The Ancients - Sex & Sparta

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

This episode contains graphic references to sex, infant mortality, and sexual assault.While Spartans are often thought of for their bloodthirsty and fear inspiring performance on the battlefield - their sex lives and relationships have also been immortalised in history. From the Spartan King Menelaus and his infamous wife Helen of Troy, through to adolescent same-sex relationships - Sparta truly had it all. But what do we actually know about sex in Sparta, and how true are the ancient sources?In the final episode of our Sparta mini-series, Tristan welcomes back Professor Paul Cartledge to look at what sex in Sparta was actually like. From tackling infertility in the ancient world, through to what Spartan courtship would've been like - was it possible to have Romanced a Spartan Warrior?Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we are wrapping up our special Sparta miniseries this December, just in time for Christmas. Today we're going to be talking about sex and sexuality in classical Sparta, and to explain all about Spartan attitudes to sex, well I was delighted to interview the one, the only, Professor Paul Cutledge from Clare College at the University of Cambridge.

It is always a great pleasure having the incredibly eloquent Paul on the show. He is an ancient history legend. Naturally, themes of a sexual nature do feature in today's episode, so you have been warned. But on the other hand, if this has just piqued your interest even more, then listen on. I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Paul. Paul, they said it would never happen, but we're both here in the same studio. Welcome

back to the ancients. Thanks, Tristan. Great to see you in person. I can almost touch you from where I'm sitting. It's brilliant in this studio in Cambridge. Sparta is the topic, quite a general statement and question to begin with, but it's the city state that never gets old that always fascinates us, whether it's military or it's everyday life or sexuality. Yeah, well, it's completely right. And a couple of people have written books with the title. One was The Legend of Sparta. One was The Spartan Tradition. And the point is that ever since, Sparta was actually something. People talked about it and then eventually wrote about it and then remembered it. And Sparta itself, of course, evolved. And one of the parts of the myth,

there's a big mythical side to the evidence for Sparta, there's as it were real history and then mythical history. But part of the myth is Sparta never changed. It's not true at all. It changed the whole time. If you like, change is a constant. But the Spartans projected the notion that one of the reasons they were so great was they very early achieved a consensus and a set of institutions, military, political, economic, which all gelled together. So it was a harmonious whole, which then sauntered on, as it were, without change. No, it changed. It was subject to stresses and strains, but nevertheless, a sufficiently big core of actuality does explain partly why Sparta was so successful. And because people have been talking about Sparta since antiquity,

people who are not Spartan, we have all of these sources from people who are not Spartan, how difficult is it for someone like you researching life in this ancient city-state to sort fact from fiction? It's a general question, Tristan, which affects all history, historiography, but peculiarly, acutely, in the case of Sparta, for the reason you gave, but for other reasons. The reason you gave most of our written evidence is by non-Spartans, and that goes way back, right back to the 5th century BC.

The father of history, as he's called, Herodotus, a principal source, not just for the 5th century, as he's called, Herodotus, a principal source, not just for the 5th century, but for earlier centuries. And we'll come back to him talking about sex and sexuality, I'm sure. But also that hardly anybody in Sparta thought it was important actually to sit down and write Spartan history. So you have a couple of Spartan poets, but you have very, very few, as it were, of Spartan poets, but you have very, very few, as it were, commentators or even describers of Spartan institutions until much later. Well, when I say much later, I mean after the great period of what's thought to be the period when Sparta's absolutely central, one of the two or the top

Greek cities. So 7th, 6th, 5th centuries BC and somewhat into the 4th. So that's interesting, actually, because sometimes when we talk about classical Greece, we think of 5th and 4th centuries BC. But actually with Sparta, it was prominent also before that time too in the Archaic period. Yes, we use the word Archaic, which makes it sound a bit old-fashioned. But it means in art historical terms and then historical terms, the archaic period is a formative period, presaging, leading to, making possible a classical. Now, the oddity in a way about Sparta is that its archaic period in terms of time, that is 8th, 7th, 6th centuries,

roughly between 800 and 500 BC, was also its classical period because though it did change in the 5th and 4th centuries, it formed and it established its principal institutions in the 8th, 7th and 6th centuries so that its archaic period temporarily was its classical period in terms of its developmental stage. And when we're talking about Sparta at this time, I think we're going to focus in on archaic and classical Sparta. But how big an area are we actually talking about? So in terms of square mileage, Sparta came to control a territory of some 3,000 square miles, which in terms of kilometreage, square kilometreage,

is about 8,000. Put it in another sense, Thucydides, a 5th century historian, a bit later than Herodotus, said that the Spartans controlled two parts of the Peloponnese, by which he meant two fifths, parts of the Peloponnese, by which he meant two-fifths, so almost half of the lower bit of the mainland Greece, which is separated from the rest of Greece by a narrow isthmus, the isthmus of Corinth. The Spartans, beginning in the 8th century, exceptionally in the 7th, expanded to control two-fifths, almost half, of that entire Panoponese, which made their city, we call it city-state or city-zen-state in Greek polis, easily the biggest in the entire Greek world in terms of territory. If I say that the next biggest in the entire Greek world,

which extended all around the Mediterranean, was Syracuse in eastern Sicily, and that controlled something like 4,000 square kilometres. Really gives you a sense of that massive area, doesn't it? And if you lived in Sparta at that time, the population itself, not all of the Spartan population were actually Spartan citizens. itself. Not all of the Spartan population were actually Spartan citizens. There were roughly three different types of inhabitants of the Spartan polis or civic territory. The Spartans, and they had more than one name for themselves, they could call themselves the Spartiates, Spartiata in Greek, or they could call themselves the Lacedaemonians because the polis was called Lacedaemon. They are the elite.

And so Herodotus tells us that at the time of the Persian invasion by Xerxes, we're now in 480 BC, there were 8,000 adult male Spartans, of whom some 5,000 could be expected and actually did turn out at any one time. So you multiply that 8,000 figure by four to give you the rough number of women, children, adult males who are Spartans, that is the elite. You've got about four times eight, so 30,000, 35,000 of them. Plus, there are two other types of population. One are not Spartans at all, in the sense they have no civic political rights or privileges within the Spartan state,

so they don't have a say in Sparta's domestic or foreign policy, which is made only by adult male Spartans. And these are called dwellers round about. There's a Greek word, perioikoi. How many of them altogether there were? Impossible to estimate. There were about 50 separate, we would call them really villages or towns, scattered around on the margins of the best land.

And the best land, that is agricultural land, for growing wheat, barley, vines and olives, those two best territories, best areas within the Spartan state were the two riverine valleys. In the east, the Rotas Valley. In the west, the Pamisos Valley. and the perioiko, as the name suggests, dwelt round about the best land which the Spartans directly owned and controlled. Now, who did the work? Well, if you're a perioiko, you're, as it were, a normal Greek. You have a wife, you have a family. You may own one or two slaves, not many, because slaves are quite expensive and difficult to manage, and you've got to make enough surplus to make it viable for them to be your employees. You own them, you make them work, but you've got to feed them. And so in the Spartans' case, they had slaves,

as Greeks typically always did. The difference between the Spartan slaves and, say, the Perioic slaves was that they're Greek. And they're not only Greek, they're locals. They were called helots because that name means captives. The sort of way in which they're conceived is that once upon a time they were free, they fought, they lost, the Spartans conquered them and made them their war captives. But whereas elsewhere in the Greek world, if you were so conquered, you'd very likely be sold abroad. You wouldn't end up enslaved on your ancestors' own land and being bred. That's what the Helots were. They were the descendants of the original inhabitants who had lost big time

in the 8th and 7th century, and they reproduced themselves as a slave community by natural reproduction. In other words, they had families, they lived in villages, and they reproduced. So that's the context of Spartan society as we delve into this topic. Before I ask about the sources and then look at the Spartan educations, you mentioned like topic. Before I ask about the sources and then look at the Spartan educations, you mentioned like the perioiko and the helots there and then the Spartan citizens. When talking about sex and sexuality, did the experience, let's say, for a perioik differ significantly from that of a Spartan, let's say, who they were expected to marry and so on? Okay, in two respects. In order to reproduce, you have to have a framework.

And the typical Greek framework was monogamous marriage. Spartans did indeed have monogamous marriage, with one or two very odd exceptions, which I won't bother you with. But reproduction could also take place outside marriage. So, in other words words a husband could be married could have had two kids with his wife and then decide well he doesn't want any more kids with his wife but his best mate is married and she the my wife is not producing any children up steps the friend and as it were by artificial insemination, he acts as

the sperm donor through natural reproduction. But the Spartans did not consider that to be adultery. Every other Greek city, that would have been a case of adultery, which was the major crime that could be committed in ancient Greece in a familial civic setting. Whereas in the perioicic villages or towns, adultery would be adultery, and the wife would have to be exposed, you know, sent away. That would be divorce. No playing around. If a wife was barren or if the husband was infertile and the couple couldn't reproduce,

well, too bad. That was it. That was just the way of the world. And I think something like a tenth of all human couples are incapable of reproducing by natural means. That's one way in which perioicic and Spartan marital sexuality differed. There are others, namely what happened to the offspring, because for a child to survive its first year in ancient Greece was in itself a feat.

Typically, we think two out of three infants would not make it beyond their first birthday simply because their mother's milk wasn't sufficient, they caught some fatal disease, all sorts of reasons why people tended not, on average, to survive their first birthday. But the Spartans put another obstacle in the way of an infant growing up, namely, there's some kind of test which was conducted. The evidence is very late and controversial, but it's something to the effect that you look at a child in perhaps a water, a bath. I mean, it was said to be of wine. I find that slightly puzzling. Spartans had lots of wine, but nevertheless, you put the infant in this bath, and if it shows signs of feebleness, it doesn't thrash around, or its limbs look slightly deformed, whatever, whatever, then it was up to, it was in, in other words, within the gift of not the father or the mother,

but senior members of a grouping, we translate it tribes, families were grouped into various lineages, typically, allegedly by birth. So we're all descended from the same ancestor, or we all live in the same village in Sparta. At any rate, the elders of the tribes people inspect this process. The child's just born, it's a few days old, it's put in this bath, allegedly of wine, and it fails or it passes. So that's the first test that a poor little baby has to pass in order to even move on to try to survive its first year which two out of three typically in an ancient situation would not goodness it's a absolutely horrifying story you did mention that the source is quite late yeah and when you are looking at a, let's say like sex and sexuality at the time of Sparta at its height and its rise to its height in the 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th centuries BC, what are our main sources for learning more about this?

Which sources talk about this the most? Well, the important point is that we don't have, suppose you're researching that subject today. You do oral interviews, you've got a lot of mass data collected by the state, and you've got checks on hospitals. Most people are born in hospitals rather than at home, etc., etc. from ancient Sparta. You have no first-hand testimony of a Spartan father or mother talking about his or her infant and how he, she, saw to that infant's upbringing. So every source is external. And therefore, it's a kind of lottery whether or not historians and biographers who are actually concentrating on major public affairs, so I'm talking about war, politics, diplomacy, it's a lottery whether they should by chance talk about something to do with sexuality and domesticity and rearing of children. There's absolutely no guarantee that they would.

With this one, and it's positive for us, exception, ancient Greek sources thought, believed, there was something slightly odd about the way the Spartans treated not their infants only, but the young generally. So in ancient Greece at this period, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th centuries, there were very few schools. Schooling for what we would call primary and secondary was not compulsory,

and it was purely optional and occasional. Sparta, and now both Plato and Aristotle, who are very interested in education, they comment on this fact that only Sparta, of all the 1,000 Greek cities that there were, had a public compulsory educational cycle, and mainly for the boys, so mainly from the age of seven. So we do have sources which are interested in getting the infant to the age of seven and then getting the infant male, the now young male, age seven, from seven to 18, which is the educational cycle. So with this educational cycle, Paul, what was the ideal Spartan man expected to be? Paul, what was the ideal Spartan man expected to be? It's somewhat now controversial, and I suppose in some ways it always has been, but it used to be assumed by scholars such as myself, and I happen still to cling to this notion, that the ideal adult male Spartan, by the age he's 20, he's become a fully-fledged adult and a member of the Spartan army. He must therefore be fit enough to take part in a very large, so we're talking about 5,000 plus,

permanently in commission unit, whereas other Greek cities, yes, you have soldiers and they know that if there's a war on, they're going to be called up. But the Spartans seem to have operated as if they were constantly in a state of war, as if they were on alert, as it were. So it's a no-brainer, it seems to me, that Spartan education should be largely physical, but also cultural in the sense of learning obedience and teamwork, also cultural in the sense of learning obedience and teamwork, but not emphasizing purely intellectual tasks, such as how to write a good essay or how to philosophize about the meaning of goodness. Spartan mentality and Spartan education would have gone together. They would foster each other, and they would be largely group as opposed to individual, cohesion as opposed to

do your own thing, and with a ultimate test, which would be at the point of battle. Can you make it? Can you withstand the enemy? And can you outfight the enemy? And I think it's not only for external reasons. I talked about the helots. There were many, many more helots than there were Spartans, and some of them did not like being helots. They resented the fact they'd been born as slaves of other Greeks when they thought they should be free, like most other Greeks were. And so they periodically rose up, and that's a peculiarity of Spartan society, that Spartans had to worry not only about other Greeks attacking them or Persians attacking them,

but helots attacking them from within. So if the ideal Spartan is raised to have, at least to try and have those qualities, but was the ideal Spartan also expected to have a lot of sex? Yes, insofar as it was necessary to reproduce the population, to maintain the relative strength of the citizen body vis-a-vis the enemy within and enemies without. But in terms of compelled, without. But in terms of compelled, depends what age you are. So if you got married before the age of 30, so some sources suggest you didn't actually live at home, you were at your peak of potential call up. So between the age of 20 and 29, these are the elite years in which you're going to be a frontline fighter. You're going to be eligible for the royal bodyguard, which is the absolute, as it were, the marines of the Spartans. And so for all these reasons, you're not going to be allowed to live

at home with your wife, even if you have married before the age of 30, which I think most Spartans probably did in their late 20s. But one of the imperatives of being a good Spartan was to reproduce at least yourself. In other words, to produce a son, at least one. And we hear of families of seven sons, which is quite exceptional. seven sons, which is quite exceptional. But in terms of social demography, we know that for any ancient population to reproduce itself, every fertile woman has to have many, many children, because two out of three are going to die before they're one. Others are going to die of disease between one and becoming an adult. When males become adults, they're going to die in war. And so something like seven, eight, nine births of every fertile Spartan wife were expected.

So that means, yes, quite a lot of sex in the sense of reproduction. But you possibly had in mind, do Spartan young men who are not married have the ability to have sex? And the answer is very much in two directions in particular. There's one that's forbidden, which is with nice Spartan girls who are going to get married and have children with their husbands. So young studs must not impregnate them. And Spartan marriages were arranged, it seems, as of course was normal in the ancient world. But there are two other possibilities. One is homosexuality, same-sex sexuality. Remember, these boys have been brought up in, as it were, packs since the age of seven. Adolescence, puberty, you can bet there will be a hell of a lot of what we call,

politely, experimentation of a homosexual kind. Some Spartans, possibly as many as 10%, will be naturally homosexual, so predisposed to that. And there are cities in Greece, Sparta wasn't one of them, which actually encouraged that so that they made use of pairing relationships between adults, so gay relationships were incorporated in the army. Actually, Sparta didn't go that direction. It assumed a heterosexual norm after the age of 20 when marriage and reproduction comes in. But as part of the educational cycle, it was absolutely, I think, prescribed. It wasn't

optional. It wasn't occasional. A young boy reaches puberty. He's 13, 14, 15. He's then expected to attract, and conversely, a young adult who is unmarried is expected to go looking for a junior partner, so to form a homosexual, homoerotic pairing relationship, which would end either when the junior partner becomes an adult or when the senior member of the pairing gets married and it seems to be perfectly functional. Spartans were thought to be by other Spartans particularly addicted to anal relations and whether or not that was true who knows but the Spartans had homosexuality. Then the third type of sexuality available to an unmarried or married Spartan male was, of course, with helot women. Young women, maybe even very young women, who knows? But there are helot women in Sparta working in the household.

They're doing the cooking, the weaving, the waiting on the wife who is, of course, at home running the home. The husband is away till the age of 30, then he lives at home after the age of 30. But helot women, there must have been tons of them around. And we happen to know of a category of mixed social status. So a Spartan man impregnates a helot woman. The offspring may be raised by the Spartan male if he so chooses. The Spartans actually had a word for it, which was mothax. So you are half Spartan, half helot. You're not a Spartan citizen unless your dad chooses to rear you, to introduce you to his mess mates, because adult male Spartans were all members of dining messes. We call them messes for the military reason, like in the army.

So your child didn't have to be 100% Spartan potentially for them to become a Spartan citizen? Spartan citizen? Well, yes, is the answer to that question. But the number that were liable to become full Spartans, having been born of a helot mother, was very small. It so happens that in the end of the 5th century BC, the 400s, we know of three of that status. And why do we know of them? Because one's Lysander, a famous general. One's Gylippus, a famous general, goes off to Syracuse. One is called Callicratidas, Admiral. So the reason we know about them is they're cited in the main narrative accounts of Greek history of the late 5th century. And then a later commentator says, oh, and by the way, these three were Mothakes, so they were half Helot, which actually is what one would predict. Because, you know, just exceptionally, people are born and it just happens their parents are not of the right standing, but they are themselves personally brilliant. And there was a scope if the father introduced the half Spartan son to the group that's going through the age-graded educational cycle.

So at the age of seven, here is my son. Yes, his mother wasn't a Spartiate, I confess it. But I do have other sons that I've already put through. The Spartans called it the agogi, the rearing, the upbringing. And that's how I think Callicratidas, Lysander and Jalippus would have found their way in almost naturally. I mean, people wouldn't worry so much if they proved themselves to be terrifically good Spartan material. Because they'd look the same. Remember, the Helots are just the same Greeks as the Spartans.

They happen to have been where they have been living for generations, even before some of the Spartans' ancestors. So they're in a way more Laconian or Lacedaemonian than the Spartans. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Well, it is really interesting because was there an overarching feeling in Sparta that almost the population of true Spartans was dying out. There was a precipitous decline in Spartan male military mampa. In other words, adults 20 plus, Herodotus says something like 8,000 in 480 BC. Fast forward a century down to the 370s and there were just over 1,000. So from 8,000 to just over 1,000. Why? Two obvious causes. There was in the 460s a massive earthquake which apparently affected the very centre of Sparta. Therefore,

all the children who were being educated in their schools, there was a very heavy loss of life. So that took all that generation from 7 to 18 out of the pool of reproduction for the next cycle. And it's thought, therefore, it would take a generation of normal sexuality to replace and reproduce up to what the population had been in the 460s. But it didn't, because by the time the Peloponnesian War begins, we're in the 420s BC, so a generation on from the 460s. Population is circa 3,000 to 4,000. They're getting worried about losing even 100 Spartans who are held hostage in Athens after being captured on an island in just off the Peloponnese. So something's going wrong. Then add to that fighting. So there is a major pitched

battle, Battle of Mantinea, 418 BC. And in the early fourth century, there are two major pitched battles in mainland Greece, one near Corinth, one in central Greece, in which Spartans were heavily involved, and therefore there are casualties. But still, why does it go down from 3,000 or so, around about 400, to 1,000 or so, 30 years later? It's therefore thought that... 30 years later. It's therefore thought that... Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you.

From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. There are both economic and social causes at work.

Now, we have no source that's analytically, you know, we've got no data, we've got no statistics. This is all inference by us. And two factors seem to be particularly important. One is noted by Aristotle much later, who talks about how Spartan shortage of manpower is a bad thing because it weakens the entire system. But he talks about Spartans losing their status as citizens because they're impoverished. They're lacking the resources to contribute a certain minimum amount to their daily mess meal. So they contribute on a monthly basis.

It's all hoarded together and then doled out at the evening meal. Every evening Spartans were expected, required with some exceptions, to pitch up and eat and drink with their mess mates. So that's an economic factor. Now, more interestingly, a sociological one, which modern scholars have postulated, that because Spartan wives were, compared with other wives elsewhere in Greece, both legally and sort of spiritually, socially, much more empowered than their sisters elsewhere, that they were saying, look, I'll produce children, yes, but only up to a point. And so either refusing sex once they'd had, let's say, a son and a daughter, or and just not, for one reason or another, proving to be less fertile than their ancestors earlier had been. But for whatever reason, people have suggested there's something about

enforced birth control, because there are no artificial methods, of course, available. There's just coitus interruptus and various sort of potions, which are not effectual at all. So there was no effective artificial birth control. And the Spartan women, therefore, would have been left to their own devices. They would somehow have to have prevented having sex or having being delivered of children. There is one other possible factor, and this is what's called exposure. Remember, I mentioned right at the beginning, I was saying that there was a test once an infant had been produced, that they had to satisfy inspection, that they were vigorous enough in a bath of some sort of liquid.

Well, it's not impossible that more of these infants were being deemed to be unfit, and therefore there was an excess exposure. We know there was a place that the Spartans took unwanted infants to, and they would there be left to die of exposure, thirst, hunger, or to be eaten by wild beasts. But we do know the Spartans went in for exposure, and it's conceivable, adding that to the economic factor, adding that to the possible birth control by the women, somehow or other, they're failing to reproduce themselves as a normal population, healthy population would. It's absolutely horrific what you described there, Paul. And I mean,

I did think whilst you were talking there, you mentioned how we have evidence of Spartan men having sex with helots and these mothaks, these mothakes. Do we have any idea as to whether children born to helot mothers would also have to face the possibility of them losing their child or would they i know there is the possibility that they become spartan at a later date or would they have to go outside of sparta you would have thought with the amount of helots that are also in sparta that they would have been able to keep that population continuing but no well there is though a very powerful cultural counter veiling factor in other words if you believe that helot by birth is servile then you are contaminating you're denigrating you're diminishing your Spartan true blue, as it were,

stock by having miscegenation, as they used to call it in the old South in America. So yes, there's the availability of halot women as potential. In other words, keeping the population up. It does seem in a way obvious on one level, but at the level of integrity and Hellenicity and strength of pure free birth, Hellot women are down there and therefore it's not something to be proud of if you can only produce a son who is the son of a Hellot mother. Or if you're adding on because you're being patriotic and you think that you should produce some more for the pool there is a law this is again slightly late evidence fourth century bc we don't know when it was introduced that if you produce three sons and i presume it means if they got through to adulthood, through the educational cycle, then you were relieved of certain, we're not told what, but civic burdens.

If you produce four or more, you're freed from all civic burdens. And then I asked myself, would it be something that a Spartan man would be so keen to do, to be relieved of being a good Spartan? I don't think so. So I think the incentive wasn't there, but the goal is clear. We need more Spartans. Well, moving on from that, Paul, I'd like to ask quickly, before we go on to Spartan women, about facial hair. Paul, how important is facial hair for spartan men well some people think it's incredibly important in other words it's a cultural denominator not only between cultures but within i'll give you one classic example pretty much every adult male Greek anywhere, whatever society, would prefer not to shave because it's a pain.

And you have to have a special razor. You've got to keep it sharp and you don't have nice foam to enable you to shave yourself daily. being this. The first leader, the first ruler of any major Greek city or community or civilization to go shaved was Alexander. And the point about Alexander was to make him look as youthful as possible and as much like Dionysus, the feistiest of the Greek gods, and Apollo. So some of the Greek gods were habitually represented as if they shaved or as if they never grew a beard. Alexander was the first. After him, it's the fashion. So if you want to be a Hellenistic ruler, 3rd, 2nd, 1st century BC Greek, you shave. If you want to be a Roman imitating Alexander, Pompey actually took Alexander's nickname, the Great, you shave.

So you get Augustus, the emperor of the whole Roman world. He's as butch, as masculine as he ideally wants to project himself, but he is clean-shaven. That rattles on until the second century when Hadrian, who is, yes, he's Roman, but he's from Spain, he wants to represent himself and have himself represented as if he's an ancient Greek philosopher, and they all had beards. And so Hadrian grows a beard, and all the emperors after Hadrian grow beards. Now, go back to Sparta. Facial hair is obviously of two kinds. There's the beard and there's the hair on the top of your head. Spartans cultivated both, but in different ways. They allowed, once the adolescent became an adult at 20, they allowed, in fact, encouraged

young men to stop having their hair cut. Whereas wives were typically short-haired in Sparta, so the women that these young men are going to marry are short-haired, they, the Spartans, grow their hair even longer than when they were adolescents. And there are various tales, why was that permitted? it original was it what the lawgiver Lycurgus laid down because it made Spartans look more frightening whatever the explanation and culturally the fact is you can tell an adult male Spartan warrior even when he's wearing his helmet because the hair pokes out underneath it. As for the beard, there was a punishment which the Spartans inflicted on bachelors. So bachelors are those

who ought, because they've reached the age and status, they're in their late 20s, they're in the army, they've gone through the educational cycle, they must now do their next Spartan duty, which is get married and have children. For one reason or another, they're refusing. And in a way, if you think Spartan mores, the unspoken or the social pressure of a community like the Spartans would have been intense on conformity. So anybody who didn't conform, well, what should we say? And I'll give you one example. His name is Der Kylidas. Was he gay? Did he just despise women, hate women, you know, couldn't bear to be in a marital relationship involving sex with a woman? I don't know. But the punishment was at a particular festival to have his beard shaved just down one

side. And it takes a fair while to grow the equivalent of what the other side was like. So very visually, for a good long time, this guy would be marked out, you are not conforming to the spartan norm getting married having children why so the fact that there are such exceptions is to me in a way extraordinary though i suppose there are always exceptions but at any rate um beards spartans typically had beards and long hair beards and long hair and very very quickly before we move on to Spartan girls' education, because, Paul, we could talk about this for hours, but what's this with no moustaches? Yes, you're quite right. You've picked me up on the next point. Well, again, the source is late, but when the chief officials of the Spartan state came into office, beginning of each year, they rotated five of them. And the chief

one, the one who got the most votes, he announced, Spartans, shave your moustaches and obey the laws. The two being, as it were, two halves of the same thing. Shaving your moustaches is a compulsory thing that you have to do. So it's imposed on you, if you like, self-imposed. But it's not natural. It's artificial. In the same way, the laws are things that have been made in the past. They've been handed down, and they're working. Otherwise, we'd change them.

So to be a good Spartan, you have to be obedient. You have to be obedient to the law. This is a law driven community. Very interesting. And there are stories about how the Spartans respect the law above any human who might give them an order. The law itself was erected as a kind of overarching good. So why shave your moustache? Because that's artificial. So the beard grows, the moustache grows, but don't shave the moustache. And we have a number of sculptures. The most famous is the so-called Leonidas, actually probably not Leonidas, but anyway, about that period, a Perian marble, island marble, very beautifully done. And he's got a curly beard.

He has no moustache. And that is the Spartan way. To be a good Spartan, you shave your moustache, not your beard. And it's a remarkable fact. Remarkable fact indeed, and very unique to ancient Sparta. Now let's talk a bit about Spartan women. Paul, we've looked a bit at the education of young boys in classical Sparta. What do we know about education for Spartan girls? Right, the same sources who talk about the educational cycle, dividing it up into two main halves, after the age of 12, 13, it gets tougher. And they talk about some of the exercises, both collective and individual, for example, wrestling or throwing the javelin, but also in a group having a mock fight near a river and so on. The same sorts of

things are talked about or said of Spartan girls. Yet, we know that Spartan girls do not leave their home at the age of seven as the boys did. So they remain with their mothers, but they were expected to develop themselves, to be developed physically. And there was a rationale, whether it's entirely accurate or not, that the stronger you are as a female and you give birth, the less likely you are to die, because of course there's a very high mortality rate. Again, it's thought to be, could be as high as two in three births would result in the death of the mother. But at any rate, very high from combination of all the things that can go wrong with a birth, plus excessive blood loss, there's no way to give them a blood transfusion, puerperal, that is, surrounding the birth, infection, absolutely regular,

which was killing women in this country until the late 19th century, before antiseptics and then before penicillin and then all sorts of artificial aids which enable women to give birth. Even so, we know there are tragedies, there are problems. So in ancient Sparta, it was thought that the more physically fit a mother was, the less likely she was to die and therefore she could have more children. So Spartan girls, it's thought, got married a bit later than girls elsewhere who might be married and be reproducing very soon after puberty, which could happen 12, 13, more likely 14.

It seems Spartan girls delayed marriage to about 18 to 20 so that they were nearer in age to their husbands who are, yes, up to 10 years older, but nevertheless, they're not 15 years older than their wives. And it was thought that this was all part of the idea that you have more of a companionate marriage. Now, the oddity of that is the actual ceremony of marriage was as brutal almost as you can think of, because the wife, the bride-to-be, is dressed up pretty much as if she were a man. And there are all sorts of possible psychosexual explanations of why the Spartan males may have found it more comforting or comfortable that their spouse was as boyish, as boy-like, as masculine as possible, whatever. It was a kind of pseudo-rape,

that's to say the husband was supposed to somehow snatch the bride, even though the bride actually had been affianced. So the husband knew which woman he was going to marry and when, but it would somehow involve the seizure and then the consummation, not in the bride's home, which would be a relatively gentle way, or in the husband's home, but somewhere other than that, in some sort of cellar somewhere. It's all described in a really quite chillingly inhumane almost, but certainly not very gentle environment, which seems to me appropriate because Spartan masculinity was not a comfortable, gentle sort of masculinity. It was a kind of brutality. On the other hand, this is, if you like, the irony, the marriage was unusual. That is, the normal relationship between a husband and a Spartan wife

would not be one of violence. But partly because they lived apart so much, partly because the wife was relatively so privileged legally, socially, culturally, she was more equal to her husband. legally, socially, culturally. She was more equal to her husband. Actually, she probably had quite a good deal compared with the wife of an Athenian, for example. It is a really interesting contrast there that you've just described. I mean, you've talked about that kind of brutish Spartan masculinity. When talking about Spartan femininity and the education that they receive, When talking about Spartan femininity and the education that they receive, let's say when it comes to sex and sexuality, before they get married. Now, of course, you have in mythology the Spartan woman, Helen of Troy. Incredibly sexy depictions, the woman who launched a thousand ships and so on.

How much of a role model was Helen for young Spartan women? Well, we happen to have a story. It's in Herodotus. It's set sometime before his own day. So back in the sixth century, where there's a young girl who's not much to look at. Her parents are rather upset, especially her mother, of course, that she's not much. She's from an aristocratic, especially her mother, of course, that she's not much. She's from an aristocratic, a leading Spartan family. So the mother takes her up, and it is up, to a shrine. It's just outside Sparta, a place called Theratni. And it's a sanctuary, a religious shrine devoted to Helen and Menelaus,

in other words, the Homeric pair, the king and his wife in the Iliadic epic. And by bringing her there quite regularly, the daughter amazingly is transformed from an ugly duckling into someone that a king of Sparta would find so desirable that he would be willing to, well, behave rather badly in order to get hold of her because she marries someone else. And the best friend of that Spartan man is a king of Sparta who fancies this woman and therefore forces his mate to divorce her in order to, and so on. You can see what I'm getting at. The point is that there were, I'm sure, ways in which mothers might go out of their way by praying to, by making offerings to Helen to encourage by transference the beauty, the sexiness of Helen to somehow become imbued

in their daughter. And we do know that, of course, there are many other gods and goddesses than the ones we've mentioned so far, but Helen was a goddess for the Spartans, Artemis was a goddess, Hera, Athena was the state goddess. So there are lots and lots of female divinities that Spartan women, wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and so on, could look to and pray to and make offerings to. But in terms of sex, of course, the one goddess is Aphrodite. And she has her shrine, she has actually more than one shrine in Sparta. So

depending on the age of your daughter, you might take her to the shrine of Helen when she's growing up. When she's pubescent, she's achieved puberty, but she's not yet fully adult. Artemis, who is the goddess of transition between girlhood and womanhood, and then Aphrodite when she gets married, or Athena, or Hera. So there's quite a lot of outlets for religion to affect sexuality. And did non-Spartan sources, did they portray Spartan women as being incredibly sexy? Did they gain a reputation for that? They did, but this is part of the myth-making that is in Sparta.

This is the anti-Spartan type of myth because there's two kinds of non-Spartan myth. One is everything in Sparta is great. If only we were much more like them, life in my community would be much better. The other one is, thank goodness, we're not like the Spartans. We don't do X, Y, and Z. And one of the things that allegedly Spartan parents automatically did was foreigner comes to Sparta for whatever reason. Of course, that's problematic in itself. Why would a foreigner come to Sparta? And they are offered any virginal or maybe, yes, they must be virginal because they're not yet married. Daughters, you know, just as a sort of gift. So in other words, Spartan women are so sexually loose, immoral, they'll sleep with

anybody. No, indeed. But you also mentioned an important point there, Paul, as we start wrapping up. Was virginity something that the Spartans were quite big on for Spartan women before they got married, or do we not have that information to hand? Yeah, we don't have that information, but it would be normal, normative, if that had been the case. So, as I say, the tale according to which Spartan girls, unmarried, had sex, therefore lost their virginity before marriage. However, the point, surely, of the tale about how marital relations were originally consummated, i.e. the wedding, implies that is deflauration, and that is when the relationship, the man asserts his masculinity, the woman, the female, becomes a woman.

asserts his masculinity, the woman, the female, becomes a woman. So having been non-deflowered, i.e. intact, she then is deflowered and becomes, having been a girl, she becomes a woman. And that's absolutely standard Greek, both vocabulary and expectation. So I assume that was the case in Sparta, but we actually don't have evidence about that. And one final point on this. We mentioned earlier, well, you mentioned earlier how in the education of Spartan boys, how maybe there could have been homosexual experimentation occurring as they were growing up. With the girls also having their own education, could there have been something similar in there? Yes. It's not, of course, very plausible.

And there is a very famous Spartan poet. He's a creator. He's actually an innovator. He's called Alckman. And he wrote what are called maiden songs because they are for girls not yet married but on the cusp so 1617 they're intact they're virgins so they're parthenoi and the type of verse the type of song is called a parthenion well elkman talks he makes the girls as it were josh each other in a quasi-sexual way, on the one hand implying that what they're all looking for is a suitable husband coming up, so they're nubile. On the other hand, they're kind of

challenging each other with, you know, who's the most beautiful amongst themselves. Therefore, it would be perfectly, I think, normal if there were sexual relations. What is not normal, and this is maybe just an invention, because Greek sexuality amongst adolescents and adults was normal, normative in many communities, because Spartans made such a thing of homosexual pairing relationships, adult male with adolescent male, there is a source that says, well, well-bred young women might look to have relationships with suitable virgins, young girls, before they are married, so that there will be homoerotic homosexual relations between women who may or may not be married, but at any rate, they're adults with adolescent girls. Well, I'm not sure I believe that. In other words, it's sort of saying because the girls were brought up to throw the javelin, to wrestle,

to be physical like the boys. Well, in the same way, because the boys had homoerotic relationships within their education, so the girls must have had something similar in their education. I personally doubt it. Paul, this has all been really, really interesting. Another of these great aspects of Spartan society and sorting fact from fiction from the evidence we have available it's really interesting to me having largely focused on ancient macedon and alexander the great and obviously his promiscuous dad philip with his many many wives and lovers yes and how big polygamy is in macedon with the archaid house and the Argeid kingdom. It's interesting how it's completely the opposite in Sparta and many of the other city-states where monogamy is key.

Yes. There's one exception which actually relates to the same family situation I was talking about with the young girl, not very attractive, and then grows up to be stunningly beautiful, such that a king wants to get hold of her for his wife. He's already married to someone else. Well, he actually has two wives. And this is unique in all the evidence that one king is recorded as being bigamous. And the reason given is that his first wife was producing no children. So he has special permission from the officials to take another wife legally,

with whom he may reproduce a royal line. That line produces, eventually, Leonidas. And on the other side, the first wife, he goes back, the king, having sired three, four children with the second wife, he goes back or continues with his first wife who for whatever reason produces and that is cleomenes the first major figure of the early fifth century bc just before leonidas who is um leonidas marries cleomenes daughter i mean just to show you how inbred uh one of the family lines of the royal houses could be.

Absolutely. Well, Paul, on that lovely note, this has been absolutely brilliant. Is there anything else you'd like to highlight quickly about spars and sex and sexuality? Absolutely my pleasure. I'm just going to add one thing, and it's a slightly technical thing. People have doubted whether that homosexual, homoerotic pairing relationship between a young adult male and an adolescent boy was as central as some of us think and as the ancient sources represent it. And in support of the view that it was central, I adduce the fact that the Spartans had their own special vocabulary. So, as I mentioned, that sort of relationship, pederasty is what it's called technically in Greek, was not unique to Sparta. So, Athens, Thebes, Elis, Corinth, you name it. But only in Sparta did the Spartans give to the two partners, the senior, the junior, a special name different from elsewhere in Greece.

It was simply the lover and the beloved. So the active lover, the passive beloved, passive in form, in language, as well as in actuality. The Spartans said, no, you've got on the one hand the inspirer and then the junior partner is the hearer. Very interesting. I mean, why would you go to the lengths of creating a special, unique local vocabulary if the institution to which you're giving the names was not central? That's my case. case well your case very

much indeed well there we go we leave it on that thank you very much yeah as mentioned once again thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast my pleasure tristan and anytime really thank you so much well there you go there was professor Professor Paul de Cartlidge talking all things sex and sexuality in classical Sparta, wrapping up our special Sparta miniseries this December. I hope you enjoyed the episode that you enjoyed the series. Leave us a comment. Let us know your thoughts. Last thing from me,

wherever you get your podcasts from, please be sure to follow or to subscribe to The Ancient so that you're notified you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.