Sparta Reconsidered

The Spartan Secret to Loving Life

2024-11-27T10:42:00.000+01:00

Sparta’s enemies allegedly joked that it was no wonder the Spartans were willing to die in battle -- because no one would have liked to live the way they did. Aside from the fact that these commentators probably knew very little about the way Spartans actually lived, the assumption is that lack of luxury and the pervasive deprivation to which Spartans were condemned by their laws made them unhappy men.

Yet Xenophon, a noted Laconophile who lived and campaigned with Spartans for decades, argued the other way around: that precisely because the Spartans learned to get along with very little, they were actually happier.

Today, I end my posts on Ancient Sparta by examining the Spartan secret to loving life.

Modern efforts to measure happiness have produced various indexes which prove that there is no direct correlation between wealth and happiness. Unscientifically, I would add that in my personal experience the Nigerians, surrounded by corruption, pollution and collapsing infrastructures, are much happier and have a greater joie de vivre than do the Norwegians, who have one of the highest standards of living and enjoy one of the most equitable and developed societies on earth.

Without getting too deeply into the philosophical topic of what constitutes happiness, I would like to suggest that happiness has less to do with objective circumstances and more to do with a state of mind. We all know that whether a glass is described as half empty or half full depends on whether the observer is a pessimist or an optimist. However, as my father pointed out: the optimist and the pessimist are both wrong – but the optimist is happier.

When outsiders looked at Spartiate society and (based on what they knew) decided such a life wasn’t worth living, they may indeed have accurately described how they would have felt if forced to live the way the Spartans did. However, they tell us nothing about the way the Spartans themselves felt. They are describing Spartan society as “half empty” – but that is not necessarily the way the Spartans saw it. The historian has to look beyond the opinion of outsiders and search for hints about Spartans attitudes toward their society.

Returning to the opening comment, I would argue that, in fact, men are very rarely willing to die for something they don’t think work preserving. Troops notoriously break, run and surrender when they have lost faith in what they are fighting for. If Spartan rankers thought that their way of life wasn’t worth living, then they would have welcomed defeat as a way of introducing revolution and constitutional reform. Indeed, if young Spartans thought the Spartan way of life was so abdominal that it was better to die than live as they were supposed to live, then idealistic young Spartans would have deserted to the Athenians in droves, helped defeat the oppressive regime they hated, and introduced Athenian-style democracy. In short, witty as the Athenian joke is – and it made me laugh out loud – it does not describe the Spartan frame of mind.

So how do we come closer to the Spartan attitude toward life? What made Spartans willing to die for Sparta? Was it really just a mindless fear of showing fear? A fanatical devotion to a code of honor? Or was Xenophon on the right track when he suggested that the Spartans learned to enjoy life – and love it better – by learning self-control and restraint?

As evidence of a certain, if not joie de vivre, at least contentment, I would like to first draw attention to those pieces of Spartan art that we have to date uncovered. Unlike the art of some warlike cultures (notably the Aztecs), Spartan art depicts many peaceful scenes: farm animals, lions and mythical beasts, bulls and horses (lots of horses!), riders with and without hunting dogs, chariots with horses and charioteers, girls running, married couples side-by-side, a king watching the correct weighing of goods for export, youths and maidens and hoplites, lots of hoplites. It is notable that the facial expressions on the human figures are uniformly benign. A convention certainly, but I would argue that a society that rarely smiled would not have conventionalized the smile as the expression in its art.

As witness to Sparta’s love of life I would also like to call Sparta’s most famous philosopher, Chilon. According to a variety of ancient sources, Chilon was the origin of the quintessential laconic advice “Know Thyself” – inscribed in the forecourt to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Maria Papadopoulos points out in her contribution to “Sparta: A city-state of Philosophers: Lycurgus in Montaigne’s essais” (Sparta: Journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek History, Vol. 7, No. 1, July 2011), however, that this expression is a condensation of the longer command from Apollo to “know that you are not a God, know that you are mortal, know that the finitude called death is an irreducible component of life. Live accordingly.” If Papadopoulos is correct, then Chilon’s admonishment to “know thyself” was not so much advice to know one’s own abilities and limitations, but advice to live each day in anticipation of death. In short, it meant much the same thing as “Carpe Diem,” a phrase usually translated as “use each day.” Arguably “using” each day is not the same as enjoying each day, and yet as Papadopoulos goes on to note: “The ancient Spartans trained hard but they enjoyed themselves [too]: feasts, dancing and singing, creative imagination and satirical banter and a temple dedicated to the God of Laughter….”

Combined, these fragments of evidence suggest that the Spartans themselves did not find their lifestyle so burdensome and certainly not intolerable. The “deprivations” and hard work that strangers found so depressing were in contrast of little importance in a society that learned to love life itself in full consciousness of its transience. A man who keeps in mind the alternative (death) loves even the simplest things in life. This, I postulate, was the secret of Spartan attitudes that can be interpreted as a very deep-seated love of life.

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Speech like Spearpoints

2024-11-20T10:16:00.001+01:00

In the ancient world, the Spartans were (in)famous for their culture of silence. They were also envied for their ability to express themselves concisely and pointedly.

But while the Spartan culture of reducing speech to its bare essentials and speaking only when necessary was described and admired by ancient observers, the reasons for Sparta’s culture of silence are less obvious.

Ancient “Laconophiles” collected alleged examples of Spartan speech all characterized by pithiness, and Xenophon stresses the – evidently unusual – ability of Spartan youth to hold their tongues except when directly addressed. Perhaps the most graphic example of the Spartan distaste for excessive verbiage, however, is the story of the Samian ambassadors, who sought Spartan aid in their fight against Polycrates. According to Herodotus, the Samians gave a very long speech after which the Spartan’s complained about having forgotten the start of the speech by the end of it. When the Samians then brought a bag and said the bag needed flour, the Spartans replied that the word ‘bag’ was superfluous – and then proceeded to give the aid requested. (Herodotus 3:46). Because Spartan eloquence was characterized by an absolute minimum of words, we describe minimalist speech as “Laconic” event to this day.

W. Lindsay Wheeler in his excellent article “Doric Crete and Sparta, home of Greek Philosophy,” (Sparta: Journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek History, Vol. 3, # 2), claims that silence was a critical component of the Spartan educational system. He alleges that silence was purposely imposed on youth so that “their thoughts should gain force and intensity by compression” and so their speech would be “short, concise and to the point, like their spear points.” He goes on expound on the depth to which philosophy lay at the roots of Spartan society and culture. Clearly, a society that valued philosophical thought based on observation of nature, scorned idle chatter, and it is fair to assume that in Sparta men were expected to speak only when they had something worth saying.

During a recent intensive training course in administering first aid to the victims of traumatic injuries, I was struck by an additional feature of the Spartan culture of silence – its utility on the battlefield. The training focused on providing first aid to trauma victims in an environment without medicine, medical technology or specialized first-aid kits. It was heavily informed by recent military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the causes of battlefield injuries have changed dramatically since the age of Sparta, the result – severed limbs, massive hemorrhaging, life-threatening puncture wounds and crippling fractures – would have been familiar to any Spartan ranker. Astonishingly, despite all the advances in modern medicine, the first response probably has not changed much in two and a half millennia.

This is where the Spartan culture of silence might have proved its utility – if it was not part of the very reason for evolving it in the first place. In warfare, serious casualties are inherently traumatic, which means the victims inevitably suffer from shock and hypothermia. Both conditions worsen, if a patient is agitated and unable to keep still. If, on the other hand, a victim has been trained to remain still and silent in ordinary circumstances, then they have a better chance of also remaining calm (and so preserving rather than squandering their strength, blood and breath) in a crisis too.

Furthermore, it appears (but I would welcome a medical opinion on this!) that the natural pain-killers the body produces in situations of extreme trauma are more effective if adrenaline levels are lower. Thus, developing behavior that reduces or shortens the period in which adrenaline is pumped into the body, may increase the speed with which natural painkillers are released into the bloodstream. Thus, far from being super-macho heroes, who ignored pain (as portrayed in most cartoons, films and novels), Spartans may literally have experienced less acute pain when dealing with battle wounds.

If we accept that this was a possibility, then it is even possible that Spartans, having observed how calm and stillness improved the survival rate among battlefield casualties, concluded that cultivating these behavior patterns in their children and youth would help them to respond accordingly on the battlefield. In short, the culture of silence and self-control may have helped Spartans to experience less pain and survive more readily on the battlefield, and the fact that self-control and silence was effective on the battlefield may have reinforced the culture of silence in the agoge and among adult, male citizens.

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The Spartan Agoge: Scandalously Co-Educational

2024-11-13T10:26:00.005+01:00

While the ancients generally admired the Spartan educational system, modern commentators tend to be critical or appalled by it. Ironically, the one aspect of the agoge that provoked contemporary outrage, is the single feature widely imitated today. Namely, Spartan girls were integrated into the public education no less than their brothers.

Today I look more closely at the co-educational aspect of the Spartan Upbringing.

Sparta differed from most other Greek city-states most dramatically with respect to the legal status, social standing, and economic importance of women. Sparta was not actually alone in this, evidence from Gortyn on Crete suggests that Doric cities generally granted women higher status and greater rights, but in comparison with the other cities of the Greek mainland, most especially Athens, the status of women was arguably the most dramatic point of differentiation.

The status of women in most of the Greek world, and particularly in Athens, was similar to the status of women under the Taliban. First, girl infants were more likely to be "exposed" -- that is murdered -- than males. The Greek comic poet Posidippus put it this way: “Everybody raises a son even if he is poor, but exposes a daughter even if he is rich.”

Even if allowed to live, a female child would be given less food than her brothers, certainly denied all wine and meat. Girls were also denied exercise and kept in the dark, poorly aired "women's quarters" at the back of the house, because girls were not supposed to be seen in public, and Athenian girls were not educated. On the contrary, they were considered mentally deficient by nature. Aristotle, for example, compared them to children incapable of growing up. Any training they received was thus informal and domestic, designed solely to ensure they could preform household tasks.

On reaching puberty, they were "given away" in marriage. Note, women were not parties to a marriage, they were the objects of contracts between their guardian and a man interested in acquiring a wife. Wives were acquired strictly for the purpose of the production of legitimate heirs, and sexual pleasure was sought from boys, slaves, and prostitutes (who were also unfree). Wives, meanwhile, were confined to the same cramped and dark "women's quarters" (now in their husband's rather than their father's house), and were excluded from the intellectual life of their husbands because they were not allowed to attend symposiums -- not even those hosted by their husband under their own roof.

Furthermore, women in Athens could not inherit or own property. At no time could a woman in Athens own anything whose value was greater than a bushel of wheat. If an unmarried Athenian girl's father owned property and died without male heirs, she was bequeathed to the next male relative, who had to marry her in order to obtain the inheritance. The heir then divorced the wife he already had (although she was utterly blameless) in order to obtain the inheritance with the female appendage he now had to marry. Meanwhile in the famed theaters of Athens women were called (to great applause) "a curse to mankind" and "a plague worse than fire or any viper" (Euripides).

In light of the above, it is hardly surprising that, as Nigel Kennel put it, "...the most shocking aspect of Classical Sparta's educational system, to contemporaries at least, was that girls trained and competed in contests similar to those of their brothers and cousins."(1) Furthermore, based on a fragment of Plato, Ducat concludes that the girls had no choice about the matter but were compelled to attend the agoge.(2) In short, the universal and compulsory nature of the agoge applied to girls no less than boys.

As to what they learned, Kennel hypothesizes that girls training "mirrored" that of the boys, while Cartledge believes that Spartan girl's intellectual education "resembled the 'primary' education given to Athenian boys, but in other ways, especially the physical exertions, it was a carbon copy of the Spartan boys' curriculum, and that is presumably an important clue to its meaning and function."(3) Xenophon speaks only of girls competitions in "running and strength" although Euripides suggests that wrestling was taught as well and Plutarch (speaking of the Roman-era agoge) mentions wrestling, discus and javelin as well. Yet, significantly, Plato points out in his Protagoras (342d), education in Sparta was not purely physical for the girls either. On the contrary, in Sparta "not only men but also women pride themselves on their intellectual culture." This suggests much more than mere literacy: it implies a systematic education in rhetoric and philosophical thought.

Why would Sparta break so radically with the rest of the Greek world with respect to female education?

The obvious answer is that this was part of the far wider issue of women's status in Sparta as a whole. Spartan women could inherit and own property. They ran their husband's kleros. They were active participants in their marriage. They are recorded voicing their opinions in public. They are known to have been disciples of Pythagoras. They drove chariots. They quite simply could not have done all that if they had not had a basic education and developed a degree of physical fitness as children.

Thus, from being a purely eugenic exercise to produce strong warriors, as most commentators (including, in this case, Xenophon) imply, the education of Spartan girls was part of a holistic system of integrating women into the society and state. Like their brothers, the shared experiences of common messes, identical clothes, and participation in the same events, festivals and competition helped to build their identity as Spartiates and to develop solidarity among the girls themselves.

Yet it had another, almost completely overlooked, function as well: it encouraged heterosexuality. The very fact that the girls and maidens shared the race-tracks and changing rooms, the dancing floors and theaters with the boys and youths made them less alien and more accessible than their sisters in other cities. Modern psychology indicates that homosexuality and particularly pedophilia is more common in misogynous societies in which women are segregated and denigrated (as in Athens) -- not in societies where they are integrated and empowered. Everything we know about Sparta in the Archaic and Classical period contradicts the widespread assumption that Sparta was dominated by homosexuality and lesbianism. The co-educational agoge is another piece of evidence that in Sparta homosexuality was less common and less accepted than in other city-states of the ancient Greek world.

(1) Kennel, Nigel. The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 45.

(2) Ducat, Jean. "Perspectives on Spartan Education in the Classical Period." Hodkinson, Stephen and Anton Powell (eds). Sparta: New Perspectives. Duckworth, 1999, p.58.

(3) Cartledge, Paul. Spartan Reflections. Duckworth, 2001, p. 83-24.

This ends my series on the Spartan agoge.

The Spartan Agoge: The Delicate Balance between Democracy and Discipline

2024-10-29T12:11:00.001+01:00

Readers who believe Sparta and its educational system were particularly brutal will be shocked to learn that many ancient Greek commentators considered the Spartan eduational system, the agoge, as one of Sparta's most "democratic features."[1]

But then, ancient observers knew -- as many modern readers do not -- that Sparta was not just the home to a disciplined army but also the first state to introduce democracy (150 years before Athens adopted that form of government). In short, Sparta was both democratic and disciplined, and the Spartan educational system, the "Agoge," reflected that perpetual balancing act between democracy and discipline.

The reason ancient observers viewed the Agoge as "democratic" was two-fold. First, because it was compulsory for all except the heirs to the two thrones, and second, it opened up the ranks of citizens to those not born of citizen parents.

Before focusing on the first point, it is important to consider the revolutionary nature of the second. Whereas birth to citizen parents was the sole basis to obtain citizenship in the rest of the Greek world, Sparta had created (as we saw earlier) an additional requirement of successfully completing the educational system. Yet while this ensured that all citizens attained a least a minimal level of education, it also opened the doors to citizenship for the sons of non-citizens. Suddenly, there was a way to become a Spartan without having been born to the privilege. (2)

The way in which this was applied is vague (to say the least) and it would appear to have been applied most commonly to the sons of former citizens, boys whose parents had been citizens, but through poverty had slipped from the ranks. Yet another very likely possibility in later years was that sons of freed helots, particularly those that fought with Brasidas or other Spartan commanders, were given the chance to send their sons to the Agoge. Possibly even the sons of run-away Athenian slaves were allowed this opportunity.

The point is extremely significant and has been too often overlooked. It shows that the Spartan state found the common experience of the agoge more important than bloodlines. Or, put another way, the Spartan state trusted the agoge to "create Spartans" in the sense of men with the right values and ethos. This is unquestionably a democratic idea, as it removes the hereditary feature of privilege altogether.

The more obvious democratic feature of the agoge was that it treated all boys exactly the same. All participants went barefoot, all wore identical himations all year long, all ate the institutional food in common messes, all had to undergo the same training, learn the same skills, and partake in the same ceremonies and festivals. Whether the (younger) son of a king or a "mothake" (non-citizen's child) "adopted" by a more wealthy citizen, the treatment and routine were the same. They were all under the authority of the Head Master and his assistants, and all subject to the criticism and oversight of all adult citizens. No boy could claim he was "better" than his colleagues or withdraw from the collective games, sport, training or learning without risking his future as a citizen.

There may also be a third democratic element in the Agoge. In the Roman agoge, the boys elected their group leaders. That is to say, in addition to being under the oversight of the Head Master and his assistants at all times everywhere, and in addition to being constantly watched over by an Eirene, each age cohort was divided up into units or teams or groups called "herds" in the Roman-era nomenclature. These herds elected from their own number a "herd leader." It was these groups within each age cohort that competed with one another at sport, play and music.

Since Xenophon makes no mention of the herds or their leaders, this may be yet another Roman invention, yet I wanted to mention it because it is not totally at odds with a city-state that invented democracy. Encouraging school children to annually elect their leaders is an excellent way to prepare them for living in a democracy by learning the consequences of elections and so how to select good leaders.

Yet, to the horror of the ancient no less than the modern world, the boys in the Spartan agoge were also subject to draconian discipline. Namely, they could be flogged. It is important to keep in mind that in the rest of the Greek world flogging was a punishment reserved for slaves. So the notion that a citizen's son might be flogged was particularly debasing and offensive; it put the free man's son on the same level as a slave. Were it not for the fact that Xenophon explicitly mentions it, it would be easy to believe that flogging itself -- like the whipping contest -- was a mere Roman-era invention.

But Xenophon does mention flogging -- three times in three short paragraphs. First, he mentions that the Head Master was authorized "to punish [his charges] severely whenever they misbehaved while in his charge." And also that Lycurgus gave the Head Master "a squad of young adults equipped with whips to administer punishment when necessary."(3) Second, he notes, "Someone might ask then, why on earth did he inflict many lashes on the boy who was caught [stealing]?" in order to answer: "After making it a matter of honor for them to snatch just as many cheeses as possible from Orthia, he commanded others to whip them...." (4)

What this tells us is that whipping was used both as punishment as part of the ritual at Artemis Orthia, the same ritual that later became the whipping contest of the Roman-era agoge. It is easier to answer the question of why the whipping at Artemis Orthia -- as practiced during the Archaic and Classical era -- than why flogging was a general means of discipline.

The festival of Artemis Orthia initially replicated an incident in which the Dorians were attacked by barbarians while celebrating a festival to Artemis. The Dorians beat off the barbarians armed with just canes from the river. The Archaic and Classic ritual entailed one class of boys from the agoge trying to steal cheese from the altar of Artemis Orthia (see above: "...an honor for them to snatch as many cheeses....") while another age cohort defended the altar armed with canes.

But why would the Spartans alone of all Greeks institute flogging as a means of punishing their own youth? Xenophon is silent, and we have no Spartan voice that explains it. Was it just a means of making their youth particularly tough? Was it a means of impressing upon the youth that they were like slaves until they attained citizenship? After all, if citizenship was not a privilege of birth, then in effect the children of the agoge were not necessarily going to be citizens; by being treated like slaves they were reminded of the value of completing the agoge successfully.

Or were Spartan youth so unruly and so impudent that only the threat of a whipping could get them to behave? We know that Xenophon praised the "respect and obedience" and appearance of modesty among Spartan youth, yet he praised these qualities in all Spartans. It was the Spartan obedience to their laws that impressed him most, along with their self-discipline and self-restraint. In short, the draconian nature of the ultimate discipline may have been a means to induce self-discipline because there would be few things worth risking the humiliation of a flogging. Unfortunately, we will probably never know.

(1) Cartledge, Paul. Spartan Reflections. Duckworth, 2001, p. 85.
(2) Ducat, Jean. "Perspectives on Spartan Education." Hodkinson, Stephen and Anton Powell (eds). Sparta: New Perspectives. Duckworth, 1999, p. 53.
(3) Xenophon, 2.1.
(4) Xenophon, 2.3.

Next month I will look at the co-educational nature of the Spartan agoge. Meanwhile,

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The Spartan Agoge: A Public Institution, a Collective Responsibility

2024-10-23T10:07:00.000+02:00

Thanks to films like "300," the Spartan Agoge is commonly viewed today as a brutal -- not to say savage -- training in which boys and youths were taught nothing but survival skills by sadistic instructors. In my last entries, I pointed out that this image is an illusion created in part by the artificial agoge of the Roman era and in part by poor historiography on the part of scholars copying from each other carelessly.

Yet even after removing the grotesque mask created by later generations, the Spartan educational system was characterized by unique elements which attracted the praise of many ancient observers -- including Plato.

Today I look more closely at the "public" aspect of the Spartan Upbringing.

In an age when private schools and colleges enjoy a reputation for quality that generally exceeds that of public institutions, it is hard to understand why the public nature of Sparta's education attracted the admiration and praise of some of ancient Greece's most famed philosophers -- including Aristotle, otherwise a critic of Sparta. To understand the attraction of Sparta's public school it is essential to understand that the alternative was often no education at all.

True, in cities like Athens that attracted great philosophers and scientists from around the world, the opportunities were seemingly limitless. An Athenian could theoretically indulge his own intellectual curiosity by attending talks by the greatest minds of his age at the famous gymnasiums and lyceums or by meeting and discussing with these men in a more intimate setting at the various symposiums hosted by leading citizens. An Athenian could even engage such men, or their more humble disciples, to act as teachers for his sons.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Athens citizens had neither the time nor the means to indulge in this kind of intellectual pursuit because the vast majority of Athens' citizens had to earn a living. That meant they could not stay up all night drinking at symposiums, nor spend the afternoons listening to lectures at the gymnasiums either because most Athenians were too busy earning a living. As for their children, as soon as they had grown out of infancy they had chores to do and errands to run. Soon they began to assist their father in his business and craft, and at the earliest opportunity learned a trade. Time for education was limited and competed with being useful to their family or learning skills necessary for gainful employment. Furthermore, education was expensive, because teachers had to make a living too and so charged for their services.

What this meant was that while the rich could hire private tutors and personal trainers for their sons, for the poor education was simply an expensive luxury that their children didn't have. Everybody in between sent their sons to one or another of the plethora of schools run by anyone who wanted to set one up, and the boys went whenever they could squeeze it between their chores and their skills-training for as long as their father could (or would) afford it. The result was that there was no overall standard of education in most Greek cities, and large numbers of citizens were both illiterate and innumerate.

Sparta, in contrast, education was deemed too important to be left to the whims and preferences of fathers. Instead, the state assumed responsibility for the education of all citizens' children. As Xenophon worded it, "Lycurgus, in place of the private assignment of slave tutors to each boy, stipulated that a man from the group, out of which came the highest office-holders are appointed, should take charge of [the children]."(1)

Xenophon goes on to stress that this Head Master was given absolute authority over the boys and youths of the city at all times and in all places. Furthermore, the city provided him with an (unnamed) number of assistants to help him enforce his regime. "The result," Xenophon claims, "has been that respect and obedience in combination are found to a high degree at Sparta."(2)

To the modern ear it is striking that a man, himself a student of Socrates, was more interested in "respect and obedience" than in intellectual development. This is particularly bewildering when one remembers that Xenophon sent his own sons to the agoge. Would a philosopher and intellectual, a man who developed his own theories on education for a prince, really have sent his children to a school where their minds were not trained, sharpened and broadened? The most likely answer is 'no." The solution to the apparent contradiction is that Xenophon's focus in his short essay was on what made Sparta different. Xenophon expects schools to deliver intellectual content, and because Sparta's education does, it is not worthy of mention. On the other, it also taught youth respect and obedience. In short, "respect and obedience" were not achieved at the expense of intellectual development but rather in addition to it.

Unmentioned but obvious is the fact that a single public school ensured a common curriculum and common standards. All attendees of the Spartan agoge learned the same things for the same amount of time and had to pass the same tests. Thus, the Spartan public school ensured at a minimum that all citizens were literate and numerate.

The latter was assured not only by the school officials but by the fact that the entire community, notably all adult citizens, were held responsible for the education of the youth. Xenophon puts it like this: "...in other cities each man is master of his children, slaves and property. But Lycurgus...caused each man to be master of other people's children just as much as his own."(3)

Jean Ducat notes that this collective responsibility for all youth is frequently encountered in tribal institutions, and draws attention to the fact that the boys and youth of the agoge were required to perform publicly at the many and varied religious festivals throughout the year. Ducat posits that this was another means of collective control over their education. (4) Throughout the year, as the various festivals came and went with their many youth events, the entire city could watch and see how well the boys were doing; They could judge if individuals boys were excelling or falling short of the mark by how well they behaved in the public fora.

Notably, however, the collective responsibility for the behavior and progress did not exclude or replace the role of parents. Ducat argues "it was indeed the father who was considered to have principle responsibility for the education of his son," noting that a boy's father "followed the boy's performance in the agoge with a passionate interest...." (5)

Furthermore, the costs of education also remained a private responsibility. The father of each child in the agoge was required to make a fixed contribution to the agoge to cover the costs of his child's upkeep. Thus while all the boys attending the agoge received the same clothes and rations, these were financed from the collective contributions of their fathers.

In short, the public nature of the Spartan agoge did not constitute an abrogation of responsibility on the part of Spartan parents, nor did it result in a complete loss of influence. Rather, like sending children to public schools today, parents retained primary responsibility for the overall performance of their children, but availed themselves of an institution that was organized by the city and run by a highly-respected (and most probably elected) public official from the city's elite. They shared the responsibility for the education of their children with their neighbors, and took an active interest in the education of their neighbor's children as well.

The reasons the Spartan state (characterized or represented by the legendary Lycurgus) would have chosen this radical innovation of introducing public education can only be speculated upon. We have no written record explaining the rationale. Several advantages of the system, however, are immediately apparent. For a start, the public schooling ensured that all men entering the ranks of the army had at least the same minimal standard of education. Every officer knew that his men could read, write, add, etc. He knew they had also received physical educational training, and music training (important for an army that sang as it marched).

Yet despite the obsession of foreigners with the military aspects of Spartan education, the Spartans themselves probably valued the fact that the agoge, with its uniform clothes and food, curricula and routine, reinforced the Spartan notion of equality.

Equally important to the Spartans, was probably the fact that the agoge was a common bond between citizens. The shared experience of common schooling reinforced identity and strengthened fraternity among the citizens long, long after they had left school.

(1) Xenophon, 2.1.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ducat, Jean. "Perspectives on Spartan Education in the Classical Period." Hodkinson, Stephen and Anton Powell (eds). Sparta: New Perspectives. Duckworth, 1990, p. 51.

(5) Ibid, p. 46.

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The Spartan Upbringing: Universal and Compulsory

2024-10-16T10:25:00.004+02:00

Today I look more closely at the universal and compulsory aspect of the Spartan Upbringing.

Unlike the rest of Greece, where education was viewed as a strictly private and optional affair, the children of all Spartan citizens were required to enroll in the agoge. Furthermore, successful completion of the agoge was a prerequisite for citizenship. Indeed, a citizen risked losing his own citizenship if he failed to pay the agoge fees associated with each of his children -- a set amount of produce owed in kind to the agoge administration.

Citizenship in other cities was more like citizenship in most countries today: the only criteria for citizenship was to be born of married citizen parents (i.e. only the legitimate children of citizens were entitled to citizenship.) Education was not part of the formula. Thus, in Classical Athens, for example, parents were not legally compelled to educate their children at all, much less up to a specific standard.

As we will examine in greater depth next month, the famed schools and symposiums of Athens, which honed human intellect as never recorded before and fostered a spirit of scientific inquiry fostered, existed only for the sons of the rich. Working and middle-class Athenians were too busy making a living to stay up all night talking, and their children learned a trade early rather than going to any kind of school. Futhermore, girls were viewed as only quasi-human with brains too small for any kind of abstract thought.

In the absence of compulsion, many Athenian citizens opted not to send their sons to school with the consequence that many Athenian citizens could not read or write at all -- something that politicians exploited shamelessly. For example, there are anecdotes of illiterate citizens being bamboozled into voting the opposite of their declared intentions. This, in turn, led "all classical Greek political philosophers, apart from the near-anarchist Cynics," to agree that comprehensive and compulsory education was essential for the creation of "good citizens" and so "good governance." (1)

It was precisely Sparta's insistence on education for all citizens that struck a chord with many of the Athenian intellectual elite. The Athenian political philosophers admired Sparta for requiring citizens' children to go to school. Even Aristotle, otherwise a severe critic of Sparta, admired the obligatory nature of the Spartan agoge.

This would hardly have been the case if the Spartan agoge had failed to deliver a standard of education better than what was the norm (not for the elite but for the average citizen) in Athens. In other words, while the Spartan agoge might not have taught youth up to the same standards as the rich could obtain with their tutors and coaches, it did deliver a standard equal or better -- yet more broadly and consistently -- to the basic Athenian education.

That "basic education" included "basic literacy (and possibly numeracy), music, and physical education." (2) Musical education included both singing, dancing and playing the lyre and bagpipes. Physical education included running, long-jumping, javelin, boxing, and wrestling. All these skills are patently evident in Sparta based on the records we have both of the festivals in which the children participated and based on Sparta's performance at the pan-Hellenic games.

To repeat then, what was exceptional about the Spartan education, was not what it taught, but the fact that it was a prerequisite for citizenship. Even the legitimate sons of citizens could not obtain citizenship if they had not passed through the agoge. This is what made the agoge "universal" (as it applied to all future citizens) and "compulsory" as no citizen had the option of not sending his sons to school if he wanted them to become citizens. Ducat, however, makes the important point that there were no penal sanctions for non-compliance.(3) There was no punishment beyond the loss of citizenship for failure to send sons to the agoge. It is telling that this alone was compulsion enough; we know of no cases where Spartan citizens opted not to enroll their sons.

The motives for making the agoge a prerequisite of citizenship are exactly the same as the reason Athenian philosophers praising the practice: education made better citizens. Education, particularly literacy and numeracy, improved the overall quality of government by ensuring that every citizen could read the laws, the inscriptions, the judgment of the courts etc. Education made citizens better able to debate and deliberate, and citizens less likely to be bamboozled by their "betters." Compulsory, universal education remains to this days one of the most important means of securing and defending democracy around the world.

(1) Cartledge, Paul. Spartan Reflections, Duckworth, 2001, p. 83.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ducat, Jean. Hodkinson, Stephen and Anton Powell (eds). Sparta: New Perspectives. Duckworth, 1999, p. 85.

Next month I look more closely at the public quality of the Spartan educational system. Meanwhile, Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

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A Unique Institution - The Spartan Agoge

2024-10-09T09:46:00.000+02:00

Thanks to films like "300," the Spartan Agoge is commonly viewed today as a brutal -- not to say savage -- training regime in which boys and youths were taught nothing but survival skills by sadistic instructors. In earlier entries, I pointed out that this image is an illusion created in part by the artificial agoge of the Roman era and in part by poor historiography on the part of scholars copying from each other carelessly.

The one feature of the Spartan agoge most admired by Athenian political philosophers was the fact that it was compulsory and universal, i.e. all future citizens of the city-state had to have completed their education before they could be admitted to the ranks of the citizens. The Athenians thinkers recognized that poorly educated citizens undermined the very basis of democracy. Yet in no other city -- not even in the city that prided itself most on its democracy, Athens -- were citizens required to obtain an education at all, much less meet specific standards. Sparta was alone in making education a criteria of citizenship.

The second key distinguishing feature of the Spartan "upbringing" or "agoge" was the fact that it was it was public. In other cities, notably Athens, each citizen was responsible for his son's education. Although the sons of the wealthy benefited from private tutors drawn from the impressive intellectual pool of the city, the sons of the poor might get none at all. In between were the vast majority of boys who got a spotty education by attending private schools irregularly for indefinite periods. In short, the quality of education varied from outstanding to non-existent. On average it was haphazard, individual and inadequate. Indeed, the fact that Athenian education system as a whole was worthless is one of the few things on which Athenian philosophers agreed! (They disagreed on how to fix it.)

In Sparta in contrast, the state ran the educational system, which was supervised by officials of the Spartan state. The curriculum and standards were set by the state. There were age-cohorts and public rituals in which the pupils had to participate in front of the entire city. Furthermore, responsibility for the education of youth was collective. By this I mean that any citizen had the right, and was expected to, take an active part in education the all children -- not just their own.

In addition, the Spartan educational system contained exceptionally draconian discipline combined with democratic elements. Particularly shocking to the ancient world was the employment of flogging as a means of discipline. In the rest of the Greek world, flogging was a punishment for slaves. The idea that the sons of citizens, even the (younger) sons of kings could be flogged for transgressions was viewed with voyeuristic horror that eventually mutated into the grotesque whipping contests of the Roman period. Yet in their shock over this tool, many commentators lose sight of the fact that Spartan youth elected some of their leaders, and the agoge itself enabled the sons of non-citizens to obtain citizenship - strikingly democratic features.

Last, yet arguably the most radical aspect, the Spartan agoge was that it was co-educational. To the horror and disgust of other Greeks -- much less barbarians, the daughters of Spartan citizens also attended the agoge, albeit for a shorter period of time. This meant they too shared in the common experience of living in barracks, eating institutional food at the common messes, wearing identical clothes, competing in sports, and participating in festivals.

Over the next four months, I will be looking at the above unique features of the Spartan agoge, examining what we know about them and speculating on its purpose -- i.e. why Sparta might have chosen to include these particular elements into their public educational system.

Next month I will look more closely at the "Compulsory and universal" aspects of the Spartan upbringing.

Meanwhile, the Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

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Removing the Roman Mask

2024-10-02T11:30:00.000+02:00

In my last entry, I explained that with the sole exception of Xenophon, all surviving ancient sources describing the Spartan educational system or agoge depict the Roman -- not the Spartan -- institution. This Roman-age school used Archaic nomenclature and paraded itself as "authentic" archaic Spartan tradition, but it was actually the creation of a society which no longer had a unique constitution or culture. Furthermore, to the extent that it was based on something older, it was the reconstruction of an institution created (consciously) by an Athenian stoic philosopher.

When searching for the Spartan agoge, the educational system that produced Chilon the Wise, Leonidas, Brasidas and the other great Spartan leaders of the Archaic and Classical periods, we must first remove the Roman mask and consider only those features that were recorded in classical sources such as Xenophon, Thucydides, and Herodotus, or can be deduced based on common sense and human nature.

Today, I focus on those familiar features of "the agoge" for which we have no evidence from the Classical and Archaic periods, in short the aspects that were NOT part of the agoge.

The most authoritative source we have for the Spartan (as opposed to the Roman) agoge is a work known as The Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, widely attributed to the Athenian general, historian and philosopher Xenophon. Xenophon was born in Athens in the 420s BC, and he was a follower of Socrates -- something that got him banned from Athens as a young man. He served as mercenary in the service of the Persian prince Cyrus and became friends with the Spartan King Agesilias. Eventually, he was given an estate in Lacedaemon and his two sons attended the Spartan agoge. He wrote a number of books including an account of his campaign in Persia (the Anabasis), a book on education for Prince Cyrus, a biography of Agesilias as well as his study of the Spartan constitution, a book on horsemanship and, in his old age his memoirs, titled A History of My Times.

In his tract on the Spartan constitution, Xenophon does not provide us a comprehensive picture of the agoge, but what he does say is the closest thing to facts that we have. Furthermore, if he says something that is at odds with reports by ANY other source, particularly later sources, then we can assume that Xenophon is describing the Spartan agoge and the other sources are describing the Roman agoge. In short, Xenophon is our most important "litmus" test for any feature of the agoge.

Xenophon is extremely explicit on a three points that continue to be widely misrepresented in the popular -- and sadly even many academic -- portrayals of the agoge.

First, Xenophon states categorically that institutionalized pederasty was prohibited in the agoge. Xenophon writes: "It strikes me that a word should also be said about men's love for boys, since this too has some connection with their education. Now what happens elsewhere in Greece may be be illustrated from Boeotia, where man and boy form a union and live together, or Elis where beautiful youths are won by favours;...[Lycurgus on contrast] laid it down that at Sparta lovers should refrain from molesting boys just as parents avoid having intercourse with their children or brothers with their sisters. It does not surprise me, however, that some people do not believe this, since in many cities the laws do not oppose lusting after boys."(1)

Xenophon could hardly have been more explicit, and the evidence of pederasty in Hellenistic and Roman Sparta does nothing to weaken or undermine his statement. The fact that homosexual relationships became common in Sparta after it had lost its constitution, independence and unique way of life, only demonstrates the degree to which Spartan society had become corrupted. Widespread pederasty in later Sparta is testimony to the fact that Sparta had become like other Greek states. It had lost its unique character -- not least with regard to its previously exceptional and uncompromising attitude to pederasty. (For more on the evidence that Archaic Sparta was characterized by a near complete absence of homosexuality see: http://www.spartareconsidered.com/sexuality.html)

Second, Xenophon's description of the deprivations of the agoge fall far short of the extremes found in later descriptions. Xenophon notes that Spartan boys had only one himation, but not that they had no other clothes. His point is not that they were naked and freezing most of the time, but rather that they were not spoiled like their Athenian counterparts with new and different garments the year through.

Regarding diet, Xenophon puts it like this: "[Lycurgus] instructed the Eiren to furnish for the common meal just the right amount for them never to become sluggish through being too full, while also giving them a taste of what it is not to have enough. His view was that the boys under this regime would be better able, when required, to work hard without eating, as well as to make the same rations last longer, when so ordered; they would be satisfied with a plain diet, would adapt better to accepting any type of food, and would be in a healthier condition. He also considered that a diet that produced sim bodies would do more to make them grow tall than one in which the food filled them out."(3) Note, the emphasis is avoiding too much food that leads to "sluggishness" and fat -- not a diet that is deficient in any way!

This leads us to Xenophon's paragraph on theft, the third point, albeit one of the most confusing in his entire essay. At first he appears to say that Spartan youth was encouraged to steal in order to ward off starvation. Yet this is a clear contradiction of the paragraph before in which he said they received sufficient rations. It is only two thirds of the way through the paragraph that becomes clear he is talking only about a specific period in a youth's education that ends with the ritual of stealing cheeses from the alter of Artemis Orthia. Kennel, drawing on other sources as well, concludes: "on a specific occasion (kairos), it was the custom (nenomisto) for ephebes to steal whatever they could without getting caught...Spartan boys only stole at particular times established by custom."(5)

Kennel goes on to point out that had all the boys from seven to twenty been stealing all the time "either the city would have degenerated into anarchy or the act of stealing would have become a counterfeit, with food set aside especially for the boys to filch."(6)
(For more on this see: http://www.spartareconsidered.com/theives.html)

Another common feature of popular depictions of the agoge for which we find no evidence in Xenophon is the notion that the boys grew up cut off from their families in the wild and so more like beasts than children. Xenophon, on the contrary, notes that Lycurgus ensured that the boys were never without someone "in charge" of them. This was done by 1) the creation of a magistrate with complete authority over the boys, 2) by providing the magistrate (head-master) with whip-wielding assistants, 3) by authorizing any citizen to give the boys instructions or punish them, and 4) "to ensure that someone was in control of the boys even when no adult happened to be on the spot, he deputed the smartest of the Eirenes to take command of every squadron." (7)

In short, far from running wild, the boys of the agoge were under constant supervision: first by the eirene (20-year-old) assigned to their unit, next by any adult Spartiate who happened to be present, and third by the agoge authorities themselves, including head-master, his assistants, teachers and coaches and chorus masters, etc. etc. etc.

Likewise, the myth that Spartan children were separated from their families at the age of seven and never had anything to do with them ever again is completely unsustainable based on the available archaic and classical evidence. There is, in fact, no evidence that they lived in barracks before they were roughly fourteen years old, and, even if they did, these were located in the heart of Sparta, where they would have encountered their siblings and parents on an almost daily basis -- and gone home for the frequent religious holidays.

Last but not least, the evidence is overwhelming that Spartans obtained in the public agoge a standard of literacy and numeracy equivalent or better to that enjoyed by citizens of other Greek city-states. The Spartans conducted diplomacy; they sent written instructions and orders to distant commanders; they wrote dispatches; they made countless dedications to the Gods (even as school-children!); they built monuments with inscriptions. Paul Cartledge concludes that: "Between the ages of seven and twelve a Spartan boy 'studied' pretty much the same subjects as his Athenian counterpart: read and writing, music and dancing, and physical exercise."(8)

What we don't know is how they learned these "class-room" skills, but the logical explanation is that they learned them exactly as children have in every other society known to man: by someone teaching them. The very fact that Xenophon says nothing about how they learned to read suggests that the method of learning was so similar to the methods used elsewhere that it was completely unworthy of comment.

(1) Xenophon, 2.4, Richard J.A. Talbert (trans), Plutarch on Sparta. Penguine Classics, 1988, p.170.

(2) Xenophon, 2.2, p. 168

(3) Ibid, p.168-169.

(5) Kennel, Nigel. Gymnasium of Virtue:Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 122.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Xenophon, 2.3, p. 169.
(8) Cartledge, Paul. Spartan Reflections. Duckworth, 2001, p. 85

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In Search of the Spartan Agoge

2024-09-25T09:53:00.000+02:00

It has been argued by leading classical scholars that the importance of the "agoge" -- Sparta's educational system - "in determining the character of the Spartan state cannot be over-estimated." (1)

Yet the sad truth is we do not have a single authentic Spartan source that describes this vital institution. Everything that we know about the "agoge" comes from foreigners -- many of whom never visited Sparta -- and most of whom wrote 200 to 800 years after the period of Sparta's glory -- the Archaic and Classical Ages.

In a seven-part series starting today, I intend to re-examine the evidence we have about the agoge, to identify the elements common in the popular picture of the agoge for which there is NO evidence, and then reconstruct a plausible theory of what the Spartan agoge might have looked like based on evidence, common sense and an understanding of human nature.

When attempting to understand the Spartan educational system commonly referred to as the "agoge," it is important to understand that this unique word -- about which Professor Cartledge makes a great fuss because it is also used for raising cattle -- is in fact an invention of the 3rd Century BC. It is not used in any earlier source about Sparta -- an alarm signal that ought to warn scholars that the entire "agoge" itself is largely a fiction, an artificial creation of a post-classical Sparta.

Nigel Kennel is his comprehensive and seminal work The Gymnasium of Virtue notes: "The story of the Spartan education system is far more complex than has hitherto been appreciated. Its single constant was change, as the system adapted to meet different historical situations."(2)

What we think we know is based on a large number of works by foreign writers purporting to describe the Spartan state and its institutions, most of which were written as much as 800 years after Thermopylae and Sparta's days of glory. Only one source, Xenophon, actually wrote in the classical era, lived in Sparta and sent his sons to the agoge. Yet even Xenophon's account, as Kennel notes, already "has a palpably nostalgic, utopian air about it."(3) By the time he was writing in the 4th century, Sparta was already in decline, and its institutions were no longer what they had been in the Early Classical and Archaic periods.

All other surviving sources were written by authors with no direct experience of Sparta and living at a much later date. The bulk of these were theoretical tracts attempting to compare and contrast systems of government. They were tools for political debate, not records of observed facts. The most famous of the later writers, because his writings are particularly detailed and vivid, is Plutarch, who lived between 46 and 120 AD. Please note: that is roughly 600 years after the death of Leonidas at Thermopylae. In other words, he was as far removed from Classical and Archaic Sparta as we are from the 13th and 14th centuries. Pausanias, another "ancient" source full of colorful details, lived even later, between 110 and 180 AD.

But the situation is made even more complex and deceptive by the fact that these later commentators thought they knew Sparta and its agoge very well. Indeed, they had personally visited and studied in a place called Sparta, a city on the same location of the ancient city of Sparta, yet arguably only marginally related to the Sparta of Leonidas because by this time Sparta had been governed by different laws for generations. Fatefully for us and our understanding of Sparta, they saw a "Spartan agoge" in practice, but it was not the same "agoge" that had operated in the Archaic and Classical periods.

At the very latest, that ancient agoge had ceased to exist by 244 BC, but it had been in decline long before that. Already in the fourth century BC, Sparta's famed military was humiliated, and the loss of Messenia had destroyed the Spartan economy. In short, Sparta had already become moribund, and it is inconceivable that the agoge was not impacted by these changes.

Certainly, the public system of education had collapsed by the time King Cleomenes III came to power in 235 BC with a powerful "reform agenda" that included "restoration" of the agoge. However, as Kennel puts it, "under the guise of revival," he invited an Athenian stoic philosopher to develop a system of education for Sparta.(4) This man, Sphaerus, consciously introduced his own ideas of what made a good education into Cleomenes' new school-system. While Sphaerus pretended that his innovations were nothing but a "restoration" of the ancient agoge, in fact his philosophy of education was not based Sparta's past or the intentions of Sparta's archaic lawgivers.

Thus, while the outward dressing or facade was "Archaic and Laconian," the content was Athenian stoicism. This was consistent with Cleomenes other reforms that he styled as a "return to the ways of Lucurgus," while butchering the Lycurgian constitution. Thus, for example, he blithely abolished both the dual kingship and the ephorate, and radically altered the the nature of the Gerousia by reducing the term of members to a single year.

Nor did the distortions end with Cleomenes and his Athenian stoic philosopher. Cleomenes agoge was suppressed after just 39 years. Sparta (after a series of poor alliances, rebellions and much intrigue) was eventually defeated by and submitted to the Achaean League, losing its very independence. It was forced in this period to give up its constitution altogether and adopt Achaean laws and customs. That included eliminating the agoge.

Thus the agoge that Plutarch and Pausanias visited and described was yet another "revival." This agoge had been created under Roman hegemony in or about 146 BC -- or more than 200 years since the Battle of Leuctra had shaken Sparta to its foundations and more than 340 years since Thermopylae. The "agoge" that was now established, however, could not function -- even if it had wanted to -- as the agoge of the classical period because it no longer had a Spartan society, or a Spartan army, to support it. The Spartan culture and laws that had created and fostered the agoge in the age of Chilon and Leonidas had been obliterated. In their place was a Roman provincial city without any unique laws or ethos. The agoge created in this state, Kennel argues, was nothing more that "a sort of tableau vivant of Spartan culture in the midst of a society little different from those of its neighbors."(5)

The Roman agoge included the infamous spectacle of youth lining up at the altar of Artemis Orthia to be whipped until they collapsed -- or died. Although we have no documented cases of youths actually dying under the lashes, most ancient commentators claimed to have "heard" that youths "sometimes" died. One can see that for a society that thought it was fun watching men kill each other or get devoured by beasts and saw burning humans alive as suitable entertainment for an imperial party, watching youths passively submit to flogging until they collapsed was a huge tourist attraction. The city dignitaries of Sparta apparently did very well in the department of tourist revenues. The connection to ancient Sparta, the Sparta of Leonidas, Chilon and Lycurgus, however, is exactly ZERO -- NOTHING.

The same is true of almost everything Plutarch and other Roman and Byzantine sources tell us about "the agoge." They are describing an Roman invention, a Roman theater dressed up in Laconian costumes, or, perhaps we should call it, one of Rome's famous and elaborate spectacles. In the next six entries, I will remove the Roman mask in search of the real Spartan agoge.

(1) Chrimes, K.M.T. Ancient Sparta: A Re-Examination of the Evidence. Manchester University Press, 1952, p. 117.
(2) Kennel, Nigel, The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta. University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 143.
(3) Ibid, 135.
(4) Ibid, 147.
(5) Ibid, 116

Meanwhile, Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

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A Spartan Philosopher: Chilon the Wise

2024-09-18T11:30:00.000+02:00

It may surprise many modern readers that Plato, writing a history of philosophy in the 4th Century BC, claimed that all early philosophers were “imitators, lovers and disciples of Spartan education.” Furthermore, the seven “wise men” that Plato considered the fathers of philosophy included two Lacedaemonians, one of which was Spartiate: Chilon the Wise. In the 5th century BC, it had become common to speak about “seven” wise men, whose selection varied from writer to writer so that a total of 17 are actually named on one list or another.

Significantly, Chilon is always among the seven.

So just who was Chilon of Sparta?

Based on the stories told about Chilon, which include personally meeting the famous writer of fables, Aesop, and Hippokrates, the father of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos, historians conclude that Chilon lived in the first half of the 6th century BC, or – one might say – in the Golden Age of Sparta. Furthermore, he is said to have been an ephor during the 56. Olympiad, or between 556 and 554 BC, by which time, the sources say, he was “very old.” Modern historians such as Conrad Stibbe suggest he was somewhere between 60 and 75 when he was elected ephor in ca. 555 BC.

Chilon was a Spartiate, but apparently not from a “leading” or royal family. The fact that his descendants married into both royal houses, however, is an indication of just how highly he was regarded by his contemporaries and admired by subsequent generations of Spartans. Particularly significant is the fact that a great-granddaughter of Chilon was selected by a later college of ephors as the bride for the then childless Agiad King Anaxandridas. Anaxandridas had been married for many years to his niece, who appeared to be barren, and the ephors after futilely urging the king to set aside his wife and take a new wife, convinced him to take a second wife. This wife (who is nameless in Herodotus) promptly became pregnant and gave birth to a male child, who later became one of Sparta’s most controversial kings, King Cleomenes I. What is striking about this particular marriage is less that the college of ephors would put forward the name of a girl descended from one of their own predecessors, than that Anaxandridas, who would have been a reigning king at the time Chilon was an ephor, would accept one of Chilon's descendents as a worthy bride. The importance of this fact is best understood when we remember that Chilon is credited by ancient and modern historians with raising the status of the ephorate to a body almost as powerful as the kings.

In any case, Conrad Stibbe in his excellent work on archaic Sparta, Das Andere Sparta (Mainz: 1996), credits Chilon with conceiving of the Peloponnesian League. As he points out, throughout Sparta’s previous history, complete subjugation of a conquered people followed successful Spartan conquests. This was true for the conquest of the heartland of Lacedaemon, the Eurotas Valley in the ninth century and for the conquest of Messenia in the second half of the seventh century.

Yet after a bitter war with Tegea during the first half of the sixth century BC, in which Sparta suffered at least one humiliating defeat resulting in the enslavement of Spartiate hoplites, Sparta chose a different path. Following a decisive victory over Tegea under the leadership of King Anaxandridas, Sparta made the revolutionary decision not to subjugate and occupy Tegea, but rather to form a defensive alliance with its defeated foe. This course was unprecedented in Greek history at the time. (Note: My novel The Olympic Charioteer deals with this period of Spartan history.) Furthermore, the alliance with Tegea was not a one-off event, but rather signaled a completely new Spartan foreign policy that was pursued throughout the rest of the century. Under both Anaxandridas and his sons, Sparta built up her power and prestige not through direct conquest but through the formation of a system of alliances, first on the Peloponnese (under Anaxandridas and Cleomenes) and with all of Hellas under Leonidas.

Yet while Chilon sought peace and alliances with Sparta’s democratic neighbors, he was according to ancient tradition together with Anaxandridas the driving force behind a series of military actions undertaken by Sparta to depose tyrants in Sikyon, Samos, and Athens. The fact that Chilon and Anaxandridas are mentioned as working together to depose the tyrants is significant because it suggests a joint policy – something that makes the later marriage of Anaxandridas to a great-granddaughter of Chilon more understandable.

Interestingly, Chilon is described in Herodotus as a seer and Chilon’s first act of extraordinary wisdom was advice that, had it been followed, would have spared Athens the tyranny of Peisistratos in the first place. Chilon’s wisdom was thus associated with Sparta’s opposition to tyranny. According to legend, when the father of Peisistratos, Hippokrates, was in Olympia, he received a sign from the Gods. A cauldron full of sacrificial meat boiled over without a fire being lit under it. Although Hippokrates recognized that this could only be a message from the gods, he could not interpret it, and turned to Chilon for advice. Chilon told him not to marry and if he was already married to disown any son he already had.

The Spartan Chilon was according to ancient tradition also a contemporary of the fable-writer Aesop. According to legend, Chilon told the former slave that Zeus’ job was to “humiliate the mighty and rise up the humble.” While this was clearly a reference to Aesop’s own fate, it was a strikingly revolutionary statement nonetheless – heralding the Christian notion that “the meek shall inherit the earth.”

Likewise with respect to women, Chilon set revolutionary standards of behavior that were uniquely Spartan. While the Athenian philosopher Socrates showed utter contempt for the intellect of his wife, refusing to even take leave of her after he was condemned to death, Chilon was depicted on his grave sitting side-by-side with his wife. Even more impressive, one of his daughters, Chilonis, was recognized by name as a disciple of the philosphoer Pythagoras. In short, while the Athenians contended that women were permanent children with brains incapable of developing rational thought,[i] Sparta’s greatest philosopher encouraged his daughter to study under the greatest of his contemporaries.

But it was hardly for his attitude toward women or former slaves that Chilon attained so much fame among his fellow Greeks. Rather, Chilon was admired and honored by subsequent generations of Greek philosophers and their Roman and modern admirers primarily for his “wisdom.” Chilon was the author of some 600 verses familiar to the ancients that they admired greatly. Unfortunately, none of these have survived into the present, at least none have been identified as the work of Chilon. More famous, however, were three – typically Laconic – sayings that were carved over the entrance to the Delphic oracle and attributed to Chilon. Let me close this brief essay on Chilon by quoting him. I think many would find his advice relevant even today:

Sponsorship brings misfortune.

Nothing in excess.

Know thyself.

[i] Good sources on Athenian attitudes for women can be found in the Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Waves and Slaves, (New York: 1975), Sue Blundell’s Women in Ancient Greece, (London:1995) and in the chapter on “Citizen Women in Athens,” in Anton Powell’s Athens and Sparta: Constructing Greek Political and Social History from 478 BC, (Portland, Oregon: 1988).

Sparta, the Divine Twins and Immortality

2024-09-11T11:30:00.002+02:00

Greek gods could be petty, selfish, immoral, arbitrary, cruel, fickle, dishonest, and everything else that humans can be. Rather than serving as moral arbiters much less as examples of virtue, their very immorality often seemed to constitute an excuse for immoral behavior. In all this chaos and depravity, however, one story stands out as touchingly uncharacteristic – and tellingly it is the story of two Spartan princes particularly honored and revered in Sparta.

The Dioskouroi

According to ancient Greek mythology, the Divine Twins, the Dioskouroi, were the brothers of Helen. More precisely, Polydeuces was Helen’s full-brother, likewise fathered by Zeus on her mother Leda, while Kastor was her half-brother, the son of Leda by her (mortal) husband Tyndareus, the king of Sparta. Raised at the Spartan court as twin sons of the king, the Dioskouroi lived the ideal lives of aristocratic youth in the age of heroes. They had great adventures, sailing with Jason on the Argo, hunting boar with Herakles, rescuing their sister from the Athenian king Theseus, who had abducted her – and then robbing two sisters from a neighboring kingdom for their own wives. Nothing about these adventures suggestions anything particularly virtuous or morally exemplary. They were, it seemed, just hot-blooded young Greek heroes.

And then, in a fight over stolen cattle, Kastor was killed. According to the myth, both brothers would have been killed, if Polydeukes hadn’t been immortal. Because, however, Polydeukes is a demi-God, he lives on after his mortal end. He goes to his father’s home on Mount Olympus, while Kastor goes into the cold, dark grave, a prisoner of grim Hades, destined never to see the light of day or breathe fresh air or enjoy any pleasures of the senses ever again.

According the myth, Polydeukes was so distraught by his brother’s fate that he was unable to enjoy his own immortality. Seeing his son’s misery, Zeus took pity on him and allowed the twins to switch places on an alternating basis. Every other day, Polydeukes took his brother’s place in hell, so that Kastor could escape the grave.

There is, I think, something wonderfully Spartan about this tale. It includes both the love of life, which – contrary to popular opinion – was characteristic of ancient Sparta, and the spirit of self-sacrifice that we associate with Leonidas.

Thermopylae and Leonidas

2024-09-04T11:30:00.000+02:00

Leonidas is remembered, admired and adulated because of his stand -- and death -- at Thermopylae.
Oddly, despite dying in defeat, he is remembered better and more widely than the commander of the Spartan army that actually beat the Persians, Pausanias, or the Spartan that defeated Athens after the gruesome thirty-years war, Lysander. Lycurgus and Chilon are familiar names only to classical scholars; Leonidas is a cult and comic-book hero -- not to mention there is a chocolate company named for him.
Today I want to reflect on why.

Leonidas was, of course, a legend in his own time. The Spartans built him a monument at Thermopylae, notably separate from the monument to the rest of the 300, and a second monument was built to him at home in Sparta as well. His body was brought home after the Persians had been driven out of Greece. But, unless it is an accident of archeology, larger monuments were built to the victors Pausanias and Lysander than to Leonidas. In short, Leonidas’ appeal appears to have been greater in the modern world than the ancient. This might have many explanations -- starting with the political agenda of his successors (or those who controlled his immature son) or discomfort with commemorating a devastating defeat. The modern world, perhaps influenced by the Christian tradition of honoring sacrifice, is impressed by Leonidas’ defiance and devotion to duty more than his defeat.

However, less understandable, is a modern tendency to assume that Leonidas’ behavior was “typical,” that he was indeed only doing what Spartan society expected of him, or acting “in accordance with the law.” This assumes that Spartans were “never” allowed to retreat and always chose death over retreat or surrender. The Spartans, of course, knew better.

Sparta had suffered many severe defeats before Thermopylae, and in no other battle did an entire fighting force die to the last man for a lost cause. For example, there is good reason to believe that Sparta lost the First Messenian War, and it was the ensuing economic and social dislocation that led to unrest and revolution. Certainly, Sparta was given a resounding thrashing by the Argives at Hysiai in 669 BC, but even so the Spartans retreated rather than die to the last man. Roughly one hundred years later, Sparta again over-reached herself in an attempt to conquer Tegea, and again there were survivors; they were enslaved in Tegea and forced to do agricultural labor for Tegean masters. In 525 BC, a Spartan expedition against Samos likewise ended in humiliating defeat, but not the extermination of the expeditionary force. Finally, in the reign of Leonidas’ half-brother Cleomenes, a Spartan force under Anchimolius was attacked by Thessalian cavalry 1000 strong at Phalerum, and, according to Herodotus, “many Lacedaemonians were killed…and the survivors driven back to their ships.” Note, again, the survivors were driven back to their ships, which they presumably boarded and used to return to Lacedaemon. There is not a word about dying to the last man.

Nor did “death rather than surrender” become the standard for future Spartan commanders after Thermopylae. The history of the Peloponnesian War is littered with Spartan defeats; none were massacres. Even in the infamous case of 120 Spartiates trapped on the island of Sphakteria, the record shows that they surrendered and were taken off into (brutal!) Athenian captivity. Nor were they written off by an indignant population as cowards, "tremblers" or otherwise disgraced as worthless. Had they been so viewed, Sparta would not have sued for peace and made serious concessions to Athens to have them returned. Even their collective degradation from full-citizen status on their return is not indicative of disapproval of surrender. On the contrary, it more likely reflects fear that men who had been in Athens for almost four years might have become subverted (brainwashed, is the Cold War term) by Athenian democracy. After an unknown period, they were collectively reinstated, and some even ran for public office. That would not have been possible if the majority of Spartans had felt they should have committed suicide rather than surrender.

Leonidas’ legacy was not one of blind, mindless self-sacrifice. His example was one of devotion to duty, even unto death, for a good cause. Leonidas did not die for the sake of dying -- much less take his comrades with him to a senseless death. He had clear military objectives that he hoped to achieve by his last stand: 1) giving the other Greek contingents time to withdraw and live to fight another day, and 2) increasing Persian respect for/fear of Spartans. Once the pass at Thermopylae was turned, Leonidas knew the Persian army would advance unopposed into Central Greece. He could not know where it would next be confronted by land-forces, but he must have feared that it might sweep through Central Greece to the Isthmus of Corinth. He must have feared that Sparta might find herself virtually alone facing the onslaught. Anything he could do to make Xerxes hesitate to take on a Spartan army must have seemed worthwhile. That is a legacy worth preserving.

Last but not least, as a devout Spartan, Leonidas undoubtedly believed he had to fulfill the Delphic Oracle. He knew he had to die, if Sparta was to be saved. In that sense, he was from the start a sacrificial lamb, but not until the position at Thermopylae was betrayed, did his sacrifice inherently encompass defeat as well. He probably hoped when he set out for Thermopylae that he could die in a victorious battle – or at least an indecisive one. He certainly hoped and expected that alive or dead his advance force over 6,000 strong could hold the Hot Gates until Sparta’s full army could reinforce the advance guard.

When it became clear he would die in a hopeless situation, he tried to minimize the losses by ordering the withdrawal of the allied contingents (and almost certainly all the Perioikoi troops that would have been with him). He even tried to save some of the Spartiates by giving them dispatches for delivery somewhere. They saw through him and refused. They refused out of loyalty, out of friendship, out of personal affection for Leonidas, both the man and the king. They did not act for military reasons but for personal ones. Yet their legacy too is worth honoring.

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Thermopylae: The Night Raid

2024-08-28T12:00:00.004+02:00

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, related a story about the Battle of Thermopylae some 400 years earlier that was not recorded in Herodotus. Diodorus and other later historians claim that on the night of the second day of the battle, knowing that his flank had been turned, Leonidas sent a raid into the Persian camp in order to murder the Persian Emperor Xerxes. Most modern historians dismiss this tale as mere legend. Today I want to look more closely at the legend.


The Pass at Thermopylae as it looks today.

In his book on the Battle of Thermopylae, Ernle Bradford* both relates and dismisses the tale of a night raid in the following language: "Diodorus and others also tell a tale, which most authorities have considered suspect, that Leonidas, knowing all was lost, personally led a suicidal attempt on the Persian lines to try to kill Xerxes. We can be sure that this is untrue, for we know that Leonidas stayed to the last at Thermopylae, as was his duty and as befitted a Spartan king." (137)

Tom Holland in his book Persian Fire** is less conclusive commenting in a note that: "Several sources claim that Leonidas, on the eve of the Spartan' last stand, launched a raid on the royal tent and was killed. It is hard to know what is made of this story -- since Leonidas himself certainly died in battle -- unless it hints at a garbled memory of a foiled mission to assassinate Xerxes." (282)

As both historians emphasize, the notion of Leonidas leading a raid into the enemy camp on the eve of the final day of battle is both absurd and demonstrably untrue. First, the C-in-C of an large army composed of diverse allied forces does not take the role of a platoon leader. Leonidas was C-in-C because he commanded the trust and respect of the allied commanders; he could not risk the disintegration of the entire operation by exposing himself to unnecessary risk. Likewise, a Spartan king's place in the line of battle was very rigidly circumscribed by tradition. A Spartan king led from the front protected only by his personal guard, which included Olympic victors. It was considered a great honor in Sparta to be allowed to fight in front of the king. Finally and most importantly, Leonidas died far too publicly on the third day of battle. There were thousands of witnesses to his last hours on the Persian side who lived to tell about it. His corpse was fought over, then mutilated and displayed. Herodotus had the opportunity to speak with the survivors of Thermopylae and his account of Leonidas' death can be trusted in this. There is no way Leonidas led -- and died -- on a raid the night before.

But does that mean the raid itself is impossible?

In his article "Thermopylae: A glorious sacrifice or failed 'black operation'" Stefanos Skarmintzos notes that Diodorus claims Leonidas had additional Laconian troops with him in addition to the 300 Spartiates of his personal guard. Certainly Spartan fielded 5,000 perioiki hoplites at the Battle of Plataea, and it is thus probably that Leonidas had at least some perioiki troops with him at Thermopylae as well. This may have included the Skiritan, Sparta's light cavalry scouts. Skarmintzos suggests Leonidas may have taken elements of the Krypteia with him as well.

Assuming there was a Krypteia at this time (and more and more historians question this, arguing it was not created until after the helot revolt of 465), the members of such a unit would have been well-trained and experienced in both night operations and murder. Yet, even if the Krypteia had not yet been created, is it completely unreasonable to imagine some sort of equivalent to the British SAS or U.S. Navy Seals? If not a permanent institution, we should not forget that all Spartan hoplites were trained to move and operate in the dark and the creation of an ad hoc "special task force" to undertake a dangerous and secret mission is hardly unreasonable.

Furthermore, Leonidas had every reason to want to kill the tyrant who had initiated the invasion of the Greek peninsula. Yes, his personal mission was to command the defense at the Pass. That was his place and he knew it was his destiny to die there. However, that is not the same thing as assuming that everyone else was going to die with him or that the sacrifice of his life would be in vain, i.e. in a defeat.

Leonidas did not go to Thermopylae to die. He went to halt the Persian invasion. His "job" was to do that anyway he could. The assassination of the man driving forward that invasion, of the supreme leader of an absolutist state, offered the prospect of, at a minimum, creating temporary confusion in the enemy camp and, at best, causing the entire invasion to collapse due to fights over the succession. If a spy or a scout suggested to Leonidas that it might be possible to smuggle Spartan (or other Greek) troops into the Persian camp with a chance of gaining access to Xerxes tent and killing him, Leonidas would have been a fool not to attempt such an operation.

As Skarmintzos puts it: "If the night raid [had been] successful, today we would talk about the great victory at Thermopylae and how a few Greeks resisted the might of an Empire." Yet because it failed, we cannot be sure it ever happened at all.

Like Stephen Pressfield, I find the notion of a night raid by a select body of Spartan troops tasked with eliminating the man who commanded the might of Persia irresistible as a novelist. A night raid, therefore, features in:

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* Bradford, Ernle. Thermopylae: The Battle for the West.(New York: Da Capo Press, 1993)

** Holland, Tom, Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (New York: Anchor Books, 2005)

The Road to Thermopylae : Leonidas the Soldier

2024-08-21T08:42:00.000+02:00

No, this is not about Thermopylae. This is about Leonidas’ earlier military career.

First and foremost, Leonidas was one of the few Spartan kings, who was a professional military man. Unlike the Spartan kings before and almost all the Spartan kings after him, Leonidas “enjoyed” the complete program of military training imposed on Spartan citizens from boyhood through ten years of active service, and a lifetime in the reserves thereafter. Thus, Leonidas was one of the only Spartan kings as familiar with every formation and drill employed by the Spartan army as his troops, and as adept with the use of weapons as his fellow citizens. Equally important, having been an ordinary ranker, he knew exactly how they thought, felt and reacted. Leonidas was as much a soldier as he was a commander. This was a significant advantage. It was what made other Spartan commanders like Brasidas and Lysander effective as well.

Nor was his experience confined to the drill-field. Sparta in the late archaic was not a city perpetually at war (though readers of Steven Pressfield’s novel Gates of Fire can be forgiven for being misled into believing this). Nevertheless, in Leonidas’ lifetime Lacedaemon was engaged in a number of significant military campaigns. Thus, while Leonidas never fought the more than 20 campaigns Pressfield fantasizes about, he would have gained first- and second-hand experience from a more limited number of wars.

First, when Leonidas was still a child or youth (depending on his date of birth), Sparta made an unsuccessful attempt to drive the tyrant Polycrates out of Samos. Notably, this required the deployment of a considerable force by sea and involved a forty-day siege as well as an assault in which some of the Spartans managed to break into the city, but were then cut off and killed. The rest returned. The failure and the loss of life must have been the topic of many discussions in syssitia across the city for many years of come – probably with recriminations and a lot of “Monday-morning-quarterbacking.” Leonidas, as a young Spartan male serving in the syssitia as part of his upbringing, would undoubtedly have listened avidly to the accounts of this campaign as told by the veterans, who took part.

Roughly ten years later, Leonidas’ half-brother Cleomenes undertook an invasion of Attica, again by sea. Once again, Sparta’s expeditionary force was defeated and driven back to their ships, this time by Thessalian cavalry. Leonidas was by this time very likely in his late teens, if not already a young man. Conceivably, he even took part in this expedition, but if so only in a subordinate capacity as an ordinary ranker. Whatever his age and role, Leonidas would have learned a valuable lesson, at least second hand, about the capabilities of cavalry and the advisability of not underestimating it.

Cleomenes undertook no less than three additional campaigns against Athens. In the first, he successfully dislodged the Athenian tyrant Hippias, but in the second, in which he sought to drive out Cleisthenes and restrict Athenian democracy, he found himself bottled up on the acropolis by the outraged Athenian masses and had to negotiate a truce to withdraw – with his tail between his legs. Given the small and evidently informal nature of these first two campaigns (Herodotus suggests both campaigns were conducted with small volunteer forces), it is unlikely that Leonidas was an active participant in either of these expeditions.

Burning from the humiliation of his defeat, however, Cleomenes called up the full Spartan army and the allies of the Peloponnesian league. Spartan law at this time, however, did not allow the full army to deploy outside of Lacedaemon without both kings in command, so Cleomenes was accompanied on this third campaign against Athens by his co-monarch Demaratus. Demaratus was not as enthusiastic about invading Attica as Cleomenes – and nor were the Peloponnesian allies. Cleomenes’ army got as far as Eleusis, but there the Corinthians drew the line. They had no quarrel with Athens, and they refused to continue. Demaratus sided with the Corinthians. The allied army disintegrated, and the conflict between Cleomenes and Demaratus hog-tied the Spartan army as well. The Spartans had no choice but to return, undefeated but humiliated again.

Leonidas was almost certainly present with the Spartan army during this last campaign against Athens. Depending on his date of birth, he might already have been a junior officer. Regardless of his military rank, as Cleomenes half-brother and heir apparent, he almost certainly knew what was going on in the command tents, if not directly, then indirectly. While the campaign would have provided him with no combat experience, it would certainly have taught him a great deal about operations involving multi-national forces -- a lesson that would be very important for his later life.

The next major military campaign of Leonidas’ lifetime was the campaign against Argos that culminated in the dramatic Spartan victory at Sepeia. This campaign again involved the entire active Spartan army, so Leonidas’ participation is almost certain. Significantly, it also contained a nautical component: the Spartan army was ferried across the Gulf of Argos from Thyrea in Lacedaemon to Nauplia in the Argolid. There followed a massive confrontation with the full Argive army that was at least as numerous if not larger than the all-Spartiate force facing it. Although the Argives had learned how to read the Spartan signals, Cleomenes cleverly took advantage of this to mislead the Argives into thinking the Spartans were standing down for a meal. As soon as the Argive phalanx broke up, he attacked. The ensuing slaughter allegedly deprived Argos of a generation of fighters, but Cleomenes singularly failed to follow up his battle-field victory with the occupation of the undefended city of Argos. The “lessons learned” for Leonidas would have started with the flexibility of deployment offered by seaborne transport, and included the importance of intelligence (the Argive familiarity with Spartan signals), and, of course, the advantages of surprise.

What Leonidas thought of his brother’s slaughter of prisoners and the burning of a sacred wood is unrecorded, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we should assume he shared popular Spartan opinion – and this was to put Cleomenes on trial for treason. The accusation was that Cleomenes had taken a bribe not to take Argos when it lay undefended before a victorious Spartan army -- probably because the prosecution could think of no other plausible explanation for squandering such a splendid opportunity to subdue their traditional enemy after over two hundred years of bitter hostilities. Herodotus specifically says that Cleomenes was charged by his “enemies” and that he was acquitted because he convinced the ephors that he could not get favorable signs from the gods.

By this time, Lenoidas was probably already married to Gorgo, and he was Cleomenes’ heir. It is unlikely that he would have been counted among Cleomenes’ enemies. It is almost equally improbable that he approved of Cleomenes behavior. Cleomenes was acquitted of taking a bribe and he defended himself with weapons (the will of the gods) against which the ephors were helpless; that is not the same thing as saying his actions were applauded even by his supporters. Furthermore, Leonidas will have taken careful note of the fact that failure to exploit a victory could put a king in jeopardy.

The next significant military engagement of Leonidas’ lifetime was one in which Sparta played no direct role and yet it may have been the most decisive military moment in Leonidas life prior to Thermopylae: the Battle of Marathon. To summarize, Leonidas very probably led the two thousand Spartiates that arrived in Marathon after a dramatic forced march that enabled them to cover the distance from Sparta to Athens in less than three days -- but one day after the decisive battle had been fought. He would have toured the battlefield in company with Athenian commanders and fighters, gleaning a great deal of information about the Persians, their weapons, armor, tactics and morale. He would also have gained considerable respect for Athenian (and Plataean) fighting capacity. Leonidas would have seen first-hand at Marathon that Greek hoplites could withstand Persian missiles and Persian cavalry and inflict dramatically higher casualties than they suffered. However, it would also have left a psychological scar: the sense of having come too late.

And so we come to Thermopylae. Leonidas’ determination to deploy when he did, even if he could take only 300 Spartiates with him was, I believe, dictated by his experience at Marathon. Leonidas, who undoubtedly appreciated the military importance of Thermopylae and Artemisium, was determined not to come too late a second time.

This is not the same thing as believing he was undertaking a suicide mission. Leonidas had every reason to believe that the force he took north was sufficient to hold the Pass until, with the Karneia and the Olympic Games over, Sparta and other cities could deploy their main forces. Leonidas did not, after all, march north with just 300 men. In addition to the Spartiates, he had perioikoi troops, allies from the Peloponnesian League, Thespians, Thebans and Phocians. Leonidas had between 6,000 and 7,000 Greek hoplites at Thermopylae, a pass that at that time narrowed down to a cart track at two places.

To be sure, Leonidas allegedly knew from the Delphic oracle that his own fate was sealed. He presumably expected to die, but there was no reason to assume his death would be futile. On the contrary, Delphi had promised to save Sparta, if one of her kings fell in battle. Leonidas most likely believed (or wanted to believe) that although he would die, his army would be victorioius. Nor did he expect all his accompanying Spartiates to die with him. He took only the fathers of living sons with him was not because he expected them all to die, but because he expected some of them would die but couldn't know which ones. He did not want to risk the extermination of even a single Spartiate family -- not when he had so many men to choose from.

Leonidas’ tactical competence at Thermopylae has been questioned primarily because of his failure to put Spartiates on the mountain trail by which the pass was turned. The argument is that he failed to take the risk to his flank/rear seriously, and the positioning of Phocian troops on this critical route was amateurish. Hindsight is always clearer than foresight. But even with hindsight, it is not completely convincing that Leonidas should have risked splitting his already very small force to send, say, 100 Spartiates to guard what was essentially a goat-trail. Furthermore, one thousand men out of a force just six to seven thousand strong represents a very significant commitment of troops available. This suggests that Leonidas took the threat seriously indeed. To imply that a hundred Spartans would have been better than a thousand Phocians reflects modern fascination with the Spartan military myth, but can hardly be considered a serious military assessment. Leonidas’ evident assumption that the locals with the greatest stake in a successful defense of Thermopylae and the best knowledge of the terrain would be the best defenders of the flanking path is more convincing than modern dismissals of such logic. It is tempting to judge a strategy by its result; that is not always fair.

Otherwise, Leonidas appears to have developed a highly effective strategy for defending the Pass, one that effectively neutralized the superiority of numbers on the Persian side and enabled a comparatively small number of defenders to hold the overwhelming might of Xerxes army for two days. Although –- or rather because -- Herodotus does not give us the casualties of the first two days, we can presume that they were not inordinate. The defense of the “Middle Gate” which was wider than the “Eastern” or “Western Gates” appears to have given the Greeks the optimal opportunity to reduce Persian pressure but bring sufficient numbers of their own troops to bear. Equally impressive, Leonidas evidently welded the diverse contingents together and succeeded in getting them to cooperate. Herodotus says that the allies fought in relays, or turns, so that the troops from each city had time to rest, refresh themselves and tend their wounds between taking their turn at the front. While this sounds logical and reasonable, it is far from self-evident. It would also have required considerable skill in execution -– or each change would have produced confusion that the Persians could have exploited.

Leonidas' military career is described in books II and III of the Leonidas Trilogy.

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The Road to Thermopylae - The Reformer King

2024-08-14T10:12:00.000+02:00

Most historians confine their commentary on Leonidas to his appearance and departure from the stage of history. His reign was, after all, quite short (ten years) and there were no known changes to Spartan territory or law, no works of art or monuments, not even any natural disasters that can be dated specifically to the reign of Leonidas. It is therefore presumptuous of me to label Leonidas a “reformer king.” I know that.

Now that I have your attention….

Looking at Spartan history from the Messenian War to Sparta’s dismal and ignominious end under Rome, the reign of Leonidas represents in many ways a turning point. In crude terms, the archaic age extended from the mid-eight century to the end of the 6^th century BC. The classical age followed. Thus Leonidas’ reign fell at the transition.

In Sparta, it is exactly that transition that represents a particularly sharp and significant break in Sparta’s development. The history of Sparta as a distinct city-state coincides with the dawn of the archaic period and the Messenian War(s). The latter sparked unrest leading to massive reforms embodied in Sparta’s unique laws.

Archaic Sparta saw not only the establishment of this new, revolutionary form of government (arguably the first democracy in history), but also a significant flourishing of the arts and trade. Sparta’s most significant monuments (e.g. the Menelaion, the Amyklaion) were constructed in the archaic period. Sparta’s most famous poets – Tyrtaios, Alkman – lived and worked in the archaic age. Spartiate sculptors produced works for Olympia, while Sparta's pottery was in international demand and exported throughout the 6^th century. Sparta’s archaic bronze works were even more outstanding and competitive, reaching a peak in quality and creativity in the early 6^th century. Not least important, Sparta’s two most admired statesmen in the ancient world, Lycurgus and Chilon, both lived in the archaic period. While many doubt that Lycurgus was a real person and prefer to see him as a mere legend, Chilon was certainly real, and counted as one of the ancient world’s “wise men.”

Sparta in the classical period in contrast is characterized by artistic stagnation and such a dramatic end to Sparta’s competitiveness in trade and manufacturing that those who study only classical and Hellenistic Sparta are completely unaware of Sparta’s impressive earlier accomplishments. Indeed, based on descriptions of the Spartan state and constitution written at the end of the fifth century and later, Sparta appears to have become a city-state that disdained luxury and by inference art itself. Certainly Sparta’s exports of finished products declined, and a sharp drop in the number of artifacts from this period have been found at the sites of Spartan temples. This may indicate that domestic production was also severely restricted. (Alternatively, younger layers of deposits were lost due to flooding, earthquakes etc.)

Assuming the existing archeological record and the written depictions of Spartan society more-or-less accurately describe classical and later Spartan society, then Sparta underwent a radical, indeed revolutionary, change in the mid-5^th century. The question is why?

There are a number of possible answers: A) the Persian Wars, B) the Great Earthquake of 465 and subsequent population decline, C) a Helot Revolt; D) the bitter war with Athens, and E) All of the Above.

So, what does this have to do with Leonidas? My thesis is that Leonidas was the last of the archaic kings not just in terms of timing but in terms of policy. Sparta obtained its reputation for opposing tyrants and built up the Peloponnesian League in the second half of the 6^th century during the reigns of Leonidas’ two predecessors, his father and half-brother. These policies reflect on the one hand an interest in world affairs, and on the other a willingness to negotiate and compromise rather than rely on brute force.

The evidence for Leonidas’ cosmopolitanism is first and foremost his election to lead the coalition of Greek states that opposed the Persian invasion of 480. This fact has far too often been interpreted simply as a tribute to Sparta’s position as the leading Greek power of the age. This ignores the fact that just two years after Leonidas’ death, the same coalition of forces preferred Athenian leadership to submitting to command by Leonidas’ successor Pausanias ― and Pausanias had just led the coalition to a spectacular victory at Plataea! Sparta was not less powerful in 478 than she had been in 480, and her reputation in arms was greater. If simply being Spartan was all that mattered to the allies, then the coalition would have asked Sparta to send King Leotychias or another Spartan general to replace Pausanias, but it did not. Just as Pausasias was not elected in 478, Leonidas was elected in 480, not because he was Spartan but because of who he was. In 481, Leonidas personally enjoyed the trust of the coalition partners.

Leonidas probably gained that trust through personal contact, and that suggests a degree of travel within the Greek world. He probably attended the pan-Hellenic games regularly, for example. (Other Spartan kings of his age were competitors.) He may also have met leaders from other cities in Sparta itself, if they came to see the Gymopaedia or Hyacinthia, for example. However, Gorgo allegedly made her famous statement about why Spartan women “rule” their men to a woman from Attica. Since Athenian women weren’t supposed to set foot out of their home let alone outside their city, it is far more likely that the exchange, if it occurred at all, took place in Attica than Lacedaemon. The most logical explanation would be that Gorgo traveled with Leonidas to Athens at some point in his reign. As the Persian threat grew, it would have been very logical to find Leonidas garnering support for a united stand against the invaders by traveling to all major Greek cities, first and foremost Athens, but also Thebes and Corinth.

During Leonidas’ lifetime, Sparta not only took an active interest in world affairs and exported significant works of art (sculpture, bronze, pottery) overseas, it also commanded respectable naval resources. In the reign of Leonidas’ father, Sparta undertook an expedition against Samos and his half-brother launched a seaborne attack against Attica. The significance of a navy is that it required loyal oarsmen. Rowing a warship is notoriously back-breaking, tedious, stinking work. It was so unpleasant that it was a form of punishment in later centuries and criminals would be condemned to “the galleys.” Slaves, chained to the oar-banks, is an image we carry around with us from films like “Ben Hur.” In fact, however, in the ancient world, particularly in ancient Greece, the crews of warships were predominantly citizens. This was because no city could afford to entrust the maneuverability and speed of their fighting ships to anyone who did not have a stake in the outcome of an engagement.

The most probable source of competent seamen was the perioikoi residents of Lacedaemon. Perioikoi towns, unlike land-locked Sparta, were often located on the coast (Epidauros Limera, Boiai, Kardamyle, Asine, Pylos, and, of course, Gytheon, to name only a few.) On the other hand, the perioikoi element at Plataea equaled Sparta’s, suggesting that the perioikoi elite did not greatly outnumber the Spartiates themselves. Another source of seamen would have been helots, but if helots were as oppressed and hostile to Sparta as most historians claim, then it would have been suicidal to entrust the oars of naval ships to helot oarsmen.

On the other hand, if conditions for helots were not as consistently severe as generally presumed, then there might have been at least some loyal helots. Possibly special incentives in the form of emancipation or increased status were offered to helots who served in Sparta’s fledgling navy, or, alternatively, conditions for helots were generally improving throughout the later part of the 6^th century when Sparta was evidently enjoying a period of prosperity and comparative peace. The very fact that the Spartans could take 35,000 helot auxiliaries with them to Plataea suggests widespread support among the helot population. (Suggestions that the Spartans took 35,000 rebellious helots with them when marching out to face the undefeated Persian army are ludicrous.) In short, in 480 BC Sparta had a fleet of at least 16 triremes requiring almost 3,000 oarsmen and 35,000 light troops, all of whom were deemed loyal to the Spartan state. Sparta was putting her future in the hands of these helots.

But roughly one decade later the only recorded helot revolt against Sparta erupted. This is highly significant because we know that revolutions occur neither when people are content nor when they are most oppressed or exploited. Uprisings are most likely to occur when a long period of rising living standards and political expectations is abruptly ended by economic or political crisis. My hypothesis is that during Cleomenes’ reign helots had enjoyed a slow but steady increase in living standards, something that accelerated under Leonidas when that economic prosperity was combined with rising political expectations. In the post-Leonidas era, however, these hopes and expectations were abruptly shattered, leading to the explosive situation that culminated in the revolt.

Leonidas was undoubtedly the last of the archaic kings. Sparta’s archaic age saw the foundation and development of Sparta’s political system, flanked by a highly sophisticated foreign policy and the evolution of a powerful alliance system. Archaic Sparta witnessed the blossoming of artistic and musical accomplishment, the growth of trade in finished products with a wider world, and the growth of naval capability. The archaic was Sparta’s golden age. Would it have continued if Leonidas and his closest companions had not died at Thermopylae? Probably not indefinitely, but possibly the helot revolt that led to intense paranoia in the later 5^th century could have been avoided. Likewise, if Leonidas had still lived, neither Pausanias nor Leotychidas would have been given a chance to turn Sparta’s allies into enemies.

Leonidas' reign is the focus of the early part of "A Heroic King".

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The Road to Thermopylae - The Consumate Diplomat: Leonidas of Sparta

2024-08-07T11:30:00.004+02:00

Fans of “300” may find it hard to think of Leonidas as a diplomat. In the Hollywood cartoon, Leonidas is portrayed as the brutal antithesis -- he personally throws a Persian ambassador down a well. But there is no more historical evidence that Leonidas committed this crime than that Xerxes was a monster. The historical record, foggy and imprecise as it is, suggests that far from being a tactless brute, Leonidas was probably a savvy diplomat.

Before turning to Leonidas' role as a diplomat, it is useful to remember that Clausewitz claimed that war was diplomacy by other means. This may explain why Sparta, popularly known as a militaristic society, was in fact a city with a long history of effective diplomacy and high regard for the diplomatic profession.

Sparta founded the first non-aggression pact in recorded history when it stopped seeking to conquer its neighbors but sought defensive alliances with them instead. A series of bilateral treaties evolved into what became known as the Peloponnesian League. While initially this organization was an instrument of Spartan hegemony, which required Sparta's allies to follow her lead, in or about 500 BC the allies successfully asserted their power and effectively converted the League into an alliance in which every member - including Sparta - had an equal vote.

Sparta’s diplomatic history, however, started earlier. According to Herodotus, for example, Sparta sent an envoy to the Persian court in mid-6th Century, long before the Persians had become interested in Greece. Allegedly, the Spartan envoy warned the Great King against enslaving Hellenes - which prompted the bewildered master of the Eastern world to ask who (in the hell) the Spartans were?

The Spartans also maintained a temple dedicated to Talthybius, the herald of Agamemnon. It was here that eerie lights and strange noises were allegedly seen and heard after the murder of the Persian ambassadors sent to obtain earth and water in 491. Eventually, the Spartans became so concerned about arousing the wrath of the gods by breaching the diplomatic immunity of the Persian ambassadors they sent two men as sacrifices to Xerxes to atone for the murdered ambassadors. Both men were volunteers and Spartiates of good family, Sperchias and Bulles.

Yet perhaps the most dramatic evidence of Sparta's finesse in diplomacy was the alliance it forged with Athens, Corinth, Aegina, (all hated rivals of one another!) and other lesser cities to oppose the Persian invasion of 480. The election of Sparta to lead this coalition on land and sea suggests that Athens would not have been able to hold this alliance together without Spartan influence. Arguably, it was Leonidas’ ability to put together a “coalition of the willing” to fight against Xerxes, more than his untimely death at Thermopylae, that was his greatest legacy.

Several of Sparta’s later commanders were also excellent diplomats. Brasidas comes to mind as a man whose greatest power came not from the strength of his arms, but his ability to win over allies and detach cities from the Delian League. Likewise, Sparta’s success in Syracuse was certainly not a military success, no Spartan hoplites were in action at any time. It was, however, an enormous diplomatic success that severely weakened Athenian strength and morale.

The weaker Sparta became, the important it was for Sparta to forge alliances and out-wit rather than out-fight her enemies. It may be an indication of weakness, but it was nevertheless a diplomatic coup that Sparta was one of the first city-states in Greece to forge an alliance with a rising Rome, for example.

All in all, Sparta's diplomatic culture deserves much more attention and research. A comprehensive work on Spartan diplomacy from the Archaic to the Roman Periods would be a welcome addition to existing scholarly literature. For now, however, let me return to the subject of Leonidas.

The evidence for Leonidas’ diplomatic talent is indirect rather than explicit. It is evident in what he did, rather than what is said about him. Quite simply: During his brief reign, Leonidas managed to forge a coalition of Greek states willing to oppose the Persian invasion and to convince this loose coalition of independent and proud city-states to agree to a unified command. The significance of such an achievement can be measured by the fact that ten years earlier Athens had been unwilling to place even her own army under the command of a single Athenian; no less than ten generals shared command of the Athenian army at Marathon. Equally notable, while Leonidas’ brother Cleomenes alienated Lacedaemon’s Peloponnesian allies to the point of provoking revolt, Leonidas won over new Allies such as Mycenae and Tiryns.

As for the incident with the Persian ambassadors, Herodotus tells us that the Spartans shared the guilt for the murder of the ambassadors. According to Herodotus, the entire city was threatened by ill-omens and the Spartan Assembly met repeatedly in order to find volunteers from among the citizens willing to appease the Gods by dying in atonement for the murdered Persian ambassadors. If, as when Cleomenes’ burned the Sacred Wood near Argos, the crime had been committed by either of the Spartan kings, the Spartans would have expected/demanded that the king bear responsibility -- not the citizens. In short, whoever killed the Persian ambassadors, it wasn't Leonidas (or Leotychidas) and so the entire Spartiate population felt collectively guilty about it – something that suggests the Persian emissaries had not been the victims of a spontaneous act of violence but rather condemned by the Spartan Assembly. (Something which in turn suggests that Spartan Assemblies could be quite rowdy affairs, but that is a subject for another day….)

Leonidas' sophisticated diplomacy is an important theme in the third book of my three-part biographical novel of Leonidas: A Heroic King.

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The Road to Thermopylae: Diplomatic Exchange

2024-07-31T10:07:00.000+02:00

Darius gave Athens, Eretria and all the other cities of Greece the opportunity to submit without war. Many Greek states, having witnessed the brutality of the Persian suppression of the Ionian revolt, submitted voluntarily. Key among these was Aegina -- a rival of Athens that sat dangerously close.

Sparta's most dangerous enemy and neighbor, on the other hand, was Argos. Sparta had just defeated Argos a decisive battle that included slaughtering a generation of fighting men. It would have been understandable if the Argives had sought Persian "protection" by submitting. That they didn't is to their credit.

What they did do, however, is less clear. Herodotus relates that conflicting stories circulated about the policy of Argos. The Argives themselves said they offered to join the anti-Persian coalition on the condition they received a 30-year truce from Sparta -- and joint command; the Spartans offered them a single voice in a trio of commanders composed of the two Spartan kings and the Argive commander. Other (unnamed) sources claimed that the Persians sent word that they (the Persians) considered the Argives "of the same blood" (going back to a joint ancestor in the Iliad) and so should not fight one another. Fact is that Argos refused to join the anti-Persian coalition, and so remained a threat to Sparta, but did not exactly submit to Persia either.

Both Athens and Sparta rejected the Persian offer to "come to terms" without conflict with exceptional -- indeed shocking -- vehemence. In both cases, contrary to prevailing customs, the Persian envoys were killed. The Athenians threw the Persians into a pit and the Spartans threw them down a well.

Curiously, however, it was the Spartans rather than the Athenians who suffered remorse. Herodotus tells us in Book Seven (133-136) the following story. The Spartans (also notable) had a temple to Agamemnon's herald Talthybius. After throwing the Persian ambassadors down a well to their death, the Spartans noticed strange things happening at the temple to Talthybius (some sources speak of strange lights and sounds) and realized that the gods were angry. They also made a connection between the murder of the Persian Ambassadors and the anger of this god and felt compelled to appease his anger.

So, the Spartans held frequent assemblies at which they asked for volunteers to go to the Persian court. What they expected is made clear by the question asked at Assembly: "Is there any Spartan willing to die for his country?" The fate awaiting these men was expected to be so horrible that the question had to be asked repeatedly before two volunteers were found: Sperchias, son of Aneristus, and Bulis, son of Nicoles. The Spartiates "both men of good family and great wealth, volunteered to offer their lives to Xerxes in atonement for Darius' messengers who had been killed in Sparta."

The two sacrificial envoys set out for Persia, stopping first at the palace of the Persian satrap on the Asian coast of the Aegean, Hydarnes. The latter feasted the Spartan ambassadors with great pomp and during the meal advised the two Spartiates to become "friends" to the Persian king. He drew attention to his own wealth and position, and then told the Spartan ambassadors that, being men of merit and courage, that if they submitted to Xerxes they might find themselves "in authority over lands in Greece which [Xerxes] would give you."

According to Herodotus, the Spartan envoys answered: "Hydarnes, the advice you give does not spring from full knowledge of the situation. You know one half of what is involved but not the other half. You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced.... If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too."

So the Spartan ambassadors continued to Susa and were brought before Xerxes. As soon as they entered the King's presence, the royal bodyguard tried to force them to bow down on the floor in an act of abject submission or worship, but the Spartans absolutely refused, fighting back against the guards that tried to push their heads to the floor. They said Spartans did not worship "a mere man like themselves." They also, somehow, managed to tell Xerxes why they were there.

Xerxes with restraint quite uncharacteristic of him (if we are to believe Herodotus' other tales about him) did not order the two Spartans tortured, flayed alive, dissected, or dismembered. Instead, he replied that he "would not behave like the Spartans, who by murdering the ambassadors of a foreign power had broken the law which all the world holds sacred." Xerxes "had no intention of doing the very thing for which he blamed them." Thus to their utter amazement, not only were Sperchias and Bulis' lives spared, they were also allowed to return to Sparta in all honor.

There was only one catch. Because Xerxes had refused to take the lives of the ambassadors, the debt had not been paid to Talthybius, nor had the Spartan crime against the recognized international law of diplomatic immunity been atoned. Sparta still owed not only Persia but the gods for what they had done to the Persian ambassadors.

Both the murder of the Persian ambassadors and the mission of Sperchias and Bulis are described in "A Heroic King":

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The Road to Thermopylae: Xerxes

2024-07-24T09:41:00.000+02:00

Today, I offer a brief biographical sketch of the man who would lead the invading Persian forces in 480 BC and face Leonidas across the battlefield at Thermopylae: Xerxes

The Persian campaign ending in the Battle of Marathon was viewed by both sides as a victory and settled nothing. The Persian King Darius became more determined than ever to crush Athens because he now felt he had to punish both Athens' support for the Ionian rebellion and for humiliating his army at Marathon. He announced his intention to personally lead an army -- greater than any before -- against Athens. To provide that army with the necessary ships, horses, weapons and provisions, however, took time and taxes. The Egyptians objected to the taxes and rebelled, and as it turned out Darius did not have the time he needed either. He died in 486 at 64 years of age.

Darius was succeeded not by his eldest son, but a younger son born to a daughter of Cyrus the Great. He was at the time of his succession already 36 years old and had been carefully groomed for his future as king by serving twelve years as governor in Babylon. After coming to power, he successfully quelled rebellions in both Egypt and Babylon. Significantly, in the later he broke with his father's tradition of religious tolerance and melted down the most important statue of the God Bel.

By 483 his attentions had turned to Greece. Xerxes' actions suggest that he was anxious to complete his father's unfinished campaign against Greece and thereby avenge the "humiliation" of his father. Herodotus, however, suggests that he was goaded into action by his cousin Mardonius.

Herodotus puts the following speech into Mardonius' mouth:

"...you will not allow the wretched Ionians in Europe to make fools of us. It would indeed be a fearsom thing if we who have defeated and enslaved the Sacae, Indians, Ethiopians, Assyrians, and many other great nations who did us no injury ... should fail now to punish the Greeks who have been guilty of injuring us without provocation. (Book 7:9)

Once Xerxes had made up his mind to attack Greece, there is no question that he undertook a campaign with single-mindedness, determination, and foresight. Massive amounts of provisions were pre-positioned along the invasion route. In addition, to avoid losing his fleet as Mardonius had done in 492, he ordered a canal cut across the Athos peninsula. Herodous, however, dismisses the later as "mere ostentation" because (he claims) there would have been "no difficulty" hauling the ships overland. Xerxes built the canal, Herodotus says "to show his power and to leave something to be remembered by." (Book 7: 34)

This is the tone of Herodotus' commentary, which he underlines with examples Xerxes arrogance and cruelty. On the one hand, we have the story of Xerxes ordering the waters of the Hellespont lashed 300 times (like a disobedient slave) because a storm had destroyed his pontoon bridge -- an action that epitomizes the stupid arrogance of a man obsessed with his own allegedly "divine" power. On the other hand, he tells the gruesome story of the Lydian noble Pythius. The latter voluntarily offered lavish hospitality to Xerxes and his army and also put his fortune at Xerxes disposal for the war -- to the tune of 3,993,000 gold Darics (a vast fortune). Yet when he asked that the eldest of his five sons be exempted from service in the army, Xerxes gave the following answer (according to Herodotus):

"You miserable fellow," he cried, "have you the face to mention your son, when I, in person, am marching to war against Greece with my sons and brothers and kinsmen and friends -- you, my slave, whose duty it was to come to me with every member of your house, including your wife? ... now your punishment will be less than your impudence deserves. Yourself and four of your sons are saved by the entertainment you gave me; but you shall pay with the life of the fifth, whom you cling to most."

Herodotus continues:

Having answered Pythius in these words Xerxes at once gave orders that the men to whom such duties fell should find Pythius' eldest son and cut him in half and put the two halves one on each side of the road, for the army to march out between them. The order was performed.

Propaganda? Maybe, but Herodotus was capable of showing respect and offering praise to Xerxes predecessors Cyrus and Darius. That the tone of his commentary is so decidedly different must have a cause beyond mere prejudice or politics. The fact that he can site incident after incident of Xerxes' bizarre behavior also suggests that there is at least some basis for his characterization.

Tellingly, Xerxes had thrones set up in safe places from which to watch his battles -- whether Thermopylae or Salamis. Xerxes sent other men to die, often under the lashing of whips, rather than leading from the front. And when things went badly, he just went home with some of his army while abandoning the rest of his "slaves," those he expected to bleed for him.

After returning to Susa, he appears to have lost interest in military affairs and to have focused on grandiose construction projects, including a palace that was twice the size of his father's. It is hard to escape parallels with other dictators like Hitler and Stalin.

In 465, Xerxes was assassinated by the commander of the royal bodyguard. That too tells us something about his popularity among his closest associates.

Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

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The Road to Thermophylae: Empire Strikes

2024-07-17T10:02:00.004+02:00

While the Battle of Thermopylae gained legendary status almost immediately and became popularized in this century through the film "300," too few people living today know the history leading up to it.

Thermopylae was not an isolated event but part of a chain of events, and while the Spartans were famously absent from the Battle of Marathon, yet the Spartan policies ten years later culminating in the Battle of Thermopylae cannot be understood without remembering what happened at Marathon.

Darius had vowed to punish the independent Greek Cities, Athens and Eretria, for aiding the Ionian rebels. He did not consider them important enough or dangerous enough, however, to warrant a major campaign under his personal command. Instead, he sent a sizable (but not enormous) expeditionary force under Mardonios, who had orders to obtain submission from these two cities. Mardonios was the son of Darius' sister, while one of his sisters was one of Darius wives, and one of Darius' daughters was one of Mardonios' wives -- incest was not frowned upon by the Persian elite.

Mardonios left Susa in the spring of 492 and assembled his fleet and land forces in Cilicia before proceeding up the Ionian coast deposing Greek tyrants and re-establishing democracies, presumably -- and intelligently -- as a means to increase the loyalty of these cities to the Persian empire. He also conquered remaining outposts of independence such as the strategic island of Thrasos, before advancing deep into Macedonia, which submitted to Persia and was absorbed into the satrapy of "Thrace." The Persian land army continued to advance as far as Thessaly, closing in inexorably on Athens and Eretria from the north.

But the expedition ran into trouble when the fleet tried to round Mount Athos and encountered a violent contrary gale. Allegedly, 300 ships and 20,000 men were lost in this catastrophe. While possibly an exaggeration, the violence of Mediterranean storms should never be underestimated and still sink ships today. Without a fleet and with Mardonios wounded in an engagement that the Persians had won, the campaign of 492 ended.

Darius needed to rebuild his fleet (that is order ships built in the various shipyards of his empire from Phoenicia to the newly subdued Ionian islands), so the next expedition was set for 490. Mardonios was evidently still disabled by his wounds, since a new commander was named for the next expedition, namely Datis. Although his exact origins are unknown, he was a "Mede" rather than a Persian and certainly not a member of the ruling family. This underlines the fact that Darius did not expect any particular trouble subduing the Athenians. He was annoyed that they had dared to support a revolt against him; he did not particularly respect them. His orders were for Datis to bring the Athenians and Eretrians back to him in chains -- slaves.

Datis' strategy (or the strategy dictated to him) was to strike directly across the Aegean, rather than taking the long way around over the Hellespont as Mardonios had done. The expeditionary force again gathered in Cilicia, and this time the entire army with their horses (in special horse transports) embarked on what Herodotus says was 600 ships. Modern historians have tried to calculate how many man and horses might have been transported by these ships and come up with an estimate a maximum of 24,000 troops and 36,000 crew (sailors) while others, based on the water resources at Marathon that sustained the Persian army for a whole week suggest the maximum number was closer to 16,000.

Whatever its exact size, the Persian army struck across the water at Rhodes. Here the population took refuge in their city of Lindos and when they had just five days of water left, they asked the Persians for a truce for five days, promising to surrender at the end of that time "if nothing happened to rescue them." Datis allegedly laughed but generously granted the peace. The next day, unexpected, torrential rains (very unusual in the Mediterranean in summer) refilled the cisterns of Lindos. The Persians duly made a treaty of "friendship" with the Rhodians and dedicated gifts at the local temples before sailing onwards. Unclear is just what this "friendship" entailed, but historians suspect Rhodes accepted a kind of subject status that left them nominal independence in exchange for token tribute.

The Persians struck next at Naxos, evidently taking the island by surprise. Rather than offer resistance, the population fled into the hills. The Persians duly burned the city and enslaved those individuals they could capture before sailing for Delos. Here Datis found the population fled from their tiny island altogether, taking refuge on a nearby island. Datis sent word to them, saying he had orders from the "Great King" (Darius) to honor the sanctuary of Apollo and do the residents no harm. He duly made more gifts to the temple after the people returned to witness his generosity. The message was clear: the Persians demanded political loyalty but respected religious diversity. It was a potent combination designed to reduce resistance to their rule, but it was also an enlightened policy that should not be disparaged. It was also largely successful, bringing the rest of the Cyclades into the Persian camp.

Datis' expeditionary force arrived on the southern tip of Euboea next and quickly subdued the city of Karystos and proceeded to Eretria itself. Eretria chose resistance, and the Persians chose assault. In six days of bitter fighting, there were heavy casualties on both sides -- until two traitors betrayed their city. The details are lacking, but the descendants of the traitors were encountered a century later, their ancestors having received land elsewhere. Eretria itself was "put to the sword." The Temples were looted and burned, the city sacked and the surviving population (said to be just 780 people including old men, women, and children) were sent to Persia as slaves.

At last, Datis could focus his attention on the main enemy: Athens. While resting his troops (and cleaning up) he gave Athens a last chance to surrender peacefully. He pointed out that not a single Eretrian had survived in freedom. Meanwhile, the Athenian pleas for help had produced only two positive responses: from Plataea and Sparta. The latter, however, could not deploy immediately. (See: https://spartareconsidered.blogspot.com/2017/07/marathon-and-sparta.html) Nevertheless, Athens had an estimated 10,000 hoplites plus 600 more from Plataea, and prospects of another 5,000 Spartans showing up within a fortnight. All three cities had an unknown number of light troops, which may have numbered between 8,000 - 12,000 more men. Given that the Persian army had now sustained some losses, the imbalance of forces was not really so overwhelming even if we take the higher number of 60,000, while it might have been smaller than the Athenian army if it was really only 16,000 strong. In addition, the Athenians would be fighting on their own territory for their own city and way of life. They chose defiance.

Datis sailed his expeditionary force across the narrow straits to land on the north shore of the Attican coastline, roughly 40 kilometers or 26 miles north of Athens. As soon as the Athenians learned where the Persians had come ashore, they sent word to the Spartans and Plataeans, mustered their own men, and deployed to the southern side of the plain of Marathon, blocking the roads to Athens. The two armies now faced one another across the plain of Marathon separated by roughly three miles.

The Athenians had ten generals and one supreme commander ("polemarchos"); one general from each of the Athenian "tribes" or demes, and a more honorary than effective "supreme" commander with no real authority. Once the Athenians had deployed there was a war council to decide what to do next and this proved divided equally between those who wanted to attack and those who wanted to remain on the defensive and force the Persians to attack them. One of the Greek generals, Miltiades, a man with experience fighting with the Persians, argued passionately for attack and convinced the "supreme commander" Kallimachos to cast the deciding vote in favor of an attack. Yet, still the generals rotated the actual command, and Miltiades had to await his "turn" before his day to command came.

Many historians have found hints that the Persians, seeing the entire Athenian army in front of them, concluded that it would be easier to take Athens from the figurative "back door" -- ie via Peireius. That is, if they could sail around the peninsula of Sounion and sail into Peireius harbor, they would by-pass the Athenian army at Marathon and would be able to march straight into Athens unopposed. To do that, however, they needed to keep the Athenian army pinned down at Marathon. This dictated a division of their force, keeping half at Marathon and sending the remainder around the peninsula to take Athens from the rear.

Although some historians dispute this, the thesis is supported by evidence that there were traitors in Athens (supporters of the deposed tyrant Hippias, who was with the Persians advising them), and by the fact that the Persian fleet appeared in Peireius harbor the day after Marathon -- something physically impossible if the ships had remained in Marathon until the end of the battle, then taken on the exhausted troops. The division of the Persian force into two, with one half remaining in position at Marathon while the other half sailed around Sounion to reach Peireius would also explain, why Militiades chose to attack without awaiting the Spartans, who were, by then, already on the march.

Whatever the reason, on a certain day (we don't know the exact date since modern calendars were not in use), Miltiades chose to attack. The two biggest advantages of the Persians were their cavalry and their archers. If the Greeks could get in close, their better armor gave them an advantage in hand-to-hand combat. The Persian cavalry appears to have camped closer to the springs and pastures on the fringe of the Persian force and it took time to catch, tack, and deploy it. By attacking early, the Greeks stood a chance of getting to grips with the Persian infantry before the cavalry could intervene. The faster they deployed, the greater the advantage of surprise. (They could assume the Persians would be surprised; Greeks did not usually attack Persians.) That left the archers to deal with, but the faster the Greeks advanced the more they could reduce the amount of time they were exposed to a barrage of arrows.

This translated into a "run" for what Herodotus describes as 8 "stadia" (lengths of the Olympic stadium), or -- in modern terms -- roughly a mile. Indeed, Herodotus makes the claim that the Greeks at Marathon were the first Greeks to run simultaneously into battle. Yet the run has been a point of controversy ever since. Early historians claimed it was a "physical impossibility" to "run" for a mile in full Greek hoplite panoply -- and still be fit to fight in a life-and-death struggle on arrival. This lead many to conclude that the Athenians didn't actually run but march "at the double."

Recent historians have pointed out that early estimates of the weight of Greek panoply were hugely exaggerated. Modern military experience seems to bear out the plausibility of the run. Soldiers in condition can "jog" for a mile (or indeed more) carrying 30 pounds of equipment, or roughly what a Greek hoplite did. It would have taken them roughly 12 minutes to cover those 8 "stadia" and engage the Persian line -- which, taken by surprise and not particularly worried, was still forming.

During the course of this run, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the wings became stronger and the center weaker. This should have been disastrous because the Persian center was held by their stronger (read Persian and Medan) troops, while the wings were held by various allied troops of less reliability and skill. This resulted in the Greeks pushing the Persian wings back while the Persian center stopped the momentum of the Greek center. Some versions suggest the Greek center broke, but the wings either joined and attacked the Persians center from the rear or turned toward the center and crushed the Persians between them. Everyone agrees it was a fierce and brutal fight that lasted several hours.

At some point, the Persian forces cracked, panic set in, men started running for their ships. The Greeks pursued, cutting down many of the Persians as they struggled through the shallows desperate to board a ship. Ultimately, the Greeks captured seven of those ships. Out of a possible 600 (or if the fleet had indeed been divided -- 300) ships that would hardly have been noticeable from the Persian perspective. What was far more remarkable was that the Persians allegedly left 6,400 dead upon the field of Marathon compared to just 192 Athenian and a handful of Plateans.

It was a great victory for Athens -- and Plataea. The Athenians made much of it -- and the Athenians were very good at telling a good story, particularly one to their credit. Plays were written. Pottery, painting, and sculpture commemorated the victory. Men bragged about participating in the battle on their tombstones. But the 4th century Chian historian Theopompos warned that "the battle of Marathon did not happen as everyone celebrates it, nor did any of the other things that the city of Athens brags about and uses to deceive the Greeks." (Fake news!) [Peter Krentz, The Battle of Marathon, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) 12.]

More important, it didn't reslove anything. Indeed, it only made Darius more anxious to subdue the pesky mainland Greeks. The campaign as a whole had been a success, bringing Rhodes, Naxos, Delos, and Euboea into the Persian sphere of influence. Now only Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth and some lesser cities of Southern Greece remained. In short, no sooner had the bulk of the troops and ships returned than planning for the next campaign could begin. That next campaign would lead to Thermopylae.

Next month I look at the commander of that expedition, Xerxes. Meanwhile....

Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

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The Road to Thermopylae: Ionian Revolt

2024-07-10T08:21:00.002+02:00

While the Battle of Thermopylae gained legendary status almost immediately and more recently became popularized in modern culture through the film "300," too few people living today know the history leading up to it. Thermopylae was not an isolated event but part of a chain of events. The incident that triggered the first Persian invasion of 490 BC was the Ionian Revolt.

The revolt of Greek city-states of Ionia against the might of Persia triggers analogies with Star Wars. Modern (Western) sympathy is immediately drawn to the underdog -- the rebels -- fighting a presumably "evil" empire. But history is rarely as neat and unequivocal as Hollywood.

The Ionian Revolt was the child of a certain Aristagoras of Miletus, a tyrant who owed his position of privilege to Persia. Aristagoras, not content with ruling the wealthy city of Miletus, was tempted by prospects of even greater wealth when Naxian exiles requested his assistance in being restored to their wealth and positions. Thinking that by assisting them he could put himself in power in Naxos, Aristagoras sought Persians support for the expedition and received no less than 200 "Persian" triremes (i.e. ships manned by client-states) under a Persian commander. The attack began in 499 -- and was a miserable failure. The Naxians were intelligent enough not to try to fight 200 triremes at sea. They withdrew behind their walls and after 4 months the large expeditionary force was out of supplies. In the face of failure, no one had the resources to pay for the ships, crews, and troops, who they had expected to reward with loot.

Aristagoras feared Persian retribution for luring them into this debacle and, to save his own skin, decided to foment revolt among all the Greek cities of the Eastern Aegean then living under Persian rule -- after obtaining promises of aid from the still independent Greek cities. He went first to Sparta, where he tried to win King Cleomenes (known as unstable and inclined to foreign adventures) to the cause. Herodotus famously describes how he sought to ignite Cleomenes' greed with a map of the world in which Sparta is a tiny dot at the fringe and the Persian Empire stretches from edge to edge. All this would be his, Aristagoras suggested to Cleomenes. Hearing, however, that it was a three-month march from the sea to the Persian capital of Susa, Cleomenes indignantly dismissed Aristagoras and ordered him to leave Lacedaemon. When Aristogoras resorted to promises of up-front cash payments, Cleomenes' daughter Gorgo intervened saying: "Father, you had better go away, or the stranger will corrupt you." [Herodotus, Book Five: 51]

Aristagoras went next to Athens where he spoke before the entire Assembly. Again he conjured up images of Persia's immense wealth and assured the Athenians they could triumph because the Persians had become soft and effeminate. The Athenian Assembly made up of thousands of presumably educated (as well as uneducated) adult males proved easier to bamboozle than one Spartan girl. The Athenians agreed to send 20 triremes to assist the rebels with an unknown number of marines (hoplites) on board. (The usual number was 20 per trireme or in this case 400 hoplites.) The only other city on mainland Greek to provide assistance was Eretria, which committed five triremes to the common cause.

These forces proved sufficient for a daring attack overland on the Lydian capital of Sardis (present-day Sartmustafa in Western Turkey) in the spring of 498. The move was so unexpected, they caught the defenders flat-footed. The latter offered no resistance and fled to the acropolis. Then, whether intentional or accidental, the Greeks set fire to the city. The Persians and residents fled to the open market to escape the flames and there, allegedly, their numbers intimidated the Greeks into returning to their ships -- or, possibly, the Greeks had no stomach for the senseless slaughter of women and children after achieving the objective of destroying the city and its sanctuary.

This striking success rapidly encouraged other Greek cities to join the revolt. From the Bosporus to Cyprus cities declared their independence from Persia. This, of course, begs the question 'why?' While Aristagoras' motives for revolt were self-serving and Athenian Eretrian motives were venal, these subject city-states must have been driven to rebellion by other considerations.

Suggestions that the cities were bled dry by Persian "tribute" or economically ruined by Persian trading monopolies won't wash; the archaeological evidence shows that these cities were building monuments and accumulating reserves of silver coinage. In short, they appear to have prospered under Persian rule. References to loss of liberty or independence, on the other hand, are a bit too vague to justify such a risky venture as revolt.

The real issue appears to have been Persian settlers/colonists that took land from locals, and -- emotionally more explosive -- conscription. Peter Krentz in his excellent monograph on the Battle of Marathon notes that the Persian invasion of Scythia had entailed the conscription of tens of thousands of Greek sailors, and the Naxos fiasco had required as many as 40,000. [Peter Kretz, The Battle of Marathon, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) 70.] The Greeks on the Ionian islands and coast along with those in Cyprus may have believed that these demands were only the beginning. They may also have feared that the next target of Persian aggression was likely to be other Greeks. They may have wanted to avoid a fratricidal war fought in the interests of distant Susa. Then again, fratricidal war was the order of the day throughout most of ancient Greek history. Maybe they were simply swept away by the prospect of jumping on what appeared to be a winning bandwagon.

Whatever their reasons, joining the revolt was a mistake. Persia was a huge, centralized Empire. Like a supertanker turning, it took a little time to react, but once it was on course it was a juggernaut.

The Persians caught up with the rebel raiding force at Ephesus and defeated it with heavy Greek losses. The survivors, however, managed to escape in their ships. In Cyprus, this pattern was repeated, the rebels lost the land battle and the Ionians sailed back to their own cities leaving the Cypriot cities to face the Persians alone. One by one the Persians battered the Cypriot cities into submission by siege. Siege ramps and tunnels testify to the intensity of these sieges, and the loss of life must have been considerable, as the evidence suggests these sieges lasted for months. The last stronghold fell in 496.

Meanwhile, after their retreat from Cyprus, the remaining rebels engaged in no further joint campaigns on land. Instead, the Persians started to pick off the rebel cities one at a time. In 495 the target was Miletus, where it had all begun, and the remaining rebels rallied to fight a naval battle. They pulled together 353 triremes off the coast of Miletus and in the Battle of Lade went down in ignominious defeat -- each blaming the others for turning tail and running first. Miletus fell in 494, and the other islands went down one by one until by the end of 493 there were no rebels left.

The Persians did not go gentle with rebels that resisted to the end. At each island, the victors formed a human chain and walked from one side of the island to the other collecting all the survivors. According to Krentz, "they castrated the best-looking boys, took the prettiest virgins for the king, and burned the cities and their sanctuaries." Those of either sex not pretty enough for "special treatment," were simply sold into common slavery.

Unsurprisingly in light of this treatment, many islands capitulated on terms. These city-states avoided complete destruction and enslavement. However, the tribute owed to Persian was re-assessed and, tellingly, the cities were forced to agree to submit all future disputes to Persian arbitration. Darius apparently blamed the incessant Greek rivalries (the exiled Naxians who had talked Aristagoras into supporting a restoration attempt?) for the problems.

Darius also blamed the Athenians and Eretrians for meddling. Allegedly, he ordered a servant to whisper to him three times whenever he sat down to dinner: "Master, remember the Athenians." [Herodotus, Book Five: 106] Darius didn't. In 490, he sent an expeditionary force to punish both Eretria and Athens for the impudence of fostering rebellion in Ionia. But that is the subject of next month's post.

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The Road to Thermopylae: The Rise of Persia

2024-07-03T08:43:00.001+02:00

It has been alleged that all ancient history (as we define it in the West) "sprang from the conflict between Persian (Iranian) culture and that of the Greco-Roman world." [Ernle Bradford, Thermopylae: The Battle for the West (New York: De Capo Press, 1993) 40.] While that may be a bit grandiose, there can be no doubt that the Persian empire was home to one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world.

The Persian ascent started with the revolt of the Persian King Cyrus against the overlordship of the Medes, which historians estimate occurred between 553 and 550 BC. It resulted in the establishment of the Achaemenid dynasty. Having established himself in the old Mede empire, Cyrus rapidly added what had been Assyria and present-day Armenia. Just three years after coming to power, he defeated the famous King Croesus and absorbed Lydia (now Eastern Turkey) into his empire as well. Within eight years of coming to power, his empire already stretched from Anatolia to the Indus and from Armenia to the Persian Gulf. From this power base, he turned his armies against Babylon and conquered that as well. Babylon at this time included (as vassal states) Syria and Phoenicia -- or what we know as the Levant.

Significantly, Cyrus pursued a policy of religious tolerance toward his subject peoples. This included the emancipation of the Jews forced into slavery and exile by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. The Jews were allowed to return to Palestine and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Cyrus appears to have enjoyed widespread respect for his wisdom and fairness -- by contemporary standards -- even among Greek observers. Herodotus, for example, tells the story of how, after the conquest of Babylon, a courtier suggested to Cyrus that the Persians leave their arid and mountainous homeland and resettle somewhere more fertile and pleasant. Cyrus allegedly replied that it was a bad suggestion because (to paraphrase) soft-countries breed soft men and soft men soon become slaves. Cyrus was killed in battle on his way to conquer Egypt in or around 530 BC.

There are good reasons to doubt the "official version" of what happened next, given the fact that this was written by the man who ended up on the Persian throne. Historians suspect that Darius was actually the leader of a conspiracy against the legitimate heirs of Cyrus, but this is impossible to prove. According to Darius, Cyrus' son Cambyses II succeeded his father and successfully subdued Egypt, but failed to take Nubia. Instead, he turned back to put down a revolt only to die of "natural causes" along the way. The alleged revolt in Persia was led by an "imposter" claiming to be Cambyses brother. Darius and his co-conspirators assassinated him before proclaiming one of their number, Darius, the new "King of Kings."

Historians' suspicions that Darius' real role are both fed by the fact that Darius was not widely recognized as the legitimate successor to Cyrus/Cambyses. Indeed, according to Darius' own admission, he had to subdue no less than 19 rebellions against his rule in his first year in power. These included revolts led by other members of the royal family. Darius put them down and dealt ruthlessly with the "liars." For example, he bragged about publicly torturing the leaders and their lieutenants before killing them.

Yet it would be wrong to see Darius as a barbaric tyrant. His rule was characterized by sophisticated administrative reforms, starting with the reorganization of the empire into 23 "satrapies" or provinces. Significantly, he also established a new legal code. This was based in large part on existing laws, judgments, and customs, but the notion of writing it all down into a single code -- with supplemental "case books" recording judgments of the past -- was novel; remnants of these laws still find expression in Iranian law today. Notably, the Persian legal code relied heavily on evidence and precedent. There were also severe penalties for corruption -- particularly on the part of judges. Allegedly, one corrupt judge was skinned alive, his skin worked into leather and then used to cover the chair of his successor.

Darius also introduced standard units for measuring everything from grain and oil to land, i.e. he established standards for weights and measures. In addition, he introduced a sound (gold) currency and fixed rates of tribute based on the assessed wealth of the various provinces. He employed an extensive, educated bureaucracy to ensure the enforcement of the laws, the collection of taxes and the recruitment of troops across his wide and diverse empire. They, in turn, developed sophisticated systems of accounting, recording, and reporting.

Darius built magnificent monuments to himself and he built splendid palaces. He also founded a new capital at Persepolis. The gardens of the palace there have been uncovered by archaeologists revealing paths and plants laid out in harmonious patterns, colonnaded pavilions and a sophisticated system of irrigation. Yet Darius was no decadent despot lolling in luxury. He was more interested in economic development and administrative control. These led him to build a network of roads across his vast empire, and the first "Suez Canal" -- a canal connecting the easternmost branch of Nile River to the Red Sea. This was 101 miles long, 16 feet deep and wide enough for two triremes to pass one another with their oars extended.

Yet for all his bold ventures and successes, Darius was a cautious man. He did not respond to events spontaneously but after due deliberation and investigation. Before each of his wars of conquest, he first sent out spies to investigate the political and physical landscape of his intended target. We have evidence of these "scouting expeditions" in the Indus Valley, the Balkans, Greece, and Italy. The fact that Darius controlled the fleets of Phoenicia, Cyprus and Egypt made Persia a naval power as well as a land power. Furthermore, at the height of his power, Darius had created an empire that could field 700,000 fighting men.

Beside such might, Sparta's 6,000 citizens and 6,000 Perioikoi were not particularly impressive. Yet it is worth noting the following incident recorded in Herodotus (Book One: 152-152):

...the Spartans dispatched a fifty-oared galley to the Asiatic coast, in order, I suppose, to watch Cyrus and what was going on in Ionia. The vessel put in at Phocaea, and the most distinguished of the men on board, a man called Lacrines, was sent to Sardis to forbid Cyrus, on behalf of the Lacedaemonians, to harm any Greek city or they would take action.

Cyrus' response was to ask some Greeks at his court "Who are the Spartans?" On learning who they were and how small their city was, he replied:

I have never yet been afraid of men who have a special meeting place in the center of their city, where they swear this and that and cheat each other. Such people, if I have anything to do with it, will not have the troubles of Ionia to chatter about, but their own.

In the event, Cyrus did not have anything to say about it -- but his son and grandson did indeed bring war to the Spartans as future entries will outline.

This series continues next month with "The Ionian Revolt."

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The World's First Non-Agression Pact

2024-06-26T08:56:00.000+02:00

Despite the undoubted effectiveness of Sparta's professional army, its foreign policy relied on diplomacy as much as the force of arms to solve its differences with neighboring city-states. In fact, the Spartans demonstrated an acute appreciation of the limits of their power and of their vulnerability, which in turn gave rise to a cautious foreign policy that relied heavily on effective diplomacy. Among other astonishing accomplishments, Sparta produced the first known permanent alliance system in history, comparable to NATO: the Peloponnesian League. It all began with Tegea...

Herodotus records that sometime before the Persian invasion and probably in the mid-6^th Century BC as we reckon time, the Spartans became restless and wanted to conquer their northern neighbors in Arkadia. As the Spartans were wont to do, they sent to Delphi for advice and received the following Oracle:

Arkadia? Great is the thing you ask. I will not grant it.

In Arkadia are many men, acorn-eaters,

And they will keep you out. Yet, for I am not grudging.

I will give you Tegea to dance in with stamping feet

And her fair plain to measure out with the line.

Taking this to mean that they would be successful, the Spartan army invaded Tegea only to suffer a devastating defeat. As Herodotus explains: “…and those who were taken prisoner were forced to wear on their own legs the chains they had brought, and to ‘measure out with the line’ the plain of Tegea as laborers. In my own lifetime, the fetters they were bound with were still preserved in Tegea, hanging up around the temple of Athene Alea.” (Herodotus, The Histories, Book 1, 66)

Although Herodotus does not tell us just how many Spartiates were killed or captured, it is clear that Sparta was both defeated and that a significant number of citizens surrendered. (Incidentally demonstrating that Sparta did not have any kind of a “do or die” mentality!) Indeed, Herodotus suggests that Sparta suffered more than one defeat saying they “continually” had the worst of it against Tegea and “a long series of reverses” until the reigns of Anaxandridas and Ariston. These kings certainly lived in the second half of the 6^th century and under their leadership, Sparta sent for a second oracle from Delphi. This told them:

In Arkadia lies Tegea in the level plain,

Where under strong constraints two winds are blowing;

Smiting in there and counter-smiting, and woe on woe;

The earth, the giver of life, holds Agamemnon’s son.

Bring him home, and you will prevail over Tegea.

At this point, a clever Spartiate, Lichas, learned that a smith in Tegea had discovered a coffin ten feet long with a skeleton inside that was just as large. Interpreting this as the body of Orestes, Lichas reported what he had heard to the Gerousia. The Spartans pretended he had committed some crime and exiled him. He returned to the forge, explained what had happened and leased the plot of land with the bones. In secret, he then dug up the bones and brought them back to Sparta, and, according to Herodotus, “ever since that day the Lacedaemonians in any trial of strength had by far the better of it.”

But that is only half the story, for -- despite having recovered what was believed to be Orestes’ bones -- Sparta refrained from launching a new war against Tegea and negotiated a non-aggression pact instead.

Why? Herodotus is silent on this, so we are left to speculate.

We know Sparta opted to negotiate with Tegea rather than to resort to arms. We also know that the resulting “non-aggression” pact became a pro-type of all subsequent agreements with other cities in the Peloponnese, and so the core of the Peloponnesian League. We also know that a key feature of this agreement was that Sparta agreed to assist Tegea against external enemies (presumably they were thinking of Argos), but also that Tegea agreed to assist Sparta against internal revolts. This suggests that recognition of the threats inherent in a large subject population may have induced Sparta to seek an alliance in place of conquest. A number of historians point out that the end of the Tegean conflict probably fell in the lifetime and possibly the Ephorate of Chilon the Wise, and postulate that this universally respected Spartan leader may have been the voice of reason that held Sparta back from new aggression.

The course of history: the attack, defeat, new appeal to Delphi, successful relocation of “Orestes” and then the astonishing restraint demonstrated by Sparta in not attacking again suggest that Spartan society was probably divided between “hawks” and “doves.” Far from being a monolithic society with a single will and a robot-like population, Sparta was a complex society inherently vulnerable to internal division by the peculiar institution of the dual kingship. Since the Kings were equal in all things, any fundamental policy differences between the kings led inevitably to political strife. Each king could be assured support from his own relatives, friends, and clients in both the Gerousia and Assembly. This means that each king would seek to win majorities by various means of persuasion and the same kind of political maneuvering we are familiar with today in the U.S. Congress and British Parliament. The “hawks” won the first round; the “doves” – very probably led by Chilon the Wise – won the second round.

The above hypothesis is the basis for my novel The Olympic Charioteer. The novel opens in Tegea, after Sparta’s defeat. In the absence of any historical record about the political system in Tegea at this time, I have used Tegea to portray one of the characteristic political developments of the period: the rise of tyrants on the backs of increasing political demands by the hoplite-class against the aristocratic elite. The novel moves from Tegea to Sparta, where the internal divisions between two factions in Sparta are revealed. The central character of the novel is one of the Spartiates taken captive in the Spartan defeat: a young man, who just before the start of the war had driven his father’s chariot to victory at the Olympic games.

For more visit my website: http://schradershistoricalfiction.com

Two cities at war

Two men with Olympic ambitions

And one slave

The finest charioteer in all Hellas.

This is the story of a young man’s journey from tragedy to triumph, and the founding of the first non-aggression pact in recorded history.

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Sparta's "Peculiar" Dining Clubs

2024-06-19T12:00:00.004+02:00

Observers of ancient Sparta noted the peculiar Spartan custom of dinning clubs or syssitia at which adult Spartan citizens were required to share their evening meals. These clubs were viewed as one of the key features of Spartan society that distinguished it from all other Greek cities. Today I take a closer look.

Although it was common, popular and indeed a matter of pride for men (never women!) to dine together in Athens, the Spartan dining clubs were considered peculiar because: 1) they had fixed membership (for life), and 2) they were a compulsory precondition for attaining citizenship; failure to be accepted or failure to pay mess fees could cost a man his citizenship.

The origins of this peculiar tradition are controversial. A large number of theories have been put forward over time from the desirability of men of different ages dining together (so that young men would learn respect and benefit from the wisdom of older men) to a conscious desire on the part of the Spartan state to weaken family ties.

This later thesis is put forward forcefully by Anton Powell, for example, in his contribution to Michael Whitby’s Sparta. Powell argues that totalitarian states, recognizing the influence of the family as inherently inimical to state control, have consistently tried to break down family ties. He cites examples from National Socialist Germany, although Soviet Russia and Communist China both provide more compelling examples of anti-family policies designed to – and incidentally more successful at – undermining family structures and influence.

The problem with the comparison to 20th Century totalitarian states is two-fold. First, modern anti-family societies were consciously revolutionary. They sought to undermine the family because families are inherently conservative. Yet Powel himself stresses the fundamentally conservative nature of Sparta in his essay. If Sparta was essentially conservative, then no institution was better designed to reinforce conservative values than the family. It is when family structures break down that societies become most vulnerable to change – not the other way around.

The other problem with Powell’s thesis is that men eating one meal together at a club is not a particularly good way to undermine family structure. It may be a modern truism that “families that eat together stay together,” but most men today nevertheless eat at least one meal away from their families. The most common pattern in Western industrialized societies is for men (and often women) to eat the mid-day meal away from home. Why should it be more destructive of family life to eat the evening meal away from home than the morning or mid-day meal? In many, particularly agricultural societies (such as ancient Sparta) it is the mid-day, not the evening meal, that is most important.

There is no evidence to suggest that full Spartan citizens (31 years and older) did not eat the morning and mid-day meal with their families. On the contrary, given the intimacy of Spartan society, it is very likely Spartans ate both breakfast and dinner (mid-day) with their families, and went to the syssitia in the evening for what was essentially a light supper.

Certainly, as all accounts agree, Spartan men returned from the syssitia to their homes (or barracks) sober before it grew too late. Furthermore, to the disappointment of visiting foreigners, syssitia were notorious for the absence of flute-girls and courtesans, unlike the traditional Athenian symposia. At the latter, men allegedly caroused together until the dawn and then staggered home drunk after indulging themselves with prostitutes both male and female. From a wife’s point of view, the Spartan custom of syssitia was infinitely preferable to the Athenian symposia, and in consequence it is arguable that the syssitia did far more to strengthen family life than to disrupt it. In short, attempts to portray the syssitia as a component of a totalitarian Spartan state’s systematic destruction of family and individuality reveal an alarming lack of objectivity.

A more appropriate parallel to the modern world might be membership in fraternities. Applicants to syssitia, as to fraternities, had to be accepted by existing members. This meant that far from being uniform, Spartan syssitia had different characters. Some syssitia would have been more intellectual than others, some more musical, some more conservative, and others outright radical. Some syssitia might have had close affiliations to one or the other royal house, and every Spartan with ambition would have expected and relied on support from his “fraternity brothers” throughout his life.

Spartan syssitia also shared some characteristics of political associations. We know that Spartans scorned the Athenian custom of men hanging around in the agora discussing public affairs. Instead, Spartan men were supposed to discuss affairs of state behind the closed doors of their syssitia where, presumably, no helots, perioikoi or foreigners could overhear them. While this may seem indicative of a paranoid or secretive society, it might on the other hand have enabled men to speak more freely and more candidly than in public. There are many people, after all, who shy away from speaking in a crowd or among strangers, yet nevertheless have opinions worth hearing. The syssitia would have provided a context in which such men could debate issues of importance and have their opinions heard.

Of course, to the extent that members of a syssitia were similar in their interests and inclinations and familiar with one another since childhood, the character of a syssitia may have the closest parallel in the modern world to the German “stammtisch” – that table in the local pub at which a group of men meets night after night to discuss everything from football to fashion and politics to pop-culture. Every “stammtisch” has its own clientele, its own group dynamics, and its own character – and they all get turned out at closing bell and sent home to their families, just as in Sparta.

Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

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Debunking Myths about Sparta: The Absence of Art

2024-06-12T08:50:00.004+02:00

Sparta is usually depicted as a bleak place and Spartans, lacking in art, architecture and even decoration. As with almost every other cliche associated with Ancient Sparta, that is wrong. Contrary to popular legend, Sparta produced both works of art and artists.

According to Conrad Stibbe in his excellent book Das Andere Sparta (Philipp von Zabern, 1996) no less than nine Lacedaemonian artists are known to have worked in Olympia alone. While the majority of these artists are described as Lacedaemonian, in two cases, Syadras and Chartas, the artists are explicitly referred to as Spartiate. While it is possible these were the only exceptions in Spartan history, it is more likely that they are the tip of the iceberg: the only surviving record over two and a half millennia of other nameless Spartiate artists.

Arguably Sparta's most famous sculpture; dating from the early 5th century it is affectionately known as "Leonidas" -- although it is unlikely to actually depict him.

Strikingly, Stibbe notes that the known Lacedaemonian artists worked for other states as well as Lacedaemon. That means they were recognized as outstanding artists and worked professionally on commission, not just as amateur artists adorning their own city’s monuments. Four of the nine were said to be students of a famous Cretan sculptor, and several of them engaged apprentices from other cities. Clearly, artistic work at Olympia was “international” not parochial.

Stibbe also notes that the Lacedaemonian sculptors worked not only in stone but in wood, ivory, gold, and bronze. Ivory and gold were used predominantly to decorate wood and therefore even if fragments of ivory and gold are found it may be difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct the total work of art. As so often when trying to understand Sparta and Spartan society, we are hampered by a paucity of archeological evidence that may reflect an absence of original material, destruction of the archeological record in earthquakes and flooding, or simply inadequate archeological investigation. Troy, after all, was considered mythical or fictional for almost two thousand years, until one amateur fanatic revolutionized our understanding of the Mycenaean period by insisting on digging in a spot that was not previously investigated. The site of Sparta itself may have been investigated, but much of Lacedaemon has never been systematically subjected to serious archeological study and new discoveries in Sparta’s “outlying” cities and temples may yet yield significant new finds.

An Example of Spartan Bronze Work

An example of this kind of discovery is a particularly beautiful stone sculpture found on Samos that appears to be of Lacedaemonian origin. It portrays a hoplite with long braids (as worn at this time exclusively in Sparta) and with breast-spirals on the breastplate (also typical of Laconian hoplites in art). Although not yet 100% confirmed, the marble also appears to be Laconian. If this statute was indeed Lacedaemonian, it would represent a significant discovery documenting more of Sparta’s almost forgotten artistic golden age.

Meanwhile, we should not ignore the plethora of smaller art objects from bronze vessels and jewellery to statuettes and figurines found at Spartan sanctuaries which record a thriving industry for domestic craftsmanship if not high art. These are well catalogued by Reinhard Foertsch in his article "Spartan Art: It's Many Deaths," in Sparta in Laconia: Proceedings of the 19th British Museum Classical Colloquium, Dec. 1995 (Cavanagh, WG and S.E.C. Walker, eds.) The same publication contains an excellent article by Maria Pipili, "Archaic Laconian Vase-Painting," which highlights the sophistication and high quality of 6th Century Laconian pottery.

Altogether, archeological research suggests that art was more common and more valued in Sparta than is widely acknowledged today. Spartiates certainly bought works of art and dedicated art objects at their sanctuaries. The extent to which they engaged in production of art themselves will never be known but, as noted above with respect to the two sculptors, at least in some cases Spartans were professional artists.

In all my novels set in Sparta I attempt to convey the complexity and sophistication that this fascinating society displayed.

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Debunking Myths: A Nation of Thieves

2024-06-05T12:00:00.002+02:00

Every scholar of Sparta knows Xenophon’s descriptions of how Spartan youths and boys were kept hungry so they would learn how to steal and were punished only for being caught rather than for theft itself. Credible as Xenophon generally is, his commentary on this aspect of Spartan society is very questionable.

Admittedly, a nation of thieves may well fit Athenian views about their enemy. The French referred to the English as “perfidious.” Americans and Soviets routinely attributed treachery to each other throughout the Cold War. The Israelis and Arabs have no end of adjectives to describe the deceitful character of the other side. Rather like calling your enemy’s men “fags” and their women “whores,” attributing sly dishonesty and immorality to the enemy is standard fare in propaganda wars regardless of culture or century.

A nation of thieves does not, however, fit well with a society that even her enemies considered remarkably stable and orderly. How do you keep a society orderly, if the entire male population between the ages of 7 and 20 are actively encouraged to steal? More important, how do you keep an economy functioning at the high levels of efficiency needed to finance a brutal, 30-year war if every farm, shop, house, workshop, and warehouse must be locked and guarded against hoards of desperate, half-starved youth? There are thieves in every society, but high levels of crime are one of the most destructive factors to social stability and political credibility.

Admittedly, the theft of food alone might not be so devastating to an economy as the theft of all goods, but the accounts usually cited, supplemented with details such as the absurd story of a youth caught stealing a fox (which is not on anyone’s menu), suggest that theft as such was encouraged. It is this picture of Spartan youth which dominates modern portrayals of Sparta.

To his credit, Anton Powell, in his article “Dining Groups, Marriage, Homosexuality,” in Michael Whitby’s Sparta, notes that “theft offended against two ideals of Spartan society: obedience and respect for elders.” (Sparta, p. 102). However, rather than questioning if Xenophon’s account is accurate or complete, Powell tries to argue that the military benefits of teaching youth stealth and deceit outweighed the disadvantages of corrupting their morals.

The problem with this argument is that such skills were conspicuously not necessary to the phalanx warfare at which Sparta excelled. Powell attempts to make a connection between guerrilla warfare and the custom of theft despite the fact that Thucydides states explicitly that prior to the Pylos campaign the Spartans had little experience of brigandage. Unable to square such a statement with his own image of Sparta, Powell hypothesizes a long history of (completely unrecorded!) helot revolts in which the Spartans learned guerrilla warfare – and so needed training in theft and stealth, but which Thucydides and Herodot knew absolutely nothing about.

Admittedly, the kryptea was an organization in which the skills of deceit and theft would have been useful, but we are told that only selected Spartan youth ever served in it, not all of them. Furthermore, as Dr. Nic Fields so significantly pointed out, Sparta probably did not have that repulsive institution unit until after the helot revolt of 465. There is, in fact, no credible indication whatsoever that Sparta had to deal with helot revolts of any kind prior to 465 – unless one counts the Second Messenian War as a major “helot” uprising. Taken all together, the evidence suggests that both helots and perioikoi prospered throughout the archaic period.

Rather than inventing unrecorded wars, I think it makes more sense to examine the presumption that Spartan youth were encouraged to steal. It is far more likely, as Nigel Kennel argues in The Gymnasium of Virtue, that if Spartan youth were encouraged to learn stealth and theft at all, it was only in a very limited and restricted context, and/or only after the degeneration of Spartan society had set in in the mid-fifth century BC.

The first book in my Leonidas Trilogy depicts the Spartan Agoge based on what we know about Spartan society as a whole and common sense.

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