Peloponnese Trip V (Part 1): Sparta

This post will be particularly text-heavy. Partly that's because Sparta's so incredibly weird that there's a lot to write about it, and partly that's because I have a total of three pictures, one of which might actually be from Epidaurus. The museum in town was closed for renovations, and the archaeological site, well, this is it. There's more to it than that, but very little is visible. That photo is of a Roman theater.

Any statement about "Greece" or "the Greeks" from the bronze age to Alexander is a pretty sweeping generalization, as each city did their own thing and getting the entire culture to agree on anything was like herding cats - cats with spears that they like to stick into you and each other every summer. Religion, calendars, units of measurement, dialect, alphabet, government, the text of the Iliad and Odyssey, and just about everything that wasn't warfare varied from city to city. But the Spartans are the exception to pretty much any rule we can come up with.

For starters, their entire society revolved around soldiers, who were the only citizens. They were supported by perioikoi, who were free non-citizens under Spartan rule who usually provided most of the man-power for the army anyway, and helots, who were enslaved Greeks from neighboring regions who had been conquered. Most of the helots were from the next valley over, Messenia. At the top of the food chain were landed nobility whose property was worked by helots under the supervision of the head of the household. Like the other Greeks, the Spartans considered the household to be women's sphere of influence; unlike the other Greeks, they actually meant it. Spartan women were notoriously liberated. Some of this was intentional. The Spartans believed that strong, physically fit women would give birth to healthier, stronger children, and so Spartan women married later in life and exercised nude just like men all over Greece did. Not surprisingly, Spartan girls almost always won the girls' footrace at the Olympics. But there was also the matter of necessity: Spartan men spent almost all of their time from age 7 until death in the barracks or on campaign, so their wives and sisters were forced to handle all economic matters.

The Spartans were famous for their one-liners, and the women got a few good ones in, too. When asked why they had so much more freedom than other Greek women, one replied "Because Spartan women are the only ones in Greece to give birth to real men.
" Greek soldiers would often drop their shields when fleeing battle, and the shields of fallen soldiers were used to carry their corpses home, hence the tradition farewell of a Spartan mother to her son going to war: "Come back with your shield or on it."

For men, life was even weirder. At birth they were inspected by government officials for any apparent defects and left on a mountain to die if any was found. From then they were given a reprieve until their seventh year, when they entered the military training system, the agoge. For the next ten years their lives were nothing but harsh training. They were issued one cloak every year, no shoes, and only enough food to keep them alive. If they wanted more, they were encouraged to steal from each other, or to sneak out of the barracks and steal from helots. They were trained constantly in athletics, hoplite warfare, and dance, which was intended to help their march in step during battle. One of the weirder examples of this training regimen is the festival of Artemis Ortheia. The boys would play a little game as part of the ritual, in which the goal was to steal a piece of cheese protected by an older boy with a whip. Participants were almost always injured and died with some frequency. Everything was more brutal in Sparta.

Pederasty was one thing that wasn't that different in Sparta, at least compared to other Greeks. The standard practice was that older men, established in their careers, would hit on boys on the cusp of puberty, give them presents, mentor them, have a sexual relationship for a few years and then continue on a "just-friends" basis afterward. In Sparta, younger boys would pick up an older boyfriend, who would mentor them, sleep with them, and help them with their career. Weird by everybody else's standards, at least until the Romans adopted all things Greek, but pretty standard in their world.

When they turned 17, Spartan trainees got a bump in status. The first order of business was to join a mess club. This was a lot like pledging a fraternity, only there were more expensive dues and if you didn't get in you were stripped of your citizenship and kicked out of school. And, of course, it was Sparta, so the hazing probably involved torture. The upside is that these guys could see the light at the end of the tunnel. From 18-19 they served as a sort of national guard if the army was away. From 20-30 they served as hebontes and made up the backbone of the army. Although they still weren't really citizens, they could at least grow their hair and beards out. The best ones served in the krypteia, the Spartan secret police, whose primary job was to ride around Messenia and Laconia at night terrorizing and murdering helots. At 30 the Spartans who hadn't died, failed out of the agoge or ran out of money became full citizens and could participate in the government. This participate amounted to voting, by screaming, to ratify the decisions of the Gerousia. The Gerousia was a 30-member body: 28 Spartans over the age of 60 (which was about all of the Spartans over the age of 60) and the two kings. What? Two kings? Being the only real Greeks with a home-grown monarchy wasn't weird enough for the Spartans. Instead they had two royal families and two kings at any given time. One king would serve as the general for the garrison in Sparta and one would lead the army out on campaign. The kings and the old men ('Gerousia', like the Roman 'Senatus', and the American 'Senate', basically means "bunch of old guys") proposed all legislature. Most of the legislature was put into practice by five men called Ephors who were elected annually, and who also served as judges and back-up generals in case of dead, young or incompetent kings. 300 presents them as inbred mutant priests who spend all day alone on a mountain counting their gold and molesting oracles, but in reality they were probably the handsomest and bravest men Sparta had to offer.

As far as totalitarian military states go, Sparta's was extremely successful. They conquered about a third of the Peloponnese in the early Archaic period and quickly established a very one-sided set of alliances with everyone else on the peninsula. By the time the Persians started conquering their way to Athens, the Spartans were the natural choice to lead the resistance. Unfortunately for King Leonidas, they needed the Athenian navy to win the war, and so the Greek army had to hastily mount a defense at Thermopylae, north of Athens. Once they were surrounded, Leonidas sent everyone home except for his 300 guards, their helot slaves, 300 Thespians and some Thebans. The Thebans prompted surrendered, and the Persians slaughtered everyone else before marching south and burning Athens to the ground. Free of any obligation to protect what was left of Athens, the Spartans holed up at Corinth, where there weren't any pesky mountain passes for the Persians to use against them. The Athenians managed to break the Persian navy just offshore near the island of Salamis, and the next year the Greek alliance finished off all of the Persian troops that Xerxes hadn't taken home with him after Salamis.

During the following decades, Athens rebuilt and founded a naval empire able to threaten Sparta and its allies. The inevitable war lasted thirty years and decimated all of Greece, and though Sparta won their victory was short-lived. The 30 tyrants they imposed on Athens were so unpopular that within a year even the Spartans were sick of them and helped the Athenians overthrow them. So the Athenians prompted went back to rebuilding their empire. Meanwhile, the arrogant Spartans had managed to alienate almost all of their allies during and immediately after the war. After about a decade of peace, the other Greeks got fed up and Athens, Corinth, Argos and Persia all went to war against Sparta again, though this war didn't last and didn't accomplish much of anything. The next war, however, broke Sparta for good. The Theban general Epamenondas and his fancy new army crushed the Spartans and killed about half of the full citizens at the Battle of Leuktra, then prompted beat feet to Messenia where they freed the helots and built them a heavily fortified city. After this the Spartans kept their attitude but lost their relevance. When the Macedonians conquered the rest of Greece, Sparta was the only city to never submit; and neither Philip nor Alexander considered it worth their trouble to march down there and conquer it.

A statue of Leonidas. The inscription, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ, is another of those Spartan quips. We have two good ones from Thermopylae. One of them is a reply to the Persian boast that they would fire so many arrows that they would blot out the sun: "Good, then we can fight our battle in the shade." The other, the one written on this statue, is Leonidas' supposed reply to Xerxes' demand that the Greek surrender their weapons: "Come and take them."
A list of every Spartan Olympic victor, from Akanthos in 720BC to Thomakos in 2004. Also of note is Kyniska, who was the only adult female Olympic victor. During the games women were not even allowed on site, but the victors of the chariot races weren't the horses or the charioteers, but the person who funded them. One of the Spartan kings entered a team in his daughter's name out of spite for the Olympic organizers.
This is Sparta (I think).

Because of the length of all the Spartan stuff, I'm breaking this day in half. See the next post for Epidaurus and Nafplio.