Why the Sparta you know Never Existed

Around the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the famous scholar and biographer Plutarch collected hundreds of sayings associated with notable Spartans. They make for colorful reading, as a few examples will illustrate. King Agis once said, Spartans do not ask how numerous their opponents are. They ask, where are they? When King Cleomenes was asked why he hadn't eliminated the people of Argos, who had often attacked Sparta, he replied, Oh, we would never kill them all. We need them to train our boys. Asked how far the borders of Sparta extended, King Agisilaus held up a spear and exclaimed, As far as this can reach. The two most famous sayings in Plutarch's collection are attributed to Leonidas, the Spartan king immortalized by his last stand against the Persians at Thermopylae. When someone told Leonidas that the Persian arrows blotted out the sun, he said, Then won't it be nice to fight in the shade? After Xerxes demanded that the Spartans surrender their weapons, Leonidas answered, Come and take them. Plutarch's collection epitomizes the popular image of Sparta, a society of hardened soldiers and their selfless wives, trained and eternally ready to fight and die for their country. Though idealized and partially misleading, this image has some basis in fact. For two centuries, Sparta was the most powerful, most famous, and most feared city-state in the Greek world. Spartans led the coalition that broke the gargantuan armies of the Persian king of kings. Spartans destroyed the Athenian empire and burned its fleets of flashing triremes. Twice, Spartans dared to invade Persia itself. Even after Spartan power dwindled, the Spartan legend continued to grow. Ancient observers marveled that a few thousand citizen-warriors, living in a cluster of villages in a single mountain-rimmed valley, had shaped the whole course of Greek history. They were even more impressed by Sparta's stability, which they regarded as an expression of Spartan self-discipline. That discipline was taught. At age seven, the sons of Spartan citizens were enrolled in a state-sponsored education system. They learned to read and write, possibly from private tutors, but their training was primarily and relentlessly physical. The boys lived in communal barracks, where they slept on heaps of dry rushes. Even in winter, they were forbidden to wear shoes or any clothing besides a single thin tunic. They were fed little, and expected to forage and steal for sustenance. Around the age of twenty, young Spartans joined one of the communal dining halls. These were close-knit organizations, each consisting of about fifteen men. Members contributed a set amount of food and wine to the common table, and dined together almost every evening of their adult lives. They also went to war together, since the members of a dining hall formed the core of the Spartan army's smallest unit. Spartans were eligible for military service from the ages of twenty to sixty. When not on campaign, they were expected to maintain their fitness and readiness for battle. A Spartan's service to the state only ended with his death, when he was lowered into a simple pit and covered with his red military cloak. Only men who died in battle were allowed a headstone, and only one inscription was permitted, the name of the deceased, followed by the words, IN WAR. Although their reputation for austerity, as we'll see in a moment, is not entirely deserved, the Spartans claimed to shun all luxuries. For those of us who aren't burdened with such scruples, there's this video's sponsor, Bespoke Post, a service that delivers boxes filled with premium products ranging from outdoor gear to live oysters. 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They ran, threw, wrestled, and danced, wearing the loose clothes, and earned them the nickname, at least in Athens, of thigh-flashers. Both these garments and public athletics, however, were set aside at marriage. Raising children was seen as a service to the state. Women who died in childbirth, like men who fell in battle, were honored with a tombstone. The duty of producing strong sons outweighed all other obligations, to the point that it was considered acceptable for a Spartan to ask a man whose strength or courage he admired to sleep with his wife, and so produce a better son than he could himself. Early in their history, when they were conquering their territory, the Spartans had made the inhabitants of some nearby towns perioikoi, free but deprived of citizen rights, and had reduced the mass of the rural population to the status of helots, serfs bound to the land and compelled to surrender their crops to Spartan masters. Each Spartan citizen went to war with a helot's servant, and bands of helots were sometimes employed as light infantry. In times of peace, however, the helots were constantly reminded of their subjugation. Helot men were sent into the dining halls, where they were forced to humiliate themselves by getting drunk and singing crude songs. Those judged insubordinate or dangerously talented were murdered. Every year, in fact, Spartan officials formally declared war on the helots, so that they could be killed with impunity. Despite these brutalities, Sparta has often been admired. To many Greeks and Romans, and to those among their intellectual descendants who admired order and hierarchy, the Spartan citizen-soldiers seemed to epitomize the civic virtues of obedience, courage, and patriotism. In several key respects, however, the Sparta applauded since antiquity bears little relation to historical reality. Since the Spartans themselves produced no historians or philosophers, all ancient sources on which our understanding of their society is based were written by outsiders. Sources contemporary with the Spartan apogee in the 5th and 4th centuries BC vary considerably in tone, and do not present a fully coherent picture. And sources produced after Sparta's decline, above all, Plutarch's ever-popular Lives, tend to idealize. The biases and limitations of these sources, and through them, the propaganda of the Spartans themselves, have simplified, obscured, and misled. Our ancient sources, for example, emphasize the austerity of the Spartan citizen-soldiers. They wore rough cloaks. They gnawed on barley bread and guzzled pig blood soup. Their dishes were clay, their money was iron, and their houses were hewn from rough wooden beams. Citizens were forbidden to own gold jewelry, engage in commerce, or practice a trade. Their days, we are told, were spent preparing for war. The fact remains, however, that Spartan citizens were a leisure class. Each citizen possessed an estate, always substantial, and sometimes very large, that often produced a profitable surplus. Their cloaks might be rough, but their hair was carefully combed and dressed. Their meals might begin with barley and broth, but they usually ended with delicacies. Their houses might look rough-hewn, but their interiors were often filled with rich furniture and stocks of foreign coins. Their preparations for war were not constant military drills, but leisurely hunting expeditions and exercises in the gymnasium. Some even found themselves with the time and money to dabble in chariot racing, the most expensive of all Greek sports. From a cursory reading of the ancient sources, it might be assumed that the Spartans were invincible in battle. There is no disputing that they were highly effective. Though not professionals like Roman legionaries, Spartan hoplites tended to be better trained and far more disciplined than their opponents, who were usually inexperienced volunteers. To other Greeks, there were few sights more terrifying than a Spartan army marching onto the battlefield in perfect order. In combination with their reputation for victory at all costs, fed above all by the legend of Thermopylae, the Spartans' discipline made them formidable opponents, and allowed them to go undefeated in any major land battle for almost two centuries at the height of their prestige. Yet the Spartans did lose, sometimes in spectacular fashion. They were frequently bested in their early clashes with neighboring city-states, and were capable of surrendering a large part of their army, even at the height of their power. From the mid-4th century BC onward, they suffered a series of defeats catastrophic enough to undermine the very bases of their power. Afterward, they never again won a major battle. Nor, contrary to what you might assume, was Sparta the antithesis of Athens. The laws and institutions of both Sparta and Athens were shaped to maintain the privileges and encourage the cohesion of a relatively small class of male citizens. For all its infamous ferocity, the Spartan system of physical education was complemented by a rather Athenian-looking regimen of literary studies. And regimented, though aspects of their lives undoubtedly were, adult Spartan citizens lived much like wealthy Athenians, hunting, exercising at the gymnasium, and dining with their fellow citizens. The Spartans attributed their laws and institutions to Lycurgus, a reformer said to have lived in the distant past. Although modern historians agree that he almost certainly never existed, the date and purpose of the reforms associated with his name remain controversial. It seems most likely that the state-sponsored education system, dining halls, and other iconic features of classical Sparta emerged quite late, possibly not until the eve of the Persian Wars. It also seems likely that the underlying goal of these reforms was not military effectiveness. Sparta's culture of austerity may have been nothing more, and nothing less, than an attempt to encourage political harmony. May have been, in other words, a cousin of Athenian democracy. The Sparta Plutarch knew looked little different from any other modestly prosperous regional center in Roman Greece. It had a theater, baths, and porticos. Its leading citizens revered the emperors, and lived in villas with fine mosaic floors. The Spartan past, however, had not been forgotten. A regular festival honored Leonidas, and featured orations on the heroes of Thermopylae. At least twice, when the Romans campaigned against the Parthians in Syria, a contingent of soldiers was sent to do battle with these latter-day Persians. And every year, Spartan boys displayed their contempt for pain by being whipped bloody at the ancient sanctuary of Artemis Orthea. Artificial though all this was, it was nothing really new. The Spartans had always lived in the shadow of their own myths. If you enjoyed this video, please consider supporting Toledon Stone on Patreon. You might also enjoy my book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants. Thanks for watching.