The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [21]
The Spartan landscape lulls one into a false sense of security. On a spring day it is fragrant with almond blossom, in the summer with oranges ripening in orange groves. The River Eurotas, high-reeded, fed by bubbling tributaries, winds through Sparta’s river plain. Land here is flat and fertile – a rare commodity in Greece. The Tayegetan mountain range all around keeps its snow long into the summer. Stretching over 5,000 square miles, ancient Sparta was the largest city-state in Greece. But this was a Shangri-La with a rock-hard heart.
Sparta had trumped Athens in the political reform stakes. When the Athenian democratic experiment was still 200 years in the future, the Spartans revolutionised their society. As early as the seventh century BC Sparta had undergone a massive social and political head-shift. All land was shared equally amongst the homoioi – the equals – an elite group of supercitizens. These men had no profession other than to be crack soldiers; between the ages of seven and thirty all males lived together in a brutal military training camp called the syssition. Boys were raised in the agoge – the word means ‘a herd’ and they were indeed treated like animals. Given one cloak to wear all year round, taught to fend for themselves in the woods that still fringe the city, bare-footed, they had one sole purpose in their lives: to grow up to be perfect warriors. Spartan men were commemorated with a headstone only if they died in battle, Spartan women if they died in childbirth.
The Spartans believed that all Spartiate men (that is, all full, male Spartan citizens) should hold land and wealth equally. That all decisions should be made for the betterment of the city-state, and that the individual counted only as a healthy part of a supra-healthy whole. No Spartan adult worked – he devoted himself simply to being the ‘perfect Spartan’. The homoioi (on average there were 8–9,000 of these ‘equals’ in the city-state at any one time) could afford to live so exclusively and with such unilateral focus because close to 725 BC the Spartans had enslaved another entire Greek people, the Messenians, to be their heilotes – more than just slave or servant, helot translates as ‘captive’. It was by the sweat of this captive race of Greeks that the Spartans made their city-state great. Messenia had at one time owned wide and fertile territories. The Spartans deprived them of all land and all rights. The Messenians became a non-people, Messenia became an ex-city-state. These helots, once free men, lived and died only to serve their Spartan masters.
In Sparta, obedience was all. Citizens had to adhere to a curious set of rules. Coined money, moustaches and prostitution were banned. The ‘national dish’ was melas zomos, black broth – an unappetising stew made from boiled pig’s blood and vinegar. Babies (we are told) were bathed in wine to toughen them up, girls were encouraged to train to fight and to eat the same rations as their brothers and boy cousins. Secret societies of Spartan youths, the krypteia, were sent out at night to kill and maim the under-class of helots at will. And secrecy was paramount in all things. Spartans were not allowed to talk about the workings or culture of their polis, and foreigners were frequently expelled.25
The Athenians decided to despise Sparta and all that it stood for. Although the two city-states, once described as ‘yoke-fellows’, had been allies against the Persians, and the only two poleis who refused to bring King Darius symbolic offerings of earth and water, as time went on the democracy recoiled from Spartan statecraft, which was totalitarian in tone. Athenian rhetoric, Athenian superiority and Athenian transparency came to be measured against Spartan secrecy and degeneracy.
There is a great difference between us and our opponents … Our city is open to the world, and we have no periodical deportations in order to prevent people observing or finding out secrets which might be of military advantage to the enemy. This is because we