At the foot of the cliff on which the tomb of Helen stood flowed the swift and muddy currents of the Eurotas. Follow the gently winding course of the river northward, and a traveler would soon see, on the far bank, what looked like a huddle of straggling villages. There was little in the provincial appearance of Sparta to hint at the awe with which her citizens were regarded. “Suppose,” as the Athenian Thucydides would one day put it, “that the city were abandoned, so that only her temples and the layout of her buildings remained—surely, as time passed, future generations would find it increasingly hard to believe that the people who once lived there had ever been powerful at all.”25
This was of little concern to the Spartans themselves. A people steeled by the virtues of restraint and fortitude could have only contempt for grandiose architecture. Let the cowards of other states raise up walls around their cities. The Spartans had no need of masonry when they had their spears and burnished shields. Why build pompous monuments from wasteful marble when the truest mark of a man was that he lead his life as though in a military camp? Only temples—an intrusion of the unearthly and the eerie within the otherwise barracks-like spareness of the city—rose distinct above the common run of buildings. On these, at least, the Spartans could lavish their plundered riches. In the great shrine on the acropolis, a low-lying hillock which served as the citadel of the town, all the interior was faced with rectangular plaques of solid bronze. In another temple, just north of Sparta, a statue of Apollo, the archer-god of prophecy, stood sheathed in the purest gold.
Most haunting of all Lacedaemon’s temples, however, was the shrine dedicated to Apollo’s sister, the virgin huntress Artemis, “mistress of wild beasts.”26 Continuing north along the Eurotas past the center of the city, a traveler would soon pass beyond open exercise grounds into a marshy hollow, where stood a black and ancient idol of the goddess. The Spartans, in the first flush of their dominance over the rest of the Peloponnese, in around 560 BC, had built there a splendid temple all of stone; and yet, despite the gleam of its new masonry, the site retained an air of menace. It was not merely that frogs continued to croak from among the rushes that surrounded it, nor that a marsh haze might sometimes rise ghost-like from the river: the temple itself was a place to provoke goosebumps. Not all its fittings were recent. Hung upon the fresh stonework were adornments preserved from a much older shrine, faces of terracotta, some of them idealized portraits of beardless youths or grizzled soldiers, but others grotesque and twisted monstrosities, their stares cretinous, their mouths wide open in animal cries of savagery or pain.27 These were the stuff of Spartan nightmares: rare was the citizen whose imaginings they would not have haunted, for the temple of Artemis, from his childhood through to his old age, was where he came to mark the staging posts of his life. Always present, blank-eyed yet watching him, were the masks. The faces of heroes to inspire him; and the grimaces of idiots, of gorgons, of deformed and toothless hags to remind him of the ugliness of failure. To fail was to be an outcast: lost beyond the bounds of the city, where only the shameful, the twisted and the bestial were to be found. All Spartans had to live with the implications of this truth. All had to live by the stern code that it forged.
For everywhere, as citizens, they were tracked and supervised. Each generation, like a jailer, kept its watch upon the next. The Spartans, who knew what it was to admire “choirs of boys and girls, and dance, and festivity,”28 nevertheless mistrusted the exuberance of youth. Lycurgus, wolf-worker that he was, had dreaded where the energies of unchecked cubs might lead. Only with the whip, he had taught his countrymen, could young predators be adequately trained. As the Spartans well knew from the grim example of their own early history, the savagery of instincts and impulses slipped off the leash might all too easily tear a state apart. Having passed through one period of revolution, they had no wish to endure another. No leeway could be given to the natural restlessness and appetites of youth. Only discipline, unyielding discipline, could possibly serve to check them. If there had to be change in Sparta, whether of a failing custom or of a law that had had its day, then it was for the elderly to moot and pass the needed reform.29 Why should any measure be accepted otherwise? After all, the elders of Sparta were living proof of what tradition could achieve: that it was capable of forging a master race of heroes.
So it was that Sparta, for all her fearsome reputation, was also widely lauded as the home of perfect manners. Only there, of all the cities in Greece, would a young man habitually step aside to make way for his senior; for he was, with such a gesture of respect, simultaneously paying honor to the laws and customs of his people. To such an extreme was this notion carried that the Spartans, appalled by the idea of a stripling unable to rise in the presence of his elders, frowned upon public lavatories. “The spears of young men” may have flourished in the city, but there was no doubting that “it is the old who have the power there.”30 Even the titular heads of state—for the Spartans, peculiar in all things, had not one but two kings—were obliged to respect their authority. Push too hard against the limits of what was constitutional, and they would quickly find themselves arraigned by their city’s supreme court, a legislative body that, aside from the two kings themselves, consisted entirely of gerontocrats aged over sixty. The Spartans duly called this intimidating body the Gerousia—a name which, like the Romans’ Senate, had the literal meaning of a council of elders. Since, aside from its role as the guardian of the constitution, it also had the right to forestall all motions put before it, and to present the fruits of its own deliberations as effective faits accomplis, the Gerousia might easily exert a stranglehold over politics in Sparta. Election to it was not only the supreme honor that a citizen could attain, but was for life. “No wonder that this, of all human prizes, should be the most zealously contested.” Even non-Spartans might concede as much: “Yes, athletic competitions are honorable too, but they are merely tests of physical prowess. Election to the Gerousia is the ultimate proof of a noble spirit.”31
This was not a nook in Sparta, not a cranny, but bony fingers would intrude there. Even the newest-born baby was subjected to the proddings of old men. Should an infant be judged too sickly or deformed to make a future contribution to the city, then the elders would order its immediate termination. Since the investment required from the state to raise a citizen was considerable, this was regarded by most Spartans as only proper. Indeed, a mother might well play the eugenicist herself, washing her baby in wine, which, as everyone knew, was the surest test for epilepsy. What true Spartan parent, after all, would wish to raise a son who might suddenly collapse in a fit? Better an early bereavement than the risk of such disgrace. A cleft beside the road which wound over the mountains to Messenia, the Apothetae, or “Dumping Ground,” provided the setting for the infanticide. There, where they might no longer shame the city that had bred them, the weak and deformed would be slung into the depths of the chasm, condemned eternally to its tenebrous oblivion. This was no abandonment, as was conventionally practiced by other peoples, but a grim and formal rite of execution. There was no hope of deliverance—such as was said to have spared the infant Cyrus—for the unwanted Spartan child. He had to die, and be seen to die, pour encourager les autres.
And no doubt, for those permitted to live, the tracery of tiny bones which littered the depths of the Apothetae must have served to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Spartan children could not help but grow up proudly conscious of themselves as an elite, chosen as such at birth; and yet the state, in return for its patronage, imposed stern and fearsome obligations. Lycurgus, it was said, rather than commit his reform program to writing, had preferred to inscribe it upon the characters and bodies of those who were to live by it, so that they might serve one another as walking constitutions. Such a process of social engineering was only practicable, of course, if begun in the cradle. Babies, soft and helpless, had to be toughened and fashioned into Spartans. No swaddling for them. No cosseting of toddlers, either, no indulging of their whims. “When they were given food, they were to eat it, and not be picky; night-fears and clinginess were to be firmly stamped on; tantrums and whining too.”32 Unsurprisingly, Spartan nannies were widely admired for their brisk, no-nonsense approach. Yet, strict as they were, even they were put in the shade by the city’s faculty of instructors. This had a role quite without precedent elsewhere in Greece, or indeed beyond. For the Spartans, in their concern to mold the perfect citizen, had developed a truly bizarre and radical notion: the world’s first universal, state-run education system.
Why—it even provided for girls! If, as seems probable, baby boys were likelier to be condemned to the Apothetae than their sisters, then this implied no lack of concern among the Spartans for the vigor of their female stock. Healthy mothers made for a healthy warrior race. Just as boys were trained for warfare, so girls had to be reared for their future as breeders. The result—to foreign eyes, at any rate—was an inversion of just about every accepted norm. In Sparta, girls were fed at the expense of their brothers. To the bemusement of other Greeks, they were also taught to read, and to express themselves not modestly, as was becoming for women, but in an aggressively sententious manner, so that they might better instruct their own children in what it meant to be a Spartan. They exercised in public: running, throwing the javelin, even wrestling. When they danced, they would do so with such abandon that they might slap their heels against the bare skin of their buttocks. For, yes—and here the disbelief of foreigners would conventionally reach boiling point—it was the habit of Spartan girls, as they trained, to sport only the skimpiest of tunics, slit revealingly up the thighs. Sometimes—horror of horrors!—they might even disport themselves in the nude.
Visions of female flesh, oiled and tanned, glistened in the imaginings of many a Sparta-watcher. The Spartans themselves, sensitive to the mockery that labeled their daughters “thigh-flashers,”33 would retort sternly “that there was nothing shameful about female nudity, nothing immoral in the slightest.” In fact, “since it encouraged a sense of sobriety, and a passion for physical fitness,”34 precisely the opposite. Yet, paramount though the requirements of Sparta’s eugenic program undoubtedly were, an aura of the erotic still clung to the training grounds nevertheless. The fertility of a future mother was best gauged, a Spartan might argue, by the glowing of her skin and the perfection of her breasts. Physical beauty—the long blond hair and elegant ankles for which Spartan girls were celebrated—provided the readiest measure by which moral beauty too could be judged. An ugly daughter, inevitably, would cause her parents alarm and distress. Desperate measures might have to be taken. So shockingly plain had one baby been, it was said, that her nurse, clutching at straws, had finally taken her to Helen’s tomb. There, outside the sanctuary, a mysterious woman had appeared and stroked the young girl’s hair. The baby, this apparition had prophesied, “would grow up the loveliest woman in Lacedaemon.”35 And so it had come to pass: the girl had become a celebrated beauty and ended up the wife of a Spartan king. Evidently, the spirit of Helen still sometimes walked her native land.
Such a story revealed an important truth about the Spartan cast of mind. Egalitarian though the Lycurgan ideal was, it did not foster any notions of equality. The sense of frantic competition that made women wish to outshine their peers in beauty gnawed at everyone in the city. “What is the best kind of government?” a Spartan king was once asked. Back came his answer, unhesitatingly: “The one in which the largest number of citizens are able to strive with each other in virtue, without threatening the state with anarchy.”36 This was why the education system, in a seeming paradox, worked both to stamp a single mold on those who passed through it, and yet to identify and fast-track an elite. Evident in the upbringing of girls, it was even more so in the training of their brothers. The Spartan who best submitted to it was the Spartan who most excelled.
For it was the goal of instructors not merely to crush a boy’s individuality, but to push him to startling extremes of endurance, discipline and impassivity, so that he might prove himself, supremely, as a being reforged of iron. When, at the age of seven, a young Spartan left his home to live communally with other boys, it was more than his sense of family that was being fractured and reset: the very notion that he possessed a private identity was, from that moment on, to be placed under continuous assault. Spartans termed his training the “agoge,” a word more conventionally applied to the raising of cattle. His supervisor was a “paidonomos”—literally, a “herder of boys.” Denied adequate rations, the young Spartan would be encouraged to forage from the farms of neighboring Lacedaemonians, stalking and stealing like a fox, refining his talent for stealth.*8 Whether in the heat of summer or in the cold of winter, he would wear one style of tunic, identical to that worn by his fellows, and nothing else, not even shoes. Strict limits on his conversation would be set, to foster the terse style of speech known all over Greece as “Laconic.” Yet, even as a young Spartan submitted to these ferocious and uniform disciplines, he was continuously being studied, compared and ranked: “As the boys exercised, they would always be spurred on to wrestle and contend with one another, so that the elders could then better judge their characters, their courage, and how well they were likely to perform when the time came for them, finally, to take their place in the line of battle.”37 Even girls might get in on the act: the boys would routinely be ordered to strip before them, to be subjected to either praise or mocking giggles. A true Spartan never had anything to hide.
A lesson most alarmingly brought home to a boy when, at the age of twelve, he became legal game for cruising. Pederasty was widely practiced elsewhere in Greece, but only in Sparta was it institutionalized— even, it is said, with fines for boys who refused to take a lover. Girls too, it was rumored, if not married, might expect to be sodomized repeatedly during their adolescence.38 In both cases, the justification was surely the same: nowhere was so private, so intimate, but the state had the right to intrude there. Yet, traumatic though the experience of submitting must have been for most young Spartans, there were, for boys at least, some significant compensations. Not only was it acceptable for a lover to serve his young boyfriend as a patron; it was positively expected. The more honored a citizen, and the better connected, the more effectively he could further his beloved’s career. Elite would advance elite: so it was that a boy, yielding to the nocturnal thrustings of a battle-scarred older man, might well find the secret wellsprings of Spartan power opened up to him.
Certainly, by the time he finished the agoge, a young man would know for sure whether he had been marked out for future greatness. To the most promising graduates was granted the honor of one final, bloody challenge. Enrolled into a crack squad known as the Crypteia, they would be sent into the mountains, armed only with a single dagger each, and ordered to live off the land. This period of exile from their city, however, was much more than a mere endurance test. Traveling alone, each member of the Crypteia would inevitably cross the Taygetos range and slip into Messenia. There, advancing soundlessly by night, as every graduate of the agoge had been trained to do, they would be expected to prove themselves as killers. Of all men, it was said, only the Spartans denied that homicide was necessarily a crime; for it was, in their opinion, perfectly legitimate to cull their slaves. Nervous lest the gods be provoked against them, however, the Spartans would proclaim each year a state of war against the helots, a maneuver of typically murderous circumspection, calculated to spare the Crypteia any risk of blood pollution.39 How else, after all, save by careful pruning of the most able Messenians, could the Spartans hope to breed natural serfs? Just as they condemned to the Apothetae the dregs of their own city, so they aimed to extinguish any spark of talent or rebellion in their slaves. Only the truly servile could be permitted to reproduce. Individual masters who failed to stunt the growth and aptitudes of their helots would be fined. The matter would be brought to the attention of the elders. The Crypteia, tipped off, would then glide in and set about its business.
Hitman though he was, the young Spartan who brought his dagger to the throat of a condemned Messenian was performing something more than an execution: it was almost an initiation rite, a deed of magic. As he felt his blade slice deep, he was privileged to know himself an acolyte of the profoundest mysteries of his state. No Spartan could lead his people who had shrunk from killing in cold blood. The elders who gave the Crypteia its commissions were simultaneously putting its members to the test. Only once he had smelled for himself the hatred of a hunted Messenian, and seen it in his eyes, could a Spartan truly appreciate the full extent of his city’s peril. Only once he had murdered could he truly appreciate what was required to keep it at bay.
Such, for the agent of the Crypteia, was the particular knowledge which he put on with his power. Not that ignorance could be permitted any Spartan, of course—whether male or female. Helen, it was said, while still a little girl, had been surprised as she danced before the sanctuary of Artemis, and raped. Messenian raiders, prior to the enslavement of their country, had similarly violated a whole chorus of dancers. And they might do so again, given half a chance. Every Spartan girl knew what her fate would be should her city’s whip hand fail. It was left to her brothers, however, to test this certainty to the limits of their endurance. Every citizen, as part of his boyhood training, had learned what it was to suffer the lash. With their rough tunics slashed to ribbons, and their shoulders scarred and bleeding, the children of Lacedaemon’s master race might sometimes, after rituals that demanded a whipping, look little better than the meanest, lowest-born slaves. And yet they had proved themselves the very opposite of servile. The whip which degraded the helot served to ennoble the Spartan boy. “Brief suffering leads to the joy of lasting fame,”40 Lycurgus had instructed his people. It was those who endured the lash with the sternest fortitude who went on, no doubt, to be enrolled in the Crypteia. The master was most the master who could best endure the toils of a slave.
An insight which governed the Spartan throughout his adult life. Although a graduate of the agoge would never again have to endure the humiliation of a whipping, his life continued to be trammeled by restrictions that a citizen of any other Greek state would have found insufferable. A Spartan was not even permitted to control his own finances until he was thirty. Rather than live with his wife, he would be obliged instead to sneak from his barracks for hurried, animal couplings. He might bear the scars of battle, but a young man who came to blows with another could expect to be treated by his elders like a naughty child—or, indeed, a slave. Symbolic of his ambiguous status was the fact that a Spartan warrior in his twenties would wear his hair short, just like a helot. So too, even more shockingly, would a Spartan bride.41
In Greece, the only women generally seen with shaven heads were slave girls shorn of their tresses for wigs, but it was typical of the many peculiarities of the Spartans that they should have regarded what was elsewhere a mark of humiliation as an emblem of matronly pride. Having been raised to breed, the newly married Spartan woman—a fit, healthy and already anally proficient virgin—could at last embrace her destiny. Society encouraged her all the way. The more prolific she proved herself, the greater her prestige. If she produced three sons, her husband would be excused garrison duty; if she died in childbirth, she would at least have the consolation of having her name recorded for eternity upon a tombstone. In such a way did the state aim to make even motherhood a matter of the most intense competition.
Not, of course, that anything could compare with the status obsession of young men. The ruthlessness with which this was fostered became, in a Spartan’s twenties, something truly carnivorous. The supreme honor, awarded to only three graduates at a time, was to be named by the elders a “hippagretes”—a “commander of horse.” This title gave a young Spartan the right to nominate a further one hundred of his peers for membership in the Hippeis, an elite squad of three hundred, who operated distinct from the command structure which governed other military units, and served in the center of the battle line as the bodyguard of the commanding king. The jealousy of those overlooked by the hippagretai was naturally fearsome. Rejects were encouraged to keep an envious and watchful eye on the Hippeis, reporting any infractions, always looking to have its members dismissed in disgrace, angling to replace them. No wonder that brawls between young Spartans were so common. No wonder, either, that they had to be framed, even into their early manhood, by such ferocious rules of conduct.
Hence the unsettling paradoxes that governed Spartan society: humiliation was pride; restriction opportunity; discipline freedom; subordination the truest mastery. Even when, at the age of thirty, a Spartan finally became a full citizen, a “homoios,” or the “peer” of his fellows, he continued to live in conditions that would have appeared to the elite of any other city akin to slavery. Every evening, he would be obliged to eat in a common mess; he would bring a set ration of raw ingredients which the cooks would mix into a black, bloody broth. So disgusting was this concoction that foreigners who were privileged to taste it would joke that at last they could understand why the Spartans had no fear of death. A shallow and uncomprehending jest. The Spartans themselves, who were not immune to a taste for witticisms, and indeed had raised a shrine to Laughter in their city, knew that some things were far too solemn to be joked about.
To a homoios, excess was always the enemy. In other states, the poor were skin and bones, and the rich might be nicknamed “the stout”—but not in Sparta. In other states, it was the elite who would indulge themselves with wine and drunken dancing—but not in Sparta. In Sparta, it was the slaves. Sometimes, as the homoioi ate in their mess, a helot might be dragged in, a stoop-shouldered, bestial thing, dressed in mangy animal pelts, and with an ugly cap of flea-bitten dog skin on his head. For the entertainment and edification of his watching masters, the wretch would be forced to drink neat wine, to gulp it down until the liquor was spilling from his lips onto the skins. Laughing, the Spartans would then order the slave to dance. His cheeks bright red, his chin wet with spittle, the helot would weave and stagger and totter until he passed out in the dirt. His masters would then amuse themselves by pelting him with bones.
With some justice, then, it could be said of Lacedaemon that “the quintessence both of freedom and of slavery are to be found there.”42 One, after all, was the mirror image of the other. Upon the walls of the temple of Artemis, the masks of young warriors and wise old men were made to appear all the nobler for the ugliness of the masks that surrounded them, those of crones, imbeciles, savages and freaks. Similarly, to the sober homoioi at their mess table, all the rigors and cruelties of their training were given purpose by the spectacle of the drooling helot collapsed at their feet. The Spartans, who were the masters of their own bodies and appetites as well as of a vast population of slaves, were the freest men of all precisely because they were the subjects of the harshest and most unyielding code. “They have their liberty, yes—but their liberty is not an absolute. For even the Spartans have a master. And that master—the one who rules them—that master is their Law.”43