The society of Sparta has traditionally been portrayed as austere and militaristic, especially given Sparta’s military power as well as the regimented system, the agoge, for educating Spartiate youth. At age seven, Spartiate boys entered the agoge in which they received athletic and military training until reaching full manhood at age 30. The classic description of this tough training (with many gruesome details about beatings and the like) stands at Plut. Lyc. 17sqq. Given the late date of this description, much in it may be exaggeration or mythologizing reconstruction. Girls apparently entered the agoge as well, though here Plutarch offers fewer details (Lyc. 14; cf. Euripides Andr. 590sqq.). The adult Spartiate males whom the agoge produced were supposed to be professional soldiers who lived not from any trade, but from half of the produce from land which Helots worked for them.
Yet there is another side to society in Sparta. For example, it seems that Spartiate males were also enthusiastic singers and members of choirs. Plutarch describes an elaborate three-part male choir (boys, men in their prime, and old men) which presumably turned on the different quality of the male voice according to age (Lyc. 16). Various poets attest to the high esteem in which the Spartiates held music and singing (see Plut. Lyc. 21), and Sparta produced a number of significant poets such as Tyrtaeus and Alcman. The latter’s intricate “maidens’ hymn,” the Partheneion, composed for a choir of fifteen girls (possibly divided up into two subchoirs singing in responsion), shows that Spartiate girls too received musical training. So besides training to be soldiers, Spartiates went to choir practice - an artistic side to their society which one might not expect.
Finally, the Spartiates, both men and women, underwent rhetorical training - albeit in a specific kind of rhetoric, namely the art of the “comeback” for which they were renowned (Lyc. 19-20). Lesser mortals generally think of the perfect response to a slight or stupid remark while brushing their teeth the next morning. Not so the Spartiates, who time and again immediately replied with devastatingly apt retorts (many of them collected by Plutarch in his Sayings of Lacedaemonian Kings and Commanders). Spartiate women also were schooled in this art, as the following selections from Plutarch’s Sayings of Lacedaemonian Women show. When a naive Athenian lady who was visiting Sparta admiringly noted that Spartiate women were the only ones who could order men around, Gorgo, the daughter of one Lacedaemonian king and the wife of another, told her, “yes, but, then again, we’re also the only ones who give birth to men.” When a certain foreign man, wearing rather elaborate dress, was making advances to Gorgo, she told him just to go away - “you can’t even act like a woman properly, much less a man.” One woman, on hearing her son explain that his sword was too short, advised, “try taking a step forwards.” And another woman, when a man made her an improper proposal, responded as follows: “When I was a girl, I learned to obey my father. When I became a woman, I learned to obey my husband. So you can run your proposal by him first.”
World History
