Episode #226 - What is the Spartan Mirage? (Part II)

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I'd like to start today with a short poetry reading.

And I quote:

No one is a good warrior who cannot face bloody battle and come to grips with the enemy.

That is manliness.

This is the best and finest prize of victory that a young man can win among men.

For that is best for the state and the whole people.

When a man takes a firm stand and abides steadfastly at his post in the forefront without a thought of flight, prepared to sacrifice his life and blood, encouraging his comrades at his side.

Such a man is a good warrior.

If he falls, he is mourned by young and old, and his fame lives forever.

In death, he becomes immortal, and his grave and his descendants are honored by all.

If he returns victorious, he is honored by young and old, and he goes full of honor through his life and to his grave.

End quote.

That is quite a passage.

If I didn't know better, I would have guessed that it was something written for a Klingon ambassador to say in an episode of Star Trek.

You all know the Klingons, right?

I don't need to break that down.

Maybe if Star Trek isn't your thing, you could picture that ode to honor machismo and the warrior ethic coming out of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Conan the Barbarian.

Conan, what is best in life?

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of your women.

That is good.

That is good.

I always like the guy being like, yeah, that is good at the end there.

Makes me smile.

Anyway, it's not an exact one-to-one, but same vibe, right?

The poem I started us off with comes from Tertius, the most famous of all Spartan poets.

Well, I should say that we think that poem comes from Tertius, who we think was a Spartan poet.

According to tradition, the poetry of Tertius was an essential part of Spartan culture.

He wasn't just the preferred poet of the Spartan upper crust.

His lines were fully integrated into Spartan military practice.

According to the ancient writer Athenaeus, the Spartans, quote, in their wars recite the poems of Tertius and move in all time to those tunes, end quote.

He also tells us that during military expeditions, quote, whenever they were at supper and had sung the prayer of thanksgiving, they should also sing one of Tertius' hymns as a solo, one after another, and that the commander should be the judge and should give a piece of meat as a prize to him who sang the best.

⁇ End quote.

Ah, nothing better than a meat prize for a well-sung poem.

Tradition has it that for the Spartans, Tertius' poetry was more like a national anthem, something every Spartan committed to memory memory that gave reminders on how a Spartan should live, fight, and die.

Tertius has been celebrated as the person who first articulated the Spartan values that would shape their unique constitution.

But when historians try to drill down on who Tertius was and when he lived, they are often left with more questions than answers.

The scraps of Tertius' writing that have survived seem to place his life in the mid-600s BC, around the time of a conflict known as the Second Messinaan War.

This was a time of transformation in Spartan society.

The ultimate Spartan victory over the Messinians solidified their state's hold over large swaths of the Peloponnesian Peninsula.

The war also solidified Sparta's hold on their population of slaves, known as Helots, who had been the original inhabitants of Messenia.

The bits and pieces of Tertius' poetry we have seem to suggest that he was writing in this context, urging the Spartans to embrace a warrior ethos so that they might ultimately prevail in the Messenian War.

or that they might be vigilant in their oppression of their freshly subjugated slaves.

But the details we get from ancient writers about Tertius' life are deeply contradictory.

Many sources tell us that he was not born a Spartan.

In fact, in one widely repeated story, we're told that Tertius was actually an Athenian.

The Roman-era writer, Pausanias, tells us that Tertius first came to Sparta after an oracle decreed that the only way for Sparta to be victorious in their war against Messinea was for them to take a general from among the Athenians.

When the Athenians were informed of this oracle, they were in a bit of a bind.

On the one hand, they did not want to disobey an oracle from the gods, but they also had no interest in helping the Spartans grow their Peloponnesian empire.

So they sent Tertius, a schoolmaster who Pausanias tells us was both, quote, lame and slow-witted, end quote, which in ancient speak could denote a whole spectrum's worth of physical and mental disabilities.

Later traditions would also claim that Tertius was, quote, one-eyed.

But whatever his physicality may have been, the choice of Tertius ended up being a huge boon for the Spartans.

Apparently, once he arrived, he proved that he was quite capable as both a poet and, potentially, a general.

In some versions of the story, his poetry ends up inspiring the Spartans to claim their final victory.

In other versions, Tertius personally leads the Spartan army in their capture of Messinae.

But

nothing about this story adds up.

If nothing else, the Spartans were deeply suspicious of outsiders.

In fact, the historian Herodotus tells us that by his time, that's the mid-4th century BC, the Spartans had only ever given citizenship to two people who were not born to Spartan parents, a certain Tismenus and his brother.

Herodotus says nothing about Tertius.

It's quite possible that the story about Tertius being from Athens was originally made up by Athenians.

This may have been done to either slander Sparta's best-known poet as somehow deficient, or to suggest that the only reason that Sparta had a good poet at all was because he was originally Athenian.

This also raises the question about Tertius' alleged disabilities.

If he was actually disabled, that's yet another piece of evidence that the Spartans did not callously kill or otherwise exclude people with disabilities.

But the story about the disabilities may have been another piece of Athenian slander.

Then there are the poems themselves, which, unfortunately, have only survived in bits and pieces.

Many scholars have pointed out that the scraps that are attributed to Tertius are stylistically quite diverse.

For instance, that poem I read up top has been flagged as suspicious because, according to the expert Ian Tigerstedt, unlike some of the other poems attributed to Tertius, it is, quote, a well-arranged development of a single and abstract theme, end quote.

It may be that poem was just a little too good to be Tertius, whose other work is generally less sophisticated.

It may have been that that particular poem was written much later and then attributed to the beloved Tertius, potentially another example of an invented tradition.

But there doesn't seem to be much agreement on this among the experts.

Most scholars seem to accept that there probably was a historical Tertius.

Early papyrus fragments containing his lines help support that idea.

And at least some of the poetry that bears his name came from that historical person.

But beyond that, everything else is disputed.

So we have a situation where Tertius is the only Spartan source that attests to those much discussed Spartan warrior values, but Tertius may not have been a Spartan and may not have written the best known poems attributed to him.

But let's say we go with the school of thought that accepts that Tertius was a real person, an authentic Spartan, and the real author of all those surviving fragments.

We still need to be cognizant of how we are interpreting his lines.

Again, Ian Tigerstedt explains that if there was a real Tertius, he was Sparta's, quote, first propagandist whose influence has lasted through the ages.

And insofar as the ideal that Tertius set before the Spartans was regarded by later generations as the real Sparta, he may also be called the creator of the Spartan legend, end quote.

That is a crucial point.

The poetry of Tertius expressed a set of ideals for how the Spartans ought to act.

It was not a journalistic document of how the Spartans actually acted.

For centuries, many people read the poems of Tertius and assumed that the Spartans always fought their enemies chest to chest, never moved beyond the range of arrows or javelins, and clamored to fight in the front lines.

Further, they obeyed their kings as though they were gods, believed a love of money was a threat to the city, never once took a bribe, and most significantly, they never gave into fear and ran away from a fight.

Tertius' poems certainly compel the Spartans to act in those ways.

But as time went on, many of Sparta's admirers began to believe that these disputed, poorly sourced poems were proof that the Spartans consistently lived up to those ideals.

The truth is, of course, far more complicated.

In the classical period, the Spartans gained a deserved reputation for producing the best heavy infantry in Greece.

This is the kernel of historical truth at the heart of the Spartan mirage.

It would be wrong to deny the fact that the Spartans were able to produce particularly effective hoplite soldiers, the distinctive heavily armed Greek infantrymen who fought in the tightly packed phalanx formation.

But this fact has been spun out into a grandiose body of mythology concerning the lifestyle, education, and moral character of the Spartan people.

When the Spartan mirage goes back as far as Tertius, is it even possible to find the real Spartans in our ancient sources?

Let's see what we can do today on our fake history.

Episode number 226, What is the Spartan Mirage?

Part 2.

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This week, we are turning our attention back to ancient Sparta and the collection of myths, misconceptions, and idealizations experts in ancient history have dubbed the Spartan Mirage.

This is part two in what is going to be a trilogy of episodes on the Spartans, so if you've not heard part one, then I strongly suggest that you go back and give that a listen now.

In that first part, I introduced the concept of the Spartan mirage.

This was a term first coined by the famous French classicist François Ollier in the 1930s, but it has since been picked up and refined by subsequent generations of experts in Spartan history.

It's perhaps appropriate that a French scholar was the first to point out just how distorted the popular understanding of ancient Sparta had become, given the way the Spartans had had been used as symbols in France.

As we saw, starting in the late 1700s, the Spartans were claimed as symbols of the Revolution and the First French Republic, before being transformed into symbols of Napoleon's regime, to then being claimed by French liberals in the Restoration period.

I made the point that part of the reason the Spartans have been claimed by so many diverse groups is that all of these groups are gravitating to their own version of the Spartan mirage.

They are choosing the myths about the Spartans that best align with their ideology and then insisting that that's who the Spartans truly were.

From there, we got into those Spartan myths, starting with the mythological founding of the city.

We saw that the Spartans used mythology to help explain their ethnic roots as Dorians, a group that migrated to Greece after the Bronze Age collapse.

But ironically, they also claimed to have a deep prehistoric connection to the Peloponnese.

They were able to square this circle through the story of the return of the Heraclids.

These were descendants of Heracles, who claimed Sparta's kingship with an army of Dorians at their back, and, according to the story, established the Spartan institution of having two concurrent kings.

In this way, the Spartans were both Dorians and descended from the most Greek of Greek heroes.

From there, we got into the figure of Lycurgus the lawgiver, the Spartan aristocrat who, tradition holds, gave the city its distinctive constitution and laid out a draconian set of laws that governed every aspect of Spartan life.

As we explored, the Lycurgus story is almost certainly a historical myth.

Lycurgus likely never existed.

Many of the laws attributed to him slowly began to take shape after the Spartan victory in the Second Messenean War in the mid-7th century BC.

But even more significantly for the Spartan mirage, later writers, particularly the Roman biographer Plutarch, recorded details about Lycurgus' constitution that were never part of Spartan law.

Since tradition held that Lycurgus' constitution could never be written down, later writers were forced to reconstruct it based on hearsay.

As a result, they often included popular legends about Spartan cultural practices.

Myths were mingled with fact, and our historical image of the Spartans was further distorted.

We left off by examining one of the most notorious examples of these allegedly uncompromising Spartan cultural practices.

This was the belief that any babies deemed insufficiently hardy by the Spartan Council of Elders would be cast into a pit by a nearby mountain.

mountain.

As we saw, this is almost certainly a historical myth.

That particular story only appears in the writings of Plutarch, a very late Roman era source, and it's not corroborated by any of our earlier Greek sources.

Archaeological excavations at that notorious pit uncovered no evidence that anyone under the age of eighteen was killed or buried there.

Not a single infant bone was found at the site.

So, if that shocking Spartan practice was a myth, then what other parts of Lycurgus' constitution should we not trust?

Well, let's head back to ancient Sparta and see what we can discover.

The one part of Lycurgus' Constitution, as we have received it, that most experts believe is mostly accurate, is the description of Sparta's unique system of government.

Now, of course, the Lycurgus myth would have us believe that this specific division of powers was devised personally by the lawgiver himself, or had been given to him by the priestess at Delphi directly from the mouth of the god Apollo.

As we explored back in part one,

this is absolutely not what happened.

The Spartan system of government evolved over the course of centuries, likely taking a shape close to what I'm about to describe around the mid-700s BC.

Now, for the sake of easy categorization, experts use different names for various periods in ancient Greek history.

Many of these names actually come from the world of art history.

We're most interested in what gets called the Archaic Period, that's roughly from 750 to 479 BC, and the Classical Period, 479 to 323 BC.

Those were the periods when the ancient Greek city-states really came into their own, developed the culture that they're best known for, and were more or less independent from foreign domination.

So, for your frame of reference, this particular Spartan government was the one that was in place during the Archaic and Classical periods.

Now, why am I so confident that this particular part of Lycurgus' mythical constitution was likely real?

Well, we have multiple ancient sources that mostly agree on it.

The classical era Greek historians Herodotus Herodotus and Xenophon both tell us things about this system that align with the more detailed but much later description we get from the Roman Plutarch.

We also have the writings of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, who were deeply interested in the Spartan form of government.

Plato was generally more sympathetic to the Spartan system, whereas Aristotle, as we will see, was quite critical.

But But significantly, they mostly agree on the facts.

So let's break it down.

First, to understand Sparta at all, you need to understand that it was a society very firmly divided into different social castes.

Your caste entitled you to a very different set of civil and legal rights.

At the top of the pyramid were the Spartiates.

In some sources, you will see this group called the Spartan citizens.

But we shouldn't think of these citizens in the modern sense of the word.

The Spartiates were a hereditary aristocracy.

This was an elite minority who were born into their privilege.

But being a Spartiate was a status that one could lose if you did not properly keep up your civic obligations, which I will be getting into.

Below the Spartiates were the periokoi.

This was a group of free laborers, artists, and craftsmen, your butchers, your bakers, your candlestick makers.

These folks were not slaves, but they also could not participate in the government in any meaningful way.

Nor were they equal to the Spartiates under Spartan law.

The periokoi could serve in the Spartan military, but they were not allowed to be part of one of the elite Spartiate units.

Then there were the Helots.

These were slaves who were bound to the land held by the Spartiates.

As I explained in the last episode, the Helots had originally been the people captured in the aftermath of the Messenian Wars.

They were a permanently enslaved population whose labor powered the entire Spartan state.

And according to some sources, they were also systematically terrorized by the Spartiates.

But hopefully more on that later.

So the government was really by

and for the Spartiates, the relatively small, aristocratic upper crust of Laconian society.

As I explained in the last episode, Sparta had the unique tradition of having two kings descended from two royal houses, the Aegeids and the Europontids, both of whom claimed to be descended from those twin descendants of Heracles, the oracle declared, should rule Sparta concurrently.

More likely, the institution of two kings grew out of the fact that Sparta had originally been two villages, each with their own leader.

When Sparta was engaged in war, the kingly duties seemed to have been split between foreign and domestic.

One king would go on campaign, and another would stay back and manage things in the city.

But despite the poetry of Tertius that celebrated these kings as quote-unquote God-honored, their power seems to have been fairly constrained.

The Spartan kings were the top generals in times of war.

They could propose policy and direct new initiatives, but they didn't really make law.

In fact, the Spartan kings could be overruled by other parts of the government and often were.

A famous example of this can be found during the Peloponnesian War.

This was the massive conflict between Sparta and Athens and their allies in the 4th century BC.

The sources tell us that during a pause in that conflict, one of the Spartan kings, a certain Archidamus II, attempted to preserve the peace between Athens and Sparta and actively argued against resuming the war.

But he was overruled by the rest of his government and was forced to lead his army once again against Athens.

So, who were these people who were overruling the Spartan kings?

The most powerful group were known as the Ephors.

This was a group of five Spartiate men who were elected annually for year-long terms.

The Ephors were part governing council and part supreme court.

Their primary role was to ensure that the kings were living and governing in accordance with the laws of Lycurgus.

And because that shadowy code of laws was not written anywhere, this gave the Ephors quite a lot of power to interpret those laws.

The Ephors essentially guided what the law of the land was, because they were trusted with interpreting and applying an unwritten constitution.

The Ephors actually had the power to arrest and punish the kings of Sparta.

The ancient writers tell us that when embassies were sent to the Spartans, they were presented to the ephors rather than the kings.

The ephors were the guys with the real power.

Now interestingly, both Plato and Aristotle were critical of this institution.

While it could potentially act as a helpful check on the power of the kings, both the famous philosophers argued that the office of ephor was far too easily abused.

Plato called the ephors, quote, tyrannical, and Aristotle used the words, quote, dictatorial and excessive.

This was because, since the Ephors were given a wide latitude to interpret and apply the law, they were able to live above the law in a way that even the kings could not.

So, according to our philosophers, it became common for the Ephors to ignore whichever laws did not suit them.

This usually meant that the Ephors tended to live more luxuriously than the Spartans were apparently supposed to.

Further, Aristotle alleges that the ephors were notorious for taking bribes and were, quote, easily bought.

And here, once again, we have a place where our Spartan mirage begins to lose its shape upon close inspection.

You see, Aristotle tells us that there was a streak of hypocrisy in Spartan society.

While he confirms that the Spartans did indeed have a rigorous set of standards for how each Spartiate was supposed to comport himself, he points out that the Spartans made a game out of getting around the rules.

The Spartiates acted one way in public, and then another way in private.

The Ephors were perhaps the most scandalous example of this.

Aristotle argued that rule-breaking, especially when it came to luxuries, was all too common among the Spartiate class.

The philosopher believed that this was because the expectations for correct Spartiate conduct, quote,

are set to such an unrealistically high standard that the Spartans cannot really live up to them.

In secret, they go around the law and indulge in sensual enjoyments, end quote.

So, if we trust Aristotle, then Spartan austerity and simplicity may have just been for show.

Some ephors may have even dispensed with the righteous appearances.

Aristotle was also critical of how the ephors were elected.

Apparently, all the Spartiates in good standing could vote for the office.

The candidates would be brought up on a stage, and then the assembled crowd would cheer for the candidate they liked the best.

A panel of judges who could not see the crowd or the candidate would then judge who got the biggest cheer.

Aristotle called this system, quote, childish, and rightly pointed out that it was rife for abuse.

The crowd could easily be intimidated or bribed.

And once again, we have Aristotle telling us that the apparently uncorruptible Spartans had a government system that was rife with corruption.

Now, it should be said that while Aristotle's commentary is incredibly useful, he should not be understood as a totally unbiased observer.

He was not technically born in Athens, but from the age of 18 to 38, he lived, studied, and taught in Athens.

In many ways, he was culturally Athenian, which may have made him less predisposed towards the Spartans, Athens' perennial rival and sometimes enemy.

He was also using Sparta in his work to make philosophical points about politics with a capital P.

So we shouldn't read Aristotle as the unvarnished truth.

But he should be thoughtfully considered, because he offers a counter narrative to the Spartan mirage.

The next piece of the Spartan government was the Gerusia.

This was a council of 30 Spartiate men, with two spots permanently reserved for the kings.

The other 28 spots were elected using the same system as that for the Ephors.

To be a member of the Gerusia, you not only needed to be a Spartiate, you also needed to be over 60 years old.

As such, you might sometimes see this group referred to as a council of elders.

The perk to being a member of the Jerusia was that you were elected for life.

New spots only opened up when a former member died.

The Gerusia could act as a jury for important law cases.

They also worked in conjunction with something called the Appella.

This was an assembly open to all male Spartiates 30 years or older.

The Appella was the final and most democratic branch of the Spartan system.

A proposal presented by the Jerusia, Ephors, or the kings would be voted on by this open assembly, who simply shouted loudly for proposals they agreed with.

Members of the Appella could not propose legislation, but they could choose between options presented to them them by the higher branches of the government.

For instance, the choice to go to war would ultimately be voted on by the appella.

Hence, you have examples of Spartan kings being compelled to fight wars that they may not have personally agreed with.

So this was the Spartan system, an interesting combination of monarchy and oligarchy with a few democratic elements sprinkled in.

Now, not all of our ancient commentators were as critical as Aristotle.

Some thought the Spartan system of checks and balances was quite ingenious.

For instance, our Roman writer Plutarch comments that this system, quote, brought safety and due moderation into councils of state.

For before the civil polity was veering and unsteady, inclining at one time to follow the kings towards tyranny, and at another to follow the multitude towards democracy.

But now, by making the power of the Jerusia a sort of ballast for the ship of state and putting her on a steady keel, it achieved the safest and most orderly arrangement.

Now, remember, Plutarch was writing five hundred years after the fact, and he basically ignores or was ignorant of Aristotle's critiques.

But you should know that from the Roman period onward, that rosy summation of the Spartan system is what most people believed about Spartan government.

But I want to underscore the point that a close look at Sparta's institutions does not tell the tale of a particularly free society.

I point this out because there's a historical metanarrative that likes to cast the Spartans as the stalwart defenders of quote-unquote Western freedom.

Setting aside the question of whether any of the ancient Greeks could even be considered Westerners, we should at least recognize that Sparta was an oppressive slave state.

Its government was controlled by a clique of older aristocrats and two royal families.

Its laws could be draconian, but since they were not written down, they were applied in inconsistent and incredibly arbitrary ways.

The Ephors had quite a lot of leeway to interpret and apply the law as they saw fit.

Only the relatively small group of Spartiates enjoyed any civil rights, and even they were constrained by an impossibly rigorous set of moral expectations.

But you could argue, and many have, that there was a special kind of equality among the Spartiates that made their society unique.

Not only were all the Spartiates equal in the eyes of the law, presumably they were all equal in terms of wealth and land as well.

I'll turn again to Plutarch, who explains this situation with the most detail.

In his Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch tells us that the mythical lawgiver, quote,

determined to banish insolence and envy and crime and luxury and those yet more deep-seated and afflictive diseases of the state, poverty and wealth, he persuaded his fellow citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew,

and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality in the means of subsistence, seeking preeminence through virtue alone, assured that there was no other difference or inequality between man and man than that which was established by blame for base action and praise for good ones.

Oh boy, can you believe that was one sentence?

My goodness.

Anyway.

So, Plutarch tells us that to banish the social ills associated with inequality, Lycurgus redistributed the land around Sparta so that every Spartiate was given the exact same share.

We're told that each lot of land was large enough to annually produce 70 bushels of barley for a man and 12 for his wife with a proportionate amount of wine and oil.

Apparently Lycurgus believed that this was the key to the success of the Spartan state.

Plutarch writes,

It's said that on returning from a journey, as he, Lycurgus, traversed the land just after the harvest, and saw the heaps of grain standing parallel and equal to one another, he smiled, and said to them that were by, All Laconia looks like a family estate newly divided among many brothers.

End quote.

So, according to Plutarch, this land reform was one of the key things that gave the Spartiates a unique type of liberty among the Greeks.

They were taken care of by the state.

Their lands were guaranteed, and apparently there was no jockeying among the powerful to grow their estates.

This form of economic organization also acted as a way to guarantee Spartan morality, as now the Spartans, quote, sought preeminence through virtue alone, end quote.

The only way to get to the top of the social hierarchy was to be an awesome dude.

Again, you can see how French revolutionaries gravitated towards these passages in Plutarch.

The Spartans really seemed to have put the egalité

into liberté, egalité, fraternité.

So, what should we make of this alleged Spartan equality?

Was it really true that the Spartans passed down the same set of unbroken family estates for centuries?

and no one ever tried to grow their holdings?

Did all the Spartiates Spartiates control the same amount of wealth?

Well, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll see what we can discover.

One element of Spartan society that was not mythical was their focus on creating incredibly effective heavy infantry units.

The idea that underpinned the Spartan system of land distribution, at least in theory, was that it freed up a Spartiate to become a professional soldier.

The land, and the slaves that worked it, provided a Spartiate with the wealth needed to not only feed himself and his family, but also properly equip himself with the armor and weaponry weaponry expected of a hoplite soldier.

Significantly, it also allowed him to buy his way into a military unit.

Well, in a way.

Allow me to explain.

Being a full Spartiate meant that you were part of something called a sistia.

This was a common mess hall where Spartiate men would eat their meals together.

But beyond the eating, the sistia served a deeper military and social function.

The men in your particular sistia would also be the men in your military unit when you took to the field.

These were literally the people you would be standing shoulder to shoulder with when you formed up in the distinctive phalanx formation.

So again, we have a kernel of truth at the heart of the Spartan warrior myth.

It is true that the social organization of the city was geared towards creating the most cohesive military units possible.

Even the simple act of eating was ritualized in a way that benefited the army.

But to be part of a sistia, you needed to be able to pay your monthly dues.

Each member was expected to contribute a specific amount of food to their common mess hall.

If your farm fell short of the required contributions, you could be kicked out.

Being kicked out of a sistia was a big deal because it meant that you lost your status as a Spartiate and all the privileges and civil rights that came with that status.

Now, in Plutarch's version of Spartan history, Lycurgus' land reforms were supposed to ensure that every Spartiate was fully equipped to make his contributions to the common mess.

In theory, only the mismanagement of a farm could result in a demotion.

But setting aside for now that Lycurgus did not exist, there are a number of questions raised by Plutarch's description of this system of land management.

First, does this mean that the number of Spartiates was always the same?

If there were a finite number of plots of land, or cleroi, as they were called, would that not suggest that there were also a finite number of men who could participate in a common mess hall?

If these plots of land could not be divided and supposedly passed unbroken from father to eldest son, what happened when a man had more than one son?

Did only first-born sons get to be Spartiates?

What happened to all those second and third-born sons?

That's to say nothing of daughters, who, evidence shows, had inheritance rights in classical Sparta.

If a piece of land could be divided, then wouldn't that create a situation where the plots would get smaller and smaller as the generations progressed?

Plutarch does not answer any of these questions.

This is because his

system of equal land distribution is a historical myth, yet another aspect of the Spartan mirage.

The best work on the reality of Spartan wealth and property ownership comes to us from Professor Stephen Hodkinson, whose book, Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta, remains one of the definitive texts on the topic.

If you want to learn more about this, get that book.

Hodkinson points out that a close reading of the Greek sources demonstrate that land and wealth inequality was a feature of Spartan society throughout the the archaic and classical periods.

There are many references to some Spartiates being rich and others being poor.

There were also clearly some families who had amassed impressively large estates while other families were seeing their plots diminished after generations of inheritance and gifts of land as dowries for young women.

Hodginson argues that the idea that the Spartans had unbroken plots of land that went directly from father to eldest son is a myth.

He points out that a collection of ancient sources make it clear that Spartan inheritance worked the way that it did in most of archaic and classical Greece.

This was known as partable inheritance, which meant dividing your estate among your many children.

In the Spartan case, this included daughters, who seemed to have more rights when it came to inheritance than in other Greek city-states.

Hodkinson's most controversial idea is that the Spartans likely had the power to buy and sell property.

Now, he admits that the ancient sources are contradictory on this point, with some saying explicitly that the Spartans could not buy and sell land.

But Hodkinson points out that a handful of lesser-known Greek sources hint that, like most Greeks, the Spartiates had the right to buy and sell things as they pleased.

Even if land deals were considered vulgar, Aristotle points out that the Spartans were allowed to make gifts of land or will the land to whomever they chose.

So it's likely that the Spartans used formal gifts as a face-saving way to make land deals.

Ultimately, according to Aristotle, this created a situation where wealth and land inequality was a serious issue in Sparta during the classical period.

In fact, multiple ancient authors from Aristotle to Thucydides point to this as one of the key reasons for Sparta's decline.

Land was concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer families.

This meant that fewer people had the resources to contribute to the cystia or the common mess.

This resulted in families losing their Spartiate status.

Fewer Spartiates meant a smaller military, or at least a military with a smaller corps of well-trained hoplite heavy infantry.

So, far from being a paragon of equality, Wealth inequality and the concentration of land in fewer hands ultimately was the undoing of classical Sparta.

Now, interestingly, there was a moment in Spartan history when land was radically redistributed, but this happened fairly late on the historical timeline, at least in the scope of ancient Greek history.

During the reign of King Cleomenes III, that's between 235 and 222 BC, an attempt was made to reform Spartan society.

Now, 235 BC was after the classical period.

This was a solid century after the Macedonians conquered Greece.

So, like I said, it was late in the game, historically speaking.

But significantly, the reforms of Cleomenes III included the redistribution of plots of land, known as the cleroi.

Now, this being Sparta, all of these reforms were pitched as being a return to the pure constitution of Lycurgus.

So, it's likely that the story of Lycurgus dividing up all the land equally in Sparta's distant past was developed around 235 to help justify the land policies of Cleomenes III.

In other words, the idea that the Spartiates each held an equal plot of land was an invented tradition that helped justify a relatively short-lived land redistribution scheme from the mid-second century BC.

The truth was that during the Archaic and Classical periods, wealthy Spartans did their utmost to ensure that all of their male children would be able to contribute to the Sistia and enjoy all the rights and privileges afforded to their social social caste.

They did this through carefully arranged marriages and clever land deals.

These were aristocrats doing aristocratic things.

But assuming your young Spartiate had the material wealth needed to participate as a full Spartan peer, to become fully accepted as a Spartan warrior, he would still be expected to pass through the Agoge.

The Agoge was the distinctive system of education for aristocratic Spartiate boys that was meant to shape them into Spartan warriors.

Now, the Agoge has become notorious as one of the most brutal, unsentimental, and ferocious educational systems ever attempted at any point in human history.

Now, given what I've told you so far about our misconceptions about ancient Sparta, you might be expecting me to tell you that the trials of the Agoge were yet another element of the Spartan mirage.

But interestingly, the specifics of the Spartan education system are better attested to in the historical record than many other aspects of their society.

Not only do we once again have Plutarch with a long and detailed description of the Agoge,

we also have a good account from Xenophon, a historian who lived during the classical period.

While Xenophon was technically an Athenian by birth, he lived many years in Sparta, and his own sons may have gone through the Spartan education system.

We also have accounts from Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus, all of whom agree that the demanding agoge was well known throughout Greece during the classical period.

Now, that doesn't mean there aren't some myths about Spartan education.

These are usually details that appear in Plutarch and other later sources that do not appear in our earlier Greek sources.

The author Philip Matisik also cautions us from taking Xenophon entirely at his word, as he may have, quote, made the Spartan education system seem more unpleasant than it was, as to deter other Greeks from putting something similar in place, end quote.

That's an interesting point.

Xenophon may have thought that the Spartan education system was so beneficial, he may have purposely made it sound nasty so other states wouldn't try to emulate it.

That way, Sparta could keep its edge.

But ultimately, Matisik admits that, quote, given the unreliable, biased, or anachronistic sources and the total silence of the Spartans themselves, an account of a Spartan upbringing has to be somewhat hypothetical, end quote.

So, what was this hypothetical education?

Well, we're told that at the age of seven, boys from the Spartiate caste were separated from their families and were organized into small groups, or classes.

This group would become the boys' new family.

They would live, learn, sleep, eat, and do all activities together.

A new entrant into the Agoge would be given a single cloak that the boy would be expected to wear every day no matter the weather.

That one cloak could only be replaced once a year.

By the same token, the boys could not wear shoes or sandals of any kind and had to go barefoot at all times.

All of this was done in an attempt to toughen the boys up.

Now, interestingly, some modern scholars believe that the boys were not as isolated from their biological family as some of the sources would have us believe.

It's possible that the boys were able to go home to their families during religious festivals and certain holidays, and there were a lot of religious festivals in ancient Sparta.

Once home, the boys would likely get a clean change of clothes and would enjoy the comforts of an aristocratic life.

But this remains disputed.

At school, the boys were instructed in the basics of reading and mathematics, as well as a curriculum that included singing and dancing lessons.

In fact, an often under-discussed part of the Spartan experience was how much singing and dancing was a part of their culture.

I'm not making this up.

Other Greeks often commented on what lovely dancers the Spartans were.

So...

I'm saying that if 300 was going to be really accurate, it really should have been a musical.

We needed more Spartan song and dance numbers.

Really reflect the culture, you know?

Now, exactly how much time was spent on literacy and numeracy is debated.

Plutarch laments that the Spartans were underserved in this regard and as a result were barely literate.

But most scholars believe that that is an exaggeration.

Still, there's no denying that the Agogai focused most heavily on physical education.

The boys competed in foot races, wrestling, and boxing matches.

They were trained with the javelin and the discus, and then eventually the sword and shield.

So they started out as little Olympic athletes and then were steadily molded into soldiers.

One thing that we're told from both Xenophon and Plutarch was that the boys were purposefully underfed.

Each group of boys was responsible for gathering enough food to feed everyone at their common table.

According to Plutarch, it was up to the boys to find this food.

Now, Xenophon tells us that the school prefects gave the boys rations to live on, but the rations were deliberately skimpy.

According to Xenophon, this was done so that, quote, later in life, they would be able to keep going on an empty stomach if the occasion demanded, and if ordered to live on meager rations, that they would be able to do so without any dramatic changes to their diet, end quote.

So, we're told that the boys were encouraged to steal whatever they could to supplement their meager rations.

This was done to teach them stealth and hopefully help them bond more tightly as a group.

However, stealing was still technically against the rules, so the trick was to steal without getting caught.

If a boy was apprehended, he could expect a severe beating, which, by the way, was the punishment for most infractions at the Agogae.

Now, Plutarch gives us a particularly memorable story about these thieving Spartan students.

He He tells us that on one particular occasion, a Spartan boy managed to catch a fox that he planned to kill and eat with his comrades.

After catching the animal, he stuffed the live creature under his cloak and headed back to his dormitory.

On the way back, the boy encountered an adult who wanted to speak to the lad.

So the boy had to stop and carry on a conversation while the live fox was still pressed against his belly.

Plutarch tells us that the boy, quote, suffered the animal to tear out his bowels with its teeth and claws and died rather than have his theft detected.

End quote.

Yeah,

somehow this kid stoically allowed himself to be torn apart by a fox while keeping a straight face.

As you might have guessed, this story is almost certainly a historical myth.

It only appears in Plutarch, and even that late period Roman writer identifies this as a quote-unquote story that he has been told.

But tales like this demonstrate how the potentially true report that Spartan students were underfed and encouraged to scavenge can be transformed into the Spartans being impossibly tough super-soldiers from from a young age.

It's not enough that they could subsist on light rations.

They needed to be the kind of people who could have their guts torn out without flinching.

Another Roman-era source, Pausanias, gives us more colorful tales of the boys training and then fighting boars.

He also tells us of the boys training puppies and then sacrificing them to Aries, the god of war.

But once again, we have a situation where these stories only appear in a very late source, and therefore are likely not true.

What our earlier sources agree on was that there was a culture of violence in the Agogai.

Now,

I think I need to give a warning here.

This final section is going to deal with the abuse of children, both physically and sexually.

So if that is not something you are interested in hearing about or you're listening with younger folks, you may want to skip ahead about three to five minutes.

Corporal punishment was a huge part of this education system.

Not only did teachers regularly deal out beatings, but the older boys were encouraged to taunt, intimidate, and physically harass the younger ones.

What we would today call systemic bullying was a feature of the Agogai.

The idea was that this would give the young Spartans thick skin.

Further, when a boy was 12 years old, he was paired with an older teenager or a young man with whom he was expected to have a close relationship.

Now, interestingly, Xenophon assures his readers that these relationships were totally chaste, writing that they, quote, resemble that of a parent and child, or brotherly love being totally without a carnal element.

Of course, it does not surprise me that some people will just not believe this, end quote.

Now, that last bit of the quote is very telling.

You see, Xenophon is acknowledging that in most Greek city-states, these types of relationships between preteen boys and older men were very common, and they almost always had a sexual component.

Now, obviously today, we would recognize this as childhood sexual abuse, so I do not want to be flippant about this.

But it should be understood that this type of arrangement was common throughout Greece in this period.

It was considered proper for the older party to act as a mentor to the younger boy.

The older man would help make introductions and smooth the way for the younger to join the ranks of aristocratic society.

In Sparta, the older partner would usually nominate the younger man to be initiated into a common mess hall.

In other words, you needed one of these relationships to become a full Spartiate.

Now, this is not to justify an arrangement that was undoubtedly sexually exploitative.

I only want to explain how it was viewed by the ancient Greeks.

Now, could it have been, as Xenophon insists, that Sparta was the one Greek city-state where these relationships were totally non-sexual?

Most modern experts think that is pretty unlikely.

There's also some evidence that suggests that when young Spartan men were first married, they could often feel uncomfortable with their female partners, because all of their sexual experiences up to that point had been same sex.

Spartan brides could sometimes be dressed in a more masculine masculine way to better suit the tastes of their husbands.

By the end of the Agoge, a Spartan had learned how to live a military-style existence.

He had been bonded to a military-style squadron.

He had trained his body and had learned how to use spear, sword, and shield.

He knew Spartan battle tactics, could form up in a phalanx, and could execute basic maneuvers.

With his education complete, he could join a common mess hall.

But once he was an adult, the average Spartiate lived the life of a leisured aristocrat, albeit a leisured aristocrat who fought.

In this way, the Spartans remind me of those amateur athletes from the early modern Olympics.

They were products of an elite boarding school system that both terrorized them but also gave them a shared sense of class identity.

They were able to be great all-around athletes with an incredibly specialized set of skills because they did not have to work.

They spent most of their lives hanging out with their friends at their social club, singing, dancing, and also training for battle.

The Spartiates were slave-owning aristocrats whose hobby was warfare.

But even then, were the Spartans really that much better than the other Greeks when it came to waging war?

We shouldn't forget that Sparta's most celebrated military achievement, the Battle of Thermopylae, saw their army completely wiped out by the invading Persians.

Did the Spartans really save Greece at Thermopylae?

Or are they just history's most celebrated losers?

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will conclude our look at the ancient Spartans.

Just want to remind everyone that we're going to be doing that fun questions and comments extra episode when we are done this series.

So, if you've got any questions about the ancient Spartans or things popped into your mind as you were listening today, please send them to me in an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

Or if you are a patron, go to the chat that I have set up specifically for questions and comments for this series and put your questions and comments there.

Speaking of Patreon, I need to give some very special shout outs.

Big ups to Michael Willis, to Thomas Ellis, to Casey Pergoson, to Christopher Wurst, to Caleb Johnson, to Nuno Apalahoo Ooh, that one's tricky, and I believe you may be Portuguese.

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All of these folks have decided to pledge at $5

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So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support.

I just want to assure everyone that the long promised extra on the Bronze Age collapse is coming when I complete this Sparta series.

I will finally have a little bit of elbow room to finally finish that off.

So I'm hoping to have that to you very soon.

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All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

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