The Ancients - The Truth About Spartan Society

Episode Date: June 29, 2021

Sparta. Situated in the southern Peloponnese, this ancient Hellenic city-state has become ingrained in popular imagination as the home of unmatched Greek super soldiers, trained for war since youth and raised within a system unlike any other in the Classical Greek world. But away from common perception, what do we actually know about Spartan society? Especially during the city’s ‘golden age’ in the 5th and early 4th centuries BC? What evidence do we have for some of the most renowned stories of Spartan lifestyle? How much of it can we believe? To provide a concise overview, Tristan was delighted to be joined by Professor Stephen Hodkinson, one of the leading authorities on ancient Sparta. Part 2 will be released in a couple of weeks.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients 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. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, we are focusing in on one of the most famous Hellenic city-states from antiquity,

classical Sparta. We're going to be looking at, shall we say, truth versus myth. It's difficult for me to say that because there is so much of ancient Sparta as you're about to hear which is incredibly debated but we're going to be looking at various aspects of classical Spartan society. We're going to be looking at social hierarchy, we're going to be looking at women, we're going to be looking at laconic sayings, the sayings of the Spartans and the influence of later writers, particularly a figure called Plutarch. Now to talk through all of these and more I was delighted to get on the show a leading ancient Sparta expert, a man who's got honorary citizenship at the modern town of Sparta today and this is Professor Stephen Hodkinson. This is going to be the first of two parts, the second part will be out in due course.

But in the meantime, here's Stephen. Stephen, it is an absolute pleasure to have another eminent Spartan historian on the show. It's really great to be here talking to you, Tristan. Now, war and society in classical Sparta, I mean, this seems like one of the most, shall we say, debated topics of antiquity. Well, it really is. It's extremely controversial.

And I seem to have spent most of my 30 or 40 years working on Sparta, trying to challenge orthodox traditional views. Well, let's start sorting fact from the fiction, truth versus myth. And first of all, when we talk about classical Sparta, what period in time are we talking about? Well, when we talk about classical Greece in general, we refer to the period from the end of the Persian Wars to the death of Alexander, that is 479 through to 323 BC. But for Sparta, it's better to think of a long classical period, starting half a century or so earlier, around 550 BC. This is the time about which we first get information about particular historical events. By then Sparta is

already the leading Greek city-state and its heyday lasts until its defeat at the Battle of Lutra in 371 BC and its subsequent decline of its power. It's also perhaps worth specifying the geography. Sparta had a comparatively large territory for a Greek city-state, about eight and a half thousand square kilometers, and it covered the southern half of the peninsula of the Peloponnese in southern Greece. And it comprised two regions, Sparta's home region of Lacedaemon to the east, and note here that the Spartans' official name was Lacedaemonioi, and then the conquered region of Messenia to the west, and the whole territory together was known as Laconachy. And this, for the time, it sounds like this is an absolutely huge geographical

region, especially when we compare it to the amount of land owned by the other city-states of the time. It is, yes. It dwarfs the majority of Greek city-states, which are much, much smaller in size. And it even dwarfs the territory of Athens. Spartan territory is about three or four times larger than the Athenian territory. So let's have a look at some of the aspects of Spartan society in depth. And one place I'd really like to start is with the classical Spartan social hierarchy, as it were. And let's work our way up. Who is at the bottom? Well, at the bottom, we've got the helots, and the helots are the Spartan slaves. Most of them work the Spartans' private estates, delivering half of the produce to their masters. Others were household servants in Spartan homes, and they may have been involved in other peacetime occupations too, but we lack hard evidence for

that. The helots also participated in military campaigns, mainly as personal servants to their masters, but increasingly they participated as active soldiers, but I think we'll talk about that in a bit more detail later. A couple of further points. First of all, I call the helots slaves, and this is quite a controversial term, but it's designed to show that they're not what they're often called, they're not serfs, they're not like medieval serfs tied to the land. Older scholarship viewed the helots as the property of the Spartan state, but the newer view is that they're the private property of individual Spartans, although that private ownership is subject to a greater than normal degree of communal intervention. So, for example, a Spartan could sell his helots,

but only within Spartan territory, not abroad. And the other point to make about the helots is that they're a self-reproducing slave population. They have their own families, and those in more distant parts of Laconicae must have had, and must have farmed the land with minimal direct Spartan intervention, and they probably had their own communities. And we have the evidence of archaeological survey in Messenia, which indicates a land populated by villages, whereas the helots close to Sparta lived in small hamlets or individual farms and were probably subject to closer supervision by their Spartan masters. It sounds like this whole title of helots, it sounds very unique in a sense. You mentioned that they seem like slaves, but you also mentioned that some further away they seem to have a bit

more, I hate to say the word independence, but I think you know what I mean by that. Is that why the topic of the helots and what their status was is so debated? Well, I think the main reason why their status is so debated in antiquity onwards is that the helots are Greeks. Many other states, Athens for example, imported their slaves from outside the Greek world. There were a small number of Greek slaves in other cities, but most of them were outsiders. They were what the Greeks regarded as barbarians. Whereas the Mycenaeans in particular, but even the helots in Lacedaemon are most definitely Greeks. And that stuck a jarring note with certain other Greeks. And ultimately, after Sparta's decline in the early 4th century, the helots of Messenia did gain their independence and formed their own new city-state of Messene,

and lived out as free Greeks like in the rest of the Greek world. And before they become these free Greeks and form the city-state of Mycenae, do we know of any uprisings with the helots against their Spartan overlords? Well, there's a big question about how many uprisings there were. We only have one definite uprising securely attested, that is a major revolt in the late 460s BC, sparked by a devastating earthquake which caused great loss of life among the Spartans. There are hints of other revolts, such as at the time of Marathon in 490. There's hints that that perhaps explains why the Spartans were late arriving at Marathon and didn't take part in the battle. But the reliability of the evidence for this and for other possible revolts is rather dubious.

However, we can say the Four Sixes Revolt was certainly a major one. It involved the helots in both Lacedaemon and Messenia. The Lacedaemonian Revolt was quickly crushed, but the Mycenae revolt lasted on for at least four to five years. The rebels held up at Mount Ithame, and the Spartans were unable to take it and eventually agreed to let the Mycenaean rebels go and depart out of the Peloponnese along with their wives and their children. Now, some scholars believe that this massive revolt led to an increasingly severe treatment of the helots, but there's little

evidence for this either way, and Thucydides does report a systematic secret killing of 2,000 prominent helots in the year 424, but the episode's historicity has been disputed. All we can say for certain is that the everyday lives of the Spartans doesn't seem to have been affected by this major revolt. It's often thought, and you see it in popular media, that the Spartans went around permanently armed. You see images of them standing guard over their labouring helots, whereas in fact the evidence is clear that the Spartans, like other civilised Greeks, went about their everyday lives unarmed. If we then go up the social hierarchy onto the next step of the ladder, as it were, who is above the helots? Well, the next step up is a group called the perioikoi,

and the term means those who dwell around. They're free men who live in communities scattered around Spartan territory, especially in Lacedaemon, but there are also a few perioikoi in Mycenae too. And they're very underappreciated, their role very underappreciated in the Spartan setup, partly because the evidence for them is only very generic and thin on the ground. Their communities have the full social range from alleged elite to farmers, fishermen, craftsmen, merchants. They're not citizens of Sparta. They're free, but not citizens of Sparta. But they do count as Lacedaemonians. So when the source talked about the Lacedaemonians, sometimes they do just mean the Spartans, but often they mean the Spartans plus the perioikoi, especially in a military context. And they fight in Sparta's armies, and they supply some 50 to 70% of Sparta's troops. And you mentioned it just there, so I'm guessing the next step on the social hierarchy ladder

are the Spartans themselves. Well, that's right. And Spartans is, of course, a modern term. The correct ancient Greek term is the Spartiates, Spartiartae. They're the citizens of Sparta itself. They all live in Sparta, but they have helot-worked estates across the territory of Lacedaemon and Mycenae. And the fact they have the helot slaves means that the Spartans don't have to work the land themselves. And except for the two kings and their immediate heirs, they all live a common lifestyle, both rich and poor, including a public upbringing, membership of a common mess, where they dine every evening, and a place in the army, and they share a common simple dress. But these common things,

they mask great differences in wealth. Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus claims that all Spartans have equal plots of land controlled by the state, but he's a late source and his evidence is infected by later events. The contemporary classical evidence is clear that Sparta had a normal system of private and unequal land ownership. And this was important because to retain membership of a common mess, you had to make a large monthly contribution of foodstuffs. And if you failed to make the contribution, you forfeited your mess membership. And if that happened, you also lost your citizen rights. And over the course of the classical period, land inequalities became bigger and large numbers of ordinary Spartans became impoverished, defaulted on their mess dues,

and lost their citizenship. And so the population of the Spartiates declined markedly. In around 480 BC, it was 8,000. After the Battle of Leutera in 371, it declined to under 1,000. Wow, that's a significant decline. It is. And it seems to be purely, well, not purely, but mainly this economic problem, increasing inequalities of wealth, a decline in the land holdings of ordinary Spartiates in liberty to make their mess dues and therefore loss of citizenship. No doubt there was a demographic element in that if you were teetering on the brink of being able to make your mess dues,

you might limit the number of children you had in order that your heirs wouldn't have their property subdivided. Because Sparta, like everywhere else, the property was subdivided among the sons and I would argue also among the daughters as well. And obviously we mustn't forget Sparta, like everywhere else, the property was subdivided among the sons, and I would argue also among the daughters as well. And obviously, we mustn't forget Sparta, remember, I think you're going to ask me about that a bit later. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles.

I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably, when we see it from hindsight, the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered

sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. Well, we can actually go into that right now. Absolutely. I mean, Spartan women, are they quite unique in the freedoms that they have in the ancient Greek world?

Well, I wouldn't say that they're totally unique. I mean, some aspects of the lives of Spartan women is actually quite close to that of other women from other Greek elites, shall we say, in that they're focused on managing their households, bringing up their daughters, and also their sons up to age seven when the sons go into the public upbringing. But they didn't have to engage in woolworking or making clothes, which was left to the helot slaves. But in other respects, yes, their life was very different. We can come on to the girls' education a bit later. But if we focus on the adult women, I'd say that it's not so much that they have more freedom.

I think this idea of Western-style liberated Spartan women is an anachronism. It's more that their roles are more integrated into the goals of the state, and also their roles are more significant elsewhere. And one aspect that I just hinted on earlier was their ownership of landed property. Aristotle says, and he's writing in the late 4th century, that they owned nearly two-fifths of the land. And how this came about is controversial. Some see it as part of Sparta's decline, that over time parents gave their daughters increasingly large dowries in land in order to attract marriages with wealthier male Spartans. I see it myself as a more long-standing situation that daughters always had the right to inherit land at the rate

of half the share of a son, and they would typically receive that share when they got married. And if on their parents' death there were no surviving sons at all, the daughters would inherit all the remaining land. And I've calculated that this system would produce a gendered distribution of property such that the women's share was approaching 40% precisely as Aristotle says. So this to me is a defining issue. As large landowners, this gives the women considerable influence, obviously within their own household, but also without it too. And we learned of some women exerting informal influence in politics. And in the fourth century, some Spartan women successfully invaded the male sphere of participating in the Olympic Games as owners of victorious teams of chariot horses.

But these inheritance rights also brought pressures, especially for unmarried girls. Because they were potential inheritors of large amounts of property, they became pawns in dynastic marriage alliances. Parents exerted control over their daughters' marriages. And young widows who were still of childbearing age also came under pressure to remarry. So that's why talking about freedom isn't quite appropriate. It's more a question of significance. I think the other distinctive feature that often causes astonishment is that, unlike elsewhere, married Spartan women could have more than one sexual partner. And this could happen in three main different ways.

First of all, several brothers could combine and marry a single woman, the practice known to anthropologists as Adelphic polyandry. And this was useful for poor families with many children who were worried about their children becoming impoverished. By combining to marry a single woman, these brothers limit the number of heirs they're likely to have, and they'll also gain from the woman's landholding. So that's one way that a woman could have more than one sexual partner. more than one sexual partner. Secondly, if a woman was married to an elderly man, there was a regulation whereby he was required to let his wife have sex with a younger, fitter man to produce more vigorous children. And the third way, and in some ways the most interesting, is that if a man didn't want to have a wife of his own, he could ask to borrow another man's wife to get children for him. And although this sounds like an arrangement controlled by the men, Xenophon, who describes it for us, and he's a contemporary

source, claims that the women were also keen because it brought them control over two different households, their original husbands and the household of the second man. Wow. And I must ask now about a famous scene we get in 300 right at the start and that famous story about how Spartan women would take their child up to the top of Mount Tygetus. Is that correct? And they would judge whether the infant child was suitable. Yes. I am guessing this is a bit of myth. Well, it's a controversial point, we say, as much about Sparta is, but I must absolve the women from this.

What the evidence is, Plutarch, and he's the only source for this, he's a late writer, claims that infants were inspected by the elders of the tribes. And if the infant was in good shape, the father was ordered to rear it. And it was given one of the tribes, and if the infant was in good shape, the father was ordered to rear it, and it was given one of the so-called 9,000 public plots of land. If the infant was deformed,

they, that is the elders, sent it to a place called the Apothetai, a chasm-like spot on Mount Taitos. Now, there's no clear evidence that this story is false, but on the other hand, Plutarch is a very late source. He's the only source to mention it. And the 9,000 plots of land that the infant supposedly gets, if it's sturdy, they're certainly a late invention. So there's a big question mark about the practice. But the women weren't involved. It was the man who took his infant to the elders, and the elders made the decision. Now, I should say that archaeologists have actually discovered and excavated a pit

in a chasm on Mount Tytos, and they found 46 human bodies dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BC, human bodies dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BC, but none of these skeletons was from anyone under the age of 18. It's been suggested that these were criminals, traitors, prisoners, or whatever. This find doesn't necessarily disprove Plutarch's evidence because there could have been another place of disposal, but it doesn't actually provide any support for it either. I'd definitely like to keep on the women for a bit longer because of course there's also that famous quote about the woman going to their husband, come back with your shield or upon it.

What is the story behind this? Well, it's a story that appears in the sayings of Spartan women which is found among the writings of Plutarch in his long work, The Morelia. There's two ways of interpreting the phrase. The normal one is that come back with your shield or brought home dead on your shield. Some people interpret it slightly differently. The alternative is to die on your shield. Now, the normal interpretation can't be true, because both the textual evidence and the archaeological evidence is unanimous that fallen Spartans were buried on the battlefield or in a nearby family territory,

if the battlefield was in enemy territory. And no battles took place near Sparta until the first ever invasion of Lacedaemon in 370 BC. So the practice could possibly relate to the period after 370 to battles fought near Sparta. But before then, it certainly can't have applied. And one of these barrels of fallen Spartan soldiers that has actually been excavated, it's in the cemetery of the Kerameikos in Athens, the fallen soldiers from King Pazeneus' expedition to Athens in 403 BC. Now, there is also a 6th century Laconian black figure cup, which shows the image of fallen soldiers being carried on their comrades' shoulders in a kind of procession but there's no indication where they're being carried. It could be a procession to the battlefield grave and there are no shields in the image either. In regards to these

laconic sayings in general of course with your on it, and there seem to be so many other ones, what do we think is the story behind all of these laconic sayings? Well, laconic sayings are a genuine historical phenomenon. They're attested in various sources in the classical period, but the only surviving collection of these sayings is in Plutarch's Morelia, and it comes under two subsections, Sayings of Spartans and Sayings of Spartan Women. And Plutarch was writing in the Roman Imperial period, end of the first, start of the second centuries AD. Now some of the sayings of Spartan men, but none of those of Spartan women, are repeats or near repeats of sayings attested in the classical period, but most of them, most of the sayings are not known from any classical source, and many of

the sayings bear the stamp of various philosophical schools in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries. Once Sparta declined as a political power in the middle of the 4th century, these schools adopted Sparta as a kind of moral ideal, and they took genuine features of classical Sparta but exaggerated them or they invented new features. And they created sayings to express these exaggerated or invented moral ideals. And I'll give you one example. Classical writers criticized the emptiness of Sparta's public treasury as a sign of the Spartans' love of money and evasion of their taxes. But the sayings turn this on its head. The empty treasury now becomes deliberate Spartan policy so that the guardians of the treasury wouldn't become corrupt. Now, what I've said actually pertains to most of the

Spartan sayings. They're creations of the school of Hellenistic philosophy in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC. But there is one group of sayings that comes later, that comes after Sparta's so-called 3rd century revolution in the late 3rd century, when kings Aegis and Cleomenes tried, and in the case of Cleomenes succeeded in creating equal public land holdings. And the sayings attributed to the lawgiver Lycurgus in the sayings of Spartans have the same stamp of equality as you find in the reforms that Aegis and Cleomenes put into effect. So these have a different origin but they're also sort of a later development, not to pertain to classical Sparta. I hope you enjoyed this podcast with the

leading ancient Spartan historian, Professor Stephen Hodkinson. Part two, where we look at food, we look at the elites, we look at the military of ancient Sparta, will be out in a few weeks time. See you in the next episode. Thank you.