SOURCE: Cartledge, Paul. “Literacy in the Spartan Oligarchy.” In Spartan Reflections, pp. 39-54. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Cartledge gathers the available evidence regarding the relative illiteracy of Sparta.]

I

Somewhere in the first half of the eighth century bc the ‘graphic counterpart of speech’ (David Diringer's nice expression) and a fully phonetic alphabetic script were respectively reintroduced and invented in Greek lands.¹ Thus the Greeks (apart from those of Cyprus, among whom continuity of writing may be inferred) achieved the feat, unique among European peoples, of rediscovering the literacy they had lost; and that after an interval of at least four centuries. The alphabet marked an enormous technical and practical advance on the clumsy ‘Linear B’ syllabic script, in the sense that it made it possible ‘to write easily and read unambiguously about anything which the society can talk about’.² However, it is important not to misconceive or exaggerate the significance of Greek alphabetism. As Harvey's exhaustive study demonstrated (1966), even in Classical Athens, where popular literacy probably attained the highest level hitherto known in the Greek world, there were still significant areas of illiteracy or at best semi-literacy.³ Widespread literacy must not simply be deduced from the mere availability of a phonetic alphabetic script of the Greek type.⁴ Further factors must be taken into account. One of these, Harvey suggested, is the political system. For although ‘democracy and literacy do not necessarily go hand in hand’ (1966: 590), he suggested cautiously that the high level of literacy in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries was perhaps ‘not entirely unconnected with the fact that she was a democracy’ (1966: 623).

In order to test this postulated correlation, Harvey compared the case of Classical Sparta, which he saw—rightly, as I shall argue below—as constituting the opposite political pole to Athens and for whose degree of literacy there was a fair amount of both literary and epigraphical evidence. His modestly expressed conclusion was that ‘the average Athenian could read and write with greater facility than the average Spartiate’ (1966: 628). Harvey's main argument seems to me to be wholly cogent; but for several reasons Spartan literacy merits thorough and constant re-examination and reassessment in its own right.

First, the claim both ancient and modern (it was entertained, for example, even by so sceptical a historian as George Grote) that the Spartans were completely illiterate must be scrutinised afresh. Second, what is probably the earliest example of Spartan writing so far discovered was published only in 1975, and it raised anew the question of Sparta's role in the development and diffusion of the alphabet in the Peloponnese and elsewhere. Third, it is only against the backdrop of the Spartans' (il)literacy that their proverbial ‘laconic’ speech can be properly evaluated. Finally, a just appreciation of the nature and level of literacy at Sparta can arguably make a significant contribution to the debate, also modern as well as ancient, on the correct characterization of the Classical Spartan ‘constitution’.

II

In 1975, two remarkable inscribed bronze artefacts were excavated at the Menelaion sanctuary near Sparta. One was a sacrificial meat-hook, dedicated by one Deinis ‘to Helen wife of Menelaos’. The other was a pointed or ovoid aryballos of exceptional quality, whose shape—provided it is appropriate to compare the Protocorinthian series in clay—should give it a firm approximate date of 650 bc. If (as we must assume) the aryballos was dedicated soon after its manufacture, the incised lettering it bears constitutes the earliest known Spartan or—to employ the conventional regional nomenclature—Lakonian writing by a quarter of a century or more.⁵

We may indeed go further. It is far harder to inscribe bronze than ivory, clay or soft limestone (the materials carrying the earliest examples of the Lakonian script known hitherto).⁶ Yet the letter-forms on the aryballos are not merely recognizably ‘Lakonian’ but (given the constricted surface) remarkably clear and neat too. This one inscription, in other words, seems to presuppose a tradition of literacy of considerable duration. It therefore renders plausible the assumption that the alphabet had reached Lakonia within a couple of generations of the generally accepted approximate date of its invention (c. 775 bc)—well in time, that is to say, for it to have been exported to Taras by Spartan colonists in c. 700.⁷ The new inscription may also have political implications; at any rate it lends weight to the view that the so-called ‘Great Rhetra’ (Pluk. Lyk. 6), whatever its precise nature or significance, was given written form as early as the first half of the seventh century.⁸

How then did the Greek alphabet reach Sparta in the first place? The possibility that it was actually invented on the island of Kythera, which lies off the Malea peninsula, was canvassed by Anne Jeffery (1961: 8). For Kythera was a known meeting-place of Greeks and Phoenicians (whose role in the invention of ‘letters’ even the priority-conscious Greeks did not seek to deny) and a Spartan dependency by c. 545 at the latest.⁹ That possibility, however, she ruled out chiefly on the ground (not entirely cogent, see Thuc. 4.53.3) that Kythera did not lie on a regular trade-route. We can now add that the island has yielded no clear archaeological evidence of connections with mainland Lakonia before the second half of the seventh century, although Xenodamos, a Kytheran poet of the first half of the century, was said to have visited Sparta.

Instead, therefore, Dr. Jeffery suggested two potential sources whence a more or less developed alphabet of the required local or regional form might have reached Sparta, namely Rhodes or Delphi. It is hard to decide between these alternatives, but on balance I prefer Delphi: negatively, because of the almost total absence of archaeological evidence for direct contact between Lakonia and Rhodes earlier than the sixth century; positively, because of the peculiarly close contact Sparta maintained officially with the Delphic Oracle, from the eighth century onwards. We do not know when the special permanent ambassadors to Delphi known as Pythioi (below, Section III) were first appointed at Sparta by the kings, but the asserted connection of the ‘Great Rhetra’ with Delphi and of both with Kings Theopompos and Polydoros implies for me a terminus ante quem of c. 675.¹⁰ Indeed, traditionally the first Delphic oracle given to the Spartans was delivered jointly to Kings Archelaos and Charillos, and their joint reign could on one modern reconstruction have fallen between c. 775 and 760, satisfyingly adjacent to the suggested date for the invention of the alphabet itself and for the start of the oracle.¹¹ Archaeological confirmation of some form of official Spartan interest in Delphi before 700 may perhaps be derived from an exemplary ‘Geometric’ bronze horse-figurine of undoubtedly Lakonian style (and presumably Spartan manufacture) excavated in the area of the Roman agora.¹² Thus the close similarity between the Lakonian and Phokian local scripts is consistent with Dr. Jeffery's suggestion that the Pythioi brought back from Delphi examples of alphabetic writing in the shape of oracles written perhaps on strips of leather (cf. Eur. fr. 627 Nauck).

Closely parallel literary and archaeological evidence attests an early and continuing Spartan interest in Olympia (the Oracle of Zeus as well as the Games).¹³ The discus inscribed with the name of Lykourgos, which Aristotle saw at Olympia and dated (in our terms) 776/3, must of course be dismissed as a ‘forgery’. But the suggestion that the alphabet was transmitted to Olympia from Sparta (Jeffery 1961: 185) is, if anything strengthened by the new aryballos inscription.¹⁴ In any case, the debt of Messenia to Sparta for its alphabet is not controversial, although the earliest known inscriptions from Messenia itself are not earlier than the sixth century, and diaspora Messenians (whether ex-Helots or other expatriates) are not attested epigraphically before the fifth.¹⁵

III

So much for what might loosely be called the ‘prehistory’ of Spartan literacy. Hereafter, although most of the discussion will have implications for the earliest period, and I shall return in various connections to the epigraphical evidence of the sixth century, I shall be primarily concerned to discuss Spartan literacy in the fifth and fourth centuries. By ‘literacy’ I shall mean simply what Trollope called ‘the absolute faculty of reading’ (and writing) rather than ‘the adequate use of a book’ or any deeper sensitivity to literary creations (although the transmission of seventh-century Spartan poetry to writers of the fifth and fourth centuries will not be excluded from consideration). Since this essay will deal exclusively with the literacy of Spartans of citizen status, and not with that of the other free inhabitants of Lakonia, evidence will be drawn solely from literary texts pertaining to Spartans and (with a few justifiable exceptions) from inscriptions found on territory directly held by the Spartan State. In this Section I shall attempt to answer the straightforward question: were the Spartans, or any Spartans, literate in the basic sense outlined above?

First, the literary sources. According to the anonymous patchwork ‘Dissoi Logoi’ (90 F 2.10 D-K) of c. 400 bc, ‘Sokrates’ in Plato's Protagoras (342a ff.), and Isokrates in his own, embittered voice (Panath. 209; cf. 251), all Spartans were illiterate. The author of the Platonic Hippias Major (285c) adds that many were also innumerate. If, moreover, a man brought onto the stage by the fourth-century comic poet Philyllios (fr. 11 Kock) was both an illiterate (which is not certain) and a Spartan (which is merely a guess), this may be further evidence at least of Athenian beliefs about Spartan (il)literacy. We should not, I suggest, take these passages au pied de la lettre. The Protagoras passage is a joke, as to some extent is the one from the Hippias Major. Isokrates was a rhetorician and, moreover, an Athenian cultural chauvinist.¹⁶ The ‘Dissoi Logoi’, finally, spoils its intended effect by including an—easily refutable—Spartan hostility to music. What such sources are doing, in short, is producing yet another variation on the well-worn theme that, in comparison to the cultivated Athenians of the Periklean Funeral Speech (esp. Thuc. 2.40), the Spartans were unlettered philistines (cf. Plut. Lyk. 20.8; Mor. 192b, 217d, 226d, 231d, 239b).

This was of course a charge which the most rabid Athenian ‘Lakonizer’ of the late fifth or fourth centuries would have been hard put to it to deny, even in the unlikely event of his wishing to do so. There was no market in Sparta, as there was in Athens, for the works of such as Anaxagoras—or for any other bibloi gegrammenai.¹⁷ We should not, however, misread the significance of this contrast by projecting it back into the seventh and sixth centuries, when there was no ‘market’ in ‘books’ anywhere in the Greek world, and when Sparta was a leading patron of creative literature. Besides Tyrtaios and Alkman, Spartans listened to a succession of foreign poets from Terpander of Lesbos in the early seventh century to Simonides of Keos in the early fifth, who found Sparta a congenial—and no doubt lucrative—field for the display of their talents. Whether or not this justifies the description of Archaic Sparta as in any sense ‘remarkably literate’ (Davison 1968) I am unclear; but it does at least raise the question of how Tyrtaios and Alkman (to ignore the practically unknown Kinaithon, Spendon and Gitiadas) acquired their familiarity with the leading literary Kunstsprachen of their day, and how their work was transmitted to Classical Athens. In other words, did Tyrtaios and Alkman practise their craft (if only in part) through the medium of the written text?

It should be emphasized at once that, even after the inauguration of a ‘market’ in ‘books’, most Greeks typically recited from memory or heard, rather than read, their literature—hence ana-gignôskô (‘I recognize again’ = I read) and akroatai (‘hearers’ = readers); also that the process whereby ancient Greek literature was disseminated or handed down in written form was always more akin to samizdat (‘self-produced’ in Russian) than to publication in the post-printing sense. Thus poems of Tyrtaios were sung by the Spartans on campaign (Lycurgus, Leokr. 107; Philochoros, FGrHist. 328 F 216), while those of Alkman received an annual airing at the Gymnopaidiai festival (Sosibios, FGrHist. 595 F 5).

By the fifth century, however, Alkman was known to the Athenian comic dramatist Eupolis (fr.139 Kock) and perhaps also Aristophanes, and in the fourth Tyrtaios could be quoted in extenso by the Athenian politician Lycurgus. Hence, since ‘any book that was well known at Athens in the fourth century is likely to have been known at Alexandria in the third’ (West 1974: 57), it is not surprising that our earliest book-text of Tyrtaios should belong to the third century or that Alkman should have excited the scholarly curiosity of no less a critic than Aristarchos. For the seventh century, however, we are reduced to inference. Given the close verbal dependence of Tyrtaios on the Iliad and of Alkman on the Odyssey (or at least an Odyssey), it is quite possible—though by no means inevitable—that they had access to a text of the poems, as is implied by the story that ‘Lykourgos’ had Homer copied (Plut. Lyk. 4.4). Again, although we have no specific evidence that Alkman caused written versions of his own poems to be produced, it is at least conceivable that those most interested in their verbally faithful preservation (one or both of the Spartan royal families, for example) would have had them committed to papyrus.¹⁸

Nevertheless, despite this evidence for literary creativity (and perhaps literate poets) in Archaic Sparta, it must be admitted that the character of Spartan public education does nothing automatically to rule out the imputation of illiteracy to the Spartans of the Classical period. For the agôgê was, at best, ‘educational’ only in an extended sense and is more fruitfully regarded as a comprehensive means of socialisation.¹⁹ Thus in the developed system of the fifth and fourth centuries the more orthodox musical and gymnastic exercises were combined with social institutions like age-classes and common meals and with rites de passage to produce tough, self-disciplined and unquestioningly obedient military men. Furthermore, Spartan supremacy abroad, which depended on repression of the Helots (and to a lesser extent the Perioikoi) at home, was not either won or significantly maintained by skills and techniques involving a developed level of popular literacy.

However, despite the contrary evidence of the ‘Dissoi Logoi’, Plato and Isokrates, and despite the character of Spartan education and society, the selection of the literary and epigraphical evidence set out below is sufficient to refute at any rate the charge of total illiteracy, even in the case of the humblest Spartan ranker.

1. KINGS²⁰

We are bound to infer from Plutarch (Ages. 1.4) that the heir-apparent was normally released from the universal obligation to go through the agôgê. This inference is apparently contradicted by Teles (fr. 3 Hense), but he is not a particularly trustworthy witness and anyway may mean only that a king's sons other than the heir-apparent were not so exempted. However, since the teaching of literacy could hardly have been an integral part of the agôgê, we need not in any case infer from this exemption that the kings were typically illiterate.

It is of course true that the stories and anecdotes which involve kings either sending letters (e.g. Hdt. 6.50.3; Thuc. 1.128ff.; 132.5; 133.1; Xen. Ages. 1.14; Plut. Mor. 211b, 212e, 219a, 222a-b, 225c-d) or receiving letters (Plut. Lys. 28.2; Athen. 7.289e) could all be interpreted in terms of dictation to or recitation by a literate person, as indeed could the political tract composed by the exiled Pausanias (FGrHist. 582); and we do once hear of a king (Agesilaos) being accompanied on campaign by a personal private secretary (grapheus: Xen. Hell. 4.1.39; Plut. Ages. 13.2).²¹ On the other hand, there are three anecdotes in which literacy is attributed to a Spartan king explicitly.

In the first (Hdt. 7.239) the exiled Damaratos for reasons of secrecy and diplomacy scraped the wax off a wood-backed tablet, wrote his message to the Spartans on the wood and then re-covered the tablet with blank wax.²² Aineias ‘Tacticus’ (31.14), a fan of such cryptography, would have approved of the stratagem, but the Spartans who received the tablet were baffled until Gorgo, daughter of Kleomenes I and wife of Leonidas, advised them to scrape off the wax.²³ The whole passage has in fact been suspected (probably unjustly) of being an interpolation in Herodotus, but at least its author did not find anything unusual or extraordinary about the literacy of Damaratos. It is only unfortunate that he was not more explicit about the identity of ‘the Spartans’ (Ephors and Gerousia?) who eventually read Damaratos' message. The two other anecdotes (Plut. Mor. 214e-f: writing; Ephoros FGrHist. 70 F 207: reading) both concern Agesilaos, who, incidentally, did participate in the agôgê.

Those are the only explicit pieces of evidence, but the use of the skutalê, whatever its exact nature, seems to demand that any king (or other commander) could write and read, unaided, at least simple messages, which would naturally be expressed as laconically as possible.²⁴ Finally, it seems legitimate to infer from the fact that the kings had custody of Delphic oracles (Hdt. 6.57.4) that they could read (cf. Hdt. 5.90f.; and perhaps Plut. Lys. 26.2).

Monarchy, even in a literate society, does not of course necessarily require or imply literacy on the part of the monarch. But the Lakonian alphabet was infinitely simpler to master than, say, the script which the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal triumphantly claimed to have learned. In any case, Ashurbanipal could rely on an elaborate scribal bureaucracy, somewhat as the mediaeval English kings could employ a literate clerical élite. Neither of these props was available to a Spartan king—although there was perhaps someone in Sparta competent to decipher Assuria grammata (Thuc. 4.50), i.e. Aramaic script.²⁵ On the whole it seems reasonable to conclude that Spartan kings could both read and write.

2. OTHER COMMANDERS AND MILITARY OFFICIALS

In some respects (dispatches, letters, skutalê) the remarks on the literacy of the kings apply here too. Indeed, the Spartan epistoleus (Vice-Admiral) may have acquired his title from his function as epistoliaphoros (Xen. Hell. 6.2.25). The bulk of the explicit evidence, however, concerns the roi manqué Lysander (Xen. Hell. 1.1.23; Plut. Lys. 14.6, with Mor. 229b, 229f [14]; Lys. 16.2, 19.8-12, 20.1-4, 28.3, 30.4); but note also, for example, Thuc. 8.33.3. Finally, mention should be made of the ‘booty-sellers’ (laphuropôlai: Xen. Ages. 1.18), who must somehow have recorded the booty they received and sold, and of which they donated a tithe to divine protectors.

3. EPHORS

The five members of the annual board of Ephors were also presumably literate.²⁶ For apart from exercising a general supervision of the laws of Sparta, which were not written down (Section V),²⁷ and a particular watching brief over the conduct of royalty, they played a key role in foreign affairs, which involved the sending and receiving of dispatches and the drafting of treaties (Section V). At least by the fourth century, the Ephors were elected ‘from all the damos’ (Arist. Pol. 2.1265b39-40, 1270b25-8 [the selection-procedure is here stigmatised as ‘extremely childish’], 1272a31-2). But unfortunately this is not quite the convincing proof we are seeking that all Spartans were functionally literate: for although numbers of eligible citizens in Aristotle's day were so low that most Spartans probably had to serve as Ephors, presumably only those who were fully qualified in all respects would have put themselves forward for election in the first place.

4. GEROUSIA²⁸

It is doubtful whether the gerontes, who counted in their number the two kings ex officio, had to produce either their probouleumata or their legal judgements in writing. But since they co-operated closely with the Ephors, for example when sitting as the Spartan ‘Supreme Court’ to try kings, they were probably as literate as they. A fourth-century bc inscription from the oracular shrine of Ino-Pasiphaë at Perioikic Thalamai records a dedication by a member of the Spartan Gerousia (IG 5 1.1317); this may be thought to support that assumption.

5. ENVOYS

In the fifth and fourth centuries diplomacy was a relatively underdeveloped aspect of Greek statecraft.²⁹ Sparta, however, took more trouble than most Greek states to get its diplomacy right.³⁰ Since war is one expression of failed diplomacy, part of the explanation of the Spartans' diplomatic finesse is, somewhat paradoxically, their general unwillingness after the sixth century to become involved in a fight. It would be surprising if Spartan envoys were not required to be literate (and possibly multilingual).³¹

As an extension of their interstate diplomacy Sparta devised a special kind of envoy, the four Pythioi, whose possible role in the introduction of the alphabet to Lakonia in the eighth century and the preservation of a text of the ‘Great Rhetra’ we have already noticed (Section II). The Pythioi were permanent delegates to the Oracle at Delphi, two being selected on a hereditary basis by each of the kings (Hdt. 6.57.2,4; Xen. Lak. Pol. 15.5; Cic. De div. 1.43.95; Suda s.v.).³² They may also have played a wider role in Sparta. The Greeks in general did not acquire the habit of keeping documentary records until fairly late, as we shall see. But if there was ever anything like a Spartan Public Record Office, the Pythioi are possible candidates for the role of archivists. The records, however, are unlikely to have consisted of much more than Delphic (and other?) oracles, royal pedigrees, and lists of kings, Ephors and perhaps the victors at the Karneia and other festivals.³³

6. HUPOMEIONES AND HIPPEIS³⁴

Xenophon's account (Hell. 3.3.4-11) of the abortive conspiracy organized by Kinadon in c. 400 is remarkable in several ways, but it has not in the past been treated from the standpoint of literacy.³⁵ Kinadon himself, who is expressly said to have been able both to read and to write, is especially interesting as belonging to the cadre of hupomeiones (‘Inferiors’) not that of the homoioi (‘Peers’, i.e. full citizens). Thus if the ‘Inferiors’ were lapsed ‘Peers’, this might strongly suggest that the average full Spartan citizen was functionally literate, unless of course Kinadon had been specially selected and trained for his role as secret agent.

In the same Xenophontic story the eldest of the hippagretai (the three who chose the other 297 hippeis) and the ‘younger men’ (presumably hippeis) detailed to arrest Kinadon are also said to be literate. An inscribed relief in honour of a Thiokles was erected by the hippeis (here called koroi) at Sparta in the sixth century.³⁶

7. ORDINARY SPARTANS

There is a story in Justin following Trogus (Hist. Phil. 3.5.10-11) that during the Messenian War of the seventh century the Spartan soldiers wrote their names and patronymics on wooden plaques (tesserae) which they then tied to their arms. This tale cannot be disproved, at least not on purely chronological grounds, but it can never be positively verified either. Nor can we say who was responsible for drawing up the presumably written wills referred to by Aristotle (Pol. 2.1270a28) or the certainly written mortgage-deeds (klaria) mentioned in a third-century context by Plutarch (Agis 13.3). In the second century bc, however, a Spartan turns up unexpectedly on a papyrus as party to a written contract.³⁷

8. WOMEN

It is well known that Spartan girls received an education equal to, though separate from, that accorded their male counterparts. Much of this was allegedly designed to produce robust mothers of sturdy male offspring, though no doubt it served also to socialize the politically disenfranchised half of the citizen population. Plato in the Laws (806a) speaks also of a ‘compulsory education in the arts’ and earlier, in the Protagoras (342d), had made Sokrates refer to Spartan women who were ‘proud of their intellectual culture’. Plato is admittedly a tendentious witness, but Aristophanes (Lys. 1237) apparently mentions a female Spartan poet, Kleitagora, and Iamblichus (Vita Pyth. 267) lists several female Spartan Pythagoreans. We need not take as literally authentic the anecdotes in which Spartan mothers write to their warrior sons (Plut. Mor. 241a, d, d-e).³⁸

So much for the literary evidence. Turning to the epigraphical, we find that this is not as helpful as we might have hoped, for two main reasons. First, all known private Spartan inscriptions have accrued from formal, religious contexts. The vast majority of them consists of ex-voto dedications, mainly of the type of those offered to Helen with which we began (Section II), but including also a significant quantity of victory-dedications. To these can be added a handful of inscribed gravestones and funerary reliefs.³⁹ Writing on perishable materials like leather, papyrus and wax has naturally not survived the Lakonian climate and soil-conditions.⁴⁰ But it is disappointing to have nothing comparable to, for example, the informal note scratched on a potsherd in sixth-century Athens, in which the author (probably a Megarian) instructs someone to ‘put the saw under the threshold of the garden gate’.⁴¹ Excavation in a settlement-area of Classical Sparta might conceivably transform our picture of Spartan literacy. To the fifth-century Athenian ostraka, however, which have figured prominently in the arguments for widespread Athenian popular literacy, there could of course be no Spartan counterpart, since the Spartans did not allow a popular say in the exiling of prominent figures.

Second, even if we adopt the useful distinction between ‘formal’ inscriptions executed by professionals (whether incised on stone and bronze or painted on pottery before firing) and ‘informal’ cursive inscriptions, we can never be sure whether the professional in any particular instance was a Spartan citizen. The point of difficulty here is the widespread belief, amounting to a dogma, that no full Spartan citizen ever practised a manual technê.⁴² But the scholarly tendency to regard Spartan society as unique in all particulars at all periods (a legacy from antiquity) rather than as a whole in specific periods should be firmly resisted.⁴³ If I were to hazard a guess at a possible division of labour, I would tentatively assign at least the public (and possibly all) formal inscriptions on stone (cf. Section V) to the hands of Perioikoi, who may have organized their profession on a hereditary basis.⁴⁴

What then are we to make of the informal cursive graffiti? Those certainly produced by craftsmen—the doodles on scrap pieces of soft limestone from the Ortheia sanctuary, the ‘ossified’ abecedarium on the neck of the Vix krater (if the alphabet is indeed Lakonian), and the masons' signatures at Amyklai⁴⁵—involve the ambiguity just discussed. But the graffito dedications incised on fired pottery, of which there is a fair number (though fewer than those painted on before firing), could well be the work of Spartan citizens.⁴⁶ At least, the frequency of error is perhaps sufficient to exclude the possibility that they were all the work of professionals, although it may be that orthography, let alone calligraphy, was not highly esteemed in Sparta.⁴⁷ Even if, strictly speaking, such graffito inscriptions imply no more than that Spartans could read, I am prepared to take them as evidence that they could write too.⁴⁸ A remarkable graffito of c. 500 on a sherd from the Spartan akropolis, whose author was presumably an illiterate trying to keep up with the literate Joneses, seems to support this inference.⁴⁹

That is pretty well the sum of evidence from literature and private epigraphy for Classical Spartan literacy, considerably eked out by inference.⁵⁰ Though rather paltry, it is still adequate to refute the imputations of total illiteracy cited at the beginning of this section. There is no reason therefore not to credit the unequivocal statement of Plutarch (Lyk. 16.10; Mor. 237a) that the Spartans—like the Cretans (Arist. fr. 611.15 Rose)—were taught as much reading and writing as was needful (cf. generally Thuc. 1.84.3-4).⁵¹ To make sense of the evidence set out above, we need only to suppose that for most Spartans the needs were ordinarily neither many nor pressing and that public functionaries alone were called upon to perform routine acts of literacy on a day-to-day basis. The Spartans, that is to say, dwelt primarily in a world of oral discourse.

IV

This was a world in which they were well fitted to survive. For the reverse side of limited Spartan literacy is the premium placed by that society on the ability to converse in a succinct and stimulating manner, employing the aphelês brakhulogia (Sextus Emp. Adv. Math. 2.21) immortalized in the Spartans' honour as ‘laconic’.⁵² This was not necessarily a sign that they had nothing worthwhile to say,⁵³ but rather expressed a refusal to privilege rhetorical form over content. The story that the Scythian Anacharsis had found the conversation of only the Spartans to be ‘sensible’ was firmly rejected by Herodotus (4.77), but the fiction bespeaks a real difference of conversational style between the Spartans and the rest of the Greeks. Well was the mid-sixth century Spartan Chilon, Ephor and reputed author of memorably gnomic utterances, accounted one of the ‘Seven Sages’ of ancient Greece.

However, our specific information about the conversational topics covered in high and low Spartan society suggests a level well below that of these lofty dicta. In an intentionally humorous passage in a Platonic dialogue (Hipp. Ma. 285d) we are told that the (presumably ordinary) Spartans listened ‘most readily to tales about the generations of heroes and men, the ancient foundations of cities, and in general to arkhaiologia’, which may be translated as ‘the whole range of stories about the distant past’.⁵⁴ As for the Spartan aristocracy, represented here by its most blue-blooded members, the doubtless well-informed Xenophon (Hell. 5.3.20) relates that ‘Agesipolis was well suited to share with Agesilaos in conversation about youthful exploits, hunting, riding, and homosexual love-affairs (paidika)’. This tallies well with Plutarch's list (Lyk. 24.5) of favourite Spartan ‘out-of-hours’ activities: dancing, feasting, festivals, athletic exercise and … conversation.⁵⁵

V

Thus we come to the last of the particular problems we set out to tackle: does an understanding of the nature of literacy at Sparta help us to characterize correctly the Spartan politeia or ‘constitution’? The study of the Spartan polity has been described as a form of ‘intellectual gymnastics’;⁵⁶ but an outsider might be pardoned for using a less friendly metaphor after contemplating the voluminous modern literature on Sparta's ‘constitutional antiquities’, much of it scarcely more than free invention, the remainder at best intelligent speculation sometimes distorted by ancient theory.⁵⁷ It could hardly have been otherwise, however; two partly overlapping and mutually reinforcing aspects of the ‘Spartan mirage’⁵⁸ saw to that.

The first in point of time and significance was the ‘Lykourgos-legend’, which treated Sparta as the paradigm of a state that owed all its economic, social and political institutions to the enactments of a single lawgiver.⁵⁹ The ancient controversies over the historicity of Lykourgos still stir some modern imaginations; but Lykourgos the man is in the present context a side-issue.⁶⁰ Nor is this the place to enter the minefield of ‘Great Rhetra’ Forschung. Suffice it to say here that this document for me represents the essence of the complex political solution wrongly attributed en bloc to ‘Lykourgos’ and that it should be dated somewhere in the first half of the seventh century.

The second distorting aspect of the ‘mirage’ was the theory of the ‘mixed constitution’ (miktê politeia), developed perhaps in the fifth century but not apparently applied to Sparta until the fourth.⁶¹ This theory held that the best (because the most stable) form of political system was either one which combined in a harmonious whole ingredients from each of the three basic ‘constitutions’ (monarchy, aristocracy/oligarchy, democracy)⁶² or one in which the different elements acted as checks and balances to each other. The ‘mixed constitution’ theory overlaps and reinforces the ‘Lykourgos-legend’ most insistently in its stress on the supposed absence of stasis in Sparta after Lykourgos' reforms.

Happily for us, however, not all the ancient sources were equally persuaded of the truth of every aspect of the ‘mirage’, and, since Sparta did in fact experience severe stasis, the ancient explanation of its supposed absence in terms of the ‘mixed’ nature of its politeia is hardly cogent. Today, indeed, it is usually denied that such an entity as a ‘mixed constitution’ is practically possible, but there have been isolated modern defences of the ancient view.⁶³ Thus, to take a representative modern statement, A. W. Gomme described Sparta's political system as ‘of a normal aristocratic type’ apart from ‘the anomaly of the two kings’.⁶⁴ It is unclear whether Gomme thought the anomaly consisted in their being two Spartan kings or in the survival of the kingship itself, but he obviously considered his description to be uncontroversial. Two decades later, however, A. Andrewes re-opened the whole question of the nature of the ‘government’ of classical Sparta in a powerfully succinct article. After giving what I would regard as a very acceptable picture of the Spartan political system (‘an oligarchy notorious for its discipline and respect for age and authority’) he concluded from the relative prominence of the Ephors and Assembly and the correspondingly low profile of the Gerousia in the period on which we are best informed (roughly the lifetime of Xenophon) that Sparta had ‘in some ways a more open constitution than most oligarchies’ (1966: 1).⁶⁵

This conclusion has not passed unchallenged.⁶⁶ To the arguments against it that fall within Andrewes' own immediate frame of reference can be added those arising from the study of literacy at Sparta. To summarize the former: whatever view we take of the political competence of the damos under the terms of the ‘Great Rhetra’, it is extremely doubtful whether there was ever much debate in the Spartan Assembly. At any rate, ho boulomenos was almost certainly not permitted (even if he had the courage and motivation) to speak as and when he pleased. On the one occasion on which we know the Spartans held ‘frequent assemblies’ (Hdt. 7. 134.2: haliês pollakis sullegomenês) the question at issue was ‘Does any Spartan wish to die for the fatherland?’ The distance in atmosphere and conception between this and, for example, the Mytilene debate at Athens in 427 is absolutely unbridgeable. Voting in the Spartan Assembly was conducted according to an archaic procedure, ‘by shouting and [as Thucydides was careful to add] not by ballot’ (Thuc. 1.87). In other words, the Spartans did not recognize the principle of ‘one man, one vote’, according to which everyone counts for one and no one for more than one. Moreover, as already noted, the methods of electing Ephors and Gerontes were dismissed by Aristotle as ‘childish’, presumably because they were so easily manipulated. Once elected, the members of the Gerousia were non-responsible (Arist. Pol. 1271a5-6), even though they together with the Ephors constituted the Spartan ‘Supreme Court’. It cannot be stressed too much that there was no popular judiciary in Sparta.⁶⁷

Add to those the arguments against ‘openness’ drawn from a consideration of Spartan literacy. First, there were no written rules governing the conduct of lawsuits heard before the Ephors (Arist. Pol. 1270b28-31). Second, and yet more importantly, legislation was not a typical feature of the ordinary Spartan's political experience,⁶⁸ and even such laws as were passed were not committed to writing (hence perhaps their ‘laconic’ expression: Plato Laws 721e). Indeed, according to a doubtless apocryphal and inevitably ‘Lykourgan’ rhetra (Plut. Lyk. 13.1 ff.; cf. Mor. 227b), it was forbidden to inscribe laws in Sparta, on the unimpeachably correct psychological ground that paideia (training, indoctrination) was a better teacher of obedience and discipline than external legal compulsion.⁶⁹ The same leitmotif lies behind the explanation attributed apophthegmatically to Zeuxidamos son of Latychidas II (Plut. Mor. 221b) for the fact that Spartan laws on bravery were unwritten. The one possible exception to or contravention of this prohibition, interpreted as a sixth- or fifth-century sacred law regulating the cult of Demeter, is of highly dubious status and value.⁷⁰ Indeed, the general prohibition of named tombstones at Sparta (Plut. Lyk. 27.3), at least after c. 500, might be taken to imply that in some areas of Spartan experience the written word was endowed with a quasi-magical potency.⁷¹

However that may be, a cursory survey of Spartan epigraphical evidence reveals at once a dearth of official State documents of any kind. It was known from literary sources that treaties were drafted at Sparta and publicly displayed there—or rather in the chief sanctuary of Sparta's fifth constituent village, the Apollonion at Amyklai.⁷² But only one actual example on stone is known to have survived from Sparta, a fifth-century treaty of summakhia (offensive and defensive alliance) with the otherwise unattested Aitolian Erxadieis.⁷³ Since the latter were presumably not admitted to membership of what we call the ‘Peloponnesian League’, it is uncertain what relation the terms of this treaty bear to those of what was probably the earliest building-block of that alliance, namely the Spartans' treaty with Tegea of c. 550.⁷⁴ The only other extant State document known from Classical (as opposed to Hellenistic) Sparta lists contributions by various individuals and states to a war-fund.⁷⁵

Apart from those two from Sparta itself, public inscriptions in the Lakonian script comprise only the following half-dozen: four from Olympia (a dedication of a bronze lebês by toi Spartiatai; two marble seats occupied by Spartan proxenoi of Elis in the sixth century; and the base of an offering to Zeus by the Spartans, probably c. 490/80);⁷⁶ one from Athens (polyandrion of the Spartans buried in or near the Kerameikos in 403);⁷⁷ and one from Delos (stele recording a decree of protection granted to the Delians by Sparta between 403 and 399).⁷⁸

For the sake of completeness we could perhaps add to the tally of known public inscriptions two victor-lists from Sparta, the (non-extant) stele inscribed with the name of those who fell at Thermopylai in 480 (Paus. 3.14.1; cf. Hdt. 7.224.1), the boastful epigram which Pausanias the Regent had inscribed at Delphi (perhaps on the limestone base of the Serpent Column), the (non-extant) inscribed stelai marking the site of the official reburial of the same Pausanias (Thuc. 1.134.4; Paus. 3.14.1), and five manumission-stelai from Tainaron (IG 5, 1.1223-32).⁷⁹ This is a poor harvest indeed, and the fact that six of them (the dedications and the funerary inscriptions) do not differ in kind from private inscriptions serves to underline the absence of documents with political implications of the sort that a law or other public ordinance would have carried.

Thus far then the contrast between Spartan and democratic Athenian practice in respect of public documentation is stark. We should not, however, magnify or otherwise distort its significance. In the first place, Athens, possibly following the example of those inveterate publishers of lawcodes, the Cretans, had published laws more than a century before the democracy was established in 508/7, the initial impetus perhaps being the growth of the coercive power of the polis at the expense of, and in open opposition to, the self-help justice of feuding aristocratic families.⁸⁰ Secondly, although no ancient state, democratic or otherwise, could rival democratic Athens in the publication of documents affecting the common weal, even Athens did not set up a central archive until the last decade of the fifth century (in what later became the Metroön).⁸¹ Finally, on present evidence it is hard to draw a sharp distinction in regard to public documentation between Sparta and, say, Corinth.⁸²

These are necessary qualifications. We need not, however, be so minimalist as to deny that the publication of documents by the Athenian democracy meant anything more than a claim to ‘open’ (rather than closed, aristocratic) government.⁸³ For at Athens the connection between the publication of potential documents in permanent form and the development of democratic institutions and practice is apparent, not only chronologically but also from, for example, ideological statements emphasizing the radically different underpinnings of written and unwritten lawcodes in terms of social class and political power (esp. Eur. Supp. 433-7; cf. Gorgias fr. 11a, 30 D-K; Diod. 12.13.1). Especially noteworthy is the insertion in published documents of a clause to the effect that ho boulomenos may read them.⁸⁴

Written definition of rights and duties will not of course automatically secure their effective exercise for all alike, whether rich or poor, strong or weak. But there seems equally to be something approaching a general rule that, to paraphrase Euripides, written definition marks an indispensable step on the road towards achieving this objective. Indeed, Spartans were reportedly not permitted so much as to criticize the laws—unless that is just another democratic Athenian slur.

To conclude, the alleged ‘openness’ of the Spartan ‘constitution’ is merely apparent and stems from the peculiarly Spartan feature that the Assembly was the army of adult male hoplite warriors in civilian dress. It naturally therefore had to rubber-stamp, in an open demonstration of solidarity and token sovereignty, decisions which in practice had already been taken elsewhere.

VI

If we return finally to the broader question with which we began, the role of literacy in social organization, we must at least conclude that the Spartan evidence does not support the technological determinism implicit in the simple deduction by Goody and Watt of widespread popular literacy from the mere availability of a version of the Greek alphabet. The simplicity of the alphabet did indeed make it possible for the ordinary Spartan man (and probably woman) to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing. Yet at the same time literacy in Sparta remained very thinly spread, and deep literacy was the preserve of an élite operating at the highest levels of state.

To say that Sparta made it ‘son point d'honneur à rester une ville de semi-illettrés’ (Marrou 1971: 45)⁸⁵ is perhaps an overstatement. Rather, the nature of the development of Spartan society from the eighth century bc onwards, above all its broadly oligarchic political system and the fraught relationship of the citizen-body to the Helots, did not either necessitate or even encourage the development of those social arts the successful performance of which is dependent on a high level of popular literacy.⁸⁶

Notes

1. The finest discussion of the possible occasion and probable date of the invention of the Greek alphabet is Jeffery 1961: 1-42; cf. Jeffery 1967. For discussion from a technological standpoint, see Havelock 1982: ch. 4. See also below, n. 9.

2. Goody & Watt 1968: 39.

3. Harvey 1966; see also Harris 1989; Robb 1994.

4. As it is by Goody & Watt 1968.

5. Catling & Cavanagh 1976.

6. Casson 1935.

7. On the Tarentine alphabet see Jeffery 1961: 279-82 (the only serious divergence from Lakonian is the absence of the multi-limbed sigma); equally close dependence on the metropolis is visible in religion and (other forms of) material culture.

8. Jeffery 1976: 177, raises the possibility of ‘the inscribing of a rhetra, perhaps on a bronze plaque like the sixth-century examples of rhetrai found at Olympia’ (cf. 1976: 42, 169). But see below, n. 69.

9. Jeffery 1961: 8. On the connections of the Phoenicians with Kythera, see Coldstream & Huxley 1972: 36. On the transmission of ‘letters’ to the Greeks by the Phoenicians, see Jeffery 1967: 152-4. See also below, n. 80.

10. Cf. Forrest 1963: 158-9, 166-8; West 1974: 184-6.

11. Parke & Wormell 1956: I. 83-4; II, no. 539. For the suggested dates of Archelaos and Charillos, see Forrest 1968: 21.

12. Rolley 1969: 61-2, no. 61; Zimmermann 1989: 134, no. 153. See further Chapter 12. For a possible dedication at Delphi by a Pythios, see below, n. 32.

13. Hönle 1968: 19-24.

14. Discus: Huxley 1973: 281-2. Transmission of alphabet to Olympia: Jeffery 1961: 185. For Lykourgos' alleged literacy see also below, n. 50.

15. Jeffery 1961: 202-6; add Bauslaugh 1990 (probably 460s).

16. Grote 1888: 390 n. 2 argued that Isokrates should be taken literally, since the second passage cited contains ‘an expression dropt almost unconsciously which confirms it. “The most rational Spartans (he says) will appreciate this discourse, if they find any one to read it to them”’ (Grote's italics). I do not see why this expression should be exempted from the charge generally accepted as valid by Grote, that Isokrates preferred rhetoric to factual accuracy; cf. Welles 1966; and, for Isokrates' take on Sparta specifically, Gray 1994.

17. Harvey 1966: 633-5. Compare the alleged banning of Sophists from Sparta (Plut. Mor. 226d); but see Harvey 1966: 627 n. 29.

18. On the transmission of Archaic Greek poetry in general, see Davison 1968: 86-128 (my quotation, however, is from 184); the samizdat simile is borrowed from Finley 1985c (1977): 146; cf. Havelock 1982: 16ff., chs 7, 12. Alexandrian commentaries on Alkman include the papyri listed as Pack 1965: nos. 81, 1950. On the language of Tyrtaios, see Snell 1969; on that of Alkman, Risch 1954: 20-37.

19. The standard modern treatment is Marrou 1971: 45-60; but see also Bolgar 1969: 23-49, esp. 30-5; see further below, Chapter 7.

20. See in general Gilbert 1895: 42-7.

21. Idaios is not otherwise mentioned, and his name may indicate that he was an Asiatic Greek or even a hellenized oriental.

22. For the kind of tablet Damaratos would have used, see Birt 1913: 259-63.

23. It is not stated whether Gorgo herself was literate, but, if I am right about Spartan women in general (see below, and Chapter 9), she probably was; see further n. 38, below.

24. The evidence for the skutalê is collected in Jeffery 1961: 57-8; and discussed thoroughly by Kelly 1985, who has demonstrated that it could not have been a cryptograph; cf. West 1988: 45-6 and n. 20.

25. The old view (that ‘Assyrian letters’ meant Persian cuneiform) was refuted by Nylander 1968: 119-36, esp. 123-4.

26. See generally Gilbert 1895: 52-9; and now Richer 1999. The Chief Ephor is explicitly credited with the ability to read in the second of the anecdotes involving Agesilaos quoted above; the same goes for Ephors as a whole in Plut. Lys. 20; cf. Thuc. 1.128 ff. (supposed letter of Pausanias the Regent to the Great King of Persia); Xenophon, Hell. 3.3.4-11 (further discussed below), and Theophrastos (fragment perhaps from his Nomoi on the use of skutalê in connection with anakrisis: Kelly 1985: 155 and nn. 46-7; Richer 1999: 433), which strongly suggest but do not state that the Ephors were literate.

27. It was presumably in this connection that the Politeia of Dikaiarchos (fr. 1 Wehrli) was allegedly read out annually to the youngest warriors in (or by) the Ephors' archeion.

28. Gilbert 1895: 47-9. Aristotle (Pol. 1271a9-10) found the method of their election ‘childish’ too; presumably the marks scratched on grammateia by the election ‘jury’ did not call for any greater degree of literacy than those made by Athenian jurors in dikai timêtoi.

29. Adcock & Mosley 1975; cf. my review in TLS 14 November 1975, 1348; Mosley 1979. For diplomacy in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, see Kienast 1973.

30. See in general Adcock 1948: 1-12, esp. 5; cf. Adcock 1924: 92-116, esp. 113. Of the 232 treaties collected in Bengtson ed. 1975, nearly one fifth involve Sparta or Spartans. In fifth-century Sparta heralds constituted one of the three hereditary professions (Hdt. 6.60).

31. See [Cartledge, Paul. “Literacy in the Spartan Oligarchy.” In Spartan Reflections, pp. 39–54. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.] p. 153.

32. Jeffery 1961: 190, suggested that the ‘-das, son of Dexippos’ who dedicated a bronze lebês at Delphi in the first half of the sixth century (199, no. 11) may have been a Pythios.

33. Plutarch (Ages. 19.6) refers to the anagraphai in which he discovered the names of Agesilaos' wife and two daughters. The list of victors at the Karneia was ‘published’ by Hellanikos of Lesbos (FGrHist. 4 F 85-6; cf. Jeffery 1961: 59-60, 195). Private inscriptions commemorating Spartan Olympic victors are IG 5, 1.649, 708; note also the victor-lists on stone cited below, n. 79.

34. Hupomeiones: Gilbert 1895: 39-40; Hippeis (an élite corps of 300 drawn from the younger adult warriors): Gilbert 1895: 60-1.

35. See now Oliva 1971: 192-3; Austin & Vidal-Naquet 1972: 106-7, 270-82, no. 59; Cartledge 1987: e.g. 170.

36. IG 5, 1.457, discussed by Bourguet 1927: 35-6.

37. P. Berl. 5883 + 5853: see Ste. Croix 1974: 53-4; Cartledge & Spawforth 1989: 71 and n. 19.

38. None of the more recent discussions of Spartan women raises the question of their literacy, but see briefly Harvey 1966: 625; and on the general issue of whether Greek women could read and write, Cole 1981.

39. Victory-dedications: Jeffery 1961: 199-201, nos. 22, 23 (?), 28, 31, 41, 42, 48, 50, 51, 52 (stele of Damonon). Grave-stones and funerary reliefs: IG 5, 1.699, 713, 824 (?); Jeffery 1961: 200-1, nos. 26, 29, 57, 59. Cf. below, n. 71.

40. Leather: Birt 1913: 254-6. Papyrus: Lewis 1974, esp. 84-8. Wax: Birt 1913: 259-63.

41. Lang 1974: no. 18. For Athenian writing in private life, see Harvey 1966: 615-17; Lang 1974.

42. Cartledge 1976a. The useful remarks of Jeffery 1961: 31-2 apply chiefly to international star craftsmen rather than to the anonymous members of the supporting cast.

43. Cf. Finley 1968: 145.

44. Jeffery 1961: 187.

45. Limestone doodles: Jeffery 1961: 188, 198, no. 6. Vix abecedarium: Jeffery 1961: 183, 191-2, 202, no. 66, 375; but see Rolley 1963: 483 n. 1. Masons' graffiti: Jeffery 1961: 194, 200, no. 32 (one at least may not have been a Lakonian: Jeffery 1961: 183).

46. Spartan akropolis: Woodward 1928/9: 241-52. Ortheia sanctuary: A. M. Woodward in Dawkins ed. 1929: 371-4. Eleusinion south of Sparta: Nicholls 1950: 297, nos. 53-4. Note also the inscribed bone flutes at the Ortheia sanctuary, appropriate offerings for contemporaries of Alkman: Jeffery 1961: 188, 198, no. 3.

47. Spartan epigraphic orthography moved Bourguet (1927: 8) to exclaim ‘je crois que nulle part n'est attesté un usage aussi peu tyrannique’; cf. Bourguet 1927: 19-20, 27, 140 (‘la fantaisie de l'écriture’).

48. It is probably true that in all societies more people have been able to read than write. As is noted by Turner 1971: 7, representations of people reading were far commoner in Greek art than those of people writing.

49. Woodward 1928/9: 247, no. 5, fig. 4 (‘presumably a votive inscription by an illiterate person’). The late Dr Jeffery, however, suggested to me that this may be a trial piece.

50. For the sake of completeness I note that ‘Lykourgos’, besides having had the Homeric poems copied (Plut. Lyk. 4.4), was reported to have transcribed personally a final Delphic oracle sanctioning the ‘Great Rhetra’ (Lyk. 29.4).

51. The process of instruction need not have taken long: see Plato Laws 809e-810a for the distinction between functional literacy and fluent calligraphy. For the further distinction between ‘slow’ and ‘retarded’ hands at the level of functional literacy in Ptolemaic Egypt, see Youtie 1971: 239-61, esp. 252-3, 256 n. 78 (repr. in 1973: 611-27).

52. The earliest source is either Ion of Chios (fr. 107 von Blumenthal) or Herodotus (3.48, dramatic date c. 525). For a curious (and painful) method of inculcating laconic brevity, see Den Boer 1954: 274-81. Spartan letters (epistles) were said to be comparably brief (fr. com. adesp. 417-19 Kock). The quintessentially Spartan apophthegms are of course of highly dubious authenticity: see Tigerstedt 1965-78 vol. II (1974): 16-30.

53. Finley 1975: 83. For the view expressed in the text, see Sakellariou ed. 1975: 275.

54. As suggested by Norden 1913: 372-3, the word arkhaiologia could be a Sophistic invention.

55. For the meaning of paidikoi logoi (Xen. Hell. 5.3.20) adopted here (‘homosexual love-affairs’), see Chapter 8, n. 81. On the role of conversation in education, cf. Sosikrates, FGrHist. 461 F 1 (Crete).

56. Ehrenberg 1973: 389.

57. The earlier literature is assembled in Busolt 1893: 510-79; add Gilbert 1895. More recent studies are amassed in the footnotes to Oliva 1971: 71-102; and in Richer 1999.

58. Ollier 1933-43; for its continuation to the present century see Rawson 1969. See further Chapter 12.

59. Cf. Aristotle Pol. 1274a29 for some others (though Solon of course is substantially a historical figure).

60. On the historicity of Lykourgos (as opposed to ‘his’ laws), see Toynbee 1969: 274-83; Oliva 1971: 63-70.

61. Aalders 1968; Rawson 1969, Index, s.v. ‘Mixed Constitution’; Nippel 1980.

62. de Romilly 1959: 81-99; Lasserre 1976: 65-84.

63. For example, Greenidge 1896: 74-107; but even he ends by adopting a position not dissimilar from that of Andrewes 1966 (see further n. 65, below).

64. Gomme 1945: 129 (ad Thuc. 1.18.1).

65. The comparison with the Athenian democracy is broached at Andrewes 1966: 16.

66. Ste. Croix 1972: 125 ff.; Cartledge 1987: esp. chs. 7-9.

67. No isêgoria: Finley 1976: 9. Voting and elections: Ste. Croix 1972: 348-9 (on Thuc. 1.87); Staveley 1972: 73-6. No popular judiciary: Ste. Croix 1972: 133, 349-50; cf. generally Bonner & Smith 1942: 113-29; Ruzé 1997: 129-240.

68. Müller 1839: 91; cf. 87 for his correct description of ‘the aristocratical spirit of the constitution, which feared nothing so much as the passionate and turbulent haste of the populace in decreeing and deciding’.

69. For the range of meanings of rhêtra, see Quass 1971: 7-11. If it meant ‘law’ in the case of the ‘Great Rhetra’, then ex hypothesi this document was never inscribed in Sparta. The Spartiatês graptos kurbis (Achaios ap. Athen. 3.68b) is a mystery.

70. IG 5, 1.722 = Sokolowski ed. 1962: no. 28. This may, however, have been inscribed for the benefit of Perioikoi, whose literacy need carry no implications for Spartan literacy.

71. According to the MSS of Plutarch, loc. cit., there were two classes of Spartans exempted from the prohibition on named gravestones: men who died in war and priestesses who died in office. For the former, see Jeffery 1961: 197, 201, nos. 57, 59; for the latter, perhaps IG 5, 1.824 (all three cited above, n. 39). Flacelière 1948: 403-5, following K. Latte, argued from IG 5 1.713 that the text for the latter exemption should be emended to read ‘women in childbed’; cf. Garland 1989: 14 n. 54.

72. Thuc. 5.77, 79; 18.10 = Bengtson ed. 1975: nos. 188, 194. For some illuminating remarks on their transcription and dialect, see Bourguet 1927: 148-50. Note also Thuc. 4.118.1-10, with Bickerman 1952 (armistice of 423); and Thuc. 5.41.3 = Bengtson ed. 1975: no. 192 (unratified treaty of 420 between Argos and Sparta, which the Spartans xunegrapsanto).

73. Peek 1974: 3-15; cf., however, Cartledge 1976b.

74. Bengtson ed. 1975: no. 112; we should probably distinguish the stele set up ‘on the (banks of the) Alpheios’ (Aristotle fr. 592 Rose) from the treaty of alliance. Such a stele, with its injunction to the Tegeans (probably) not to make Messenian Helot asylum-seekers into Tegean citizens, does not of course say anything about the literacy of Messenian Helots in the mid-sixth century.

75. Meiggs & Lewis eds 1989: no. 67; Fornara 1983: no. 132.

76. Lebês: Jeffery 1961: 190, 199, no. 10 (c. 600-550?). Seats: (i) Jeffery 1961: 190, no. 15 (c. 600-550?—perhaps too high); (ii) Mallwitz 1976: 275, pl. 212a (c. 500). Offering: Jeffery 1961: 195-6, 201, no. 49 (repr. in Meiggs & Lewis eds 1989: no. 22; cf. Fornara ed. 1983: no. 38).

77. Tod 1933; Jeffery 1961: 198, 202, no. 61.

78. Jeffery 1961: 202, no. 62; used as cover-photograph of Richer 1999.

79. Victor-lists: Jeffery 1961: 195, 201, nos. 44, 47 (the precise nature of no. 44 is unclear, and the last of the four pairs of names is written in a different hand from the others). The Thermopylai list is discussed in connection with the relevant poem(s) of Simonides by Podlecki 1968: 257-75, esp. 257-62, 274-5. Pausanias' epigram: Meiggs & Lewis eds 1989: 60, no. 27. The stelai marking his official reburial presumably fell outside the scope of the prohibition discussed in n. 71, above. Manumission-stelai: the sanctuary of Pohoidan (Poseidon) is known to have been an asylum for fugitive Helots (Thuc. 1.13.1), but, despite the use of Ephordates, it is uncertain whether the manumittees are Helots or private slaves (whether of Spartans or Perioikoi): see Ducat 1990: 25-6 (agnostic); Richer 1999: 281-2 (chronology only).

80. Stroud 1968. Cretan precedent: Meiggs & Lewis eds 1989: no. 2; cf. Jeffery 1961: 43, 194; Whitley 1997; Boardman 1999: 60; Hölkeskamp 1999.

81. Boegehold 1972; Boffo 1995; Sickinger 1996; cf. Welles 1966: 6, n. 16. But see below, n. 84.

82. Using Jeffery's catalogues as rough samples, we find that in the Corinthian alphabet there are 7 public inscriptions out of the 40, in the Lakonian (counting only those from Sparta and Amyklai) 1 out of the 32, or (counting them all wherever found) 6 out of the 67; Dow 1942 had suggested a political explanation—oligarchy might have influenced illiteracy.

83. Finley 1985a (1977): 156.

84. Harvey 1966: 600-1. This implies that the absence of a central archive need not have prevented persons from perusing any document in which they were particularly interested.

85. Marrou 1971: 45.

86. David Harvey, George Huxley, Peter Parsons, and the late Robert Bolgar and Anne Jeffery made illuminating comments on earlier drafts of the original version of this chapter.

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