Go tell the Spartans
The works of the Seven Sages (regardless of the exact names on the list) inspired Greek thinkers for centuries, afterwards, and some of those most inspired appeared in Classical Athens.
However, the greatest works of the Athenian philosophers, ironically, took place during one of the city’s darkest periods, following a defeat by a league of enemies led by the city-state of Sparta. So, before we get to Athens, let’s look at her great rival.
Most people, these days, know at least a little something about the Spartans, due to its appearance in popular culture. Frank Miller’s highly stylized graphic novel, 300, drew inspiration for its visual presentation from Greek red-figure pottery, and proved immensely popular. The 2006 film, based on the works collected in graphic novel format, grossed nearly a half-billion dollars in a time when tension between European and Middle Eastern cultures remains high.
However, Miller forthrightly acknowledged he took artistic liberties with his presentation of the Spartans and the Persians, because he meant to tell a good story, and not write and draw a documentary. As such, he presented the Spartans as better people than they actually were, the Persians as worse, and turned the whole thing into an historical fantasy only loosely inspired by what remains of the historical record.
Without going into too much detail about a relatively well-known people, the Spartans actually started out as not terribly different from other Greek city-states. The city originally formed about 1000 BC in the fertile valley of the Eurotas River, in the southwest of the Peloponnesian Peninsula. By about 800 BC, or so, the high quality of Spartan pottery, ivory-carving and other crafts gave them a share in international trade throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, and Spartan poets were widely renowned.
All of that changed when Sparta decided to conquer its neighbors in the nearby, fertile region of Messenia. The successful Spartan invasion allowed them to enslave any Messenian not slaughtered, and the conquerors reduced the Messenian population to a status that closely resembled a particularly harsh form of serfdom, and began to call them “helots” (“captives”). However, given their own Greek heritage, the helots proved a restive population that engaged in periodic (albeit unsuccessful) revolts, a couple of which cost Sparta victories in minor wars.
The worst such incident took place in about 464 BC, when an earthquake crumbled much of Sparta, the helots revolted, and the Spartans had to put them down, brutally.
The periodic revolts taught the Spartans a hard lesson: A slave is a blade at the throat of the master; his greatest delight is to destroy his master’s property, and to take his master’s life. To keep the blade from their own throats, the Spartans warped their own society so as to keep their boots on the throats of the helots.
In so doing, Spartan men abandoned all professions except for “soldier.” They created a brutal training regimen that began at age 7, and included survival, endurance, theft, unarmed and armed combat, tactics, strategy and institutional pederasty to build unbreakable bonds between the members of a 24-member platoon, or “warband.” They built the most formidable standing army in the ancient world by forbidding any man from practicing any profession except warfare, and in so doing they forced their entire society into stagnation.
Not only did innovation in Spartan arts and literature halt, it actually degenerated. The archaeological artifacts from Sparta that date from the time of the Peloponnesian War with Athens have less sophistication than those created centuries earlier, and the only remnants of Spartan poetry from the later eras concerns martial topics to the exclusion of all else.
As for the oligarchical society, itself, it split into three tiers. At the top were the “Spartiates,” the citizens themselves, with men devoted exclusively to warfare and politics, and women expected to manage and administer all other aspects of civic life. Two clans, the Agaiad and the Eurypontides, lay at the top of that hierarchy and each contributed a king to lead the city as part of a “biarchy.”
The second tier consisted of non-citizen perioikoi (“dwellers around”), who provided a lot of the craftsmanship and manufacturing, including the production of weapons, armor and ships for trade. Perioiki also acted as supplemental troops and were allowed to own land. They were free, but not full citizens.
At the bottom, of course, lay the helots, who produced most of the food consumed in Sparta, in a system that resembled share-cropping. They had no rights, and the Spartan system existed mostly just to keep them in check.
The rigid oligarchy of Sparta meant that, rather than contribute to the development of Greek science and philosophy, the Spartans clung tightly to religion, which played the role for them it so frequently plays in many societies in many eras – an institution designed to provide social conditioning to reinforce preservation of the traditional status quo.
When the Spartans made themselves into the most elite troops of the ancient world, so as to keep the helots under their heels, they made themselves the most fearsome force imaginable. However, they also transformed themselves into “one-trick ponies.” All they knew, all they could do, was fight.
While that allowed Spartans to help preserve Greece from conquest by outside foes, for several centuries, it also meant they could not tolerate any sort of economic or cultural change that might alter the political structure of the Peloponnesus. As long as all the Greeks city-states quarreled among themselves and never managed to unify, Sparta would remain unchanged. As soon as the Greeks unified effectively, Sparta was doomed.
However, while Spartan stagnation made doom inevitable, the society it created did have some interesting – and even bright — points. For one thing, the entire society showed a unity seldom achieved anywhere else – and possibly by no one else. Spartan men and women identified themselves as Spartans, first and foremost, with even family loyalty a distant second, and individual ambition hardly a factor.
Unfortunately, they maintained this social cohesion through a lifetime of social conditioning and the periodic exercise of brutality. Spartans would sometimes send out groups of armed men in their 20s to various areas of the hinterlands, where they would conceal themselves during the day. At night, they’d emerge from hiding, and murder any helot they caught outside, and even target those they considered too smart or too healthy and strong. Effectively “death-squads,” they helped ensure short-term obedience, while adding fuel to the smoldering resetment of the helots.
That said, of all Greek city-states, Sparta was about the best place for women. The devotion of men to war and politics meant women had to manage the rest of society, and the Spartans granted them unprecedented education, freedom and authority. Spartan women received a good education from an early age, could and did own property of their own, and engaged in strenuous exercise routinely, as a way to maintain health and fitness. As such, most Greeks considered the women of Sparta the best, the brightest and the most beautiful.
However, the dedication of Spartiate men to warfare made for odd – even bizarre – relationships. Once they joined a military “mess,” Spartan men were required to marry, but were also encouraged to engage in homosexual relations with other men and boys as a way to build unbreakable personal bonds. Additionally, while in their 20s, Spartan law required that men live in the barracks, so they had to sneak out in order to spend time with their wives. It was not until age 30 that the men could leave the barracks and have homes of their own – assuming they had those homes and wanted to do so.
That meant, for the first two or three decades of life, Spartan women managed everything on their own, and even raised children as (effectively) single mothers with only limited emotional support from their husbands (assuming they had one). Moreover, as Spartiates, they were expected to support and live by the city’s social mores. That meant, when war came, they had to (without flinching) send their fathers, sons, husbands and brothers, off to die.
As a society, Sparta serves as a strange outlier, and while the contemporary observers admired the martial prowess of its people, they acknowledged the bizarre aspects of Spartan society. It could only exist in that place, at that time, and only under those circumstances.
The limited conditions that allowed Sparta to exist, at all, meant it couldn’t last, and they crippled its ability to make lasting contributions to Western civilization. However, while its social structure crippled its own contributions, it ironically allowed Sparta to play a key role in the profound and lasting contributions made by its most pernicious foe.
Links
https://www.ancient.eu/sparta/
http://history-world.org/sparta.htm
http://www.livescience.com/32035-sparta.html