SOURCE: Powell, Anton. “Life within Sparta.” In Athens and Sparta: Constructing Greek Political and Social History from 478 BC. Second Edition, pp. 218-70. London: Routledge, 2001.

[In the following excerpt from his monograph originally published in 1988, Powell probes the daily aspects of classical Spartan culture, including its secrecy, communality, and austerity.]

SPARTAN SECRECY AND DECEPTIVENESS

What went on inside Sparta was a question which intrigued many Greeks of other cities and is the subject of much recent study. In the fourth century, during or soon after the period of Sparta's empire, several studies of the subject were published.¹ Xenophon, the author of one of them, began his work by observing that the Spartans had the greatest power of any Greek community but also one of the smallest populations.² This paradox was no doubt widely felt; Sparta's extraordinary dominance called for an explanation. For this, Thucydides,³ Xenophon and others looked to the political and social arrangements within Sparta. Yet Sparta was secretive, …⁴ and has left us no literary record of her own from the classical period. Reconstructing the internal arrangements of Sparta is more difficult than tracing her external military ventures, which happened before a crowd of witnesses. Non-Spartans admitted into Spartan territory were subject to periodic expulsion, the xenēlasia (“driving out of foreigners”), which some contemporaries believed to be a device for preserving Spartan secrets.⁵ Those who visited Sparta, or disseminated information about her, were often (though not always) Lakonisers, Sparta's partisans. Such were the Athenians Kritias and Xenophon. Our problem with Sparta's internal history is rather similar to that faced by dispassionate Western students of maoist China, where the movements of foreigners were restricted, communication with outsiders was guarded, while much that was reported derived from the uncheckable accounts of enthusiasts.

Caution is made still more important by a fact which shrewd contemporary observers of Sparta came to understand very well: the Spartans were masters of deception. Modern works have tended to overlook this. Thus the author of one valuable recent book refers to the devious commander Derkylidas as “ostentatiously unSpartan in his Sisyphos-like cunning”.⁶ The idea that the Spartans were honest and decent may have its roots in the record of Thucydides, that Greeks at the start of the Peloponnesian War favoured the Spartans as potential liberators and that the general Brasidas behaved with encouraging rectitude.⁷ Faith in Spartan honour may even have come on occasion from the assimilation of Sparta to the English boarding school, with its professed virtues of “owning up” to the truth and “playing the game”.⁸ To have left this image of virtue may be one of the greatest attainments of deceptive Spartan propaganda.

From contemporary Greek sources we hear of deception worked by Spartan officials on their own citizen soldiers, on Sparta's subject population, the helots, and on enemy states. Xenophon records two cases in which a Spartan general, on learning of a defeat for Spartan forces elsewhere, announced it to his troops as a victory, to sustain morale.⁹ Thucydides writes of the helots' being deceived with attractive promises by the Spartan authorities, as a preliminary to massacre.¹⁰ The seditious Kinadon was removed from Sparta by means of a lie, according to Xenophon.¹¹ In these cases we are not dealing with some untruth uttered briefly by a cornered politician, such as might be found in any society. Rather, each deception was supported by careful arrangements and appears to have been successfully maintained for as long as necessary.

Life at Sparta in several ways resembled that of a military camp—a point familiar in antiquity.¹² Spartan deceit may be best understood in this light. To mislead an enemy was widely regarded as quite proper, if not commendable.¹³ (The attitude is common today; if we wish to refer without disapproval to a deceptive arrangement, as of household furniture or shop goods, we may talk of things being “strategically placed”.) Xenophon writes of the Spartan king, Agesilaos:

In a further respect he appeared to have achieved something characteristic of a proper general (stratēgikon): when war was declared and deception as a result became religiously permissible and just, he completely outclassed Tissaphernes [his Persian enemy] in deceit.¹⁴

Xenophon may also cast light here on the religiosity, in other circumstances, for which the Spartans were noted.¹⁵ He describes how Agesilaos, in a previous period of truce, had steadfastly and ostentatiously refused to break his oath while knowing that the other party, Tissaphernes, was breaking his.¹⁶ There is little doubt that religious rectitude appealed to Spartans partly for its own sake.¹⁷ But religiosity had a further attraction: it might entice opponents into failing to guard against the deception which Sparta had in store for them, following the moral alchemy of a declaration of war. In addition, in war and peace alike there were many opportunities to deceive without oath-breaking or even uttering a direct lie. And the moral distinction between war and peace might be overlooked at times because of the permanent militarism and permanent military threat under which the Spartans lived. Sparta would always be aware that the image she transmitted was an important instrument of war.

Cases of Spartan commanders seeking to deceive a foe are numerous. Lysandros' triumphant outwitting of the Athenians at Aigospotamoi may be the most important.¹⁸ In 392 the Spartan Pasimakhos lured men of Argos into battle by equipping warriors of Sparta with shields bearing a sigma, the distinctive blazon of the far less formidable state of Sikyon. According to contemporary report, he went into battle saying “by the twin gods, these sigmas will deceive you, Argives, into coming to fight us”.¹⁹ Spartan boys of the classical period learnt to steal as part of their education.²⁰ Thucydides reports Brasidas as seeking to persuade his soldiers of the virtue of a surprise attack, aimed at exploiting an enemy's mistake: “These stealthy actions involve the greatest glory when they most deceive the enemy and most benefit one's friends.”²¹ The word here translated as “stealthy actions”, klemmata, is cognate with the regular word for “to steal”, kleptein, and—if it was not Brasidas' own—was perhaps chosen by Thucydides as illustrating a connection between the two Spartan institutions of juvenile theft and adult military deceit.²² At least in later antiquity, a legend existed of a Spartan boy who, after stealing a pet fox cub, bravely chose to endure in silence while the animal inflicted a fatal wound under his cloak, rather than to cry out and be detected.²³ The tale has traditionally been told as reflecting courage. But it also should be seen as glamorising deception. We are far from the values implied in the tale of young George Washington; the Spartan boy is noted not because he could not tell a lie, but because he would not tell the truth.

In classical Athens there was a different connection made between the Spartans and foxes, animals proverbial for deceit. A character in comedy was made to allude to the Spartans as “little foxes … with treacherous souls, treacherous minds”.²⁴ The point could be applied in action. Alkibiades, by duplicity of his own, succeeded in discrediting Spartan envoys by persuading them to seek to mislead the Athenian assembly.²⁵ Iphikrates, an Athenian general of the fourth century, heard at one point that the Spartan commander of an opposing force, Mnasippos, was dead. He reacted by remaining ready for battle. “For,” in Xenophon's words, “he had not heard the news about Mnasippos from any eye-witness, but was on his guard, suspecting that the statement had been issued to deceive”.²⁶ For an Athenian commander, careful source-criticism in Spartan matters was not an academic luxury; it was a means of staying alive.

Central to the Spartans' image was the idea that the political and social arrangements of their city were largely static and of very ancient origin.²⁷ Thucydides, who could state with impressive rigour that events much earlier than the Peloponnesian War were too remote in time to be strictly knowable,²⁸ was persuaded that by 404 bc the Spartans had been enjoying the same political system “for slightly more than four centuries”.²⁹ That system was said by Spartans and others (though not by Thucydides) to be the creation of one Lykourgos.³⁰ The historicity of Lykourgos will not be dealt with here. Even Plutarch, a writer not noted for attending closely to defects in his sources, observed that ancient traditions concerning Lykourgos were profoundly contradictory.³¹ Modern attempts to date the reforms which produced Sparta's famed way of life have created a further museum of contradiction.³² For our purposes, statements about what Lykourgos ordered or banned are important in that they may reveal Spartan ideals and practices of the classical period. Historical fiction is fact about the society which produces it. Changes within the “Lykourgan” system were no doubt themselves attributed before long to Lykourgos.³³ (We may think of the former Soviet practice of attributing arrangements to Lenin.)

Sparta's willingness to falsify the past may be seen with unusual clarity where the past in question was that of other Greek cities. Soon after the end of the Peloponnesian War the Spartan ephors decided to establish “ancestral constitutions” in the cities of Greece.³⁴ How were they to determine what for each state was an ancestral constitution? We are hardly to imagine Sparta sending out its most literate men, to imitate in every city Thucydides' technique of examining informants and inspecting old inscriptions. Rather, the Spartans were almost certainly doing what Thucydides has described them as doing in allied states in the fifth century: “taking care that they were governed by oligarchy in a way that favoured Sparta”.³⁵ The form of oligarchy used would be given the label “ancestral constitution” irrespective of historical precision, to meet the accusation that these new governments were alien implants imposed by Sparta, and to exploit the folk memory that dēmokratia, recently swept aside by the Spartans, was only a few generations old and far less old than oligarchy. Spartan traditions about their own history were probably shaped to meet current political needs. King Arkhidamos of Sparta boasted, according to Thucydides, that Spartan education effectively suppressed criticism of political arrangements at home. This was deliberate; Sparta excelled at avoiding internal revolution and, as we shall see, many aspects of Spartan life were ingeniously contrived to promote harmony. One way of containing dissent was to convince potential revolutionaries that the system had succeeded in resisting change for centuries.³⁶ We recall that Spartan officials at times practised deception upon their own citizens, and not only upon helots and outsiders.

THE LITERARY SOURCES FOR SPARTAN LIFE

A more promising field for investigation is the daily life, social and political, of the Spartans. This was observable by a succession of visitors who were not Lakonisers, politicians who came on diplomatic missions; Themistokles is the most famous example. Diplomacy, then as now, was inevitably combined with spying. (In seventeenth-century England, envoys of a hostile state were customarily blindfolded.³⁷) Adverse criticisms of Sparta made by writers who generally admired her are also of much value, because of the argument from bias. And certain conspicuous facts about Spartans abroad, such as the names and the death-rate of commanders, can be exploited by us as reflections of life within Sparta. Before surveying the problems presented by individual sources, it should be noted—on the positive side—that not only do our sources cohere encouragingly on particular features of Spartan society, but those features themselves form coherent patterns. To create and impose falsely such a consistent picture, in a sphere which was checkable by an intelligent few among her opponents, may seem a task beyond the mendacity even of Sparta.

Modern reconstructions of Sparta's internal history have tended to draw heavily on Plutarch's Life of Lykourgos. This is the source of various colourful claims which have become familiar; for example, that Spartan babies were inspected by elders, who ordered weaklings to be cast out; that mothers washed babies in wine to test and toughen them; that boys in winter tried to keep warm with vegetation for bedding.³⁸ In other spheres, scholars are very wary of trusting Plutarch for details of what occurred many centuries before his own time. It may perhaps be argued that the exceptional conservatism of Sparta gives unusual value to a late source. But we cannot yet be sure how successfully conservative Sparta was. Conspicuous institutions such as the dual kingship, the ephorate and helotage did indeed persist throughout the classical period. But while forms, especially such noted ones, might be preserved to give an image of stability, practical realities could change.³⁹ Xenophon, as we shall see, believed that possession of an empire—from 404 bc—made the Spartans disobedient to “the laws of Lykourgos”.⁴⁰

Although Plutarch cannot be ignored,⁴¹ we should try to reconstruct our history mainly from writers of the fifth and fourth centuries, to reduce the risk of distortion. Even with these earlier writers considerable problems arise. When dealing with Sparta, Thucydides appears to depart twice from his normal, rigorous, procedures of criticism: on the age of the constitution and on the details of Pausanias' downfall.⁴² On both subjects his account seems to coincide with the interests of the Spartan authorities. In a general preface to his work the historian tells of the difficulties he regularly faced from informants who told divergent stories.⁴³ But in a way the very diversity of those accounts might be of value, in that it obviously called for criticism and a suspension of belief. We may suspect, though only suspect, that Thucydides—through being used to the famous variety and freedom of speech at Athens—was at times taken off guard by a unanimity on the part of informants from Sparta, a state so disciplined as to produce almost a “party line”. In communicating with Thucydides, in particular, Spartans may have been encouraged to adhere to official history by the knowledge that they were addressing someone who, although now an exile, had formerly campaigned against Sparta as a general of the great enemy state, Athens, and would still have influential friends there.

Xenophon, less intelligent than Thucydides in most respects, warmly admired many aspects of Sparta and must be treated as a partisan source. Exiled from Athens, probably for aligning himself with Sparta,⁴⁴ he was made welcome by eminent Spartans and given an estate in the north-western Peloponnese.⁴⁵ His sons may even have been admitted to the Spartan process of education.⁴⁶ However, his Hellenika (a history which begins at 411, near the point where Thucydides' account breaks off), his laudatory Agesilaos (on the Spartan king of that name), and the Constitution of the Spartans are, when used carefully, sources of great importance. Although Xenophon omits certain failings of the Spartans,⁴⁷ he is candid enough to include much to Sparta's discredit.

Plato and Aristotle, while more profound than Xenophon, resemble him somewhat in their analyses of Sparta. Both philosophers were intrigued by Spartan political arrangements, which each treated with a mixture of severe criticism and deep respect.⁴⁸ The rapid decline undergone by Sparta in the decades after 404, first in her reputation abroad, then in her military power, may have caused these and other analysts to exaggerate Spartan defects to some extent. As a study of modern journalism should reveal, changes of fortune—and trends generally—receive disproportionate attention as compared with static reality. Also, the special Greek fascination with the downfall of the mighty, reflected in the literary genre of tragedy, might be exercised by the case of Sparta, causing some to look for a religious explanation. Numerous faults in the Spartans were identified, which were—or could have been—used to account for their fall. The laws of Lykourgos were no longer obeyed;⁴⁹ Spartans were indulging in forbidden luxury at home;⁵⁰ the women were out of control and had taken over aspects of administration;⁵¹ Spartan education did not fit men for peace;⁵² there was a severe shortage of population;⁵³ Spartan wickedness had provoked the gods.⁵⁴

These claims (except for the last one) probably reflect important realities, and will be examined below. But some exaggeration has very likely occurred in the degree of importance ascribed to particular faults, as a result of two common processes of error. One, already noted elsewhere,⁵⁵ is the tendency of disappointed partisans to dwell on the failings of their favoured party to the exclusion of merits possessed by opponents.⁵⁶ Since Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle, who report the faults of Sparta, were in different degrees sympathetic with her, it may be that they made too much of Spartan defects, and too little of the merits of Sparta's conqueror, Thebes. Second, there is the common fallacious tendency of reductionism; reducing to a single cause an explanation which should be complex. We hear this working daily. (“The trouble with you is …”) Popular Marxism is a form of it. (“It's all economics …”) Traditional Christianity has used the Devil, Anti-Communism the Reds, and so on. These two processes of error were instructively combined, in British attempts to explain the loss of the British Empire; the explanation was seen as lying within Britain, rather than within (e.g.) the USA and USSR, and was widely agreed to be a single “deep-seated malaise”. But on what that malaise might have been, there was no consensus. After Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, there was a general feeling in the city that the Athenian side was responsible, and one element of it in particular—the “sykophants”⁵⁷—was hated and persecuted for having caused the loss of empire. In the case of Sparta and her fall, we shall see special reason to suspect Aristotle of a form of reductionism, albeit less crude, involving the Spartans themselves.

PRESSURE FOR HOMOGENEITY: THE DINING GROUP, MARRIAGE, HOMOSEXUALITY

Thucydides may have been at fault to claim that Sparta's internal good order was over 400 years old by 404 bc. However, his belief that effective order existed during his own period of political maturity, down to 404, cannot be set aside. He was surely right in stating that Sparta's ability to dominate other poleis derived from the stability of her own domestic arrangements.⁵⁸ (He might have said the same of Athens. Conversely, two large Greek states which seem to achieve very little in external affairs in relation to their size, Argos and Kerkyra, are recorded as the scene of ferocious civil strife.⁵⁹) The immediate and irresistible pressure upon Sparta to avoid discord among her citizens came …⁶⁰ from the desire to keep the huge population of helots at work and away from their masters' throats. In a famous passage, of which the exact meaning is disputed,⁶¹ Thucydides states either that “most of the relations between the Spartans and the helots were of an eminently precautionary character”⁶² or that “Spartan policy is always mainly governed by the necessity of taking precautions against the helots”.⁶³ In any case, since both helots and Spartans had an acute sense of military opportunity,⁶⁴ we should expect strenuous attempts to prevent dissension among the Spartans which the helots might exploit. Much of this chapter will be about the mechanisms whereby the unity and discipline of the Spartans were maintained.⁶⁵

Adult male Spartans were obliged to belong to a particular dining group,⁶⁶ which met at night.⁶⁷ Inability to share the expenses of this institution disqualified a man from citizenship, at least in Aristotle's day.⁶⁸ So, presumably, did unwillingness to participate; Xenophon writes that Lykourgos excluded from the citizen body anyone who shrank from the rigorous customs of Spartan life.⁶⁹ Nightly dining together was undoubtedly meant to consolidate Spartan society and preserve its traditions.⁷⁰ The citizens of Sparta were known as the homoioi (“the equals” or “those who are similar”),⁷¹ and the homoioi had to be homogenised. Xenophon observed that in the other cities of Greece social gatherings usually consisted of men of a particular age, whereas at Sparta old and young met together, in an atmosphere consequently more restrained and conducive to the transmission of the older men's wisdom.⁷² Cultural differences and disruptive friction between generations might thus be minimised. (Athens certainly had such friction; at one point, Thucydides shows an Athenian orator appealing for the assembly not to split politically on age lines).⁷³ According to Herodotos, Sparta was the only Greek state in which the young made way in the street, and gave up their seats, for their elders.⁷⁴ Spartan veneration of the old is reflected also in the institution of the gerousia, a court of elders with power over important cases.⁷⁵ It is probable that the influence of the elderly, as in other societies, tended—and was expected to tend—towards conservatism in politics. Plato suggests that at Sparta only the old were allowed to criticise the local practices;⁷⁶ such change as there might be had seemingly to be filtered through the society's most conservative age-group.

The dining group might also be expected to unify the fighting men and their seniors by diverting attention and affection from the family. Family life, in modern societies at least, appears to be responsible for much of the difference between the characters of individuals; political reformers seeking to generate new, standardised, personalities have sought to reduce the influence of parents upon children.⁷⁷ Family life may cause people to put the interests of relatives before those of the state; accordingly, reformers ancient and modern have tried to replace family loyalty with something wider. Plato complained about the way that family life in private produced personalities which were “varied, and not homoia to each other”.⁷⁸ His Republic, in many ways an idealised version of Sparta, involved citizens not knowing their own close kin but instead treating as relatives all their fellow citizens.⁷⁹ Thus, it was hoped, affection might be transferred to the wider community. Aristotle wrote of Greek cities with an extreme form of dēmokratia, in which the state accepted from women charges of political disloyalty against their own male relatives.⁸⁰ In National Socialist Germany children informed similarly against their parents;⁸¹ a recent Head of State of West Germany⁸² was no doubt reacting consciously against that system when he said “I do not love the State; I love my wife.”

At Sparta, Xenophon informs us, a husband in the early stages of marriage was discouraged from being seen entering or leaving his wife's presence.⁸³ The reason, he suggests, was a theory that stronger children would be born to couples who yearned lustily for each other rather than being almost sated with sexual activity.⁸⁴ Perhaps such a theory was influential at Sparta. But we have seen elsewhere that our sources are more likely to be right when they report directly observable facts (such as, in this case, signs of disapproval directed against an indiscreet husband) than when they seek to reconstruct the psychology behind those facts. Young Spartans were trained in stealth, as has been observed. They were also taught to travel at night.⁸⁵ It should be doubted whether the taboo which Xenophon mentions would have been expected to reduce by very much the sexual activity of young husbands with their wives. To do so might seem to risk reducing the number of conceptions, and among precisely those people, the youngest and strongest, who could be expected to have the fittest children. In other ways the Spartans took drastic measures to keep up the citizen population.⁸⁶ An alternative explanation of the taboo may be preferable.⁸⁷ Rather than being expected to have much effect on the amount of marital sex, the restriction might be meant to limit the time young couples spent together. As a proportion of that time, hours spent in sexual activity would increase, to the exclusion of activities productive of wider forms of mutual influence. The first years of marriage at Sparta may have been meant to teach wives and husbands to see each other mainly as sexual partners, and to produce, in George Eliot's phrase, “a merely canine affection”. Xenophon tells strikingly and repeatedly of how news of military defeat was greeted by Spartans. Those whose relatives had died (bravely, as was presumed) appeared most gratified, whereas close kin of the (possibly ignoble) survivors seemed ashamed.⁸⁸ It seems that model Spartans did not love their families; they loved the State.

Aspects of Spartan society conduced less to heterosexuality than to homosexuality.⁸⁹ In his Laws Plato wrote that homosexuality resulted from the (male) dining groups and from male nudity in gymnasia.⁹⁰ Records of Sparta from the classical period seem to refer to homosexual boyfriends at least as often as to wives. Particularly revealing are some assertions by Xenophon on this subject. According to him, Lykourgos encouraged association between man and boy, where it was the boy's character that was admired, but decreed that obvious lust for a boy's body should be rejected utterly.⁹¹ Xenophon suggests that the lawgiver was successful in this respect. “However,” he adds guilelessly, “I am not surprised that some people do not believe this.” Among those people was Xenophon himself at other times, when the need to praise Sparta was less prominent in his mind.⁹² The claim that Sparta avoided homosexuality should be compared with the assertion recorded later by Plutarch, that there was no adultery at Sparta,⁹³ and with the statement made to foreigners during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, that there was no adultery in China.

Aristotle writes that soldierly and warlike peoples appear to be profoundly influenced either by heterosexual or by homosexual attachments.⁹⁴ It seems to have been his view that Spartans were devoted to the heterosexual kind,⁹⁵ which would give strong support to Xenophon's general claim. However, Aristotle proceeds to use the idea of the Spartans' eager sexuality to explain his own (indignant) observation that, during the period of Sparta's empire, much was administered by women. If Aristotle's opinion on heterosexuality was evolved as an explanation of the prominence of Spartan women, it may seem to be feebly based. That prominence can be accounted for easily without assuming that male Spartans were unusually attached to their women. From a very small citizen population Sparta had to supply soldiers and administrators to control a large empire, after 404. In the resulting shortage of trustworthy men to control things at Sparta, citizen women might well prove indispensable, particularly since they had more knowledge of the men's world than (for example) their cloistered Athenian sisters.⁹⁶

On the subject of Spartan sexuality we are faced with conflicting generalisations from Plato, on the one hand, and Xenophon with Aristotle, on the other. Detail is a proper test of the general statement, and references to particular homosexual attachments of Spartans are conspicuous even by Greek standards.⁹⁷ The regent Pausanias was betrayed to the ephors, according to Thucydides, by a former boyfriend (paidika).⁹⁸ Xenophon's hero, King Agesilaos, whose own relations with attractive boys forced themselves on the writer's attention, had a son, Arkhidamos, whom Xenophon describes as in love with a handsome Spartan youth named Kleonymos.⁹⁹ Alketas, a Spartan commander, is recorded by Xenophon as having lost control of the Euboian town of Oreos as a result of paying attentions to a local boy.¹⁰⁰ Homosexuality may have been seen as making a positive contribution to the solidarity of the homoioi. Partners, or former partners, acted in battle and elsewhere under each other's gaze or even by each other's side. Thus each might have a special motive for not bringing discredit—or danger—on himself or his mate.¹⁰¹ According to Xenophon, Kleonymos gave Arkhidamos his word—after receiving some vital help from Arkhidamos' father—that he would try to take care that Arkhidamos would never be ashamed of his friendship.¹⁰²

He did not lie; during his lifetime at Sparta he performed every action that is esteemed there, and at Leuktra was the first Spartan to die, fighting … in the midst of the enemy. His death pained Arkhidamos to the limit, but, as he had promised, he brought him credit and not disgrace.

If Xenophon is right, the nature of Arkhidamos' affection for the other man was not discreditable. Nor was his eventual grief, which contrasts interestingly with the fortitude displayed by, and thought creditable in, relatives of those who died in the same battle. We read elsewhere in Xenophon's Hellenika of a Spartan commander, Anaxibios, who found himself in a hopeless military position and chose, with fellow officers, to stand his ground and die. The rest of the force fled, save for Anaxibios' paidika, who stayed by his side, evidently until death.¹⁰³ Xenophon's point in referring to this devoted individual by his sexual status, and not by his name, is probably that the sexuality produced the exceptional loyalty. In spite of himself, Xenophon allows us to see why in a warrior society homosexual affections may have been privileged.

In their dining groups Spartans—rich and poor together—ate the same food,¹⁰⁴ the plainness of which became famous.¹⁰⁵ Thus were neatly removed two potential sources of friction between different sections of the citizen group. Rich men of other Greek cities were sometimes referred to as “the stout”. Plato, who stated that an oligarchically-controlled polis was in reality two cities, of rich and poor, alluded—with his fat rich man and his thin pauper—to conspicuous differences in diet which might encourage division and revolution.¹⁰⁶ Not only did the system of dining groups meet that problem; it also seems to have excluded the symposion, the private drinking party at which wealthy men of like mind might reinforce their social distinctness and perhaps plot revolution.¹⁰⁷ (The phenomenon of Dutch Courage was familiar to Greeks and Romans; Julius Caesar was to be described as the only man to undertake revolution while sober.¹⁰⁸) Megillos, the Spartan character in Plato's Laws, boasts that in the cities controlled by Sparta there are no symposia and no one gets away with drunkenness.¹⁰⁹ Other contemporaries with an admiration for Sparta praise the city for her sobriety. Xenophon commends King Agesilaos for regarding drunkenness as madness,¹¹⁰ as indeed it would have been, given the sense of military opportunity which the helots shared with the Spartans. Predictable mass intoxication at a festival of citizens would have presented rebellious subjects with a wonderful chance; Kritias wrote in the late fifth century that the Spartans had no day set aside for excessive drinking.¹¹¹ But apart from its military aspect, drunkenness might amount to a display of luxury, irritating to the poor onlooker;¹¹² that, too, helps to explain the sobriety of Sparta.

In addition to the schooling together of the children of rich and poor, further devices for promoting social harmony included the wearing by the rich of clothes “of a sort that even any poor man could get”¹¹³ (compare modern remarks on “classless” denim). Thucydides comments on the Spartans' moderation in dress, and on the unusual lengths to which better-off Spartans went in assimilating their style of life to that of ordinary citizens.¹¹⁴ There was also a limited sharing of wealth outside the dining groups.¹¹⁵ (Athens for her own reasons of social harmony had laws to restrain the spending of the wealthy on symposia¹¹⁶ and other forms of display.¹¹⁷) But, given the existence of rich men, to deny any outlet for showing off wealth might itself be provocative—to the wealthy themselves. And the discontented rich are usually in a better position to make a revolution than the discontented poor. In Athens a permitted form of display involved expensive horses, which could serve the common good as cavalry mounts in wartime. Rich Athenians often chose for their children names with the element -hipp-, “horse”.¹¹⁸ Similarly at Sparta. In a single source, Xenophon's Hellenika, we meet Alexippidas, Euarkhippos, Herippidas, Hippokrates, Kratesippidas, Lysippos, Mnasippos, Orsippos, Pasippidas and Zeuxippos, all prominent Spartans and therefore likelier than not to be from the wealthier section of society.¹¹⁹ It is also made clear by Xenophon that horses used in battle by Spartan cavalry were reared by “the richest men” of Sparta.¹²⁰

The enthusiasm of many Spartans for patronising chariot-racing teams is well documented.¹²¹ In the early fourth century, as wealth poured in from Sparta's new overseas empire, this lavish competition seems to have caused a certain tension. Xenophon records King Agesilaos as having tried to demonstrate that the production of fine chariot-horses was not a mark of manly virtue but rather of wealth, by persuading his sister, Kyniska, to rear a victorious team.¹²² We do not know whether Agesilaos succeeded in reducing the eagerness of rich men for this sport. (Its aura may be better appreciated if we recall the vicarious virility now associated with motor racing.) There is, however, some evidence that Kyniska's victory had the effect of inducing other rich women to patronise chariot teams.¹²³ Ironically, by advertising his point that it was wealth rather than manliness which counted in this sphere, Agesilaos may have intensified the competition by bringing in a new group of enthusiasts. The participation of women would seem to confirm that one motive of patrons had no reference to gender, but was the display of the very wealth which Agesilaos hoped to belittle.

MILITARY TRAINING AND THE SCHOOLING OF THE YOUNG

In his Constitution of the Spartans Xenophon writes that Lykourgos arranged for the Spartans to dine communally, where they could be observed easily, because he knew that when people are at home they behave in their most relaxed manner.¹²⁴ Since the standards of public morality at Sparta were strenuous, we might anyway have expected to find an unusually large proportion of life being spent under public supervision.¹²⁵ Another, more strenuous, activity, which again must have involved lengthy exposure to public view, was military training. The Periklean funeral speech, likely of course to reflect some Athenian bias against Sparta, suggests that Spartan soldiers depended more on preparation and deceit than on spontaneous courage.¹²⁶ Xenophon states that the Spartan hoplite formation is not, “as most people think”, exceedingly complex.¹²⁷ But even he admits that Spartan soldiers perform with great ease manoeuvres which others think very difficult,¹²⁸ and that fighting in an improvised position, amid confusion, “is not … easily learnt except by those schooled under the laws of Lykourgos”.¹²⁹ It hardly needs saying that the apparent simplicity in the movements of any superior athlete or trained human formation is likely to be the product of laborious practice. Xenophon's willingness to concede the importance to the Spartans of training, and his reluctance to admit the existence of complexity in their manoeuvres, together fit very well with a theme of Spartan propaganda which we identified [elsewhere]. …¹³⁰ Sparta wished to discourage the idea that there was anything clever about her military actions, which an intelligent opponent might learn to counter at little cost. Instead, emphasis was laid on the hardness of Spartan hoplites and of their training, which enemies from more comfortable cities might despair of matching. If, distrustful of this Spartan theme, we assumed that Xenophon's “most people” were right, and that there was much complexity in the manoeuvres taught at Sparta, we should be able to account—in agreement with the Periklean funeral speech¹³¹—for the periodic expulsions of foreigners from Sparta.¹³² These could have been the occasions for practising the more complicated, or the deceptive, moves. Manoeuvres involving all or most of the army would have needed concealment additionally so as to protect a secret of great significance—the size of Sparta's fighting population.

Xenophon, who cannot with consistency argue that the expulsions were meant to hide complex manoeuvres, suggests instead that their purpose was to remove foreign influences.¹³³ This may be part of the explanation. But it raises a less familiar question, which Xenophon does not tackle: why did Sparta not exclude foreigners all the year round? Diplomacy might be conducted a few miles from the city,¹³⁴ and trade carried on at some remote frontier or coast. Given the generally coherent pattern of Sparta's political arrangements, and her policy of promoting ignorance and error in her enemies, the admission of Greeks from other states (including, it seems, the astute and menacing Perikles¹³⁵) is unlikely to have resulted from oversight. Some positive benefit was probably expected. It will be argued below that the Spartans were skilled in visual propaganda. Their practice of this in many other contexts may suggest that they allowed limited access to their city precisely in order that visitors would take away impressive images. The idea of such motivation was certainly known to the Greeks; it is involved in Herodotos' story about Greek spies, captured by the Persians on the eve of Xerxes' invasion, and deliberately set free to report the daunting facts about the scale of the Great King's forces.¹³⁶

Aristotle, who has words of strong disapproval for the Spartan system of educating the young,¹³⁷ concedes that “one might praise” the Spartans for the great care they took in having that system run communally by the state.¹³⁸ What Xenophon says of other Spartans was no doubt true also of children: that any who evaded the burdensome processes imposed by the state were excluded by the rules of Lykourgos from the privileges of citizenship.¹³⁹ By educating the children of rich and poor together, Sparta eliminated much friction which might otherwise have arisen in adult life, among those of diverse upbringing. Perikles (as reported by Thucydides), Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle concur in describing Spartan education with words from the Greek root pon-, which connotes toil or suffering. Perikles speaks of the practice in suffering undergone by young Spartans, as their education prepared them to show manly courage (to andreion).¹⁴⁰ Aristotle states that the Spartans made their children bestial through ponoi, with the aim of producing manly courage (andreia).¹⁴¹ He goes on to blame Sparta for concentrating on this quality to the exclusion of others. In this context Aristotle is interested in explaining the military downfall of Sparta. He seems to have meant that Sparta fell because other states had come to match her training while having additional attainments which Sparta lacked. Here he perhaps exaggerates the narrowness of Sparta's educational ideals and attainment. Elsewhere in the same work he has a different explanation of the city's downfall which he does not mention here, that Sparta perished through shortage of population.¹⁴² In this second context there is in turn no reference to the explanation involving narrowness of character. It may be that the two explanations were intended as complementary.¹⁴³ On the other hand, there may be at work in both passages the tendency to inflate a single factor into the deep-seated malaise. (In passing, it is interesting that Aristotle, even while blaming Sparta for narrowness and bestiality, seems to have accepted the Spartans' own propaganda point,¹⁴⁴ that their sheer toughness had brought them to power.)

When Xenophon describes Spartan education, he has a very different angle from Aristotle. He writes earlier in the fourth century, to explain the success, at the time, of his friends the Spartans. In spite of his plain bias, he is more plausible than Aristotle when he asserts that Spartan education produced useful qualities besides crude animal courage. Xenophon stresses the instilling of obedience and aidōs—willingness to defer to the moral opinions of others, and the avoidance of misbehaviour in public¹⁴⁵ Both qualities have their dangers; as Euripides hinted,¹⁴⁶aidōs might be good or bad, depending on the nature of the moral opinions deferred to. But in a state outnumbered and hemmed in by potential enemies, as Sparta was, the cohesion promoted by these two qualities would in general be of the greatest importance. The willingness of Spartans to die on the battlefield, which will be examined below, was not a result merely of bestial courage, whatever that might be. It derived in part from a sophisticated and perhaps peculiarly human consideration, that death was preferable to life with dishonour of the hurtfulness which Sparta contrived for cowards. Not only was that dishonour imposed with unusual vigour;¹⁴⁷ Spartan aidōs would involve an unusual sensitivity to the community's disapproval.

A detailed and believable account of the rigours of Spartan upbringing is given by Xenophon in his Constitution. Boys were supervised by an adult of high standing, in contrast, as Xenophon notes, to the child-minders of other Greek cities, who were slaves.¹⁴⁸ This reflects not only the importance attached to education at Sparta, but also the difficulty of keeping children and youths to so strict a discipline. Slacking must have been a familiar and threatening event,¹⁴⁹ and was heavily punished by the adult supervisor.¹⁵⁰ Young men with whips also punished delinquents.¹⁵¹ (This is one of several references to the role of the whip in Spartan education;¹⁵² Plato observes that Spartans were educated “not by persuasion but by violence”.¹⁵³) Children were made to go barefoot and to wear only a single cloak whatever the season.¹⁵⁴ They were also kept hungry, and were permitted to steal food.¹⁵⁵ Boys caught doing so were severely whipped, but only as an incentive to steal more discreetly.¹⁵⁶

Theft offended against two ideals of Spartan society: obedience and respect for elders. So assuming, by rule of thumb, rationality in this successful society, we should look for some considerable benefit, one sufficient to outweigh that disadvantage. The military usefulness of a training in deceit has already been stressed, and Xenophon states that boys stole in order to become better warriors.¹⁵⁷ But we are left vague as to the military context in which a soldier might need to live off the land. In another passage, Xenophon writes that Spartans on expedition were discouraged from going far from camp, at least in some circumstances.¹⁵⁸ The aftermath of defeat might require irregular foraging, but the Spartan system did not countenance the survival of defeat. The education in theft may need a different explanation. The helot revolts which we hear of were mostly large affairs, which Sparta could not keep secret, if only because she needed outside help to deal with them. How common were small-scale revolt and brigandage? That we hear little of them is hardly surprising. Masters of deceit, secrecy and military opportunism, the Spartans were not going to advertise gratuitously their own distractions. In connection with the Athenian seizure of Pylos in Messenia, Thucydides states that the Spartans had previously been inexperienced in regard to brigandage and the kind of fighting which went with it.¹⁵⁹ His opinion cannot be dismissed, though we may wonder how he arrived at it. He is in effect putting forward a very large and vulnerable generalisation—that in a long preceding period the Spartans had always or almost always been uninvolved with brigandage—about a state whose desire to obscure its own circumstances he notes in this very passage. Also, he himself records that, at the start of the Pylos episode, the Athenians got help from Messenian brigands “who happened to be present”.¹⁶⁰ We may suspect that irregular fighting in Spartan territory had a longer history than Thucydides' Peloponnesian informants could or would make clear. Since Tegea over the northern border would not harbour runaway helots, taking to the hills or the coasts and living by plunder off the rich lands of Lakonia and Messenia may have been the resort of numerous small groups of helots who had lost patience with their masters. Guerrilla notoriously imposes its own tactics on the opposition. That, perhaps, was why young Spartans were taught to live off the land, deprived of food and normal clothing.

Notes

1. Arist. Pol. 1333b. Kritias' work on Sparta (see below) dates from the late fifth century.

   Modern study of Sparta was reinvigorated by the work of Geoffrey de Ste Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972), which showed that it was still possible to construct much that was new and plausible about the Spartans from literary sources of the classical period, and above all from Thucydides. Two important books followed from P. Cartledge. His Sparta and Lakonia: a regional history 1300-362 bc sets Sparta's development in its physical environment and provides a narrative of political history. Agesilaos, by the same author, is a biography of the fourth-century Spartan king but also a full-scale analysis of Sparta's political, social and educational workings; approached through its index, the work is an authoritative handbook on life within Sparta, and incidentally the most efficient resource for tracking down quickly the diverse ancient passages from which Spartan history is largely constructed. S. Hodkinson has taken the leading role in exploring the political economy of Sparta, in various articles (see below) and now in his Property and wealth in Classical Sparta. He has also done most to apply the evidence of archaeology to the fields of Spartan political and cultural history. E. David, in articles mentioned below and in Sparta between empire and revolution 404-243 bc, has given unusually perceptive analysis of Spartan culture. And two French scholars have now provided fundamental and stimulating studies of areas central to Spartan life: J. Ducat in his Les hilotes (with further work, forthcoming, from the same author on Spartan education and on the krypteia) and N. Richer in his Les éphores.

2. Xen. Const. Spart. I.

3. Thuc. I 18 1.

4. [Powell, Anton. Life within Sparta, Athens and Sparta, 2d ed. London: Routledge, 2001.], Chapter 4.

5. Thuc. II 39 1. On the xenēlasia, see below.

6. P. Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia, 275f.

7. Thuc. II 8 4, IV 81 2f., cf. III 57 1.

8. Cf. T. Rutherford Harley, “The public school of Sparta” in Greece and Rome, III (1934) 129ff. The comparison, though not well made by Harley, does have some value.

9. Xen. Hell. I 6 36f.; IV 3 13f.

10. Thuc. IV 80 3f., on which see below.

11. Xen. Hell. III 3 8ff.

12. Isok. VI 81; Plat. Laws 666e; Plut. Life of Lykourgos XXIV 1; cf. Arist. Pol. 1324b.

13. Cf. Virgil, Aeneid II 390. See now E. L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the vocabulary of military trickery (= Mnemosyne Supplement 108); P. Krentz in H. van Wees (ed.), War and violence in ancient Greece.

14. Xen. Ages. I 17.

15. See, e.g., [Powell, 2001], Chapter 4, nn. 122f.

16. Xen. Ages. I 10ff.

17. See esp. Thuc. VII 18 2. The most important general study of Spartan religion is now R. Parker in (Powell, ed.) Classical Sparta, 142-72.

18. Xen. Hell. II 1 22-8. Compare King Kleomenes at Sepeia; Hdt. VI 77f.

19. Xen. Hell. IV 4 10; Arist. Nik. Eth. 1117a.

20. See below.

21. Thuc. V 9 5.

22. It will be argued below that juvenile theft was itself seen by Spartans as a training for guerrilla.

23. Plut. Life of Lykourgos XVIII 1.

24. Aristoph. Peace 1067f.

25. Thuc. V 45.

26. Xen. Hell. VI 2 31. Further on Sparta's reputation for deceit: Hdt. IX 54; Thuc. II 39 1; Eur. Andromakhē 446ff.

27. E.g. Hdt. I 65 2ff.; Xen. Const. Spart. I 2 and passim, Ages. I 4. Contrast Arist. Pol. 1313a on the establishment of the ephorate.

28. Thuc. I 1 3, discussed [Powell, 2001], Chapter 1.

29. Thuc. I 18 1.

30. Above, n. 27.

31. Life of Lykourgos I 1. The element “Lyk-” in the name meant “wolf”. Aristotle, when arguing that the Spartans were wrong to produce young males as fierce as animals, singles out the wolf as an animal which does not show the right sort of courage (Pol. 1338b). Is this because he believed that the Spartans used the wolf as a positive ideal? If so, that might help to explain the invention of a reformer with a wolf-name. Or, if there actually had been a charismatic man named Lykourgos, his wolfish name might have helped the growth of his legend. It may be significant that two other militaristic peoples, the Romans and the Turks, have given a prominent role to a wolf in their respective foundation myths.

32. For references, P. Oliva, Sparta and her social problems, 63-70. Sensibly sceptical remarks on Sparta's early history have been made by M. I. Finley, The use and abuse of history 161f., C. G. Starr, Historia, XIV (1965), 257-72.

33. Compare the suggestion of Xen. Const. Spart. VII that Lykourgos knew about coinage and took measures against it. Coinage in Greece appears not to antedate the late seventh century, whereas many of those who take Lykourgos seriously date him considerably earlier.

34. Xen. Hell. III 4 2, cf. II 3 2, V 2 7.

35. Thuc. I 19.

36. Thuc. I 84 3, cf. Plat. Laws 634d-e. Plato suggests (Hippias Major 285d) that the Spartans liked stories involving genealogy, a genre notoriously contrived to evoke awe for contemporary arrangements by stressing the antiquity and nobility of their roots. Officially, Spartan kings were descended from Herakles (e.g. Hdt. VIII 131; Xen. Ages. I 2). However, some reforms were remembered as post-Lykourgan; Hdt. V 75 2; Xen. Const. Spart. XII 3f; cf. Arist. Pol. 1313a. In the Laws, a set of theory owing much to Spartan practice, Plato notes that a belief in the extreme antiquity of political arrangements serves to deter potential reformers (798b).

37. Samuel Pepys, Diary, entry for 3 April 1667. For evidence of diplomacy used as a cover for spying in the Roman period, Appian, Civil wars, V 552.

38. Plut. Life of Lykourgos XVI.

39. N. M. Kennell, The gymnasium of virtue, demonstrates well that in the post-classical period Spartans conducted much falsification, to promote an image of continuity in upholding ancient tradition. Spartan practices are sometimes compared closely with those of supposedly primitive peoples in recent times; see, e.g., H. Jeanmaire, REG [Revue de Etudes Grecques], XXVI (1913), 121-50. It is, however, a highly subjective and dangerous procedure to identify particular Spartan customs as primitive and therefore as already of great antiquity by the start of the classical period. Finley rightly suggests that a traditional practice which survived into classical times is likely to have retained some social value (op. cit., 164). To which we might add that if the social value could cause the retention of something “primitive” in the fifth or fourth century, it might perhaps cause the invention then of some such thing. But the category “primitive” is probably best abandoned, as too vague.

40. Xen. Const. Spart. XIV.

41. On Plutarch as a source for Spartan history, E. N. Tigerstedt, The legend of Sparta in classical antiquity, II, 226-64. On particular lives, see now D. R. Shipley, Plutarch's Life of Agesilaos and (on the 3rd century kings Agis IV and Kleomenes III) A. Powell in (Hodkinson and Powell eds.) Sparta: new perspectives, 393-419. For Plutarch's biographic methods in general, and recent research thereon, see [Powell, 2001] pp. 23ff.

42. See [Powell, 2001], Chapter 4.

43. Thuc. I 22 3.

44. J. K. Anderson, Xenophon 147-9.

45. Ibid., 165.

46. Diogenes Laertius II 54.

47. Most notably, their failure to prevent the secession, in 370 or 369, of Messenia.

48. Cf. E. Rawson, The Spartan tradition in European thought, 64: “it is possible crudely to equate the Gerousia to [Plato's] guardians, the homoioi to [his] auxiliaries and the perioeci and helots to Plato's artisans”. To which may be added (e.g.) Plato's ideas on literary censorship and salutary deceit. For aspects of Sparta which inspired much of Plato's Laws, A. Powell in (Powell and Hodkinson, eds.) The Shadow of Sparta, 273-321. On Aristotle, Rawson ibid., 72.

49. Xen. Const. Spart. XIV.

50. Plat. Rep. 548a-b.

51. See below.

52. Arist. Pol. 1271b, 1338b.

53. Ibid., 1270a.

54. Xen. Hell. V 4 1.

55. [Powell, 2001], Chapter 5.

56. Like much else in the psychology of partisanship, this may be clearly seen nowadays at a football match. Disappointed supporters more readily jeer their own side than applaud the opposition; afterwards, “We were awful” is far commoner than “They were good”.

57. See [Powell, 2001], chapter 7.

58. Thuc. I 18 1.

59. On Argos, see especially Diod. XV 57 3—58 4; on Kerkyra, Thuc. III 70-81, IV 46ff.

60. Chapter 4.

61. Thuc. IV 80 3.

62. Cf. Gomme, HCT, III, 547f.

63. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Origins, 92.

64. On the Spartans, see [Powell, 2001], Chapter 4; on the helots, Arist. Pol. 1269a.

65. For a subtle and wide-ranging review of internal tensions which Sparta had to overcome, S. Hodkinson, Chiron, 13 (1983) 239-81.

66. E.g. Hdt. I 65 5; Xen. Const. Spart. V 2-7; cf. Alkman quoted at Strabo X 482.

67. Xen. op. cit. V 7.

68. Arist. Pol. 1271a, which refers to the arrangement as “ancestral”. However, cf. Xen. Const. Spart. X 7 (a vaguer, idealising, passage).

69. Xen. Const. Spart. X 7.

70. Cf. Xen. Const. Spart. V 2. A similar rationale has been put forward in our own day for preserving communal dining among members of Cambridge colleges and trainee barristers at the Inns of Court.

71. E.g. Xen. Hell. III 3 5, Const. Spart. X 7, XIII 1.

72. Xen. Const. Spart. V 5.

73. Thuc. VI 18 6; cf. Xen. Mem. III 5 15; W. G. Forrest, Yale Classical Studies, XXIV (1975), 37-52.

74. Hdt. II 80 1.

75. Xen. Const. Spart. X 2 (the old more respected than those physically in their prime); Arist. Pol. 1270b (senility and the gerousia); cf. Xen. Hell. V 3 20, Const. Spart. XIII 7; Plat. Laws 634d-e. On the importance of the gerousia see de Ste. Croix, Origins, (index, under Sparta; Gerousia), Cartledge, Agesilaos, A. Powell in (Powell and Hodkinson, eds.) The shadow of Sparta, 274-84.

76. Plat. Laws 634d-e.

77. As, e.g., in Communist Russia and National Socialist Germany.

78. Laws 788ab, a work written with Sparta much in mind.

79. Plat. Rep. 463c ff. On Plato's ideal cities, in Republic and Laws, as idealised versions of Sparta, see above, n. 48 and Powell in Powell and Hodkinson (eds.), The shadow of Sparta, ch. 8.

80. Arist. Pol. 1313b.

81. R. Grunberger, Social history of the Third Reich, 151f.

82. Gustav Heinemann.

83. Xen. Const. Spart. I 5.

84. Cf. the idea expressed in King Lear (Act I, scene 2), that bastards get from the circumstances of their conception a superior vigour as compared with the legitimate, “got [conceived] 'tween asleep and wake”.

85. Xen. Const. Spart. V 7; Plat. Laws 633c; cf. Thuc. IV 103 1, 110 1, 135 1, V 58 2, VII 4 2; Diod. XIII 72 3.

86. See below.

87. According to one modern suggestion, by effectively not recognising a marriage in its early stages the Spartans sought to facilitate divorce in cases of infertility; W. K. Lacey, The family in classical Greece, 198.

88. Below, and nn. 176f.

89. P. A. Cartledge, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 27 (1981), 17-36. For stories of intense homosexual attachments involving Spartans of the hellenistic period, Powell in (Hodkinson and Powell eds.) Sparta: new perspectives, 393-419.

90. Plat. Laws 636a-c.

91. Xen. Const. Spart. II 13.

92. At Hell. V 3 20 the word paidikōn may refer to homosexual boyfriends (as de Ste. Croix suggests, Origins, 140) or, as often, merely to things of childhood.

93. Plut. Life of Lykourgos XV 10.

94. Arist. Pol. 1269b.

95. Ibid.

96. Further on Spartan women, see below.

97. In general on the openness of homosexuality in archaic and classical Greece see K. J. Dover, Greek homosexuality, passim and especially the evidence cited there from vase-painting.

98. Thuc. I 132 5. The person in question was not a Spartiate.

99. Hell. V 4 25. Xenophon evidently felt some awkwardness over Agesilaos' own relations with the ardent Persian boy Megabates; Ages. V 4-7 (cf. esp. 6 with Const. Spart. II 14); cf. Hell. IV 1 39f. (Agesilaos' regard for another youth, “still at the desirable age”).

100. Xen. Hell. V 4 57.

101. Cf. Xen. Symposion VIII 34f. On the role of homosexuality in Greek warfare, see now D. Ogden in A. B. Lloyd (ed.) Battle in antiquity, ch. 3.

102. Xen. Hell. V 4 33.

103. Xen. Hell. IV 8 38f.

104. Xen. Const. Spart. V 3; Arist. Pol. 1294b. On the kings' double rations, Xen., op. cit. XV 4.

105. E.g. Hdt. IX 82. Tales proliferated, as of the visitor from luxurious Sybaris, who felt he had at last understood the Spartans' willingness to die in battle when he had experienced one of the meals on which they had to live; Athenaeus 518e.

106. Plat. Rep. 551d, 556d; cf. 422e-423a.

107. Aristophanes' Wasps gives a lively comic sketch of a vehement democrat converted into an arrogant oligarch by attending a symposion; esp. 1326-449; cf. N. R. E. Fisher in Powell (ed.), Classical Sparta, 26-50.

108. Suetonius Life of the Divine Julius 53. Cf. Arist. Nik. Eth. 1117a.

109. Plat. Laws 637a-b.

110. Xen. Ages. V 1; cf. Const. Spart. V 4.

111. In H. Diels—W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 88, no. 6; translated by K. Freeman, Ancilla to the pre-Socratic philosophers, 154f. Cf. Plat. Laws 637b for communal drunkenness at Sparta's colony Taras (later Tarentum), at a festival; Sparta herself is contrasted. Xenophon, who had much experience of Sparta and of her military methods, attributes to his semi-fictional and Spartan-resembling hero, the Persian Cyrus the Great, a decision to attack Babylon on a night when its inhabitants were incapacitated by a drunken festival (Cyropaedia, VII 5 15).

112. Pittakos, the anti-aristocratic ruler of Mytilēnē, made famously severe regulations against drunkenness; Arist. Pol. 1274b, Rhet. 1402b.

113. Arist. Pol. 1294b. On the importance of dress in Spartan society, see now E. David in Ancient World, 19 (1989), 3-13.

114. Thuc. I 6 4.

115. Xen. Const. Spart. VI 3; Arist. Pol. 1263a. On ways in which rich Spartans deployed their wealth for political and social purposes, see now Hodkinson, Property and wealth in Classical Sparta, chs. 6, 11.

116. [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 50 2.

117. S. C. Humphreys, JHS [Journal of Hellenic Studies], 100 (1980), 96-126.

118. See esp. Aristoph. Clouds 63ff.

119. Xen. Hell. II 3 10; III 4 6; I 1 23; I 1 32; III 2 29; VI 2 4; IV 2 8 etc. The connection between rich Spartans and horses is now definitively explored in Hodkinson's Property and wealth in Classical Sparta, ch. 10 and index s.v. “horses”.

120. Xen. Hell. VI 4 10f., cf. Ages. IX 6. The mobility given by the horse might allow Spartiates to combine supervision of their large estates with the necessary attendance at Sparta itself. Also, mounted Spartans would present an intimidating spectacle to helots.

121. E.g. de Ste. Croix, Origins, 355; Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia (n. 6), 233, and especially Hodkinson loc. cit.

122. Xen. Ages. IX 6.

123. Pausan. III 8 1, 15 1, 17 6, V 12 5.

124. Xen. Const. Spart. V 2.

125. Sparta is very likely the target of the remarks in the Periklean funeral speech (Thuc. II 37 2) about suspicion and disapproval directed against fellow citizens who sometimes allow themselves to relax; cf. Xen. Const. Spart. IV 4.

126. Thuc. II 39 1.

127. Xen. Const. Spart. XI 5.

128. Ibid., 8.

129. Ibid., 7.

130. Chapter 4.

131. Thuc. II 39 1: “we [Athenians] never use exclusion of foreigners (xenēlasiai) to prevent anyone from learning or seeing something which, being revealed, it would profit an enemy to see; we rely not for the most part on preparation and deceit but rather on spontaneous courage”.

132. See the references collected by H. Schaefer in Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll, RE (article under xenēlasia).

133. Xen. Const. Spart. XIV 4.

134. Cf. Xen. Hell. II 2 13, 19, on the use of Sellasia.

135. Thuc. II 13 1 makes it clear that King Arkhidamos of Sparta was xenos of Perikles. The institution of xenia involved the exchange of hospitality.

136. Hdt. VII 146f.

137. See below.

138. Arist. Pol. 1337a.

139. Xen. Const. Spart. III 3, cf. X 7.

140. Thuc. II 39 1, cf. 4 and I 84 3, where King Arkhidamos is reported as speaking of the severity (khalepotēs) of the Spartan upbringing.

141. Arist. Pol. 1338b. In Plato Laws 633b the Spartan speaker describes Sparta's krypteia as polyponos.

142. Ibid., 1270a.

143. Aristotle might perhaps have argued that the narrowness of the Spartan education blinded the community to the danger of the declining population.

144. Cf. Thuc. I 84 4.

145. Xen. Const. Spart. II 2; cf. Cyropaedia 8 1 31, Thuc. I 84 3. The Cyropaedia passage, which presents the definition of aidōs as behaviour in public, contrasts the quality of sōphrosunē, which involves the avoidance of misbehaviour in private too. Aidōs was recognised as a divinity at Sparta; Xen. Symp. VIII 35. On the use at Sparta of derisive laughter, a particularly effective way of imposing the values of the group, E. David in Powell (ed.) Classical Sparta, 1-25.

146. Eur. Hipp. 385-7. At the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War, obedience to orders was ruled unacceptable as a defence to charges of war crimes. In other words, international law—as defined by the presiding powers—required (on pain of death) that certain orders be disobeyed or evaded. On aidōs as undesirable inhibition, Hesiod, Works and days, l. 319 with the Commentary of M. L. West.

147. See below.

148. Xen. Const. Spart. II 2.

149. Xenophon has a word for it, used several times—rhadiourgein (Const. Spart. II 2, IV 4, V 2, XIV 4).

150. Ibid. II 2.

151. Ibid.

152. Xen. Const. Spart. II 9, Anab. IV 6 15; Plat. Laws 633b.

153. Plat. Rep. 548b.

154. Xen. Const. Spart. II 3f.

155. Ibid., 5-7; Anab. IV 6 14f.

156. Xen. Const. Spart. II 8.

157. Ibid., 7.

158. Ibid., XII 4.

159. Thuc. IV 41 3.

160. Thuc. IV 9 1, cf. 53 3.