The distinctiveness of Sparta

Prominent among the states that never experienced tyranny was Sparta, a fact remarked on even in antiquity. It was exceptional in that and in many other respects, some of which have already been noted: it sent out few colonies, only to Taras (Tarentum, in southern Italy) in the 8th century and—in the prehistoric period—to the Aegean islands of Thera and Melos. It was unfortified and never fully synoecized in the physical sense. And it succeeded, exceptionally among Greek states, in subduing a comparably sized neighbour by force and holding it down for centuries. The neighbour was Messenia, which lost its independence to Sparta in the 8th century and did not regain it until the 360s. It was the Messenian factor above all that determined the peculiar development of Sparta, because it forced Spartans to adjust their institutions to deal with a permanently hostile subject population.

Despite Sparta’s military prominence among Greek states, which is the primary fact about it, Sparta’s development is especially difficult to trace. That is so partly because there are few Archaic or Classical Spartan inscriptions. Even more important, there is very little genuine Spartan history written by Spartans (there was no Spartan Herodotus or Thucydides, though both men were deeply fascinated by Sparta, as indeed were most Greeks). And partly it is so because—a related point—“invented tradition” had been particularly active at Sparta. As early as the 5th century one finds “laconizers” in other states (the word derives from “Laconia,” the name for the Spartan state, or Lacedaemon, and signifies cultural admiration for Sparta and its institutions).

The Spartan tradition in European thought can be traced through the centuries up to modern times, though it has never amounted to a single easily definable set of ideas. In the intellectual world of the 4th century bce, when many of the most significant myths about Sparta seem to have been concocted, Sparta, chiefly under the influence of idealist philosophers seeking some solution to civic disorder, was virtually turned into a shorthand expression for a pure community free from stasis (internal dissension and fighting) with equality of land ownership and other utopian features that never existed in the historical Sparta or anywhere else. In the Roman period Sparta had become a tourist attraction, a place of uncouth, half-invented rituals. This was also the period when Sparta the living legend consciously traded on and exported fantasies about its great past (in the Hellenistic First Book of Maccabees one even finds the idea seriously put forward that the Jews and Spartans were somehow kin). If more is said about Athens than about Sparta in the present section, that is not because Athens was intrinsically more important but because the amount of usable evidence about it is incomparably greater.

By way of compensation for the lack of evidence about Sparta there are two items of cardinal importance: an extraordinary document about the early Spartan constitution and state, preserved by the Greek writer Plutarch (the “Great Rhetra”), and the poetry of the 7th-century Spartan poet Tyrtaeus. Tyrtaeus wrote poetry in elegiac couplets (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines) intended for symposia. Much of it is military in character and enshrines the hoplite ethic in a developed form at a time when Sparta and Argos were at each other’s throats (a fragment of Tyrtaeus’s poetry published in 1980 definitely disproved modern skepticism about whether Sparta and Argos could have confronted each other militarily as early as the 660s).

Sparta had two kings, or basileis. If it is right that this title merely denotes hereditary nobles with stated prerogatives, this was originally one of its less remarkable aspects. It is odd, however, that the number two should have been so permanently entrenched. In other respects the Sparta that emerged from the Dark Age had many standard features, such as a warrior assembly based on communal eating in “messes,” syssitia (a system analogous to the symposium system), and a council of elders. Magistrates called ephors were unique to Sparta and its offshoots, but there is nothing intrinsically odd about formal magistracies.

The Rhetra

The Rhetra is an alleged response by the Delphic oracle to the lawgiver Lycurgus around the 9th or 8th century bce. The Rhetra purports to define the powers of the various Spartan groups and individuals just mentioned. It begins, however, by saying that the tribes must be “tribed” (or “retained”; the Greek is a kind of pun) and the obes (a word for a locality) must be “obed.” The meaning there is desperately obscure, but in an 8th-century context it ought to refer to some kind of political synoecism (Sparta, as stated, was never physically synoecized). The tribes and obes must be the units of civic organization. The Rhetra demands the setting up of a council with the kings and stipulates regular meetings for the Assembly (something not attested at Athens until far later). A crucial final clause seems to say firmly that the people, or damos, shall have the power. Yet a rider to the Rhetra, associated with the late 8th-century kings Theopompus and Polydorus, says that, if the people choose crookedly, the elders and kings shall be dissolvers. A poem of Tyrtaeus’s has traditionally been thought to echo both parts of that document, rider as well as Rhetra, but that relationship has recently been challenged. Certainly there is some circularity in the usual reconstructions of one crucial corrupt line of the relevant poem.

The Rhetra is a precocious constitutional document, if it really dates to the 9th or early 8th century, and for that and other reasons (Delphi was not active and writing was not common much before the middle of the 8th century) it is common practice to date the whole document or pair of documents a century or two later. On this view, which is not here followed, the Rhetra itself, with its stipulation of powers for the (hoplite) damos, is a 7th-century manifestation of hoplite assertiveness: in fact, it represents a kind of Spartan alternative to tyranny. The references to tribes and obes are then seen as part of a reform of the citizen body and of the army, comparable to and not much earlier than tribal changes elsewhere (see below The reforms of Cleisthenes). The rider then dates from an even later period, when Spartan military reverses called for a reactionary readjustment of the balance of power.

That view—which involves down-dating Theopompus and Polydorus to the 7th century from the 8th and still more arbitrarily attributing to them the activity presupposed by the Rhetra rather than the rider—does too much violence to the best chronological evidence (that of Thucydides and Herodotus), and a view in terms of 8th-century political synoecism should be preferred. As for the alleged army reform, nothing can be said about it in detail. The best reconstruction is hardly more than a creative fabrication from Hellenistic evidence that dealt with a Spartan religious festival but had nothing straightforwardly to do with the army at all.

The helot factor

It was definitely in the 8th century that Sparta took the step which was to make it unique among Greek states. It had already, in the Dark Age, coerced into semisubject, or “perioikic,” status a number of its more immediate neighbours. Then, in the second half of the 8th century, it undertook the wholesale conquest of Messenia (c. 735–715). One consequence, already noted, was the export of an unwanted group, the Partheniai, to Taras. These were sons of Spartan mothers and non-Spartan fathers, procreated during the absence in Messenia of the Spartan warrior elite. A still more important consequence of the conquest of Messenia, “good to plow and good to hoe” as Tyrtaeus put it, was the acquisition of a large tract of fertile land and the creation of a permanently servile labour force, the “helots,” as the conquered Messenians were now called.

The helots were state slaves, held down by force and fear. A 7th-century revolt by the Messenians (the “Second Messenian War”) was put down only after decades of fighting and with the help (surely) of the new hoplite tactics. The relationship of hatred and exploitation (the helots handed over half of their produce to Sparta) was the determining feature in Spartan internal life. Spartan warrior peers (homoioi) were henceforth subjected to a rigorous military training, the agoge, to enable them to deal with the Messenian helots, whose agricultural labours provided the Spartans with the leisure for their military training and life-style—a notoriously vicious circle.

The agoge and the Sparta that it produced can best be understood comparatively by reference to the kind of male initiation ceremonies and rituals found in other warrior societies. Up to the Second Messenian War, Sparta’s political institutions and cultural life had been similar to those in other states. It had an artistic tradition of its own and produced or gave hospitality to such poets as Alcman, Terpander, and Tyrtaeus. But now Spartan institutions received a new, bleak, military orientation. Social sanctions like loss of citizen status were the consequence of cowardice in battle; a system of homosexual pair-bonding maintained the normal hoplite bonds at a level of ferocious intensity; and the economic surplus provided by the lots of land worked by the helots was used to finance the elite institution of the syssitia, with loss of full citizen status for men who could not meet their “mess bill.” The agoge, however, transformed Sparta and set it apart from other states. The difficulties of reconstructing the details of the agoge are acute: “invented tradition” has been unusually busy in that area. But a recent investigator goes too far in seeing the agoge as the work of the 3rd-century Stoic philosopher Sphaerus; the Greek historian Xenophon in the 4th century allows us to glimpse the essentials.

The helot factor affected more than Sparta’s internal life. Again and again modifications were forced on Sparta in the sphere of foreign policy. The Spartans could not risk frequent military activity far from home, because this would entail leaving behind a large population of discontented helots (who outnumbered Spartans by seven to one). A solution, occasionally tried by adventurous Spartan commanders, was selective enfranchisement of helots. Yet this called for nerve that even the Spartans did not have: on one occasion 2,000 helots, who were promised freedom and were led garlanded round the temples, disappeared, and nobody ever found out what had happened to them. Some person or persons evidently had second thoughts. Xenophon, who was no enemy to Sparta, illuminated helot attitudes in his description of an episode called the “Kinadon affair,” which happened at the very beginning of the 4th century; it was suppressed with ruthless and effective speed. The leader Kinadon, according to Xenophon, said that the rebel groups, among whom helots are listed in first place, would have liked to eat the Spartans raw, and incidents such as this one explain why.

Attempts to minimize the importance of that episode as evidence for helot discontent should be firmly resisted. It is a question whether the tension should be seen as Messenian nationalism or as the expression of class struggle, but nationalism cannot be the whole story. One effect of the helot phenomenon was the brutalization of the Spartan elite itself. Spartan violence toward other Greeks, particularly taking the form of threats with or actual use of sticks (bakteriai), is attested with remarkable frequency in the sources, as is the resentment of such treatment by other Greeks. It seems that Spartans of the officer class had a habit of treating other Greeks like the helots by whom they were outnumbered and surrounded at home, and the implied insult and humiliation was deeply resented. The arrogant use of a nonmilitary weapon such as a stick actually added to the degradation.

The Peloponnesian League

After the suppression of the Messenian revolt (perhaps not before 600), Sparta controlled much of the Peloponnese. In the 6th century it extended that control further, into Arcadia to the north, by diplomatic as well as by purely military means. On the diplomatic level, Sparta, the greatest of the Dorian states, deliberately played the anti-Dorian card in the mid-6th century in an attempt to win more allies. Sparta’s Dorianism was unacceptable to some of its still-independent neighbours, whose mythology remembered a time when the Peloponnese had been ruled by Achaean kings such as Atreus, Agamemnon, and his son Orestes (in a period modern scholars would call Mycenaean).

The central symbolic act recorded by tradition was the talismanic bringing home to Sparta of the bones of Orestes himself—a way for Sparta to claim that it was the successor of the old line of Atreus. The result was an alliance with Arcadian Tegea, which in turn inaugurated a network of such alliances, to which has been given the modern name of the Peloponnesian League. A valuable 5th-century inscription found in the 1970s concerning a community in Aetolia (north-central Greece) illuminated the obligations imposed by Sparta on its allies: above all, full military reciprocity—i.e., the requirement to defend Sparta when it was attacked, with similar guarantees offered by Sparta in return. Another, more obviously pragmatic, reason why Sparta attracted to itself allies in areas like Arcadia was surely fear of Argos. Archaic and Classical Argos never forgot the great age of Pheidon, and from time to time the Argives tried to reassert a claim to hegemony in mythical terms of their own. One way of doing so was to back the claim of the Pisatans (rather than the Eleans) to run the Olympic Games.

In the same period (the middle of the 6th century), Sparta drew on its enhanced prestige and popularity in the Peloponnese to take its antipathy to tyranny a stage further: a papyrus fragment of what looks like a lost history supports Plutarch’s statement that Sparta systematically deposed tyrants elsewhere in Greece—the tyrannies in Sicyon, Naxos, and perhaps even the Cypselid at Corinth (though this may be a confusion for a similarly named community called Cerinthus on Euboea).

The most famous deposition was Sparta’s forcible ending of the tyranny at Athens. Finally one must ask, however, what were Sparta’s motives for those interventions. Perhaps part of the motive was genuine ideological dislike of tyranny; Sparta was to exploit this role as late as 431, when it entered the great Peloponnesian War as would-be liberator of Greece from the new “tyranny” in Greece—namely, the Athenian empire. But that theory can be turned on its head: perhaps the Spartans retrojected their antipathy to tyranny into the Archaic period as a way of justifying their moral stance in the late 430s. Or Sparta may have been worried about the ambitions of Argos, with which certain tyrants, like the Athenian, had close connections. Or it may have longsightedly detected sympathy on the part of certain tyrants toward the growing power of Persia: it is true that Sparta made some kind of diplomatic arrangement with the threatened Lydian power of the Anatolian ruler Croesus not long before his defeat by Persia in 546.

If suspicion of Persia was behind the deposition of the tyrants, Sparta was inconsistent in carrying out its anti-Persian policy; it did not help Croesus in his final showdown with Persia, nor did it help anti-Persian elements on Samos, nor did it do much in the years immediately before the great Greek-Persian collision of 480–479 called the Persian War (it sent no help to the general rising of Ionia against Persia in 499 nor to Athens at the preliminary campaign of Marathon in 490). Inconsistency of diplomatic decision making on the part of Sparta is, however, always explicable for a reason already noticed—its helot problem.