The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [63]
If you walk through the modern city of Sparti today it is very hard to imagine this as one of the world’s greatest and most fearsome civilisations. Ruins are diminutive and neglected, squashed between carelessly built 1960s condominiums, twentieth-century architecture on occasion brought tumbling down, as it was in Socrates’ time, by regular earthquakes and tremors.
But there is good reason for the Spartan feel. The ancient society here believed passionately in the value of experiential over material delights. The Spartans did not regularly commission beautiful works of art; they banned coined money and perfumes. They did not write their own history, and did not believe in inscribing their laws. Unlike Athens, they mistrusted words – both spoken and written: the good Spartan, living as he did in the region of Lakonia, was expected to be ‘Laconic’.
But Spartans did have a fiery zest for life. They sang obsessively, chanting sensual oral poetry; they worshipped their gods with an ecstatic devotion, often dancing late into the night; they even capered into battle (albeit with regular, choreographed steps), piping complicated, erotic rhythms on their haunting auloi – double-flutes. Girls as well as boys were allowed to train in the gymnasia (liberation unheard of in Athens); young women could spend heady evenings together by the banks of the River Eurotas, where they stroked one another with olive oil until they gleamed, while chanting of ‘limb-loosening desire’ in the ‘ambrosial night.’19
Homer described Sparta as ‘the land of beautiful women’ and lauded ‘Lacedaemon’s lovely hills.’20 The territory here at the heart of the Peloponnese is flat and fertile; in stony, mountainous Greece, Lakonia appeared Elysian. The wide River Eurotas, which dashes and then meanders through the Taygetan valley, is fed by snow-water from the top of the Taygetan mountain ranges, and in turn feeds Spartan lands. And it is in fact the riverbed and its environs that have yielded the latest clues to the extreme excellence of the Spartans.
In 2008 work was completed on an unpromising-looking rectangular stone structure – believed to date from the early fifth century BC. The building is a botched job, adapted and mucked about with over the years: but this DIY is revealing. It turns out this was a sanctuary with a long history, a spot overlooking the River Eurotas where dead heroes of the city were idolised.21 Today the locale is uninspiring: nettles rim the site; to enter, one has to squeeze past a smashed-up car, and gawping Gypsy children fix on winsome smiles at the effort. But the Spartan authorities today are right to have preserved the remains, because the authorities back in Socrates’ day would have kept this spot buzzing with activity. For the Spartans, dying well and living well were paramount. Soldiers, draped in their trademark red cloaks – red so as not to admit that blood might be spilt inside – could come back dead or alive as long as they were true to the Spartan ideals of absolute obedience and unstinting effort. At appointed days throughout the year, and particularly in late autumn after the campaigning season, these heroes would be fervently worshipped by the men and women of Sparta. With the Eurotas silver at sunset and the landscape behind a petrol-blue, with the clouds scudding down from the Taygetan mountain range that protects the city-state, it takes only a short moment of adjustment to imagine the passions that ran high here, the rigid sense of self-belief and specialness that the Spartan state enjoyed.
Supremely confident, the Spartans had no need of PR; unlike the Athenians, they did not glorify their own name or write themselves into history. And also unlike Athens, they mocked the need for city walls. Sparta was wall-less.
Back in Athens, Socrates would have heard reports of the glory of the Spartan youths who emerged from their years of gruelling training; the Spartans’ boast, you may remember, was that ‘our young men are our walls,