Now if the
city of Sparta were to be deserted and only the temples and foundations of
their buildings were left, I think that people living at a much later time
would scarcely accept the Spartans' power as having been equal to their reputation
for it.
Thucydides of Athens, late V century BC.
Thucydides was right: from what
remains at Sparta, you could never infer how powerful she had been, and
now she is little more than a stopping point for tourists heading to the Byzantine
town of Mistra or down to Monemvasia. Yet there was a time when no one dared
stand against the dreaded Spartan warriors who proudly bore on their shields
a lambda, for “Lacedaemon”—Sparta’s ancient name.
In classical times, the Spartans had a remarkable social and political organization
(which was widely admired by her peers), most famous now for the astonishing
training program designed to turn the Spartan youth into tough, stoic warriors
through shared hardship and deprivation.
Perhaps the most famous story is
that of the Spartan youth, who, in compliance with the dictates of his training,
had stolen a fox to supplement his meager rations. Such theft was expected in
the young to improve their stealth, but getting caught led to frightful punishment.
The boy was caught but concealed the animal under his cloak (a Spartan’s
only covering), making no visible sign as the fox tore into him except to fall
dead when it reached his heart. We needn’t believe this folk story,
but it revealingly depicts a Spartan ideal. We also recall the Spartan mother’s
valedictory to her son as he left for the famous battle of Thermopylae:
come back carrying your shield or borne on it. The Spartan poet Tyrtaeus
(later seventh century BC) gives us first-hand evidence of this developing ideology
in what is probably the noblest expression of the exhortation to self-sacrifice
(from poem 9):
“. . . And he who falls among
the champions and loses his sweet life,
So blessing with honor his city, his father, and all his people,
With wounds in his chest, where the spear that he was facing has transfixed
That massive guard of his shield, and gone through his breastplate as well,
Why, such a man is lamented alike by the young and the elders,
And all his city goes into mourning and grieves for his loss.
His tomb is pointed to with pride, and so are his children,
And his children’s children, and afterward all the race that is his.
His shining glory is never forgotten, his name is remembered,
And he becomes an immortal, though he lies under the ground,
When one who was a brave man has been killed by the furious War God
Standing his ground and fighting hard for his children and land.”
Why should the Spartans have chosen
to live this way? Mostly it’s because they had essentially enslaved
the people of a different ethnicity who lived around them, turning them into
agricultural workers they called Helots; then they crossed Mt. Taygetos,
which rises impressively behind the modern city, and helotized the neighboring
Messenians. The Spartans took half the Helots’ produce, which freed
them from want. Alas, this Faustian bargain forced them to live in a permanently
militarized state in order to protect themselves from the vastly greater numbers
of understandably hostile Helots surrounding them. A state of war was annually
declared on the Helots, not because the Spartans wanted to slaughter them wholesale
but because they wanted to be able to slay potential Helot leaders and rebels
with impunity and no incursion of blood guilt.
Sparta was accordingly the great
land power in classical Greece, just as Athens dominated the seas; indeed,
this fact is what prompted Thucydides to the meditation recorded at the head
of this entry. The famous defeat of the Persian invasion under King Xerxes
in 480-79 BC had altered the outlook of the Greek cities permanently, and it
was Athens’ resulting imperial ambitions, coupled with Sparta’s
distrust of her, which led in great measure to the terrible Peloponnesian War
(431-404 BC) fought between the two and their respective allies. The war took
away the Greeks’ innocence and ended Greece’s greatest age, ending
with a humiliating total victory over Athens. Characteristically, the Spartan
conservatism kept them from wiping out the Athenians, costing her the support
of more sanguinary allies like Corinth. Only thirty-three years (371 BC) later,
however, Spartan power was fatally crippled in the defeat at Leuctra where
the flower of the all-too-small core of Spartan warriors was cut down. Sparta
was successively stripped of her Messenian Helots (and thus her living) and
fades rapidly from the historical scene.
Perpetual militarization left the
Spartans no leisure to pursue the fine arts. The result was the forfeiture
of a once vibrant literary and artistic culture, some remains of which can be
seen in the local museum. The temple of Artemis (c. 700 BC: originally connected
with coming of age rituals for girls) compares favorably with contemporary structures
elsewhere in Greece; the museum contains first-rate artistic work both from
this temple and from artisans of the premilitarization period. The lyric
poetry of Alkman, a contemporary of Tyrtaeus, is among the best produced
in Greece, and it is comforting to see in a Spartan’s poetry the sentiment
(fragment 100):
“Counterbalanced against the
iron is the sweet lyre-playing.”
Sparta had been populated in Mycenaean
times and figures very prominently in Homer. “Tawny-haired Menelaus”
was not only the king of Sparta but also the luckless husband of Helen of Troy.
Greek heroes achieved that status not for their moral fineness but for operating
on a (mythical) plane greater than the simply human. Accordingly, Menelaus and
Helen, the two great Spartan characters from Homer’s epics, fittingly
enjoyed a hero cult as semi-divine figures near Sparta in a late-eighth century
(BC) shrine atop the ashes of a much earlier Mycenaean palace.
The lyric poetry is quoted from Richmond
Lattimore's Greek Lyrics (Chicago1960).