In the second book of his great work entitled ‘Matters relating to the polls’ (our Politics) Aristotle first examines and rejects the ideal states of Plato, Phaleas and Hippodamos and then turns to consider the three polities which had commonly been accounted the best of those actually existing: Sparta, Crete and Carthage. He prefaces his detailed discussion of Sparta with the general observation that any law shall be adjudged good or bad according as it is or is not consonant first with the laws of the truly ideal state (as conceived by Aristotle) and second with the idea and character of the polity proposed to the citizens by their lawgiver.
In relation to his ideal state Aristotle finds Sparta defective on the grounds that the lawgiver (meaning Lykourgos) concerned himself with only a part of virtue, the military part, and neglected the arts of peace. But no less harsh are his criticisms of the failure of Spartan laws to bring about even the defective kind of polity the lawgiver had proposed. These criticisms are directed especially to seven aspects of Spartan social and political organization: the Helots, the women, the Ephorate, the Gerousia, the common meals, the system of naval command and public finance. We have glanced earlier at those concerning the Helots. Relevant here are those directed against the organization of the common meals and more especially the position of women. For under the general heading of the women he produces his most damning criticism of all (Pol. 1270a29-32). In a country capable of supporting 1,500 cavalrymen and 30,000 hoplites the militarily active citizen-body shrank to fewer than 1,000; and, as events showed, the state was not capable of withstanding a single blow but was destroyed through lack of manpower (oliganthropia).
Clearly, Aristotle’s estimate of Sparta’s citizen military potential is appropriate only to the period before the loss of the Pamisos valley, and the ‘single blow’ is the defeat at Leuktra in 371. Probably too the figure of less than 1,000 militarily active citizens was borrowed from Xenophon’s evidence for the Spartiate effective at Leuktra. Aristotle therefore expressly linked Sparta’s defeat at Leuktra and consequent ‘destruction’ with its deficiency in
Citizens. He is in fact the only surviving source to make this theoretical connection and, if that was all there was to it, his explanation would be vulnerable to the objection that it was not a shortage of Spartiate warriors but inadequate generalship, military conservatism and poor morale that brought about the Leuktra debacle. However, the strength of Aristotle’s analysis is that, in shining contrast to all our other ancient sources, he does not merely note or explain away Spartiate oliganthropy but interprets it squarely as a function of the Spartan system of land-tenure and inheritance. As we shall see, this sociological rather than moralizing approach saved him from the error of Xenophon and others who ascribed Sparta’s downfall to a random ‘exogenous variable’. For Aristotle the failure lay within the system itself, which necessarily produced the historically decisive oliganthropy. In this penultimate chapter I shall try to demonstrate that Aristotle was right both in fact and in interpretation and to explain why official measures to combat oliganthropy proved in the end a failure.
It must be stressed at once that the oliganthropy for which we have evidence concerns only the adult male citizens of full status. We have no figures for the categories of men, below the status of ‘Homoioi’, who, like the Roman capite censi or proletarii, did not originally form part of the regular army. Even for the Spartiates, however, we have at most four texts which give, or can be made to yield, concrete, if hardly cast-iron, totals. The
8,000 of 480 (Hdt. 7.234.2), which is corroborated by the 5,000 of 479 (9.10.1, 11.3, 28.2, 29.1), had become about 3,500 by 418 (Thuc. 5.68, as interpreted in Chapter 12). The 2,500 or so of 394 (extrapolated from Xen. Hell. 4.2.16) had fallen by nearly a half to a maximum of about 1,500 in 371 (Hell. 6.1.1; 4.15, 17). This then is the scale and pace of Spartiate oliganthropy in the last 100 years of Spartan greatness. Can we say when and why it became first critical and then apparently irreversible?
The tying of citizenship and so membership of the hoplite army to land ownership and minimum contributions to a common mess (Arist. Pol. 1271a27-38) will possibly have encouraged a general ‘malthusianism’ from the seventh century, especially if I am right in thinking that the kleroi then distributed became to all intents and purposes private property and so subject to the normal Greek practice of partible inheritance. In particular, though, rich Spartiates, like rich men elsewhere in Greece, will probably have tried harder than most to limit their male offspring, so as to bequeath their considerable property intact. A further inducement to this end will have been the fact that in Sparta daughters as well as sons were entitled to a share of the paternal inheritance.
However, we lack relevant evidence to substantiate these hypotheses before the mid-sixth century, when the Ephors intervened to force the Agiad king Anaxandridas to divorce a loved but barren wife—or rather to take a second, bigamously (Hdt. 5.39f.). This could of course be explained by reason of state, but it was also around 550 that Sparta abandoned its aggressively imperialistic policy of expansion by land in the Peloponnese, and there may have been a demographic factor in this change of course (Toynbee 1969, 314). Even if we do not believe Cicero’s report (De Div. 1.112; cf. Pliny NH 2.191) of a serious earthquake at Sparta about this time, the Spartans may already have been alarmed by the disparity in numbers between themselves and the Helots.
In the late sixth and early fifth centuries the Agiads Kleomenes I, Dorieus and Pleistarchos all failed to leave a son—or at least, in Dorieus’ case, a legitimate one (White 1964, 149-51). By the same general period, we happen to hear, the line of one Glaukos had become extinct (Hdt. 6.86). An inscription of about 500 (IG V.1.713) suggests that women who died in childbirth were by then exempt de facto from the prohibition on named tombstones (Plut. Lyk. 27.2). In 480 the 300 Spartans selected to fight with Leonidas at Thermopylai had already produced male issue (Hdt. 7.205.2). A decade later the authorities moved most circumspectly against the regent Pausanias, because ‘it was the custom of the Spartans not to act hastily in the case of a male Spartiate’ (Thuc. 1.132.5). This formulation, though softened at the edges, recalls Agesilaos’ reason for supporting the acquittal of Sphodrias in 378 (Xen. Hell. 5.4.32) and for exonerating the ‘tremblers’ at Leuktra (Plut. Ages. 30.6; Mor. 191C, 214B).
Taken together, these scraps of evidence fully support the brilliant suggestion of Daube (1977, 11) that around 500 Sparta, in common with other Greek states, took legal steps to stimulate the procreation of embryonic warriors. Daube explains this development in terms of the military threat to Greece from the Persian empire, and this is no doubt partly right. But since the measures taken at Sparta were more extreme than elsewhere, it seems necessary to postulate that the Helots rather than, or in addition to, the Persians prompted their passage. If we were to assign them to a specific date, 490 comes to mind.
The measures in question involved above all the legal obligation on men to get married (Plut. Lys. 30.7; cf. Lyk. 15.1; Stob. Flor. 67.16; Pollux 3.48; 8.40). Under the law bachelors suffered a diminution of full civic rights and a fine, together with public disgrace and ridicule. They were excluded from the Gymnopaidiai festival (Plut. Lyk. 15.2) and so, I assume, from the holding of offices connected with its celebration. On public occasions not only would younger men not rise to offer them their seats, but the bachelors were obliged to surrender theirs to their juniors, a terrible humiliation in gerontolatrous Sparta (Xen. Lak. Pol. 9.5; Plut. Lyk. 15.3; Mor. 227EF; cf. Hdt. 2.80.1). Each winter they had to walk naked around the Agora, compounding the agonies of the cold (-6.3°C has been recorded in Sparta) by singing a song to the effect that they were being justly punished for breaking the law. But perhaps the most powerful evidence for the strength of the opprobrium heaped on bachelors is the assimilation of their social status to that of the ‘tremblers’ (Xen. Lak. Pol. 9.4f.). Laws in Sparta were of course unwritten, but, other things being equal, we should expect the force of example and the pressure of peer-group conformism in such a disciplinarian and public culture to have been at least as efficacious as any written law. Thus the fact that we do hear of confirmed bachelors— including, as we shall see, a man occupying high public office—suggests that other things were not always equal.
The whole point of this elaborate legal, ritual and customary apparatus was of course to force adult male citizens to procreate within the accepted framework of marriage. But monogamy within what we call the nuclear family is only one among many possible variants of pairing relationship contrived for the procreation of legitimate offspring and so for the transmission of hereditary private property; and Sparta was notorious in antiquity for its seemingly lax attitude to monogamy (Oliva 1971, 9).
It might happen, says Xenophon (Lak. Pol. 1.7-9; cf. Plut. Lyk. 15.11-18), that an old man had a young wife. Such a husband was permitted to introduce into his house a younger man to beget children for him by his wife (a kind of anticipation of our AID system). Conversely, a man who did not wish to marry (perhaps a bachelor, but presumably a widower) might have children by a married woman, if he could secure her husband’s consent. Xenophon claimed to know of many similar pairing arrangements. One of these may have been what Polybius (12.6b.8) calls the honourable custom whereby a man who had produced enough children might pass his fertile wife on to a friend.
It is unclear whether such marital practices had legal as well as customary sanction. However, since Plutarch (Lyk. 15.16; Mor. 228BC) denies the possibility of adultery (between citizens, that is: contrast Hdt. 6.68.3; 69.5) in Sparta, and since Xenophon does not mention adultery at all, it is tempting to connect this in Greek terms extraordinary state of affairs with the legal crackdown on bachelors. It may also have been in the early fifth century that fathers of three sons were exempted from military service, fathers of four or more from all state burdens (Arist. Pol. 1270a40-b7; cf. Aelian VH 6.6).
Be that as it may, the measures certainly failed to produce the desired effect. In 425 the eagerness of Sparta to sue for peace to recover the mere 120 or so Spartiates captured on Sphakteria (Thuc. 4.38.5) unambiguously signifies extreme concern over manpower-shortage. For even if some or all of these captives were leading men or related to leading men, as a scholiast believed, and even if there had been a peace movement in Sparta well before the Sphakteria disaster, the change of official attitude compared to that of implacable hostility towards the survivors of Thermopylai is starkly apparent. Some scholars, notably Ziehen (1933, esp. 231-5), would attribute the change largely to the great earthquake of c.465. But, as I have suggested in Chapter 11, the demographic effects of such a natural disaster should have worked themselve out by 425. Far more important, as should emerge, was one of the penalties imposed on the returned Sphakteria hostages in 421, deprivation of their right to buy and sell real property (Thuc. 5.34.2, with Gomme 1970, 36).
By 425, then, Spartiate oliganthropy had become critical. It cannot be merely coincidental that immediately thereafter ‘Brasideioi’ and Neodamodeis appear in the ancient sources, that in 418 these ex-Helots fight as hoplites at Mantineia and that by the same date (at the very latest) Perioikoi are brigaded with Spartiates in the regular hoplite phalanx. Between 418 and 394, however, if our estimates are approximately correct, there apparently supervened a generation or so in which the pace of oliganthropy slackened somewhat. Appearances, though, may be misleading, since the number of Spartiates at the Nemea River may have been artificially bolstered by a determined resort to ‘Homoioi by adoption’ (the mothakes) and/or by enlisting Hypomeiones (‘Inferiors’). For what is meant by these terms we must now return to Xenophon’s remarkable account of Kinadon’s conspiracy in c.399 (Hell. 3.3.4-11) and consider its social implications.
The informer, so he told the Ephors, was taken by Kinadon to the edge of the Agora in Sparta and asked to count the Spartiates, who numbered only about forty all told (one king, the five Ephors, the twenty-eight Gerontes and five or six others). Those, Kinadon pointed out, were the enemies, whereas the other 4,000 or more persons in the Agora were to be considered allies. Kinadon then took the informer on a guided tour of the streets of Sparta, where again the Spartiates in their ones and twos were contrasted with the many ‘allies’, and then of the country estates, where it was noted that on each there was but one enemy, the Spartiate master, and many ‘allies’ (i. e. the Helots and any private slaves there may have been).
The Ephors then asked how many people Kinadon had said were implicated with him. The answer was, a few but trustworthy individuals, who themselves added, however, that the ensemble of Helots, Neodamodeis, Hypomeiones and Perioikoi were potential accomplices. For whenever among these groups any mention was made of Spartiates, no one could hide the fact that he would gladly devour them—even raw.
This obviously tendentious account—neither the informer nor Xenophon’s source (if they were different persons) nor Xenophon himself supported Kinadon’s cause—poses three main difficulties. First, were Kinadon and his intimates right to imply that all the subordinate classes of population within the Spartan state were bitterly hostile to the ruling Spartiates? Second, did Kinadon’s plan embrace Messenia as well as Lakonia or did his plot have ‘an essentially Laconian character’, as suggested by Vidal-Naquet (in Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977, 258)? Third, who are these Hypomeiones—a group explicitly attested only in this one passage of Xenophon and in no other author?
In the first place, it was clearly in the interests of Kinadon and his confidants to exaggerate the extent of the hatred for the Spartiates. Thus we surely need not accept that even a majority, let alone all, of the Neodamodeis and Perioikoi were so cannibalistically inclined. This does not of course mean that there were not some Neodamodeis who were disenchanted with their semi-liberated status and some Perioikoi who desired full citizen rights at, or (more likely) independence from, Sparta. But most of the Neodamodeis and at least the hoplites among the Perioikoi (like Eualkes of Geronthrai: Chapter 12) presumably regarded it as a privilege to be counted as ‘Lakedaimonian’ warriors. To the Hypomeiones we shall return presently. The attitude of the Helots is linked to the second of the problems under discussion.
A priori, perhaps, we would expect most Helots to be at least ill-disposed towards the Spartiates, although we must draw a distinction between the domestic and the agricultural Helots. Again a priori we might imagine that the Messenian Helots would be more hostile than the Lakonians. However, in favour of Vidal-Naquet’s interesting suggestion (above) is the geographical consideration that the country estates nearest to Sparta were of course in Lakonia, and that it was in Lakonia too that the vast majority of the Perioikoi lived. Moreover, Kinadon was sent by the Ephors, after they had learned of the plot, to arrest some named Helots at a Perioikic town in Messenia, a dangerous tactic, one would have thought, if there had been a serious risk of a rising of the Messenian Helots and Perioikoi. On the other hand, however, it might also be argued, as Vidal-Naquet himself notes, that the Ephors were seeking to divide the potential enemy’s front by setting Lakonian and Messenian Helots and Perioikoi at each other’s throats; and we might add that, if Kinadon did have purely Lakonian aims, he was apparently depriving himself of one of his most potent levers against the Spartiates, Messenian ‘nationalism’. It is best therefore to leave open the question of the intended geographical application of Kinadon’s plans.
This leaves for consideration the identity and status of the ‘Inferiors’ and a possible motive for Kinadon’s behaviour. We may begin with Kinadon himself. Xenophon does not expressly say that he was an ‘Inferior’, but he implies this in two ways. First, he notes that he was not one of the Homoioi or ‘Peers’, the citizens of full status. Second, he reports Kinadon’s alleged reason for plotting as his wish to be inferior to no one in Lakedaimon. In fact, unless Kinadon wished to make himself tyrant or institute an egalitarian democracy, what he probably said was that he did not want to be one of the ‘Inferiors’ or perhaps that he wished to abolish the status of ‘Inferiors’ altogether.
Now we know that Kinadon was not consigned to ‘Inferior’ status for want of physical robustness or moral fibre, since Xenophon emphasizes that he was suitably endowed in both these respects and yet was not one of the Homoioi. On the other hand, it appears from another passage of the Hellenika (6.4.10f.) that physical and moral debility were grounds for degradation. For the men enrolled specially for cavalry, not hoplite, service in the emergency of 371 were ‘the most physically incapable and the least ambitious’. In other words, men who had failed to pass through the agoge or had not subsequently been elected to a common mess and so were automatically ineligible for regular hoplite service became ‘Inferiors’.
Some of the plotters, however, as Kinadon revealed to the informer, were enlisted men (I prefer this translation of syntetagmenoi to Underhill’s ‘definitely organized conspirators’) and had hoplite weapons. Kinadon could of course have been referring to Neodamodeis and Perioikoi, but as leader he must surely have had arms of his own. Thus, if he was in fact an ‘Inferior’, as I believe, then some ‘Inferiors’ at least could be enlisted for hoplite service. This will have been less hard to arrange if the state anyway provided weapons and armour to Spartiates (Chapter 10). The enlisted men, however, would have comprised relatively few of the revolutionaries: the ‘masses’, Kinadon said, would seize their weapons from the ‘iron store’. This, I think, must be a reference to the central military arsenal in Sparta. For the great quantities it contained of daggers, swords, spits (for cooking), axes, adzes and sickles (for cutting down the enemy’s crops) are explicitly contrasted by Kinadon with the civilian tools used in agriculture, carpentry and stonemasonry.
To return to the enlisted men among the ‘Inferiors’, these would have acquired their degraded status solely by reason of their poverty, being men of Spartan birth on both sides who had perhaps completed the agoge and even been elected to a common mess but then found themselves unable to maintain the stipulated mess contribution. Also to be assigned to the ‘Inferiors’ are those who had been temporarily or permanently deprived at law of their full citizen rights, whether for cowardice in battle (the ‘tremblers’), alleged revolutionary designs (the returned ‘men from the island’ in 421) or other misdemeanours.
More problematic, however, are the two or possibly three other categories whose names are attested but whose status as ‘Inferiors’ is uncertain. Xenophon (Hell. 5.3.9) refers once to foreigners of the category trophimoi and to the nothoi of the Spartiates, some of whom volunteered, apparently as hoplites, for the Chalkidian campaign of 380. The latter are described as ‘exceedingly fine-looking men not without experience of the good things of the city’, which perhaps means that, like such trophimoi foreigners as Xenophon’s own sons, they had gone through the agoge. Phylarchos (81F43), Plutarch (Kleom. 8.1) and Aelian (VH 12.43) mention also the category mothakes, possibly to be identified with the mothones cited by lexicographers and scholiasts.
If these disparate sources can be reconciled, it may be that the nothoi were bastards of Spartiate fathers and Helot or Perioikic mothers and that they, like the trophimoi foreigners, formed part of the wider category of mothakes/ mothones. The shared characteristic of the latter was perhaps that, regardless of their status at birth, they had been raised with and put through the agoge with the sons of men of full status. Since such distinguished figures as Lysander and Gylippos were believed to have been mothakes, clearly mothax origin was not necessarily incompatible either with Spartiate birth on both sides (Lysander indeed was a Heraklid) or with adult Spartiate status. The nothoi and trophimoi foreigners, however, were presumably disqualified from Spartiate status by their illegitimate or foreign birth and so remained ‘Inferiors’ for life.
However this may be, we have no positive indication whatsoever of the size of the ‘Inferior’ group in 399 (or any other time of course). Still, if ‘Inferiors’ could on occasion be enlisted as hoplites, the continuing drastic fall in the size of the ‘Lakedaimonian’ army in the fourth century must mean either that they did not then form an abundant reservoir of military manpower or that the Spartiates were unwilling to draw upon it extensively. Whatever the true number of ‘Inferiors’ may have been, by 371 there were not many more than 1,000 Spartiates all told. Since this was presumably a matter of no small concern to the Spartan authorities, or at least Aristotle clearly thought it ought to have been so, we must ask what were the countervailing factors over which they had insufficient control.
First, those of demography. The incidence of exclusive homosexuality and bachelorhood, and their effect on the birthrate, are not quantifiable, but the ability of a confirmed bachelor like Derkylidas to shrug off the potent sanctions of civic disgrace and reach the political heights suggests that this factor may not have been negligible. Habitual intermarriage among a small group of families, without replenishment from outside or below (Herodotus, 9.35, was struck by the small number of outsiders to acquire Spartan citizenship), should also have tended to diminish the citizen population. So too would contraception, abortion, infant mortality and the exposure of neonates; but only for the latter do we have any solid, though again not quantifiable, evidence (Roussel 1943). On the other hand, it seems certain that Spartan girls married relatively late by Greek standards (Plut. Lyk. 15.4), and this would perhaps have reduced total female fertility. Such also would have been the effect, and was perhaps the object, of the polyandry, especially adelphic polyandry, attested by Polybius (12.6b.8): for the multiple husbands were restricting the number of their legitimate offspring to the childbearing potential of a single shared wife.
However, no matter how great we suppose the effects of these demographic factors to have been, they should have been partly if not wholly offset by the measures to encourage procreation discussed earlier. We must therefore look for an explanation of the drastic oliganthropy to broader and deeper socio-economic conditions. This after all is the general direction in which the ancient sources pointed the finger.
We should not, however, follow Xenophon (Lak. Pol. 14.3) and Plutarch (Lyk. 30.1 etc.) in inflating the significance of the wealth, especially coined wealth, that flowed into Sparta following Lysander’s successful imperialism (Xen. Hell. 2.3.8f.; Diod. 13.106.8; 14.10.2; Polyb. 6.49.10). For it was a commonplace from at least Herodotus (9.122) onwards that military might was gained through personal abstinence; and anyway wealth, even if in less liquid forms, had been passing between the same kind of few Spartan hands long before the end of the fifth century. Nor, I think, should we follow Phylarchos and Plutarch in attributing a decisive causal importance to the probably inauthentic rhetra of Epitadeus (Chapter 10), even if the injection of foreign cash may have stimulated the market in Lakonian land in the fourth century, as it certainly affected Spartan lifestyles.
On the other hand, we are, I believe, bound to respect the sources’ unanimous association of Sparta’s downfall with materialistic greed. By this I suggest we should understand not so much greed for cash and movables as greed for land and the resultant anxiety of the ever fewer rich Spartiates to keep their ever increasing property intact. Aristotle tells us that most of the land in Lakonia in his day, the third quarter of the fourth century, had fallen into a few hands (Pol. 1307a36) and that almost two fifths of it were in the hands of women (Pol. 1270a23f.). This was but the culmination of a process extending over at least a century and a half, in which the rich had grown richer through bequests, adoptions and marriage-alliances, while the impoverished majority found themselves increasingly unable to maintain the stipulated contribution to a common mess and so were degraded to the status of ‘Inferiors’ (above).
There was of course nothing peculiarly Spartan about this anxiety over the transmission of property, any more than there was in the widening gulf between rich and poor Spartans, in the fifth and fourth centuries. What seemed to demand some exceptional explanation and so prompted the misplaced recourse to the ‘exogenous variable’ was the suddenness and distance of Sparta’s fall, from the leadership of the Greek world to the status of a second-rate power in less than a decade. In reality, though, the fall exemplifies the rule enunciated by Montesquieu in 1734 in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and of their Decline: ‘if the chance of a battle, that is to say, a particular cause, has ruined a state, there was a general cause ensuring that this state had to perish by a single battle.’ The battle was Leuktra, and the ‘general cause’ was the acquisitiveness of the famous vaticinatio post eventum (cited in Arist. fr. 544 and Diod. 7.12.5) that ‘acquisitiveness alone will destroy Sparta’. For acquisitiveness in the matter of landed property entailed the oliganthropy through which, as Aristotle laconically put it, Sparta was destroyed and for which, as Aristotle also saw, the remedy would have been to keep landownership more evenly distributed, as was done for example in the state in which he was himself resident, Athens.
The destruction was not, however, a simple quantitative process. The Spartiates had always been a minority in the total Lakonian population and greatly outnumbered by their allies in all major battles since the second half of the sixth century. It was rather the effects of Sparta’s progressively shrinking citizen numbers first in Lakonia and Messenia on the ‘Inferiors’,
Perioikoi and Helots, then in the Peloponnese on its Peloponnesian League allies, and finally on its enemies, especially the Thebans, that brought the destruction about.
In short, if I were to single out any one group of Spartans as chiefly responsible for Sparta’s downfall, that group would consist of the few rich Spartiates, personified precisely by those like Agesilaos for whom Xenophon and Plutarch evinced such warm admiration. It was perhaps fitting that Agesilaos should meet his end in Libya at the age of about eighty-four, returning home from fighting as a mercenary in Egypt.
Notes on further reading
The evidence for Spartiate oliganthropy is conveniently brought together in Ste. Croix 1972, 331f.; it is well discussed in Toynbee 1969, 297ff., less convincingly in Christien 1974 (in particular, I disagree with her interpretation of Epitadeus’ rhetra as a response to a debt-crisis).
On social differentiation at Sparta in the fifth to fourth centuries see Oliva 1971, 163-79. There is as yet no wholly satisfactory account of the status of Spartan citizen wives in any period. I hope to publish shortly a discussion dealing with among other things their property-rights during the sixth to fourth centuries.
For Aristotle as an interpreter of Sparta see Ollier 1933, 164-88; Tigerstedt 1965, 155f.; Laix 1974.
World History
