, and Xenophon also passes comment about ‘men’s love for boys’ at Sparta:
If out of admiration for a boy’s personality a man of the right character should seek to befriend him in all innocence, Lykourgos would consider it the finest training. On the other hand if someone was obviously chasing after a boy for his body, he regarded that as an absolute disgrace and laid it down that at Sparta lovers should refrain from molesting boys.9
This tone seems to pervade Spartan attitudes to the intimate personal relationships of both sexes. Plutarch adds that sexual relationships of this type were so highly valued across society that even respectable women would initiate love affairs with unmarried girls. Yet we also hear that there was no rivalry; instead, if two males found that their affections had the same object, they made this the basis for mutual friendship and pursued joint efforts to perfect their loved one’s character.
From age eighteen to nineteen, the Spartan entered the class of youths (paidiskoi) and could be called up for military service. Xenophon says that at this stage of life youths become very self-willed, cocky and subject to intense cravings for pleasure, so this was the age at which Lykourgos felt they should be kept as busy as possible. The paidiskoi were required to observe specific rules relating to their public behaviour, such as keeping silent and gazing down at all times when walking in the streets. This gave rise to Xenophon’s characteristically chauvinistic comment: ‘In consequence it has become absolutely clear that by nature the male sex possesses greater strength than the female even in matters of self-control’.10
At age twenty the young men (hebiskoi) were permitted to marry, although they still lived in the barracks and only visited their wives in secret. This resulted, we are told, in some husbands having children even before they saw their own wives in daylight. The sources again stress the moralistic side of this:
Such intercourse was not only an exercise in self-control and moderation, but also meant that the partners were fertile physically, and always fresh for love, rather than being sated and pale from unrestricted sexual activity.11
At the age of twenty-four the Spartan male became a front-line combatant, and at thirty he became a full citizen with the right to participate in the Assembly. From then on he lived at home with his wife and family, although he was still obliged to dine every night in the mess. The citizens were also allowed to let their hair grow:
They took particular care over it in the face of danger, making it look sleek and combing it. They bore in mind one of Lykourgos’ statements about long hair, that it renders handsome men better looking, and ugly ones more frightening.12
On the eve of the Battle of Thermopylai, Leonidas and his 300 Spartans took care arranging their hair, and the baffled Persian king Xerxes was informed that it was common for the Spartans to pay careful attention to their hair when they were about to risk their lives.
The education of girls was also aimed at producing healthy bodies, and Lykourgos made them run, wrestle and throw the discus and javelin. The purpose of this was so that:
their children in embryo would make a strong start in strong bodies, while the women themselves would … meet the challenge of childbirth in a successful, relaxed way.13
The girls’ physical regime was intensive. Perhaps their most strenuous workout was bibasis, jumping up and down touching their buttocks with their heels. This features as part of Aristophanes’ caricature of Spartan women in Lysistrata:
LYSISTRATA: Welcome Lampito my dear. How are things in Sparta? Darling, you look simply beautiful. Such colour, such resilience! Why, I bet you could throttle a bull.
LAMPITO: So could you my dear, if you were in training. Don’t you know I practise rump jumps (bibasis) every day?
LYSISTRATA: And such marvellous tits, too!14
They participated in choral performances at festivals’ clad in basic slit-sided tunics – a mode of dress that some regarded as indicating healthy-minded purity, others as the exact opposite. Lykourgos was supposed to have done away with prudishness, sheltered upbringing and ‘girliness’, and a fragment of the writings of the philosopher Herakleides Lembos tells us that Spartan women were deprived of make-up, not allowed to have their hair long or to wear gold. Lykourgos also made young girls participate in processions in the nude, as well as dance and sing at festivals with the young men looking on: sometimes the girls would make fun of the young men and criticize their failings; or they might sing their praises. Those who received the girls’ accolades went off feeling good, whereas the barbs of the girls’ playful humour were no less effective than more serious warnings. Plutarch says there was no hint of immorality about the girls’ nakedness. Rather, it encouraged simple habits, enthusiasm for physical fitness, and imparted a touch of masculine gallantry. A typical attitude is reflected in the anecdote about Leonidas’ wife Gorgo: when a foreign woman said, ‘You Lakonian women are the only ones who can rule men,’ Gorgo replied: ‘That is because we are the only ones who give birth to men’.15
Spartan girls were usually married at a later age than their Athenian counterparts:
The custom was to capture women for marriage – not when they were slight or immature, but when they were in their prime and ripe for it. The so-called ‘bridesmaid’ took charge of the captured girl. First she shaved her head to the scalp, then dressed her in a man’s cloak and sandals, and laid her down alone on a mattress in the dark. The bridegroom first had dinner in the mess, then would slip in and carry her to bed.16
A rather colourful version states that young men were locked up in the dark with girls of marriageable age, and each married the one he caught. In either case, she would not appear in public as a wife until she was pregnant, and she wouldn’t share a household with her husband for the first ten or so years of marriage. So important was it to produce children that it was said that an older husband would lend his young wife to a well-bred childless young man to bear him a child. However, children remained in essence the property of the state, rather than of their parents, and Lykourgos supposedly regarded non-Spartan attitudes to these issues as stupid:
Such people have their bitches and mares mounted by the finest dogs and stallions whose owners they can prevail upon for a favour or a fee. But their wives they lock up and guard, claiming the right to produce their children exclusively, even though they may be imbeciles, or past their prime, or diseased.17
The end result of these customs was that the Spartans, allegedly, had no notion of adultery.
Spartan women were noted for their intense patriotism, too: they famously told their sons, as they went off to battle, to return ‘with your shield or on it’. The death of a son in battle became a cause for celebration; Spartan women bore sons to die for Sparta, so it was a positive thing when it happened. Other Greeks were often critical of Spartan women, though: Aristotle complained that they lived ‘intemperately, enjoying every kind of licence and indulging in every luxury,’18 and in Euripides’ Andromache Peleus rages against their lack of morals:
No Spartan girl could grow up modest even if she wanted to. They go out of the house with bare thighs and loose clothes to wrestle and run races with young men – intolerable behaviour!19
Essentially the Spartans were taught a way of life. Their upbringing certainly produced very courageous and loyal citizens, but it didn’t encourage adaptability. During the fourth century BCE the Spartans were unable to cope with changing conditions: although they won the Peloponnesian War, they never made the most of that victory, and soon afterwards fell victim to innovative battle tactics developed by the Thebans.
One of the reasons for this inflexibility was the existence of the helots (serfs). Tyrtaios gives us a very vivid picture of their economic conditions:
Like donkeys worn out with huge burdens, compelled by a terrible necessity, they bring their masters a half of all the fruits of the earth.20
Although the Spartan authorities frequently enrolled helots in the army, sometimes giving them freedom, they never trusted them: they had an institution called the Krypteia (‘Secret Police’) in which young Spartans were sent out into the countryside to hide by day and kill the most active helots by night.21 The relationship between Sparta and the helots involved an awkward contradiction: Sparta needed the helots for military purposes, but even lightly armed helots were a huge risk. Yet, as ever, Sparta found a solution: on one occasion, those helots who thought they had particularly distinguished themselves in battle were invited to claim their freedom, on the premise that the first to do so would be the most liable to revolt. Some 2,000 helots came forward and immediately ‘disappeared’.
Slavery of the Athenian type (‘chattel slavery’) was a more ‘modern’ institution than keeping helots, and by the Classical period it was the normal type. The helots were different. You didn’t buy them at a slave market. They were a homogeneous, self-reproducing native people who all spoke Greek, and who had become dependants through conquest. The problems this engendered were evident to Plato, who felt this was a recipe for disaster, and indeed helot revolts were a constant factor in Sparta’s history. One individual to challenge the system was Kinadon, a young man who was not one of the homoioi, and who claimed that the majority of the helots were of one mind with him. He told someone, who ultimately informed against him, that those who had to do military service had all the weapons they needed, and that the quantities of daggers, swords, axes, hatchets and sickles in the iron market could easily equip everyone else. The Spartan authorities were very alarmed, but decided to send Kinadon on a mission to arrest a beautiful woman who had the reputation of corrupting all the Lakedaimonians who came to her village (he had carried out assignments like this before), and when he got there he was arrested.
When asked what was his aim in acting as he did, he replied: ‘I wanted to be inferior to no one in Lakedaimon.’ Thereupon his hands and neck were tied in a collar, he was scourged and stabbed and led around the city with his accomplices.22
Kinadon’s final comment is relevant to the class of individuals at Sparta called the hypomeiones (= ‘the inferiors’), who ranged from the upwardly mobile Neodamodeis (helots granted freedom in return for some act of courage or service to the state) to theTresantes(= ‘tremblers’), homoioi demoted (temporarily) for cowardice.
The people of Lakedaimon who most closely approximated to the citizens of ‘normal’ Greek states were the perioikoi. They resided in communities that had some degree of local autonomy, but were liable for military service, and had no independent foreign policy. Although they served in the army, the perioikoi were not bound by the code of values of the Spartan warriors, and so could engage in all the economic activities that the Spartiatai spurned. They cultivated the land, carried on manufacture, and enjoyed a fairly secure position. We seldom see them showing disaffection towards the Spartiatai, and in general they were one of the essential elements in the stability of Lakedaimon. Indeed, the official designation of what we call the Sparta was not ‘the Spartiatai’ (cf. ‘the Athenians’ = ‘the Athenian State’), but ‘the Lakedaimonians’, which expressly included the perioikoi.
Sparta’s Constitution
If Sparta had an unusual social structure, it also had an extraordinary constitution. Its main elements were two kings, a council of elders, a popular assembly and five officials known as ephors. This curious mixture of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy made it difficult for ancient writers to classify: Plato couldn’t decide whether it was a democracy or a tyranny; Aristotle described it as a happy mixture of oligarchy and democracy; and the Roman writer Cicero described it as ‘mixed’.
Why there were two kings and two dynasties at Sparta remains a mystery, although Herodotus recounts the story of King Aristodemos’ wife Argeia giving birth to identical twins just before Aristodemos died. The Spartans wanted to make the elder child king, but they had no idea which of them to choose. Argeia knew perfectly well which was which, but pretended not to, in the hope that both of them might be made kings. The Delphic Oracle told the Spartans to let that happen, but to give the elder one the greater honour. In order to ascertain which baby had been born first, a man called Panites suggested that they should observe the mother and see which of them she fed and washed first. If she varied the order it would be clear that she knew no more than they did, but if she always kept to the same routine, that would tell them everything they needed to know. Apparently Panites’ scheme worked.
The kings were the supreme military commanders and, although Aristotle defined the Spartan kingship as a ‘perpetual hereditary generalship’,23 it could be far more than that. The advice of a successful warrior carried great political weight, and Sparta’s history falls naturally into a series of influential kings, who left their imprint, be this positive or negative, on their country’s fortunes.
Sparta’s council of elders, the Gerousia, consisted of twenty-eight life-members, who had to be sixty years old or over, plus the two kings. The system of election was by ‘acclamation’, which Aristotle described as ‘childish’: an assembly was called; judges were confined in a windowless room nearby; the candidates came forward; the people shouted; and whoever got the loudest cheer was elected.24
The Gerousia was the criminal court, and operated as the guiding committee of the Assembly. It called the Assembly at fixed periods and put motions before it, which were then either rejected or confirmed, although it could also veto decisions of the Assembly of which it disapproved. Many ancient historians represent the Gerousia as being virtually the governing body of Sparta.
The Assembly of Citizens comprised all male Spartiatai from the age of thirty. Tyrtaios speaks of how the Delphic Oracle decreed that:
First in the debate shall heaven’s favourites, the kings, the guardians of fair Sparta’s polity, speak, and the elders. After them the commoners shall to direct proposals make response with conscientious speech and all just consequence, making no twisted plans against our realm; and commoners majority shall win the day.25
How far they enjoyed the right of free debate is rather doubtful: Aristotle implies that the Assembly could simply vote yes or no on motions that were presented to it.
The final pieces in Sparta’s constitutional jigsaw were the five ephors, who, as representatives of the people, had formidable powers. They were elected by acclamation; any Spartiate over the age of thirty was eligible; the term of office was one year; no one could be ephor twice; they assumed office on the full moon after the autumnal equinox, and issued a proclamation to all citizens to ‘shave their upper lips and obey the laws’; every year they declared war on the helots (who could then be killed without incurring religious impurity) and could execute them without trial; they had disciplinary powers over all citizens; they virtually conducted Spartan foreign policy; they presided in the Gerousia and the Assembly; they oversaw the training and discipline of the young; theKrypteia (Secret Police) was under their orders; and they had interesting powers in relation to the kings, with whom they exchanged a monthly oath, ‘for the kings that they would rule according to the established laws of the city, and for the city that if he were true to his oath they would maintain his kingdom unshaken’.26 In the presence of the kings all rose, but the ephors remained seated. And they could fine a king, as they did Arkhidamos for marrying a short wife: ‘for she will not bear us kings but kinglets.’27
Sparta’s Afterlife
In 1834, very soon after Greek independence, a new Sparta was laid out close to the ancient site. It was a symbol of the rebirth of Greece. Admirers of Sparta include many of the big names of political science, including Machiavelli and Montesquieu. In The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) James Harrington urged Oliver Cromwell to imitate Lykourgos; Rousseau praised the Spartan system in Du contrat social (1762); according to the classical scholar Meyer Reinhold, ‘American leaders judged Sparta as a model of freedom and order, a stable, long-lived commonwealth, its people distinguished by virtue, simple life-style, patriotism, vigour’;28 and Samuel Adams looked forward to Boston becoming ‘a Christian Sparta’.29
Degas’ Young Spartans Exercising (1860) depicts Lykourgos standing among a group of mothers as naked boys and topless girls work out in what is intended to be a utopian, naturalistic view of Sparta. The great French romantic Chateaubriand was more ambivalent: ‘If I hate the manners of the Spartans, I am not blind to the greatness of a free people, and neither was it without emotion that I trampled on their noble dust’.30
As the nineteenth century progressed, however, Athens took over as the model to be admired. The democratic tradition that dominates modern western thought still tends to favour Athens, although Walter Pater’s Lacedaemon bucks the trend with its positive assessment of the ‘half-military, half-monastic spirit which prevailed in this gravely beautiful place’. In Proust, the Baron de Charlus reflects on the First World War: ‘Those English soldiers who at the beginning I dismissed as mere football-players … well, they are … Spartiates’.31 Later in the twentieth century the similarities between the education of Spartan boys and the Hitler Youth are not coincidental. Admiration for Sparta reached an astonishing climax under the Nazis:
Many of the plans and ground rules which the Spartans had about how to build a state and how to train its ruling class are of relevance to us … We want to help the Führer to build a great Reich. Sparta should be a rousing example.32
Hitler himself, according to his Table Talk, often praised the Spartans, and their subjugation of the helots. As Tobias Hill wrote in his 2009 novel The Hidden, which is set in Sparta, ‘all extremisms are alike and in Sparta all are prefigured’.33
Notes – Chapter 7
1. According to Plutarch, Apophthegmata Lakonika, 225c.11, this was what Leonidas said to Xerxes before the Battle of Thermopylai.
2. Thucydides, 1.10, trans. R. Warner, in Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
3. Tyrtaios, fr. 5 Diehl = frs. 6–7 West.
4. Plutarch, Lykourgos 9.
5. Xenophon, Constitution of the Lakedaimonians 7, trans. R.J.A. Talbert, in Plutarch on Sparta, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
6. Plutarch, Lykourgos 16, trans. Talbert, in Plutarch on Sparta.
7. Ibid.
8. Xenophon, Constitution of the Lakedaimonians 2, trans. Talbert, in Plutarch on Sparta.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 3.
11. Plutarch, Lykourgos 15, tr, R.J.A. Talbert, op. cit.
12. Ibid., 22.
13. Ibid., 14.
14. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 79 ff., trans. A.H. Sommerstein, in Aristophanes: The Acharnians, The Clouds, Lysistrata, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
15. Plutarch, Lykourgos 14, tr, R.J.A. Talbert, op. cit.
16. Ibid., 15.
17. Ibid.
18. Aristotle, Politics 1269b22, trans. T.A. Sinclair, in Aristotle: The Politics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
19. Euripides, Andromache 595–600, trans. P. Vellacott, in Euripides: Orestes and Other Plays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
20. Tyrtaios, fr. 5 Diehl = frs. 6-7 West.
21. Plutarch, Lykourgos 28.
22. Xenophon, Hellenika, 3.3.11, M.M. Austin and P. Vidal-Naquet, Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece: An Introduction, London: Batsford, 1986.
23. Aristotle, Politics 1285b.
24. Described in Plutarch, Lykourgos 26.
25. Tyrtaios, fr. 4West, trans. M.L. West, Greek Lyric Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
26. Xenophon, Constitution of the Lakedaimonians 14.
27. Plutarch, Agesilaos 2.
28. Reinhold, Meyer, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984, 233.
29. Letter to John Scollay, 30 December, 1780, in H.A. Cushing (ed.), The Writings of Samuel Adams, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–8, Vol. 4, 238.
30. Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt and Barbary, translated from the French by F. Shoberl, New York: Van Winckel & Wiley, 1814, 106.
31. M. Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 7, Le Temps Retrouvé, Abbeville: F. Paillart, 1927, Vol. I, Ch. 2, 154.
32. K. Petter, Preface to O.W. von Vacro, Spata, der Leberskampf einer nordischen Herrenschicht, 2nd edn, Kempten: Arbeitsheft der Adolf-Hitler Schulen, 1942, 1.
33. T. Hill, The Hidden, London: Faber & Faber, 2009, 194.