Early Greece

by Oswyn Murray

  X

  Sparta and the Hoplite State

  SPARTA was the ideal hoplite state of classical Greece: it is significant that she was especially proud of having avoided tyranny, as well as of the permanence of her constitution. Both claims were already standard in the fifth century:

  After its foundation by the Dorians who now inhabit it, Sparta suffered the longest known period of faction, and yet from the earliest times has been well-ordered and always avoided tyranny: for it is a little more than four hundred years from the end of this war (404 BC) that the Spartans have possessed the same constitution; and because of this they have become powerful and settled the affairs of other states as well.

  (Thucydides 1.18)

  Herodotus’ account of early Sparta (1.65f) contains essentially the same elements: the original bad government was followed by a settled constitution; he adds details of how the reformer Lykourgos brought this about. Both Herodotus and Thucydides use variants of the word eunomia (good order) to describe the new state of affairs.

  The success of the Spartan system in resisting change and keeping power in the hands of the hoplite class led to its idealization. The reinterpretation of history involved is so pervasive that it has led some historians to decide that the truth about early Sparta cannot be known; more constructively it calls for two related attitudes – extreme scepticism about the ancient tradition, and a sympathetic understanding of the purposes served by the myth of Sparta.

  The myth is typical of a society which overvalues its past, and seeks to use it to justify the present. Already in the sixth century the Spartans were proclaiming the merits of their own eunomia and declaring their hatred of tyranny (below ch. 15); later they tried to avoid change in a changing world by making a virtue of their own unchanging society; and even when change was forced upon them, it was veiled in the claim of a return to the ancestral constitution of Lykourgos – thus, in the early fourth century the exiled king Pausanias wrote an account of the ‘constitution of Lykourgos’ designed to further his own political aims; and successive kings of Hellenistic Sparta in the late third century, Agis, Kleomenes and Nabis, were still promoting what were in fact the most radical of social reforms as being a necessary return to the original constitution. The result was that both institutions and their potential changes were inevitably attributed to the constitution of Lykourgos, since that was the unalterable standard to which all Spartans appealed: nothing had ever changed, except possibly for the worse if one were a radical; at least all were agreed that nothing ought ever to change. This syndrome belongs to a society under continuous threat of extinction from internal enemies: the overvaluation of tradition is a phenomenon common today among entrenched minority groups.

  Outside Sparta the myth served other functions: in the classical period Sparta was a refuge for oligarchs everywhere, and the model for conservatives in social behaviour and politics. More broadly the subordination of the individual, his education and his private life to the ends of the state have always given the Spartan system a fascination to all who value order and conformity above freedom, to revolutionaries of the left and of the right: the Spartan model remains central to European thought. Plato based his ideal Republic on a critical interpretation of Spartan institutions, and Sparta plays a prominent role in his last work, the Laws; Aristotle thought Sparta the most important historical model for an ideal society. Both men agreed that what was wrong with the Spartan system was not its methods but its aim. Sparta aimed to produce citizens who excelled in courage alone, and that was not enough: they should be trained by Spartan methods to excel in all the virtues: so the creation of social virtue by the control of education and private life had become an unquestioned part of Greek as of much modern political thought. The result of the political and theoretical importance of Sparta is that, although we possess more literary information about her than about any other ancient Greek city apart from Athens, this evidence is systematically unreliable, because it is designed to serve theoretical ends; and since the Spartans were notoriously secretive, expelled foreigners and kept no written records apart from oracles, the myth was always easier to manipulate than to verify.

  Nevertheless it is still possible to recover the outlines of the military and constitutional history of the early Spartan state and the character of its culture from contemporary sources – the poetry of Tyrtaios and Alkman, composed in Sparta between about 650 and 590, and the evidence of archaeology, especially the British excavations of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia (1906–1910), which transformed our understanding of the material basis of Spartan culture.

  The Dorians of Sparta arrived before 1000 BC in ‘hollow Lakedaimon’, the fertile plain of the Eurotas river; they seem originally to have differed little from other early Greek communities. Their political constitution was normal in basic structure, with the typical warrior assembly (apella) and council of elders (gerousia): the council was later composed of the kings and 28 members elected by the people for life from those over sixty, but it seems to have always retained something of its aristocratic origins, for membership was effectively confined to certain leading families. The only peculiarity of the Spartan political system, the existence of a ‘dual kingship’, has never been satisfactorily explained. Two families, the Agiadai and the Eurypontidai, traced their ancestry back to the ‘sons of Herakles’, essentially alleging that the normal Greek division of the inheritance between two sons was the origin of the duality; this claim of common descent is shown to be false by the fact that they had separate burial grounds. The leaders of these two families possessed equal privileges, described by Herodotus (6.56–60): each was a priest of Zeus; both were permanent military leaders, originally with the right of declaring war; they could campaign either together or separately. Each received first honours at public sacrifices and dinners, and was entitled to double rations. They had the right to appoint proxenoi or foreign representatives, and were attended by a special bodyguard; each was served by two Pythioi, officers who were responsible for consulting the Delphic oracle and for the preservation of the responses, the only government records. The kings also supervised family law, allotting husbands to unmarried heiresses and performing adoptions; they were permanent members of the gerousia. The rituals on the death of a king were complex and public; Herodotus compares them to non-Greek customs. Succession was hereditary, by the first male child born while the king held office (Herodotus 7.3), and the heirs-apparent were the only Spartans excused the traditional Spartan education; during a minority the eldest close male relative was regent. Yet despite these hereditary privileges, the Spartans were always remarkably free in criticism of their kings for alleged irregularities of birth or conduct, and were able to depose or exile them; this attitude was even institutionalized in a ritual of uncertain age, whereby every ninth year the ephoroi (overseers) watched the skies at night: if they saw a shooting star the kings were suspended until Delphi had been consulted (Plutarch Life of Agis 11); other powers of supervision acquired by the ephors over the kings (p. 170) show how comparatively weak their position was. There is in fact little to suggest that the kings had gradually declined from a position of greater power: if anything, their importance seems to have increased during the sixth century, because of their success in military leadership. Part of the paradox of a dual kingship can perhaps be avoided by recognizing that they were never kings in the conventional sense; as Aristotle pointed out in a careful discussion of different types of monarchy, the Spartan kingship was properly ‘a hereditary generalship for life’ (Politics 3.1285b); their functions were and perhaps always had been primarily military, rather than fully regal. But even this creates a problem, since neither royal house was connected with the original tribal military organization, which was in any case tripartite: the Spartans were still fighting in the three Dorian tribes in the age of Tyrtaios:

  warding off with hollow shields

  separately Pamphyloi, Hylleis and Dymanes,

  holding in their hands death-dealin
g spears

  (Fragment 19.7–9 = 1D)

  However, apart from this tribal division, the Spartans were also arranged for some purposes by locality, in four obai or villages; one of the less fanciful modern theories is that the origin of the dual military leadership may be territorial.

  Military activity was certainly central to the early Spartan community, whose development is easiest to trace in relation to its successive conquests. At some stage at least one further village was incorporated into the state, the oba of Amyklai; thereafter the Spartans proceeded by creating groups of dependent status. The first of these comprised the various Dorian settlements of the plain, the perioikoi (‘dwellers around’): there were ultimately perhaps about thirty of these communities, possessing local autonomy but without separate military organization or foreign policy; they were liable to military service, but until the fifth century served in separate contingents. When the Spartans formed themselves into a military elite and forbade themselves productive activities, it was the perioikoi who engaged in the manufacturing and other service activities necessary to the state. They therefore occupied a privileged position, protected by the Spartan military system and yet not subject to its full rigours; they were completely loyal to the Spartans, who indeed called themselves officially not ‘Spartiatai’, but ‘Lakedaimonioi’, inhabitants of Lakedaimon – thereby claiming to include in their state the communities of perioikoi.

  Expansion beyond the plain began seawards into the marshes, and a second group of inferiors was created, the helots; their name means either ‘captives in war’ or perhaps ‘inhabitants of Helos (Marsh)’, a village in southern Laconia. Their status is obscure, since they were later not differentiated from the Messenians.

  It was the conquest of Messenia which created the economic and social basis for the classical Spartan state. Essentially the war was a colonial movement, in which, by the conquest of the south-west Peloponnese, the Spartans secured land for themselves without the necessity of settling overseas; the process involved the enslavement of one Dorian group by another. The war is securely dated to the early colonizing period, from about 730 to 710. Olympia lies just north of Messenian territory: the victor lists record seven Messenians between the foundation of the games (776) and 736, thereafter only one; while the first Spartan appears in 720, and from then until 576 over half the recorded names are Spartan. Tyrtaios supports the dates suggested by these lists, when he ascribes victory in the war

  to our king, Theopompos beloved by the gods,

  through whom we took Messene of the broad plain,

  Messene good to plough and good to plant;

  they fought over it for nineteen years,

  relentlessly unceasing with enduring heart,

  the warrior fathers of our fathers.

  And in the twentieth, leaving the rich fields,

  they fled from Ithome’s mountain stronghold.

  (Fragment 5 = 4D)

  The land of the Messenians was divided among the Spartans; already their society was showing that exclusiveness and ability to engender subordinate statuses which ultimately destroyed it; for a group of Spartans, the Partheniai or ‘maiden-born’, were excluded from the distribution, either because they had not fought in the war or because they were born of Spartan women and non-Spartan men – we need not believe the various romantic embellishments, such as that they were the result of liaisons while the men were away on campaign; for it is typical of any society to exclude for whatever reason dubious members at the point when new benefits are being apportioned. The Partheniai went off to found Sparta’s only colony, Tarentum in south Italy: archaeological evidence supports the ancient foundation date of 706.

  Sparta itself was now a fully colonial city, in which every male citizen possessed an equal kleros of land, probably in addition to whatever he had inherited; her position was unique within old Greece, but only slightly different from the new foundations overseas. It is probable that the later system of métayage was instituted immediately, for the helot system already existed as a model, and the new land was too distant to be farmed direct from Sparta itself; it may originally have seemed a not unjust settlement. In this system the Messenians were retained on the land as peasants, paying half their produce to their absent masters:

  Like asses worn down with great burdens,

  bringing to their masters under harsh necessity

  half of all the crop that the field bears,

  mourning for their masters, themselves and their wives alike,

  whenever the dread fate of death comes to one of them.

  (Tyrtaios Fragment 6–7 = 4D)

  In this early stage of conquest the Spartans can hardly have been so heavily outnumbered as they were later: the only figures come from the full Spartan military levy at the battle of Platea in 479: 5000 Spartans, 5000 perioikoi and 35,000 light-armed helots; seven helots were allotted to each Spartan, and probably directly levied by him from among those on his estate (Herodotus 9.28).

  The first Messenian War was presumably fought in the old style; the crushing defeat by the Argives at Hysiai in 669 may have been the catalyst of change to hoplite methods. The festival of the Gymnopaidiai was instituted shortly afterwards according to ancient chronographers; it seems to have been an apotropaic ritual for this defeat, and was closely related to the Spartan military training: in it competitions by male choruses from the different age groups also served as feats of endurance. Certainly the evidence of the lead figurines of hoplites dedicated at the shrine of Artemis Orthia shows that Sparta possessed a fully conscious hoplite class by 650. The uniquely ‘colonial’ combination of economic and military factors at Sparta will have made this transition particularly abrupt, for the hoplite class comprised the entire Spartan citizen body. The impact of this change on the Spartans themselves is shown by the claim embodied in their description of themselves as the homoioi, ‘the men who are equal (or alike)’.

  This is the period in which must be placed the earliest surviving written Greek political constitution; it is preserved in a context of great historical importance in Plutarch’s Life of Lykourgos, to whom Plutarch of course attributes it:

  So eager was Lykourgos to establish this government that he obtained an oracle about it from Delphi, which they call a ‘rhetra’ (the Spartan word for decree). It runs as follows:

  Founding a shrine of Zeus Syllanios and Athene Syllania, tribing (or keeping – a pun) the tribes and obing the obes, establishing a council of thirty with the rulers, to hold apellai from season to season between Babyka and Knakion, thus to bring in and reject; but to the people [to belong the decision] and the power (?? this clause is very corrupt).

  In this the phrase ‘tribing the tribes and obing the obes’ means dividing and distributing the people into parts, which he called tribes and obes; ‘rulers’ refers to the kings; ‘holding apellai’ means to hold assemblies, because he attributed the source and origin of the constitution to Pythian Apollo. Babyka is now Cheimarrhos and Knakion is Oinous; Aristotle says Knakion is a river and Babyka a bridge. They held their assemblies between these two, having no halls or other buildings… (space for Plutarch’s attack on the debilitating moral effect of decorated architecture) … When everyone was assembled, none of the others was allowed to put forward a motion; but the people was sovereign to decide on the motion put forward by the elders and the kings. But later when the people by subtractions and additions perverted and distorted the motions, the kings Polydoros and Theopompos added the following rhetra:

  But if the people speaks crooked, the elders and the rulers are to be rejecters.

  That is, they should not ratify the decision but dismiss it outright, and dissolve the meeting on the grounds that it was perverting and changing the motion contrary to the best interests. And they persuaded the city that the gods had ordered this, as Tyrtaios recalls in the lines:

  Listening to Apollo they brought back from Pytho

  oracles of the god and words of truth:

  l
et the kings rule in counsel, beloved by the gods,

  those entrusted with the lovely city of Sparta,

  and the elders in session, and then the men of the people,

  replying in answer with straight decrees.

  (Plutarch Lykourgos 6)

  The passage of Plutarch consists of a document, a commentary on it and a fragment of Tyrtaios’ poem called Eunomia (good order), arranged into a coherent narrative. This is quite unlike Plutarch’s normal practice, and since the whole passage is a unity, it is clear that he has taken it from one earlier writer. It was common in antiquity to quote one’s main source of information for a subsidiary detail: originally the technique may have been an attempt to make a false claim to originality without losing the reputation for learned research; but by Plutarch’s day it was a mere stylistic device. The mention of Aristotle’s name is therefore good evidence that the whole passage is derived from him; this conclusion is supported by the fact that the information fits his known views on Spartan history; and comparison with his methods in the extant Constitution of the Athenians and elsewhere shows the same use of poetry and documents together with learned commentary. The passage of Plutarch probably derives directly from Aristotle’s lost Constitution of the Spartans: this conclusion sets the limits of our belief and disbelief.