Hello! Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 18: This… Is… Sparta!!! I’m Scott Emmons. 

I had to open with a little riff on one of the big challenges we face in getting an accurate picture of ancient Sparta. Somehow we have to cut through the Spartan caricature that’s so deeply embedded in our pop culture. We have this simplistic view of the Spartans as almost superhuman warriors who never backed down and would fight on to victory or death. And it doesn’t just come from our modern media. That idealistic image of the Spartans goes all the way back to classical Greece. Ancient historians and political thinkers often admired Sparta, not just for its military success, but for the stability of its constitution and what they regarded as its virtues. Just about every Greek historian touched on Sparta at some point, but two of our richest sources are Xenophon and Plutarch. Xenophon was a 4th century BCE Athenian who fell in love with Sparta and wrote a glowing treatment of its customs and its educational system. Plutarch wrote in the 1st to 2nd century CE, long after the heyday of the Spartan polis, but he looked back at it with great admiration. By his time, Sparta had become a kind of tourist attraction, where people would come to experience some of its ancient glory, somewhat like the way you can visit a place like Tombstone, Arizona today to get a taste of the Old West.

Sparta has been so mythologized that a lot of historians have adopted the term “the Spartan mirage” for the somewhat distorted image we can get from the sources. But even if the popular image is oversimplified, I don’t want to give the impression that there’s no basis for it. In its time, Sparta was the most powerful state in the Peloponnese, and its army was the best trained in the Greek world. So in this episode we’ll look at how Sparta got to be what it was at its height. We’ll examine its unique educational system and its constitution. And along the way, I’ll address some common misconceptions about the Spartans.

But first, we need to define a couple of terms, because even the name can be tricky. When you read ancient Greek historians for the first time, you might be thrown off, because they usually refer to the Spartans as Lacedaemonians. Technically, Sparta was the central town, actually a group of villages, but the polis, the state, was called Lacedaemon, and that included the surrounding territory that was governed by Spartan institutions. The broader geographical region was called Laconia, which Sparta certainly dominated, but it wasn’t all part of the political entity of Lacedaemon. So they were Lacedaemonians, but the people who had full citizen status were called Spartiates. To keep it simple, I’m just going to stick to the usual modern terminology and call them Spartans. An episode with the title “This… Is… Lacedaemon” wouldn’t have the same ring to it. 

When we start to look at how Sparta got to be the unique city-state it was, we immediately run into a piece of that Spartan mirage. The traditional ancient view was that Sparta’s constitution and its whole way of life were created in the distant past by one lawgiver, a man named Lycurgus. Different authors give wildly different dates for him. Lycurgus is such a legendary figure that no one really even knows whether he existed or not. Plutarch wrote a Life of Lycurgus, but even he admits that just about everything about him is disputed. Among modern historians who don’t think he was a real person, a favorite line is, “He was not a man, he was only a god.” In other words, he was just a figure the Spartans invented to explain their laws and customs. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he probably did exist and made some important contributions, but it’s clear that he couldn’t have created the Spartan system in one go. Some elements were old Dorian customs that died out in most places but for whatever reasons survived in Sparta and a few other places. There were communities in Crete that shared certain institutions with Sparta. But Sparta was its own thing, and parts of its system developed to adapt to changing conditions over time. 

Leaving legends aside for the moment, a crucial factor in the development of the Spartan system was the peculiar type of slavery they practiced. By the time the Spartan polis starts to emerge in history, there’s a class of slaves called helots. In some ways it might be better to call them serfs, because each helot is tied to a specific plot of land. And each of those plots is allotted to a Spartan citizen. But that citizen doesn’t own the helots who work his land in the same way that, say, an Athenian owns chattel slaves. He can’t buy or sell helots or free them. In effect, the state owns them. There isn’t a lot of hard evidence for how these Laconian helots got to be in that position, but a good guess is that they were Achaean Greeks who became an underclass when the Dorians became dominant in that part of the Peloponnese. So you have Spartans and helots, and then there’s one other category of free non-citizens living in Laconia but outside Sparta. They’re called perioikoi, which literally means “dwellers around.” People who live around Sparta. There are more categories and subdivisions, but for our purposes, those are the three basic divisions of the population: Spartan citizens, free perioikoi, and enslaved helots. 

Well, there was one big event — or really a pair of events — that put Sparta on the road to becoming the military state that it was. These are known as the Messenian Wars. To the west of Laconia is a high mountain range called the Taygetos range, and on the other side is the big, fertile region of Messenia. In probably the late 8th century and again in the mid-to-late 7th century, the Spartans fought two wars that brought Messenia under their control and reduced its inhabitants to helots. To put this in a broader context, remember that this was a time when some Greek states were establishing a lot of settlements outside of mainland Greece, and one reason for that was the need for land to support a growing population. Sparta is known to have sent out only two settlements: one to the island of Melos, and one called Tarentum in southern Italy. And Tarentum seems to have been as much about getting rid of a troublesome group of people as about meeting the need for land. The Spartan solution to the problem of land hunger was not the foundation of settlements, but the conquest of Messenia. 

Most of our information about the Messenian Wars is legendary, but one thing is clear. These were long, drawn-out, difficult wars that cost a lot of hard effort and a lot of lives. We can get some sense of how hard the fighting was from the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, who wrote during the Second Messenian War. In the episode on the polis, I quoted some lines from Tyrtaeus urging the Spartan soldiers to fight courageously and be willing to face death. In one of his surviving poems, he suggests that the men he’s addressing have been fighting for some time and have been through some setbacks. In the translation by Douglas Gerber, quote:

You know how destructive the deeds of woeful Ares are, you have learned well the nature of grim war, you have been with the pursuers and the pursued, you young men, and you have had more than your fill of both. Unquote  

So it took two long, bitter wars, but Sparta finally got Messenia under its boot. With it came a whole population of helots. And the implications of the helot system for the state were profound. Because no Spartan citizen had to work his own land. They had helots to do that for them. We’re a long way from those Athenian farmers who were out there working their fields with a few slaves to help them. In Athens, of course, there were wealthy aristocrats who had slaves managing their estates. But the difference is that in Sparta, every citizen was a member of a leisure class. And that means they were free to devote themselves to higher pursuits, which in Sparta meant military training. This is something that really appealed to ancient political thinkers. Here’s a place where every adult male citizen can devote all his time to the polis. 

Of course, from the point of view of the helots, the Spartan system wasn’t quite so appealing. We have a short fragment of Tyrtaeus that tells something about their condition. He describes the helots as, quote:

…like asses worn out by heavy burdens, bringing to their masters out of grievous necessity half of all the produce that the land brings forth. Unquote

So the helots had a hard life. It varied, of course, according to the situation. We know that some helots accompanied Spartan hoplites as attendants in war, so those must have been treated well enough that they could be trusted not to stab their masters the first chance they got. But on the whole, the helots seem to have been treated not just with contempt, but with outright abuse. As the author Nigel M. Kennell puts it in his book Spartans: A New History, quote, “Spartans engaged in systematic and even ritualized degradation of helots.” Unquote. Helots were required to wear animal skins and leather caps that would identify them as the lowest of the low. At certain festivals, there was a ritual where the Spartans would get helots drunk on undiluted wine — which was thought to be about the worst thing you could drink. The Greeks talked about unmixed wine the way we talk about meth. That stuff would mess you up. So they’d get these helots blackout drunk and then parade them through the mess halls where they’d stumble around and make fools of themselves. Plutarch tells us they did that to remind the Spartans about the importance of moderation in drinking. Yeah, right. Obviously, the point was to humiliate the helots and keep them in their place. 

From there, it only gets worse. When an elite young Spartan reached a certain point in his training, he might go into what they called the krypteia, which translates roughly as the “secret service.” I’ll let Plutarch describe their duties. As translated by Bernadotte Perrin, quote: 

This secret service was of the following nature. The magistrates from time to time sent out into the country at large the most discreet of the young warriors, equipped only with daggers and such supplies as were necessary. In the daytime they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, where they hid themselves and lay quiet; but in the night they came down into the highways and killed every helot whom they caught. Oftentimes, too, they actually traversed the fields where helots were working and slew the sturdiest and best of them. Unquote 

Now, Greek religion had strong taboos against murder. It was thought to bring a pollution on the community. But the Spartans had a loophole for that. Once a year, a group of officials called the ephors declared war on the helots, and that way they avoided the impiety of homicide. 

Well, what resulted was a powder keg. Here you had a mass of people reduced to servitude, subjected to abuse, who naturally hated the Spartans — and greatly outnumbered them. Also, unlike so many slaves in other parts of Greece, the helots in Messenia were Greek and had a common identity as Messenians. So there was always the threat of a helot uprising. Xenophon tells a colorful anecdote about a conspirator named Cinadon who tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the Spartan system. And at his trial, one of the witnesses testified that the helots were so full of anger and hate, they would “eat the Spartans raw.” So this was a scary situation for the privileged class, and Sparta’s early solution was to become the strongest, toughest military state in all of Greece. A state in which a citizen’s whole life revolved around training and preparing for war.  

But that didn’t happen all at once. It’s not like someone flipped a switch after the second Messenian War and suddenly Sparta was the ultimate warrior state. Back in the 7th century BCE, along with Tyrtaeus, we have a few works by a poet named Alcman, who wrote for choruses of Spartan girls who competed in singing and dancing. There was also some fine pottery produced in Sparta, with a distinctive Laconian style. But over time, the Spartan state became more and more focused on its military might, to the exclusion of almost everything else. By the classical period, no Spartan citizen was writing tragedies or founding a philosophical school. A Spartiate’s life was devoted to miltary service.  

This is a good place to address one of those misconceptions I mentioned at the beginning. You might assume that a state that poured all its resources into its army would always be out fighting and conquering. But for a long time, the Spartans were very reluctant to send armies out very far from home, because there was always the danger that the helots would revolt. It wouldn’t do much good to go off and win a great victory over another city state only to come back and find their wives and children with their throats cut. That was a serious risk. Thucydides, who lived through the long war between Athens and Sparta, tells us that fear of a helot uprising was always a consideration when the Spartans made decisions about where and when to fight. So they found other ways of expanding their power and influence, one of which was to build a solid network of alliances in the Peloponnese, with Sparta as the dominant power.  

But that’s a subject for another episode. Right now, it’s time for our first break. If you’re a regular listener, you know that this is the part where I say Epic Greek History is free and I’ll never put any content behind paywalls. But of course, I’m grateful to anyone who wants to subscribe and help with the cost of production. And so, I’d like to say thanks to my newest subscriber, John Lewis. John tells me he’s a third-generation Greek American who started listening because he wanted to learn more about his culture, starting with the ancients. John, εύχαριστώ πάρα πολύ, thank you so much! If you’d like to follow John’s lead and subscribe for as little as three dollars a month, the one way to do that is to go to the website at www.epicgreekhistory.com and hit that “Subscribe” button. Enough said. Let’s move on to… 

[SFX: A Moment of Greek]

If you ever prepped for the SAT, you probably ran across a vocabulary list with the word “laconic,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “using or involving the use of a minimum of words; concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious.” The word comes from the name Laconia, Sparta’s region in the Peloponnese. And it gets its meaning from the fact that Spartan men were known for being very brief and to the point in their speech. That seemed especially strange to the Athenians, who loved to talk. Herodotus tells a great anecdote about how “laconic” the Spartans could be. Some exiles from the island of Samos came to Sparta to ask for help overthrowing their tyrant, Polycrates. So they gave a long speech to the Spartan authorities, presenting all the arguments about why Sparta should help them. And when they were done, the Spartans said they’d forgotten everything that was said at the beginning and they didn’t understand the rest of it. So this time, the Samians just stood up, showed an empty flour sack, and said, “The sack needs flour.” The Spartans got it this time, and they told the Samians, “You didn’t need to say, ‘the sack.’ Just say, ‘Needs flour.’” But they agreed to send help. I’m sure a Spartan would have told this story in ten words or less, so I’ll let that be today’s moment of Greek! 

[SFX] 

In most Greek cities, there was nothing like our public education systems. It was a family’s responsibility to see that its children — which really means its sons — had the right kind of education. So a well-to-do family would typically have a slave called a pedagogue to look after a boy and tutor him or maybe take him to a school, but that school would be a private enterprise. In Sparta, it’s a whole different story.  And this, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the Spartan way of life. Back in the episode on the polis, I mentioned that in order for it to thrive, some of the traditional loyalty to the family and clan had to be transferred to the state. Sparta took that farther than any other Greek city. The Spartan polis took over many of the functions that the family would have performed in other places. And in fact, some institutions seem to be designed for the specific purpose of weakening family bonds in the service of the state. So in this section I’m going to focus on the Spartan educational system. But I’m using that term in a broad sense, because the Spartan system was essentially a program for a citizen’s entire life.

That state involvement starts right at birth. In the ancient Greek world, when a baby is born, there’s often a question as to whether the family is even going raise it. Is the child healthy enough to raise? Can we afford another mouth to feed? If the answer is no, the father as head of the household can make the decision to have the child exposed — that is, taken out and abandoned on a mountainside or some open place. That’s probably a way of getting around religious taboos, since there’s at least some chance that the gods or just a good-hearted passerby will rescue the child. In Sparta, it’s not the family but the state that makes that decision. When a Spartan boy is born, he’s taken before a board of elders which determines if he looks like he’ll grow up to be an asset to the state. If he’s judged to be weak or deformed in some way, he’s abandoned at the foot of Mount Taygetos. If he passes the test, the elders order the father to take him home and raise him — although as we’ll see, for the first few years, most of the actual child-rearing is delegated to the mother.  

Well, through age 6, a Spartan boy lives at home with the family and the slaves. Then, when he turns 7, he’s taken off to live in what amounts to military school. This is the beginning of what’s called the agoge, the Spartan training course that every citizen has to go through. As you’d expect, physical training is a big part of it — running, wrestling, athletics of all kinds. But beyond that, the objective is to develop both physical and mental toughness. Qualities you’d need to have if you were out on a tough campaign for any length of time. So for one thing, shoes are forbidden. Boys are expected to go barefoot to toughen up those feet. They’re issued one cloak to serve as their clothing for the entire year. And that’s not enough to provide much comfort in the winter months. Despite what the tourist photos tell you, it’s not always warm and sunny in Greece. It can get pretty cold in the winter.  

So boys have to learn how to tolerate cold. They’re also deliberately kept hungry. Not to the point of starvation maybe, but their meals are just enough to keep them going, not enough to satisfy them. Ancient authors give several reasons for that. An obvious one is to teach them to endure the hardships they may experience in war. Another is a weird notion that both Xenophon and Plutarch mention, that withholding food actually promotes better growth. That any increase in girth would detract from height, as if the human body were like an inflatable rubber ball, and if you stretched it out in the middle, the height would decrease. But a more practical reason is to foster resourcefulness. Kids are deprived of food with the expectation that they’ll go out and steal it. But they have to be clever enough to avoid getting caught, and if they are caught, they’re severely punished for it. Plutarch gives us an anecdote that I personally don’t believe, but it’s meant to illustrate the extremes that Spartans would go to in their training. A boy supposedly stole a fox cub and hid it under his cloak. And he was so determined not to get caught that he kept it hidden there even though it started eating through his midsection to escape. It finally ate into his vital organs, and he dropped dead on the spot. As I said, it’s a bit far-fetched. I mean, who keeps foxes as livestock anyway? But Plutarch offers it as an example of how seriously the Spartans took their discipline.

So obviously, the agoge is no picnic. On the other hand, it’s not all physical education. Mousike, which we simplistically translate as “music,” has an important place in the curriculum. It’s not just what we call music, but poetry with musical accompaniment. This is a sharp cultural contrast between ancient Greek and modern ideas about music in education, at least here in the U.S. When short-sighted school boards and politicians are looking to improve student performance, music programs are one of the first things to get slashed. They’re thought of as a nice add-on, something that may have some value but isn’t absolutely necessary. But to the ancient Greeks, it was necessary. To them, music was an essential factor in molding a virtuous character and a good citizen. A great illustration of that is a long passage in Plato’s Republic, where he discusses different musical modes and rhythms and the effects they have on the human character. The Ionian and Lydian modes, for example, are soft and effeminate, so they shouldn’t be allowed in Plato’s ideal state, but the Dorian mode promotes courage and boldness, so it’s appropriate. I don’t think much is known specifically about the poetic part of a Spartan education, but it’s a good bet that it included Tyrtaeus, because his works continued to be recited in the mess halls and maybe even during military operations. 

Well, as the boys get older, one prominent part of a Spartan education is the development of close emotional bonds between adult men and adolescents. I talked a little about this kind of relationship in the last episode. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail now, because in two weeks I plan to release an episode on Greek homosexuality. But the form it takes in Sparta is that young men between the ages of 20 and 30 still live in the barracks, and they become teachers and role models. And a twenty-something man will often pair off with a younger man, and they’ll become a couple. It’s not usually expected to last forever. When the younger partner reaches full adulthood, he’s outgrown that role, and then he may take up with a younger Spartan, and the cycle continues. Xenophon, somewhat naively, goes out of his way to assure us that there’s nothing overtly sexual going on here. I’ll let you hear it in his words as translated by J.M. Moore. Xenophon portrays all the standard Spartan practices as creations of the lawgiver Lycurgus. So on this subject he says, quote: 

Lycurgus yet again took a totally different course; if an honorable man admired a boy’s character, and wished to become his friend in all innocence, and spend time with him, he approved, and thought this a very fine form of education. If, however, a man was clearly physically attracted to a boy, he classed this as a heinous disgrace, and so ensured that in Sparta there is no more physical love between men and boys than there is between parents and children or brother and brother. I am not surprised that some find this difficult to believe, for many cities tolerate love between men and boys. Unquote 

My impression is that Xenophon, having philosophical pretensions, had a low opinion of bodily pleasure as something that would detract from the virtuous life. I’m sure these relationships varied from couple to couple, but of course there was some eroticism in the mix. 

On the other hand, 20 is also the age when a young Spartan is expected to start thinking about getting married. It’s very important to produce more Spartan babies who’ll grow up to be good Spartan citizens and hoplites. But at this age, even if he’s married, he still lives in the barracks, away from home. And in fact, visiting his wife for conjugal relations is outwardly frowned on. So, just as he had to steal food as a kid, now he has to sneak out at night to visit his wife. Xenophon says this is to make sure that husband and wife have a heightened desire when they finally meet, and that extra energy will produce stronger children. From there it gets weirder. Plutarch describes a marriage rite that’s essentially a ritual abduction. An attendant cuts the bride’s hair very short, dresses her in a man’s cloak, and leaves her on a mattress in the dark. The groom then comes in and carries her off to the marriage bed, consummates the marriage, then heads back to the barracks to sleep. Ritual abductions are common features of Greek marriage ceremonies, but what’s going on with the short haircut and the man’s cloak? Scholars have advanced different theories about that. I suspect there may have been a notion that giving the bride masculine traits would increase the likelihood of producing male children or that they would be very masculine. But that’s just a guess. 

In any case, this is a Spartan man’s life until the age of 30, and then he can finally go home and live with his family. But he still doesn’t eat there, at least for his main meal. He has his dinner at a special mess, called a syssition. A syssition has 15 members who all eat together regularly. Each member is required to contribute an equal share of food and/or wine from his kleros, his plot of land. The fare, as you’d expect, is supposed to be very plain. Any kind of luxury is frowned on. The syssition is a vital part of Spartan society. It fosters a sense of fellowship and camaraderie, and it also ties in with the supposed equality of the citizens.  

Here we run up against that Spartan mirage again. The Spartiates called themselves “homoioi,” which means not exactly equals, but men who are like one another. And they cultivated an image of a city-state without great differences in wealth within the citizen body. But there’s clear evidence that there were richer and poorer citizens. Ancient authors commonly refer to “wealthy” Spartans. And quite a few Spartans are recorded as winners of the four-horse chariot race at Olympia. Nobody could enter that competition who wasn’t rich. Still, the ideal is that the citizens operate on a more or less equal footing, and each man contributes his fair share to the syssition. If someone falls on hard times and can’t contribute his share, he forfeits his citizenship. Which you can imagine would be a horribly shameful thing to have happen to you.  

At the age of 60, a Spartan citizen is finally released from military service. An elite man with extraordinary talents and a very impressive record might then be chosen to serve on the council of elders, which we’ll talk more about in the next section. Ancient authors don’t tell us much about a man’s life after 60 if he’s not elected to that council — although Plutarch mentions in his essay on Spartan customs that elders commanded great respect, that younger men were expected to make way for them in the street and so on. 

So that’s basically the life program for a man. But another thing that made Sparta unusual was the extent to which women participated in society. Women didn’t fight as hoplites or play active roles in government, but they did go through an educational system. Because the Spartans took very seriously the role of women in bearing and raising healthy children. And that doesn’t just mean cooking and changing diapers. Women are supposed to be physically strong, so they’ll give birth to the next generation of Spartan warriors. So, for one thing, early in life, they’re better fed than girls in most other cities. They participate in physical training, just like the boys. They run races, throw the discus and javelin, and they practice athletic dances that require a lot of strength. And just like the boys, they do their exercises nude, or close to it. That would be scandalous in most Greek cities, but in Sparta it’s considered an important part of a girl’s training.  

An obvious question is, “How much of that is intended to be erotic?” Plutarch goes on at some length about how there’s nothing immodest about it, that the intention is to promote simple living and healthy habits in girls. But he does go on to say that the sight of scantily dressed young women in processions is an incentive for men to get married and start families.  

Well, whatever the case, Spartan girls don’t marry as early as, say, Athenian women. In Athens, a man doesn’t get married until he’s around 30 to 40 years old, and he typically marries a girl of about 14 or 15. Spartan men get married as young as 20, and their wives are much closer to their own age. And when you look at the way the system is set up, young married women essentially run their households. From 20 to 30, men still live away from home and can only sneak out to see their wives now and then. Women are raising their children and managing their homes with the help of whatever slaves they have. Even after 30, men eat with their army buddies, and of course they’re sometimes away on a campaign, so women are still managing things at home. 

 That experience naturally gave Spartan women a kind of confidence that was rare for women in the Greek world. Other Greeks were impressed by the way they weren’t afraid to speak up. I mentioned earlier that Spartan men had a reputation for talking laconically, never wasting words. I wouldn’t say the women were long-winded, but they were famous for making bold, pithy statements. They had a certain sass to them. One of Plutarch’s extant works is a collection of sayings of Spartan women. A typical example is a story he tells about Gorgo, the wife of the famous king Leonidas, who led the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. A woman from another city asked Gorgo, “How is it that Sparta is the only place where women rule the men?” And she answered, “We’re the only women who give birth to men.” I don’t know the ancient Greek for “Oh, snap!” but that calls for it. Probably the most famous example, also from Plutarch, is the story that a Spartan mother handed her son his shield as he went off to war and told him, “Come back either with this or on it.” In other words, either win the battle or be brought back dead on your shield. If you drop your shield and run, don’t bother coming home. 

 And that’ll take us to our second break. Which means it’s time for…

 [SFX: Random Facts!]

 Let’s go back to the syssition for a minute, that common mess where Spartan men had their meals. What did they eat? The had bread, cheese, and other staples, of course, but they were notorious throughout the Greek world for eating a dish known as “black soup.” What made it “black” was the main ingredient, pig’s blood. Other Greeks thought it was revolting. In his essay on Spartan customs, Plutarch tells the story that a tyrant from one of the Sicilian cities got curious about black soup, so he bought a slave who’d been a cook in Sparta and ordered him to prepare it. As soon as the king tasted it, he spat it out and said, “That’s disgusting!” And the slave explained, “Well, you have to have exercised in the Spartan way and bathed in the Eurotas river to appreciate this dish.” In other words, you pretty much had to be a Spartan to enjoy black soup. And that’s today’s Random Fact.

 [SFX]

 Now that you’ve heard about the Spartan educational system, marriage customs, and black soup, you may have come to the conclusion that Sparta was a weird place. And its constitution was no less unusual. So in this section I’m going to go through the basics of that constitution and then follow up with a few peculiar laws and customs. Just to clarify, when we talk about an ancient Greek constitution, that doesn’t mean a written document. It just means a set of established institutions and laws that make up the foundation of the government. 

 When Greek political theorists looked at city-state constitutions, they usually divided them into three categories: monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. Sparta was an anomaly, and thinkers like Aristotle identified its system as a “mixed constitution,” with elements of all three. And one reason they admired it was that it remained very stable for such a long time. Unlike so many other Greek states, Sparta never had a tyranny. Political thinkers saw its mixed constitution as providing the balance that helped it avoid civil strife.

 For the Spartan constitution, we actually have some very early evidence, in the form of a short document called the Great Rhetra, which means something like the Great Proclamation. According to legend, the lawgiver Lycurgus received the Great Rhetra as an oracle from Delphi. Plutarch quotes it in his “Life of Lycurgus,” and even though there’s a lot of debate about details, it’s generally thought to be an authentic document from early Sparta. I’m not going to quote it directly because so much of it is obscure, but it mentions three of the main divisions of government: the kings, the council of elders, and the assembly of the people. So already, we can see some elements of that “mixed constitution.”

 So let’s start with the kings. Most Greek city-states had left kingship behind by the early Archaic Period, but there were a few exceptions. And Sparta was even more unusual in that it had two kings. No one really knows how that happened. A plausible guess is that in the synoecism of the original four villages and then an additional a fifth one, two of those villages had strong kings who wouldn’t give up their position, and they settled the matter with a dual kingship. It’s just a hypothesis. In any case, they came from two different clans, called the Agids and the Eurypontids, which both traced their lineage back to Heracles. In some ways, the Agid clan was considered to be a little more exalted, but they were both full-fledged kings.

 Still, the Spartan kings were far from all-powerful. They commanded great respect, but their official powers were limited and clearly defined. Their most important function was to serve as the chief commanders in wartime. If that sounds like it could slip into a “too many cooks” situation, you’re absolutely right. In a later episode we’ll see an expedition where an aggressive Spartan king was conducting operations in Attica and the other one undercut his efforts, so the whole thing was a bust. And because of that, the Spartans passed a law that only one king would command the army on any campaign.

 I don’t want to bog this episode down by listing all the specific powers and responsibilities of the kings. Just to name a few, they held important priesthoods and could confer certain honors. For example, they were responsible for appointing the representatives who would consult the Delphic oracle. The kings also had certain privileges. Herodotus tells us that they received double portions of food in their common messes. That was probably not so much a matter of letting the king stuff himself but of giving him an opportunity to show his generosity by sharing with the group or by honoring particular individuals. The kings were also the only Spartan citizens who were not required to go through the agoge. That must stem from a taboo against anyone putting a future king through that kind of abuse. They must have gotten extensive military training in some other way. But it’s interesting that the commanders of the troops had never been through the kind of boot camp that everyone else had been brought up in.  

 Well, along with the kings, there was an elite council called the Gerousia. In Greek, “geron” means “old man,” so “Gerousia” is literally a council of elders. It’s an exact parallel with the word “senate,” “senatus” in Latin, from the same root as the word “senior.” The Gerousia had only 28 members plus the two kings, bringing the total to 30. To be on this council, you first of all had to be over 60, but you also had to be of noble lineage. The Spartans may have liked to think of themselves as “homoioi,” men who were essentially alike, but there were elite families. And you had to be remarkable for your talents and accomplishments. Members were elected by the general assembly, and it was done by a voice vote, which was the normal procedure in Sparta. A select group of judges was closed off in an adjoining room, and the men being considered for the Gerousia then appeared one by one in front of the whole assembly. The judges made their decision based on how loud the shouts were for each candidate. They couldn’t see which was which, but they’d record that, say, candidate 2 got the loudest shouts, so he was elected. It sounds almost like a game show. Aristotle remarked that the Spartan procedure for elections was, as he put it, “childish.”

 In any case, the Gerousia had great prestige and a great deal of influence on Spartan policy. It was primarily a deliberative body that would discuss proposed legislation, although it couldn’t pass laws on its own. It was also a powerful court, with jurisdiction over cases involving high crimes like murder or treason. Another advantage that members of the Gerousia shared with the kings was that there were no term limits. Once you were in the Gerousia, you were there for good. So with lifetime membership in a very exclusive body, the Gerousia was the oligarchic element in that “mixed constitution.”

 Now, a council of some kind was a universal feature of a city-state constitution. But Sparta had an additional, much smaller body of five officials called ephors. If you’ve seen the movie “300,” please do not believe the steaming pile of B.S. that is its depiction of the ephors. It made them out to be these grotesque, cultish, Gollum-like figures scheming against the hero Leonidas out of their own greed. That’s nothing like what they were. The word “ephor” essentially means “overseer.” They aren’t mentioned in the Great Rhetra, and they seem to have been a later addition. Plutarch says the ephorate was created 130 years after Lycurgus to provide a check on the power of the kings. And they did that. Spartan kings were not above the law, and if they committed crimes, the ephors could bring charges against them. 

 But they did a lot more than that. They were heavily involved in foreign policy. In that capacity, they were something like our State Department. When ambassadors from other cities or even foreign countries had some business to conduct with Sparta, they’d go through the ephors. At the start of a military operation, the ephors did the bureaucratic work to mobilize the army, and two of them accompanied the king on the campaign. As we saw earlier, they were the ones who declared war on the helots every year. And they also had legislative duties. The kings and the Gerousia would discuss legislation and debate its pros and cons, but the ephors would prepare it to go to the assembly for approval. 

 Over time, the ephorate seems to have kept getting stronger, until by the classical period, it had enormous influence. Xenophon, writing in the 4th century BCE, was struck by their power to prosecute city magistrates at any time. That was a sharp contrast with Athens, where an official was typically immune from prosecution while in office but then had to face an audit at the end of his term. Xenophon compared the ephors’ authority to that of tyrants or presidents of the games. On the other hand, one significant check on their power was a term limit. An ephor could only hold office for one year, and then never again in his lifetime. The Gerousia and of course the kings kept their positions for life, so they had the advantage of continuity. Ephors were elected annually by the assembly, and they didn’t have to be elites. Any Spartan citizen could be elected an ephor. For that reason, Aristotle identified the ephorate as the primary democratic piece of the mixed constitution.

The final organ of government, which I guess by default you’d have to call democratic, is the assembly of all citizens. We don’t have a huge amount of detail about what went on in the Spartan assembly, but the rules of order seem to have been a lot stricter than what we’ll see later in Athens. The assembly couldn’t introduce legislation or amendments. It could only vote on what the Gerousia and the ephors had prepared for it. There were debates, but evidently the only ones allowed to speak were the kings, the ephors, and members of the Gerousia. An exception is that foreign ambassadors often addressed the Spartan assembly on matters of interstate relations. The assembly had the ultimate authority to approve or reject any measure, and as we’ve seen, that was normally done by a voice vote. In the rare event that the decision wasn’t clear, they could vote by division, with the “yeas” and “nays” separating into different groups to be counted. So the assembly had the final word, but there was, at least in theory, a loophole for the elites. A passage at the end of the Great Rhetra, often called the “rider,” stated that if the assembly made a quote-unquote “crooked decision,” the kings and the Gerousia had the right to adjourn the meeting without ratifying the measure. But that doesn’t mean the assembly was just a rubber stamp. We’ll see in upcoming episodes that it handed down some very consequential decisions.

 Well, this last section has been pretty wonky. I hope it’s been interesting, but sorting through a city-state’s constitution may not be every listener’s idea of a good time. So I’d like to finish up with just a few interesting customs, laws, and unusual facts about Sparta.

 For one thing, money was illegal. In the sense that Spartan citizens weren’t supposed to touch silver or gold coins. It was one of many measures meant to discourage luxury. If they needed a medium of exchange, they could use iron spits as currency, which would obviously be good only for small purchases. Some modern scholars have questioned this, but ancient authors are more or less unanimous, and I think they were in a better position to know.

 When Spartan men reached adulthood, they grew their hair long and took good care of it. Especially when preparing for battle, they had a ritual of combing and anointing their hair. In Athens, long hair was the mark of an aristocrat, because short hair was more compatible with manual labor. Aristotle points out that the Spartan citizen’s long hair was a sign that he belonged to the leisure class.  

 Spartans used a special kind of drinking cup called a kothon, which had ridges that were thought to filter out impurities from the muddy water they might have to drink while out campaigning.

 They wore red cloaks in battle. Xenophon says it was because red was a more manly and warlike color. Plutarch adds that if a Spartan was wounded, his blood wouldn’t show on his red cloak, so he’d still look threatening to his enemy.

 Plutarch also tells us that in wartime, the rigid Spartan discipline was relaxed a little so that the men didn’t have to work out as strenuously. As he puts it, “they were the only men in the world with whom war brought a respite in the training for war.” It sounds like the same principle as swinging two bats before stepping up to the plate. After life in Sparta, war is a piece of cake!

 The last point I want to make is about ideas of freedom. When I look at ancient Sparta, I don’t see a lot of freedom. And that’s in large part because I’m a 21st-century American, which means I tend to think of freedom as personal choice. Imagine having the state tell you whether your child will live or die. Or having only one option for your lifelong career. But if you asked an ancient Spartan, and by that I mean a citizen of Sparta, they’d probably have said they were absolutely free. A pro-Spartan Athenian by the name of Kritias was quoted as saying Sparta had the most freedom and the most slavery of any state. In other words, the helots were the most enslaved of all people; but because of that, the Spartans were the most free, because they didn’t have to work for a living. To a great extent, freedom in ancient Greece meant the freedom to participate in the state.

 Well, Sparta is a monster topic, and in a one-hour episode I’ve only been able to scratch the surface. If you want to dig deeper, I’ve left a few reading suggestions in the show notes and on Substack. Meanwhile, that’s a wrap for Episode 18. As always, I’d love to get your comments, questions, corrections, what have you. My email is scott@epicgreekhistory.com. Or you can always leave a comment on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε, be well.