The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  He was taught reading and writing, but barely enough to make him literate; books found few buyers in Sparta,53 and it was easy to keep up with the publishers. Lycurgus, said Plutarch, wished children to learn his laws not by writing but by oral transmission and youthful practice under careful guidance and example; it was safer, he thought, to make men good by unconscious habituation than to rely upon theoretical persuasion; a proper education would be the best government. But such education would have to be moral rather than mental; character was more important than intellect. The young Spartan was trained to sobriety, and some Helots were compelled to drink to excess in order that the youth might see how foolish drunkenness can be.54 He was taught, in preparation for war, to forage in the fields and find his own food, or starve; to steal in such cases was permissible, but to be detected was a crime punishable by flogging.55 If he behaved well he was allowed to attend the public mess of the citizens, and was expected to listen carefully there so that he might become acquainted with the problems of the state, and learn the art of genial conversation. At the age of thirty, if he had survived with honor the hardships of youth, he was admitted to the full rights and responsibilities of a citizen, and sat down to dine with his elders.

  The girl, though left to be brought up at home, was also subject to regulation by the state. She was to engage in vigorous games—running, wrestling, throwing the quoit, casting the dart—in order that she might become strong and healthy for easy and perfect motherhood. She should go naked in public dances and processions, even in the presence of young men, so that she might be stimulated to proper care of her body, and her defects might be discovered and removed. “Nor was there anything shameful in the nakedness of the young women,” says the highly moral Plutarch; “modesty attended them, and all wantonness was excluded.” While they danced they sang songs of praise for those that had been brave in war, and heaped contumely upon those that had given way. Mental education was not wasted upon the Spartan girl.

  As to love, the young man was permitted to indulge in it without prejudice of gender. Nearly every lad had a lover among the older men; from this lover he expected further education, and in return he offered affection and obedience. Often this exchange grew into a passionate friendship that stimulated both youth and man to bravery in war.56 Young men were allowed considerable freedom before marriage, so that prostitution was rare, and hetairai here found no encouragement.57 In all of Lacedaemon we hear of only one temple to Aphrodite, and there the goddess was represented as veiled, armed with a sword, and bearing fetters on her feet, as if to symbolize the foolishness of marrying for love, the subordination of love to war, and the strict control of marriage by the state.

  The state specified the best age of marriage as thirty for men and twenty for women. Celibacy in Sparta was a crime; bachelors were excluded from the franchise, and from the sight-of public processions in which young men and women danced in the nude. According to Plutarch the bachelors themselves were compelled to march in public, naked even in winter, singing a song to the effect that they were justly suffering this punishment for having disobeyed the laws. Persistent avoiders of marriage might be set upon at any time in the streets by groups of women, and be severely handled. Those who married and had no children were only less completely disgraced; and it was understood that men who were not fathers were not entitled to the respect that the youth of Sparta religiously paid to their elders.58

  Marriages were usually arranged by the parents, without purchase; but after this agreement the bridegroom was expected to carry off the bride by force, and she was expected to resist; the word for marriage was harpadzein, to seize.59 If such arrangements left some adults still unmarried, several men might be pushed into a dark room with an equal number of girls, and be left to pick their life mates in the darkness;60 the Spartans thought that such choosing would not be blinder than love. It was usual for the bride to stay with her parents for a while; the bridegroom remained in his barracks, and visited his wife only clandestinely; “in this relation,” says Plutarch, “they lived a long time, insomuch that they sometimes had children by their wives before even they saw their faces by daylight.” When they were ready for parentage custom allowed them to set up a home. Love came after marriage rather than before, and marital affection appears to have been as strong in Sparta as in any other civilization.61 The Spartans boasted that there was no adultery among them, and they may have been right, for there was much freedom before marriage, and many husbands could be persuaded to share their wives, especially with brothers.62 Divorce was rare. The Spartan general Lysander was punished because he left his wife and wished to marry a prettier one.63

  All in all, the position of woman was better in Sparta than in any other Greek community. There more than elsewhere she preserved her high Homeric status, and the privileges that survived from an early matrilinear society. Spartan women, says Plutarch,64 “were bold and masculine, overbearing to their husbands . . . and speaking openly even on the most important subjects.” They could inherit and bequeath property; and in the course of time—so great was their influence over men—nearly half the real wealth of Sparta was in their hands.65 They lived a life of luxury and liberty at home while the men bore the brunt of frequent war, or dined on simple fare in the public mess.

  For every Spartan male, by a characteristic ordinance of the constitution, was required from his thirtieth to his sixtieth year to eat his main meal daily in a public dining hall, where the food was simple in quality and slightly but deliberately inadequate in amount. In this way, says Plutarch, the legislator thought to harden them to the privations of war, and to keep them from the degeneration of peace; they “should not spend their lives at home, laid on costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves up to the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, to fatten them in corners like greedy brutes, and to ruin not their minds only but their very bodies, which, enfeebled by indulgence and excess, would stand in need of long sleep, warm bathing, freedom from work, and, in a word, of as much care and attendance as if they were continually sick.”66 To supply the food for this public meal each citizen was required to contribute to his dining club, periodically, stated quantities of corn and other provisions; if he failed in this his citizenship was forfeited.

  Normally, in the earlier centuries of the code, the simplicity and asceticism to which Spartan youth was trained persisted into later years. Fat men were a rarity in Lacedaemon; there was no law regulating the size of the stomach, but if a man’s belly swelled indecently he might be publicly reproved by the government, or banished from Laconia.67 There was little of the drinking and the revelry that flourished in Athens. Differences of wealth were real, but hidden; rich and poor wore the same simple dress—a woolen peplos, or shirt, that hung straight from the shoulders without pretense to beauty or form. The accumulation of movable riches was difficult; to lay up a hundred dollars’ worth of iron currency required a large closet, and to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen.68 Human greed remained, however, and found an outlet in official corruption. Senators, ephors, envoys, generals, and kings were alike purchasable, at prices befitting their dignity.69 When an ambassador from Samos displayed his gold plate at Sparta, King Cleomenes I had him recalled lest the citizens be spoiled by alien example.70

  The Spartan system, fearful of such contamination, was inhospitable beyond precedent. Foreigners were rarely welcomed. Usually they were made to understand that their visits must be brief; if they stayed too long they were escorted to the frontier by the police. The Spartans themselves were forbidden to go abroad without permission of the government, and to dull their curiosity they were trained to a haughty exclusiveness that would not dream that other nations could teach them anything.71 The system had to be ungracious in order to protect itself; a breath from that excluded world of freedom, luxury, letters, and arts might topple over this strange and artificial society, in which two thirds of the people were serfs, and all the masters were slaves.

  6. An Estimat
e of Sparta

  What type of man, and what kind of civilization, did this code produce? First of all, a man of strong body, at home with hardship and privation. A luxury-loving Sybarite remarked of the Spartans that “it was no commendable thing in them to be so ready to die in the wars, since by that they were freed from much hard labor and miserable living.”72 Health was one of the cardinal virtues in Sparta, and sickness was a crime; Plato’s heart must have been gladdened to find a land so free from medicine and democracy. And here was courage; only the Roman would equal the Spartan’s record for fearlessness and victory. When the Spartans surrendered at Sphacteria, Greece could hardly believe it; it was unheard of that Spartans should not fight to the last man; even their common soldiers, on many occasions, killed themselves rather than survive defeat.73 When the news of the Spartan disaster at Leuctra—so overwhelming that in effect it put an end to Sparta’s history—was brought to the ephors as they presided over the Gymnopedia games, the magistrates said nothing, but merely added, to the roster of the holy dead whom the games honored, the names of the newly slain. Self-control, moderation, equanimity in fortune and adversity—qualities that the Athenians wrote about but seldom showed—were taken for granted in every Spartan citizen.

  If it be a virtue to obey the laws, the Spartan was virtuous beyond most men. “Though the Lacedaemonians are free,” the ex-king Demaratus told Xerxes, “yet they are not free in all things; for over them is set law as a master, whom they fear much more than thy people fear thee.”74 Seldom—probably never again except in Rome and medieval Jewry—has a people been so strengthened by reverence for its laws. Under the Lycurgean constitution Sparta, for at least two centuries, became always stronger. Though it failed to conquer Argos or Arcadia, it persuaded all the Peloponnesus except Argos and Achaea to accept its leadership in a Peloponnesian League that for almost two hundred years (560-380) kept the peace in Pelops’ isle. All Greece admired Sparta’s army and government, and looked to it for aid in deposing burdensome tyrannies. Xenophon tells of “the astonishment with which I first noted the unique position of Sparta among the states of Hellas, the relatively sparse population, and at the same time the extraordinary power and prestige of the community. I was puzzled to account for the fact. It was only when I came to consider the peculiar institutions of the Spartans that my wonderment ceased.”75 Like Plato and Plutarch, Xenophon was never tired of praising Spartan ways. Here it was, of course, that Plato found the outlines of his Utopia, a little blurred by a strange indifference to Ideas. Weary and fearful of the vulgarity and chaos of democracy, many Greek thinkers took refuge in an idolatry of Spartan order and law.

  They could afford to praise Sparta, since they did not have to live in it. They did not feel at close range the selfishness, coldness, and cruelty of the Spartan character; they could not see from the select gentlemen whom they met, or the heroes whom they commemorated from afar, that the Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind. With the triumph of the code the arts that had flourished before its establishment died a sudden death; we hear of no more poets, sculptors, or builders in Sparta after 550.* Only choral dance and music remained, for there Spartan discipline could shine, and the individual could be lost in the mass. Excluded from commerce with the world, barred from travel, ignorant of the science, the literature, and the philosophy of exuberantly growing Greece, the Spartans became a nation of excellent hoplites, with the mentality of a lifelong infantryman. Greek travelers marveled at a life so simple and unadorned, a franchise so jealously confined, a conservatism so tenacious of every custom and superstition, a courage and discipline so exalted and limited, so noble in character, so base in purpose, and so barren in result; while, hardly a day’s ride away, the Athenians were building, out of a thousand injustices and errors, a civilization broad in scope and yet intense in action, open to every new idea and eager for intercourse with the world, tolerant, varied, complex, luxurious, innovating, skeptical, imaginative, poetical, turbulent, free. It was a contrast that would color and almost delineate Greek history.

  In the end Sparta’s narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of soul. She descended to the sanctioning of any means to gain a Spartan aim; at last she stooped so far to conquer as to sell to Persia the liberties that Athens had won for Greece at Marathon. Militarism absorbed her, and made her, once so honored, the hated terror of her neighbors. When she fell, all the nations marveled, but none mourned. Today, among the scanty ruins of that ancient capital, hardly a torso or a fallen pillar survives to declare that here there once lived Greeks.

  IV. FORGOTTEN STATES

  Northward from Sparta the valley of the Eurotas reaches across the frontier of Laconia into the massed mountains of Arcadia. They would be more beautiful if they were not so dangerous. They have not welcomed the narrow roads cut out of their rock slopes, and seem to threaten gloomily all disturbers of these Arcadian retreats. No wonder the conquering Dorians and Spartans were both baffled here, and left Arcadia, like Elis and Achaea, to the Achaean and Pelasgian stocks. Now and then the traveler comes upon a plain or a plateau, and finds flourishing new towns like Tripolis, or the remains of ancient cities like Orchomenos, Megalopolis, Tegea, and Mantinea, where Epaminondas won both victory and death. But for the most part it is a land of scattered peasants and shepherds, living precariously with their flocks in these grudging hills; and though after Marathon the cities awoke to civilization and art, they hardly enter the story before the Persian War. Here in these perpendicular forests once roamed the great god Pan.

  In southern Arcadia the Eurotas almost meets a yet more famous river. Swiftly the Alpheus wears its way through the Parrhasian range, meanders leisurely into the plains of Elis, and leads the traveler to Olympia. The Elians, Pausanias tells us,76 were of Aeolic or Pelasgic origin, and came from Aetolia across the bay. Their first king, Aethlius, was father of that Endymion whose beauty so allured the moon that she closed his eyes in a perpetual sleep, sinned at leisure, and had by him half a hundred daughters. Here, where the Alpheus joins the Cladeus flowing from the north, was the holy city of the Greek world, so sacred that war seldom disturbed it, and the Elians had the boon of a history in which battles were replaced by games. In the angle of the merging streams was the Altis, or hallowed precinct, of Olympian Zeus. Wave after wave of invaders stopped here to worship him; periodically, in later days, their delegates returned to beseech his help and enrich his fane; from generation to generation the temples of Zeus and Hera grew in wealth and renown, until the greatest architects and sculptors of Greece were brought together, after the triumph over Persia, to restore and adorn them in lavish gratitude. The shrine of Hera went back to 1000 B.C.; its ruins are the oldest temple remains in Greece. Fragments of thirty-six columns and twenty Doric capitals survive to show how often and how variously the pillars were replaced. Originally, no doubt, they were of wood; and one shaft of oak still stood when Pausanias came there, notebook in hand, in the days of the Antonines.

  From Olympia one passes by the site of the ancient capital, Elis, into Achaea. Hither some of the Achaeans fled when the Dorians took Argos and Mycenae. Like Arcadia it is a land of mountains, along whose slopes patient shepherds drive their flocks up or down as the seasons change. On the western coast is the still-thriving port of Patras, of whose women Pausanias said that they were “twice as numerous as the men, and devoted to Aphrodite if any women are.”77 Other cities huddled against the hills along the Corinthian Gulf—Aegium, Helice, Aegira, Pellene—now almost forgotten, but once alive with men, women, and children, every one of whom was the center of the world.

  V. CORINTH

  A few more mountains, and the traveler re-enters, in Sicyon, the area of Dorian settlement. Here, in 676, one Orthagoras taught the world a trick of politics that aftercenturies would use. He explained to the peasants that they were of Pelasgic or Achaean stock, while the landowning aristo
cracy that exploited them was descended from Dorian invaders; he appealed to the racial pride of the dispossessed, led them in a successful revolution, made himself dictator, and established the manufacturing and trading classes in power.* Under his able successors, Myron and Cleisthenes, these classes made Sicyon a semi-industrial city, famous for its shoes and its pottery, though still named from the cucumbers that it grew.

  Farther east is the city that should have been, by all geographic and economic omens, the richest and most cultured center in Greece. For Corinth, on the isthmus, had an enviable position. It could lock the land door to or upon the Peloponnesus; it could serve and mulct the overland trade between northern and southern Greece; and it had harbors and shipping on both the Saronic and the Corinthian Gulf. Between these seas it built a lucrative Diolcos (“a slipping through”)—a wooden tramway along which ships were drawn on rollers over four miles of land.† Its fortress was the impregnable Acrocorinthus, a mountain peak two thousand feet high, watered by its own inexhaustible spring. Strabo has described for us the stirring sight from the citadel, with the city spread out on two bright terraces below, the open-air theater, the great public baths, the colonnaded market place, the gleaming temples, and the protective walls that reached to the port of Lechaeum on the northern gulf. At the very summit of the mount, as if to symbolize a major industry of the city, was a temple to Aphrodite.80