This summary of Ancient Sparta is a type-up of my notes on an excellent Massolit course by Prof. Paul Cartledge of Clare College, Cambridge.
Perhaps the most famous aspect of Ancient Spartan culture is the education provided for boys and young men in antiquity: an education that taught not only literacy and numeracy, but how to fight, and how to fight bravely. This education system was unlike any other in the entirety of Ancient Greece. For a start, it was run and mandated by the state, whereas in poleis such as Athens, education was self-taught and optional; it was simply expected that any intelligent individual would take it upon themselves to seek an education under the best qualified teachers and philosophers they could find. In Sparta, boys were separated from their families at age 7 and taken away to a boarding school of sorts with no choice in the matter.
It is a common misunderstanding that Spartans were illiterate. While it is true that their education focused mainly on skills in combat, they were taught basic literacy as aforementioned. That said, it is also generally true that Spartans were so good at fighting because that is all they were good at. From a young age, young Spartan boys would have aspired to be great and noble warriors, where Athenian boys might have set their sights on becoming philosophers or poets.
The training that boys would undergo once they began their agore (the Spartan term for training/education) would be extremely tough and intensive. The Spartans believed that the goal of their education system was for boys to challenge and extend their karteria, or endurance. After the age of 12, the education boys received took a more competitive turn. They would be allowed to fight one another with edged swords, which allegedly led to the death of a young boy once.
It is another common misconception that Spartan women were not given the physical training that their brothers might receive. Though they never went through the agore system that boys did from the ages of 7 to 18, girls were still trained physically in courtyards and marketplaces. They were taught how to swordfight, to throw javelins, to wrestle and fistfight. It might come as a surprise after learning this that girls were never sent into battle to fight the enemy; they received the training that they did simply to keep them fit. A Spartan woman’s role in society was to produce children, and the rate of death during childbirth was extremely high in those times. The Spartans believed that if their women were physically fit, they were less likely to die in childbirth. In fact, women were even fed more than girls in other poleis, in order to keep them as healthy as possible. Their training would continue up until the age at which they were married which in other city-states would be around 12 or 14, but which in Sparta was closer to 18 or 20.
Although women were an integral part of Spartan society as wives and mothers, men were, of course, generally more important because of their vital role on the battlefield. But what did the Spartans constitute as a “man”? Interestingly enough, although boys were broadly considered to be men at the age of 20, they had none of the typical rights of men until they were voted in to a kind of mess (the military socialising kind, not the untidy kind) by the Spartan elders. If the elders were convinced that the boy in question had reached by means of their education andragathia, or male virtue, they would be allowed to integrate into adult male society.
There were generally three different classes of Ancient Spartan men: noble warriors, helots, and perioikoi. The helots were basically slaves originally from the land of Laconia; Paul Cartledge describes them as an “underclass of unfree servile workers” who generally worked as farmers. Spartan warriors would have thought of them as the enemy within; they were part of Spartan society, but they did not belong there. Perhaps the one defining characteristic of the relationship between helots and warriors was that the latter was perfectly allowed, legally, to kill the former with no consequence to their actions at all.
Seeing as every Spartan boy was brought up to be a fighter, who would have created the weapons they used to fight with? Who built the houses they lived in? Sometimes the answer was slaves, but more often than not it was actually the perioikoi who were responsible for these things. Perioikoi were typically Laconians like the helots, but they were freemen; they simply weren’t Spartan citizens, so they were not usually allowed to fight alongside Spartan men.
Professor Cartledge concluded his series of lectures with a short discussion of three words that we get from the Spartan dialect: helot, laconic (from Laconia), and, of course, Spartan. A laconic reply means a very brief reply to something; my personal favourite story about the use of laconism in antiquity is about how a threatening army once sent a long letter to the Spartan king. The letter basically said, “If we conquer your country, we will do this to your slaves, this to your women, this to your warriors, this to your lands and this to your temples,” and went on and on and on; to which the Spartan king replied quite simply, “If.”
The other two words speak for themselves: the word helot is Greek, not English, and nowadays “Spartan” means having little possessions or luxury.
I really enjoyed this Massolit course with Paul Cartledge. He made some very interesting points and summed up the whole of Ancient Sparta very well indeed. I must say though that I spent too little time paying attention to what he was saying and too much time looking at the beautiful Clare College library that he was sitting in!
