The Spartan
Enigma.
Part One
For someone
like me, who writes factually inspired fiction based in the Ancient world, it
strikes me, not how much we know of our ancient ancestors, but how little we
know about so much of them, and never more so when considering the enigmatic
Spartans, famed throughout the ancient world, yet, even to them, they were as
mysterious as the gods themselves. To modern historians and Archaeologists, the
Spartans present a whole field of science and study in itself, to which a
person could – and have dedicated their entire lives and still not scratch the
surface, and what we do know, from our Twenty-First Century perspectives are fascinating,
for no other culture in Europe at that time endured. It was a culture of
contradiction and irony, stuck in an archaic past that endured for centuries.
Rising to become the most powerful military power in Europe at the time, and
not by design or ambitious will, for the Spartans were content with what they
already had, but through war with her bitterest enemy – the Athenian Empire,
which Sparta defeated in 404 BCE, suddenly finding they had an empire on their
hands.
As superpowers
go, their decline was rapid and unexpected, but Sparta’s legacy lives on to
this day.
Following
the Greco-Persian Wars – 499-449 BCE, the mind-set of the Greeks began to
change in very different directions – at least they did beyond the Eurotas
Valley, the homeland of the Spartans. Athens, whose city had been sacked and
destroyed by the Persians in 480 BCE, emerged from the war with an empire and a
league of solid allies and colonies in Greece and Asia Minor, the Delian League
– Sparta, who held command of the war until the Persian threat was dealt with,
remained outside of this league, and withdrew from the idea of empire and
expansionism when the Athenians wanted to press on with the war despite the
Persians being soundly defeated by the Greek coalition forces.
Sparta did not pursue policies of conquest
and had very few overseas colonies, or interest in anything or anyone outside of
their insulated bubble. Sparta’s only territories beyond the Eurotas were
Kynouria on the Gulf of Argolis, and Messene in the west and Taranto in Puglia
Italy. Her main overseas ally however, was the powerful state of Syracuse on
Sicily, founded by Corinth around 734 and 733 BCE.
Like Athens with her Delian League, the
Spartans had their own complicated system of alliances, primarily among the
Dorian Greeks of the Peloponnesus. The alliances were very different from that
in the Delian League. Athens’ allies were tributary, taxed in food supplies and
other essentials, wine, olive oil, war ships, men to man them, and men in times
of war, raw materials such as iron ore, copper ore, tin, gold, silver, marble
and so forth. Consequently, Athens became a very wealthy city state and
extremely powerful, especially with her navy, as Thucydides tell us through the
words of the Spartan King Archidamos, the Athenians “have an extraordinary familiarity with the sea…” A familiarity no
other [Greek] state could match.
In essence and simply put, if you wanted to
belong to the happy chappies club of the Delian League, you had to pay for it.
Sparta had no tributary allies as such. It
was a hostile world out there, and the Eurotas was vulnerable these days of
high tech triremes and sophisticated soldiering, and it pays to have loyal
friends who can come and give you some muscle when you need it. The Spartan
League was based more on promise than substance, though when it did have
substance, it was awesome and impressive. The Spartan system of alliances were
created individually, tailor measured you might say with each state they had
alliances, mostly localised to the Peloponnesian peninsular.
Simply put, the alliances were this. Should
any ally of Sparta be attacked by a foreign power, Sparta would come to their
aid, should the tables be turned, and Sparta be attacked by an enemy, she could
call upon all her allies to come to
her aid. There were no tributes paid to Sparta as a condition to her alliances.
It wasn’t just the outside world the Spartans
feared, it was the internal world they inhabited that worried them most – the
enslaved indigenous populations of Messene, Lakedaemonia and Kynouria known by
the Spartans as Helots (Prisoners of war) who were subjugated and reduced to
serfdom by the invading (migrating) Dorians, possibly from Crete and other
islands in the Mediterranean known as the Return of the Herakleidae. There are a number of theories
about how Doric Greeks came to inhabit the Peloponnese, some theories have it
as an invasion of military conquest, though any evidence of this is sketchy at
best. Many historians now believe that the Dorian migration took place over a
number of decades and centuries, rather than through a war of conquest.
Archeological evidence suggests that the Dorians first settle the Eurotas
valley between 1000 and 900 BCE, some two hundred years after the estimated
date of the Trojan War and collapse of the Mycenaean kingdom, which in itself
was likely a slow demise as with all empires and superpowers, before and since
and to come. It is possible that the decline of the Mycenaeans left the void
into which the Dorians flowed and flourished.
It was in the 730’s BCE when Lykurgos (Lat. Lycurgus) the Lawgiver
arrived on the scene and transformed the farming communities of Sparta into a
military state, an institution which lasted until the Roman invasion in 146
BCE, and some of its institutions, such as the Agōgē endured, albeit with a
couple of periods when it was abolished and reestablished and underwent radical
reforms, the Agōgē survived well into the Christian era.
The city of Sparta grew from a cluster of five villages – Pilane, Selakia (Selacia)
Aigitida, Phari, Amyclae (Amikles) follow years of squabbling, warring and lawlessness, around 8th
Century BCE, and it is likely that the non-mythological origins of the dual
monarchy of Agiad and Eurypontid dynasties came out of the political
settlements when the villages merged into the un-walled sprawl of Sparta.
The Spartan citizen polis was divided into four
strata, and by distinct, I do not mean unequal by any means. Beginning at the
top with the Spartan aristocrats, then, what we would today call the middle
class, ordinary Spartans of modest means (the Homoioi, the Equals, a term that
equally applies to aristocrats, but for the sake of avoiding confusion, I will
refer to this group as the Homoioi. After this group came the Mothakes,
(singular mothax) meaning stepbrother/s.
After the Spartiates came the non-citizen
groups: Helots, Perioikoi. (see below)
The
Spartiates, structure and society
a.
The Aristocrats: The Aristocrats were as the name might
imply, the political and commanding elites, usually inherently wealthy through
the ownership of land, livestock, crop yields etc. They may have had monetary
wealth as well, though strictly speaking coined money was “officially” considered
an unclean and corrupting influence and no coins were struck in Lakedaemonia
consequently until the reign of Areus I of the Agiad dynasty 309 – 265 BCE, the
official Spartan currency being iron spits known as obol, (pleural oboloi) literally spit/s of iron, which took
the form of short iron rods. The ancient Greek coin obol comes from this
pre-coinage Greek system of bartering. It is also known that strips of silver,
gold and other metals and ores were used as currency in Hellenic and Classical Sparta,
though law forbade the hoarding of money, coined or otherwise, but I think we
can safely assume this may have been the law, but not the practice, and I
believe it was probably something the state may have turned a blind eye to,
providing the citizen (Homoioi) maintaining the outward façade at least of
uniform frugality and self-disciplined austerity. There was a telling saying at
Sparta: “where the threshold begins, Sparta ends.” When analysed, this implies
ostentation and luxury may have existed in many aristocratic houses, possibly
through the auspices of their wives (See Spartan girls & women below). Indeed, many contemporaneous outside
sources say that the Spartans behaved quite differently when they were abroad,
than how they did when in Lakedaemon, wearing luxurious robes, and indulging in
extravagances expected more of Periclean Athenian aristocrats than those of the
austere Spartans.
It is likely, in order to indulge in these
extravagances, that Spartans hoarded material wealth in coined and uncoined
metals of value, and as pointed out in my novel, “Rise of the Wolf” available
at Amazon in paperback or Kindle formats, King Pleistonax of the Agiadae took a
bribe of money, some ten talents of gold, from Pericles to bring to an end the
First Peloponnesian War, 460 – 445 BCE. In consequence to this, Pleistonax was
exiled from Sparta following a trial in the Gerousia (the Spartan Senate) and a
number of his officers, including the father of Gylippos, Kleandridas
(Cleandridas if you prefer) were sentenced to death for treating with the
enemy.
b.
The Homoioi: may not have been born into the privileged upper
echelon, it did not exclude them from entering it, as I said earlier, wealth
was measured in land and the chattel thereof, not how much gold you’ve got
tucked under your bed. Your ordinary Jo Sparti would have received exactly the
same state education as their aristocratic counterparts, although, the
aristocrats may have had a comprehensive academic education, and there are some
theories that outside sophists may have existed within Sparta and may have
taught the sons of wealthy Spartans at the Grammata,
(see Spartan Education below).
c.
The Mothakes: The Mothakes (stepbrothers) were a more
clearly defined group, though there is a great deal of ambiguity as to just who
qualified as a Mothax, Mothakes and Neodamodeis, the Mothakes, singular mothax,
were possibly of impure blood, that his one of their parents was not Spartiate,
a foreigner, helot or perioikoi (dwellers about). Or they may have been of pure
blood, but too poor to pay their fees, and one theory put across regarding
Gylippos, is that he was reduced to the status of mothax following the
treachery of his father Kleandridas, thus disenfranchised to some degree,
leaving them dependent upon the sponsorship of wealthy Spartiates who would pay
their fees and mess bills, and make them the stepbrothers of their sons to pass
through the education system. There are some very famous Spartan commanders who
were from this socio-political group of Spartiates, Lysander and, as mentioned
above, Gylippos to name but two.
In my novel, “Rise of the Wolf” my
characterisation of Lysander is as a Mothax, (as indeed he was) the son of
Aristokleitos (as indeed he was) an impoverished Spartiate warrior of the
Herakleidae, or house of Herakles (Heracles), making him of noble blood, making
him a descendant of Heracles (Hercules if you prefer). There the known facts
end and speculation begins. “Rise of the
Wolf” I have made Lysander’s mother is a helot to add another layer to my
characterisation of him. Just who his mother was is unknown to history, but in
reality, it is more likely she and Aristokleitos were both pure-blooded
Spartans, possibly so impoverished they were unable to afford to put their sons
through the education, though Lysander’s brother, Libys, is nowhere described
as a mothax in contemporaneous sources, so the family fortunes may have
improved, possibly through early successes of the young Lysander. The literal
meaning of mothax (pleural Mothakes) means foster brother. The Third Century BCE
historian Phylarchos, tells us that the Mothakes are free, but not
Lakedaemonians, but undergo the same upbringing, ergo, they go to the infamous
Rearing (Agōgē. The period we are in, there is no record of the word Agōgē, and may not have occurred until
sometime later. Whatever the word was to describe the Spartan education is not
known to history, at least at the moment).
There has been some argument among modern
scholars, as to whether or not, once released from the charge of the Paedonomos (the magistrate in charge of
the Rearing/Agōgē) (see education below) the mothakes
became citizen Spartiates – others think it was only granted later, possibly by
vote at his syssition (common mess) (see
Syssition below) if he was
considered worthy enough, and his eating and drinking companions would be the
best to know his character.
d.
The
Neodamodeis: (new demos
men) were manumitted helots who served in Sparta’s army as heavy and light
infantry, and appear to have been well trained, though not reared in the
education system, probably in their own divisions, which might account for the
wildly varying estimates to the manpower of the Spartan army. The Neodamodeis
first appear in the record in 420 BCE in the written accounts of Thucydides in
his “History of the Peloponnesian War”
as the helot army inaugurated by Brasidas from the helot population to serve as
hoplites and an expedition force in the Second Peloponnesian war, around which “Rise
of the Wolf” is centred. This helot army earned a formidable reputation and the
respected title of being “Brasadians”
a place of great honour. The Neodamodeis were probably chosen from the most
loyal helots to Sparta, probably the helots of Lakedaemonia rather than from
Messene or Kynouria.
Sparta’s new-borns v Athenian new-borns
I will
conclude this part of my blog with a brief analysis of the state education and
the raising of the young.
Before the
sciences of sociology, anthropology and psychiatry were ever conceived of, the
Spartans “may” have practiced eugenics on a disturbing scale. (I say may have
tentatively, as new archaeological evidence brings some of what I am going to
say regarding the judging of infants into question) Now, before I go on to tell
you about why and how they killed their own offspring who didn’t make the
grade, it’s important to know one thing about the Ancients, be them Greek,
Persian, Roman or Celtic. They did not go all soppy-eyed with children – maybe
mum and dad did, but the man or woman in the street could not have cared two
hoots for your little adorables. In fact,
perhaps ironically, the only society that did take a keen interest in the
development of their children were the Spartans, and I think I can say with
absolute confidence, that not until the mid-Nineteenth Century, did a society
ever care more for their children. But I digress...
There would have been many reasons not to
want a child in the ancient world, mostly dependant on your social caste or
rank. There were roughly four main classes of people in the ancient world (beyond
Lakedaemonia) generically speaking. The aristocracy; kings, princes, oligarchs
and politicians fit into this grouping in general, like today, they were few in
number but very powerful, and conducted the fate of the less favoured like
puppet masters. Below these elites, you had the merchant classes. They were, as
the name suggests, the businessmen of the ancient world (I say businessmen
because women, as you will see, figured very little in your average ancient
city state, again, Sparta being the exception to this rule). These merchants
were as vital to ancient economies as they are to our own economies today, and
in places like Athens, they could thrive and prosper and even become powerful figures
themselves. Below the merchants were the hoi-poloi,
the free masses, the working classes, who had their own social echelons, much
as today, with lowers and uppers, depending how much you earned. These
accounted for small businesses – bakers, butchers, carpenters, blacksmiths,
innkeepers, pimps etc. after them the employed workers, who might do anything
from working on a fishing boat to litter-bearing, prostitution etc. For them
work was difficult with long hours and eye-wateringly reward. Below the hoi-poloi were the slaves, the absolute
bottom of the social order, slaves had no rights in the main, and were
politically considered on a par with beasts and farm animals. Disenfranchised
and unprotected by law. A master could do pretty much whatever he liked with
his slaves, and many masters did just that. Of course, there were as many, if
not more people who treated their slaves well, both because it made commercial
good sense to keep your slaves healthy and even happy, and because the ancients
were every bit as human as we like to think of ourselves today, close bonds and
relationships often developed between slaves and masters/mistresses, and manumission
was a possible and is attested to many times in contemporaneous literature,
grave markers and graffiti.
So, looking at these social strata from top
to bottom, it is unlikely an aristocrat would reject a child, unless he thought
he was not the father, the child was sickly or disabled, or he had a daughter
when he wanted a son as he could afford to raise children. We might say the
same of the merchant classes, at least the successful ones, but as with the
aristocrats, there would be occasions they would reject a baby or child.
Mostly, according to the majority of
archaeological evidence and current thinking, most rejected children would have
come from the bottom strata of society, the low paid or unemployed hoi-poloi and the slaves for very
rational reasons – at least to societies which had no orphanages or social
welfare. Babies were expensive then as they are now, and if you were eking a
living of just a few obol or a few drachma a month, then you barely had enough
to keep yourself and the family you already had alive. So there would have been
economic reasons for rejecting an infant. Now back then, there were no lines of
people wanting to adopt babies, to the contrary, adoption would have been as
rare as rocking-horse dung. You couldn’t sell your baby into slavery either,
who wants a slave who can’t sweep the courtyard or serve wine or plough a
field? No-one, that’s who. So there you are, as poor as poor can get, a brood
of kids already, (contraception was very crude and certainly no guarantee of
not getting pregnant, You can’t even afford to feed and clothe them properly as
it is. So what do you do? Well, you take the unwanted baby out of the city, to
some hillside, or the city dump, you cry your eyes out all the way most likely,
you even string some religious talismans together and put it round her neck (I
say her, because it’s ten-times more likely your child is a girl) and you leave
her out to the elements to expose her, putting her at the mercy of predatory
animals like foxes, rats, wild dogs and wolves, but there’s nothing else to be
done, and you can tell yourself or hope to yourself, that some kindly stranger
happened on your baby and took it home to care for and love. You can’t kill her
yourself, that’s against nature more than leaving her out on some cold mountain
or in the city dump. It was a sad end to an unfulfilled beginning, and I do not
think the ancients took such decisions lightly. We are, when all is said and done,
the children of our own times, so I say do not be too rash to judge.
Girls presented two big problems to Ancient
Greek society. Firstly, they were disenfranchised and utterly subservient to
their menfolk, and there was very little a woman was permitted to do. Many
Aristocratic women at Athens and other places, were even forbidden to leave the
house, and lived in a certain part of the house away from hubby with the
children and female companions if they were lucky, and they wore veils and long
robes – yes, Hollywood has it completely wrong about women in the Ancient
world. Sure, there were some strong and charismatic women, women who had
influence over powerful husbands, but these were very few and far between and
usually came from very powerful families. On the whole, Greek society, like
most others at the time would have made a modern misogynist seem like a saints.
A husband could beat his women, he could even
kill them, sell them or prostitute them for money. They were forbidden from
owning property or engaging in business activities, though this only applied to
upper echelons of Greek society, women of the hoi-poloi were largely ignored
and did servile jobs and often prostituted themselves, and their children –
male and female.
The Athenians and others beyond the Eurotas Valley
may have self-righteously judged and bewailed the cruelty of the Spartans, who
dropped their unwanted babies off the side of a mountain, or into an
underground chasm. But is it this act of infanticide that instils horror in the
ancient Greeks beyond the Eurotas, who left their unwanted babes to be exposed
or eaten alive by some wild animal outside the city? Or is it the fact that it
was male children the Spartans so callously hurled off of their sacred
mountain?
Sons, unlike daughters were valuable, both
socially and economically. A son was almost a long term investment. For the son
of a freeborn Greek, the world was his oyster, and the close bonds of family
also meant he would one day contribute to the family and inherit the family
wealth. He might marry well, in which case, daddy will get a nice dowry from
the daughter’s family, yes, you really did have to pay to get someone to marry
your daughter, a custom still carried on in the West today in the tradition of
the bride’s family paying for the wedding. And some cultures still have the
dowry system in place as an integral part of their social mores. No dowry, no
marriage.
Having a son in the ancient world was also a
status symbol, if I can coin the phrase. Sons are handsome, and strong. The
athletes who so titillated the Greeks at the gymnasia.
Now you may be thinking the ancients were
heartless so-and-so’s, devoid of love and compassion. As I said above, I do not
believe this is so.
Killing your child was not an easy option,
nor would it have been a preferred option, and without the help of any sort of
welfare, it was often, the only option. Let that be a warning to us all in our
age of welfare cuts.
Let’s say bye-bye to Athens for now, and go
back to those mysterious and vilified Lakedaemonians, brooding menacing beyond
their rugged mountains, locked into their long narrow valley named for the
River nymph Eurotas. It is a land famed in mythology for heroes and demigods, a
land where men are suckled on iron and blood, and raised on a whip’s end.
So, you’re a Spartan, and your wife, who you
only see once or twice a year, and then only through clandestine means, has
given you a baby son. Okay, well, as at Athens, the preferred gender is male,
especially among the Spartans, who are born to serve in the Spartan army. But
just for the moment, let’s say the gods did not favour you, and you have been
given a daughter – what are you thinking, off the mountain with her? – Get out
of here! The Spartans did not expose or kill their daughters without a damn
good reason. Illness, infirmity, disability, yes, they would have exposed her,
or possibly hurled her into the “deposits” AKA “Apothetae? Place of Rejection” but if she is healthy, then she will
be raised in her own school with other girls, educated and indoctrinated with
her duty to Sparta by bearing strong sons. A woman who gave birth to a son was a
highly regarded by the citizenry. And
for strong sons to be made, both mum and dad had to be fit and strong, so a
great deal of emphasis was placed on physical exercise, and indeed, Spartan
women were considered strong, tall and beautiful. So if you had a daughter, her
odds of survival as a Spartan girl were a heck of a lot better than they were
for an Athenian girl, or any other girl in any other place anywhere in the
known world.
Now let us suppose the gods were generous and
gave you a son. At Sparta there was no greater joy than the birth of a son. It
was a community thing, and though you may not have had the cooing and soppy
smiles, the man and woman on the streets would have congratulated you and patted
you on the back and wished all the favours the gods could give to your fit and
healthy son, who will one day make a formidable warrior, and you would’ve been
the proudest dad in town.
But, before you can take your little sprog
out in public, he must first undergo three tests, tests which will have his
life hanging on fate’s fine thread.
First, after he is born, he will be bathed in
wine, possibly undiluted wine, which is many times stronger than modern bottled
wine, and acidic. Prayers would have been chanted in thanksgiving. Once the
wine bathing was over, the baby was laid on the threshold of the house – which
maybe a residual of a time when the Spartans exposed children, before they
became a militaristic superpower.
So you’ve done all this, and the next
morning, your son has survived the night without getting eaten by wolves or
freezing to death. So far so good then. But now comes the third and most
dangerous test, the tests of the Deposits,
which lies some distance up in the Eurotas Mountains and is a deep and
spectacularly beautiful gorge/or a chasm where criminals were hurled, in my
novel “Rise of the Wolf” the Deposits are a gorge.
Once the 5 Elders possibly the ephors, (annually
elected magistrates who had extraordinary powers). Your son is either
considered worthy, or unworthy to undergo the education. If he was considered
unworthy through infirmity, or weakness, he was thrown over the chasm top
certain death. If he was deemed worthy, he was given back to his father, and
ordered that the baby be raised for seven years at home, and in the seventh
year of life, the child would be inducted into the educational system.
·
Note: New
Archaeological evidence brings the Apothetae
as the place where infants were killed into doubt.
Part Two of
this blog – to follow - the Agōgē, the Helots, Women in Spartan society and the
Spartan army.
