Evaluating the Spartan Mirage

A charge frequently leveled against Greek historians is that they too often make generalizations based on a single city - namely, Athens. Indeed, most treatments of Archaic Greece - this one included - devote at least one chapter to the history of Athens, seemingly contributing to such an “Athenocentric” focus. Nevertheless, while caution should always be exercised before assuming that Athens was either typical or atypical, there is some justification for focusing comparatively more attention on this city. Firstly, the combined literary and archaeological evidence for Archaic Athens outweighs that for any other polis. Much of the literary evidence is, of course, late and it cannot be employed uncritically, but neither can it be ignored. Secondly, Athens in the Classical period was one of the most powerful poleis in the Greek world and certainly the most important from a cultural point of view. To understand the origins of the city’s ascent to such dominance, it is necessary to consider what was happening there in the preceding Archaic period.

Ideally the evidence for Athens should be compared to that available for other parts of the Greek world and such comparisons normally focus on Sparta, for which we possess almost as much evidence as for Athens. But if the testimony for Athens needs to be treated cautiously, that for Sparta should carry a formal warning. The reason for this is that much of what we think we know about Sparta - and especially Archaic Sparta - is veiled in what a French scholar once described as “the Spartan mirage,” an idealized image of a pristine, static political community that has been eulogized, exaggerated, and distorted by a succession of ancient and post-antique thinkers.

The Romans, for example, liked to imagine parallels between their own constitution and that of the Spartans, and Greek authors such as Dionysius of

A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Halicarnassus (RA 2.13-14, 23, 49) and Athenaeus (6.273f), influenced in good measure by Polybius (6.3, 10-11), maintained that they had deliberately set out to imitate the Spartans in this regard. The famed simplicity and austerity of the ancient Spartans was praised by Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria and claimed as a model for the early monastic movement. Statesmen such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Sir Walter Raleigh expressed their admiration for the stable, “mixed” constitution of the Spartans, with its popular assembly presided over by kings and an aristocratic council. The Spartans’ supposed rejection of private property influenced the utopian ideas of Sir Thomas More and the Abbe de Mably and, much later, the communist philosophy of Friedrich Engels. For the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Spartans’ subordination of their own individual interests to the good of the state offered a prototype for the “social contract,” while the apparent license accorded Spartan women constituted, for the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Johann Jakob Bachofen, the remnants of a once more universal institution of matriarchy. But Adolf Hitler also had a particular fascination with Sparta, basing the Hitler Jugend on the Spartan agoge or public education system. In the rambling thoughts that form the Table Talk - itself a title borrowed from Plutarch - Hitler admired the Spartans’ determination to weed out weak or inferior children and compared the fate of his own Sixth Army, cut off in Stalingrad, to that of King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans who fought to the death, defending the pass of Thermopylae against the Persians in 480.

The image of Sparta, then, has served a multitude of political, philosophical, and ideological purposes throughout the centuries but all of these ideas expand, to varying degrees, on a discourse that seems to originate in the fifth century. The Spartan authorities, no doubt, played an important role in manufacturing the image that they projected to the outside world, but our perception of that image has been refracted through the lenses of non-Spartan writers - especially Athenian authors of a more oligarchic persuasion, for whom an idealized portrayal of Sparta as a stable, just, and meritocratic society could serve as a utopian blueprint for the establishment of a new political order that did not pander to the Athenian masses. A key figure in the Athenian contribution to the Spartan mirage was Critias, who is supposed to have written two treatises on Sparta - one in prose and one in poetry, neither of which has survived save for a few fragments - and who was a relative of Plato, for whom Sparta constituted an important point of reference in more political works such as the Republic and especially the Laws.

Our most detailed accounts of Archaic Sparta are a treatise entitled the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians and Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus. The first has come down to us among the collected works of Xenophon and, although the attribution has sometimes been doubted, the author would certainly seem to fit Xenophon’s profile. Like Critias, Xenophon was an associate of Socrates and, at about the time of Socrates’ execution in 399, he was exiled from his native Athens and eventually given an estate in Elis by the Spartan king Agesilaus II. The debt of gratitude that Xenophon owed Agesilaus was amply repaid in the laudatory account that Xenophon wrote about his Spartan patron and a similar adulation for the Spartan way of life characterizes the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians. Plutarch was not so closely connected to Sparta, though the Xeno-phontic Constitution of the Lacedaemonians was an important source for the Life of Lycurgus, along with accounts by various Hellenistic writers who seem to have been content to allow their antiquarian research to promote more contemporary propagandistic purposes.

Both texts are already suffused with the Spartan mirage. And, although both end on a pessimistic note that comments on the state’s decline from the end of the fifth century, both sketch a picture of a hitherto stable, unchanging society, living according to the laws and institutions that had been established by the famed lawgiver Lycurgus, “for it was not by imitating other cities but by actually conceiving the opposite to most that he unveiled a country that exceeded others in good fortune” (Xenophon, CL 1.2). Aside from his association with the Great Rhetra (CL 14; Plutarch, Lyc. 5-7), Lycurgus is credited with institutionalizing adulterous relationships to combat demographic decline (CL 1.7-10; Lyc. 15), expropriating private property and redistributing the land into 9,000 equal lots (Lyc. 8), establishing the agoge for boys (CL 2-3; Lyc. 16-25), as well as an educational programme for girls (Lyc. 14), instituting the common-messes, named variously as pheiditia, syssitia, or syskenia, to which Spartan citizens were obliged to contribute monthly rations (CL 5; Lyc. 10, 12), banning money, save for a cumbersome iron currency (CL 7; Lyc. 9), and organizing the military (CL 11-12).

As we have seen (pp. 209-10), the fundamental elements of the Spartan constitution probably date back to the early seventh century though their attribution to Lycurgus appears to be a later invention - in which case, the belief that Lycurgus was responsible for virtually every Spartan institution and that such institutions had persisted unchanged over several centuries is inherently unlikely. Much more plausible is the hypothesis that various new legal and institutional developments were represented as incarnating Lycurgan ideals and prescriptions in order to stamp them with a traditional authority. The clearest example of this concerns the supposed redistribution by Lycurgus of public land into 9,000 inalienable lots. The idea that equality would be better maintained if land were not bought or sold was already current in the fourth century (Aristotle, Pol. 2.6.10). Yet, Aristotle also makes it clear that property was being transferred and accumulated in his own day and the widespread belief that, prior to a reform sponsored by the fourth-century ephor Epitadeus, land had been legally inalienable is found only in later sources (e. g. Plutarch, Agis 5). Furthermore, the figure of 9,000 is immediately suspect because the third-century King Agis IV had proposed the redistribution of Spartan land into 4,500 lots at a time when Sparta had lost half of its available territory after the liberation of Messenia (Agis 8). This was just one of a series of radical reforms that Agis promoted, along with the cancellation of debts and the enfranchisement of perioikoi and helots, and one can easily imagine that Lycurgus’ name had been co-opted to disguise the revolutionary character of the proposals (for which Agis was eventually assassinated). By contrast, the marked economic differences between Spartans - notwithstanding their profession of an egalitarian ideology - together with Aristotle’s observation that land had been concentrated in the hands of a few makes it virtually certain that private property and the right of alienation existed at Sparta as they did in most Greek poleis.

Some program of public education certainly existed at Sparta in the last third of the fifth century: Thucydides (2.39.1) has Pericles contrast the Athenians to the Spartans, who “pursue courage from the earliest age through painful training.” It is, however, unlikely to have resembled closely the detailed picture that Plutarch in particular sketches for the simple reason that the agoge had been completely overhauled at least twice before Plutarch’s own day. The first reincarnation of the agoge was during the reign of Cleomenes III (235-222), when the Stoic philosopher Sphaerus of Borysthenes was charged with revamping a program that may have fallen into neglect earlier in the century. Suspended by the Achaean general Philopoemen in 188, the agoge was restored by the Romans after their conquest of Greece in 146 though we cannot be sure how faithfully it replicated its Hellenistic and Classical predecessors. The army too must have witnessed many changes and developments over the centuries: certainly the army that Xenophon describes in some detail is organized differently from the one depicted by Herodotus at Plataea in 479.

The supposed ban on precious metal currencies has also come under critical scrutiny. While it is true that Sparta did not mint its own currency before the mid-third century, it has been estimated that around 50 percent of poleis never coined at all. In fact, the Spartan state must have had some reserves of gold and silver currency minted elsewhere for purposes such as maintaining ambassadors overseas, paying mercenaries, and ransoming prisoners of war, and numerous stories about Spartans accepting or offering foreign bribes would suggest also some private ownership of precious metal currency. It may well be that the tradition concerning Lycurgus’ ban on gold and silver was created as part of the moralizing reaction to the Spartan general Lysander’s conquests in the east at the end of the fifth century, when Sparta was suddenly flooded by overseas revenues (Diodorus 14.10.2; Plutarch, Lyc. 30). At this point, some - ultimately ineffectual - provisions seem to have been taken to try to prevent the private acquisition of wealth.

As for the unbridled license supposedly afforded women, it is probably the case that Spartan women enjoyed a higher legal status than, say, women in Athens: there is, for example, good reason to suppose that they were legally entitled to inherit at least a share of their fathers’ property. But the practices that Xenophon describes with some bewilderment - namely, that older Spartan husbands were required to procure younger male lovers for their wives or that men might have children by the wives of other men - appear to be a response to demographic decline. As Xenophon (CL 1.9) explains, “the wives want to have two households, while the men want to provide brothers to theirs sons who will share their lineage and influence but not lay claim to their property.”

A plausible suggestion is that these measures were taken only after the devastating earthquake of the 460s (Thucydides 1.101; Diodorus 11.63).

Ultimately, our two fullest sources for Archaic Sparta are so irredeemably affected by later invention and distortion that they possess practically no historical value for the early history of Sparta, even if they furnish important testimony for the eventual creation of the Spartan mirage itself. This is no less true of earlier, fifth-century sources. It has been claimed that Herodotus was largely immune from the effects of the mirage because his acquaintance with Sparta predated the serious distortions produced by Athenian prejudice and idealization. And yet, a different conclusion seems to emerge from the diametric oppositions that he sketches between Athens and Sparta (1.56), as well as from the fact that Sparta is the only Greek polis for which Herodotus offers an “ethnographic” portrait (6.56-60), akin to his descriptions of the Persians, Egyptians, and Scythians. In fact, he explicitly compares some Spartan customs to those of the Persians and the Egyptians, going as far as to claim that the Spartans were actually descendants of the Egyptians, and this all suggests that the exotically “alien” character of Sparta - a central constituent of the mirage - was already a topos in Herodotus’ day. Thucydides is concerned primarily with contemporary, rather than early, Sparta and even there he is forced to admit that complete accuracy is impossible due to Spartan secrecy (5.68.2). When he does refer to earlier Spartan history (1.18.1), it is to say that that the Spartans were powerful because they had possessed the same, stable constitution, free from tyrannical interventions, for approximately 400 years. This belief was, as we have seen, central to the idealized image of Sparta that emerged in the fifth century. It is inherently incredible but it also meets with little support from the extant fragments of the Archaic poets Tyrtaeus and Alcman.

At first sight, the jingoistic, martial exhortations of Tyrtaeus fit well with the militaristic spirit that characterized Sparta in the Classical period. It is, however, important to remember that we only possess those fragments of Tyrtaeus’ poetry that later authors saw fit to record. It is entirely possible that Tyrtaeus composed verses on a whole variety of matters but that those that were deemed incompatible with the later ideology of Sparta ceased to be recited and were therefore eventually forgotten. Alcman is another matter entirely. Although his focus on choirs, dances, and festivals is not inconsistent with later descriptions of Spartan culture and society (e. g. Plutarch, Lyc. 21), these are probably not the first items that come to mind when imagining Sparta. Alcman’s Sparta is a Sparta not of austere egalitarianism or militaristic isolationism but rather of trans-regional elites who participate in high culture. With the British excavations of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia between 1906 and 1910 and the discovery of a rich deposit of ceramics, terracotta figurines and masks, carved ivories, bronze statuettes and vessels, and tens of thousands of small lead figurines, it became clear that Alcman’s world was not so fictitious after all. Sparta, it was argued, had not originally been so distinct from other Greek poleis. There must have been some sort of turning-point, and when archaeologists noted that the higher quality dedications at the sanctuary began to tail off ca. 550, scholars were quick to interpret this as a consequence of important political, economic, and ideological changes that took place in the mid-sixth century and served to isolate Sparta from the mainstream. Some even attributed the changes to the Spartan ephor Chilon, regarded as one of the seven sages of Greece (Plato, Prot. 343a; Pausanias 3.16.4), and credited with strengthening the power of the ephorate (Diogenes Laertius 1.68).

Several decades on, the picture looks less straightforward. On the one hand, the terminal date of ca. 550 has little to recommend it any longer. The objects deposited in the sanctuary of Artemis prior to this date had been sealed beneath a sand layer caused by an inundation of the River Eurotas. Without the protection of this layer, dedications of the later sixth and fifth centuries could easily have been washed away by subsequent inundations or plundered. In fact, with the identification of Laconian products that the excavations offered, it became possible to recognize Laconian exports further afield and this suggested a very different story. There was, for example, a marked increase in the sixth century in the production and circulation of Laconian goods such as bronze figurines and vessels and fine black-figured pottery. Although production of the figured pottery tails off from the second half of the sixth century, it is still higher in the first quarter of the fifth century than it had been in the seventh, and plainer black-glaze wares continued to be exported long afterwards. It is the second half of the sixth century that sees a peak in the production of impressive bronze vessels - including, perhaps, the monumental bronze krater (mixing-bowl for wine), 1.64 meters high, that was found in the burial of a Celtic princess at Vix in the Seine Valley (though the Spartan provenance is contested). Bronze mirrors and figurines, instead, continued to be manufactured into the fifth century. Attempts have been made to reconcile the material evidence with later literary representations by assuming that manufacture was in the hands of the perioikoi rather than Spartan citizens, but it is almost certain that the more costly objects in sanctuaries were dedicated by citizens and the possible identification of a potter’s burial in the center of Sparta itself hints at the distinct possibility that the supposed prohibition on “banausic” activity was nowhere near as thorough as later Spartans or their admirers liked to imagine.

There is, on the other hand, a danger of exaggerating the typicality of Archaic Sparta. Even if the conquest of Messenia was a longer, more drawn-out affair than is sometimes supposed (pp. 184-8), it remains the case that the area over which Sparta exercised some sort of control - however indirect - was, at ca. 7,500 square kilometers, exceptionally large. Furthermore, a closer look at Laconian material culture reveals some rather unusual and distinctive features. The techniques behind the production of sixth-century figured pottery may have been borrowed from Corinth and Athens, but the decorative themes are entirely original. There are now some indications that the rather atypical podium construction of the early fifth-century sanctuary of Helen and Menelaus at Therapne (Figure 111.1) was a characteristic of other Spartan temples also, serving to mark them out from the canonical architectural styles adopted else-

Figure III.1 The sanctuary of Helen and Menelaus near Sparta. Source: photo by author

Where. Strange objects such as the harpax (a bronze butcher’s hook) and iron sickles, together with the unusually high incidence of lead votives, give Spartan dedications a rather unique character, while the fact that the closest parallels for the clay masks, found in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia and dating mainly to the seventh and sixth centuries, are with Phoenicia may provide some material support for the easternizing features that Herodotus observed for Sparta. A mirage, however distorted, has a point of reference and it is reasonable to conclude that there were some peculiarities about Sparta that were, from the fifth century onwards, capitalized upon by Spartans and non-Spartans alike. If that is the case, it would clearly be unwise to assume that Archaic Sparta can provide a benchmark against which we can assess the typicality of other Greek poleis.