The Art of Manliness - #461： The Spartan Regime

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast for thousands of

00:00:19.420 years the spartans have captured the imaginations of westerners in ancient greece the city-state was

00:00:24.060 admired for its military prowess civic unity and dedication to leisurely athletic pursuits

00:00:28.860 today we make movies about spartans and name sports teams after them when we moderns think of

00:00:33.640 spartans we typically think of them simply as fierce warriors but while the spartans were indeed

00:00:37.800 fierce warriors their culture is much more complex today on the show i unpack some of these

00:00:41.840 complexities with historian paul ray paul is working on a series of books with yel university

00:00:46.180 press which explore both the military and political strategy of the spartans we begin our conversation

00:00:50.720 discussing why it's hard for us moderns to truly understand sparta we then dig into the history

00:00:55.220 and culture of spartans including where they came from their economic setup and relationship

00:00:59.000 with the helot population and the strenuous upbringing of boys that made them fit for battle 1.00

00:01:03.380 we then talk about the mixed government of the spartans and we end our conversation discussing

00:01:07.040 how the city-state faded into obscurity and why the spartans yet live on in modern culture

00:01:11.420 after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash sparta and find links to resources

00:01:16.520 we're going to delve deeper into this topic paul joins me now via clearcast.io

00:01:20.680 paul ray welcome to the show pleasure to be here so you are a professor of history political history

00:01:34.620 and you've written some books you're working on a series of books about sparta so the spartans i

00:01:38.720 think are interesting because they they enjoy a very prominent place in our collective and popular

00:01:43.560 culture there's movies written made about spartans books written about spartans teams are

00:01:48.960 named named after spartans so i think we feel like we know them well but in your book the first one

00:01:55.320 in this series you quote winston churchill his phrase describing russia where he used it for the

00:02:02.240 spartans saying they're a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma so do we actually know much

00:02:08.220 less about the spartans than is commonly thought well it depends on what you mean by the word

00:02:13.320 no if if you mean do we have less information about them than about other communities the answer is

00:02:23.420 we have more information about them than about most communities the obstacle to our understanding

00:02:30.560 is the way we see the world we live in a liberal regime it's it's a product of a certain kind of

00:02:39.500 political science and we're used to thinking in terms of say the primacy of economics uh are you

00:02:47.580 better off now than you were eight years ago being the sort of thing a presidential candidate could say

00:02:53.440 in in running against someone who is in office but also we think primarily in institutional terms

00:03:02.580 separation of powers separation of powers federalism and so forth the ancient greeks thought in different

00:03:11.680 terms and let me give you a an example of of how that might be in the 19th century we forced japan to

00:03:19.240 open up and the japanese horrified by our military intervention in tokyo harbor sent the crown prince

00:03:28.040 to the great capitals of europe and they invited the european powers to send embassies to japan they

00:03:36.060 were looking for support against us and in england a conversation i'm told took place between a an

00:03:45.120 english civil servant and one of the attendants of the japanese crown prince and the english civil servant

00:03:52.240 asked what were your instructions and the japanese the attendant to the crown prince said i don't quite

00:03:59.980 know what you're me what you mean and he said well we sent an embassy to japan and our instructions were

00:04:05.560 to find out what do they produce that we might buy what don't they produce that we might sell to them

00:04:11.940 what are their defenses like do they have navigable rivers and so forth and the japanese the attendant

00:04:19.980 to the crown prince responded ah now i see he said we were asked to find out what do the english bow

00:04:26.420 down to well we don't when we think of a political regime or form of government that's not the first

00:04:32.860 question we ask but in a way that's the first question you have to ask in order to understand the

00:04:39.200 spartans so when when when i talk about the spartan regime i'm talking about a whole way of life

00:04:46.660 a set of practices that that begin with birth and end with death that are set by the spartan laws and

00:04:56.640 and by spartan customs that essentially have the force of law and not just about the distribution of

00:05:04.400 powers between different magistrates when you look at it that way we have a great deal of information

00:05:11.800 about sparta because aristotle was interested in this plato was interested in this and plutarch

00:05:18.160 was interested in this xenophon was interested in this and plutarch had access to certain writings

00:05:24.500 of aristotle the constitution of the lack of daemonians that we don't have and he drew rather heavily on it

00:05:31.240 so we get a kind of of comprehensive picture of sparta if you put together what we're told by

00:05:38.780 herodotus and thucydides and plato and xenophon aristotle and plutarch and you can begin to see

00:05:46.240 how the whole way of life works so that's one obstacle another obstacle is we tend to think of a city

00:05:54.620 as urban but the greek polis actually was rural in character there was a town but the vast majority of

00:06:03.880 the citizens were farmers from the countryside and that distinguishes by by the way the the ancient

00:06:10.060 greek city and ancient rome from places like venice and florence where it's the cittadini who live in

00:06:17.480 the città in the city who are citizens and the contadini who live in the rural district called the contado

00:06:24.120 are not citizens they're subjects so the the the greek city is agricultural in character

00:06:31.680 and that shapes it profoundly yeah so i mean i go so i guess the problem is it's hard to know because

00:06:39.060 it's just in a way it's very foreign to us we tend to think of sparta the greek city states using what

00:06:45.060 we know about politics or what a city is and when we do that there's a mismatch and so we you miss the

00:06:52.180 mark a bit right we we we read certain elements in the makeup of say athens and we put great emphasis

00:07:03.020 on them because they're familiar to us or there's something like what we know and then we miss what

00:07:10.320 is alien now that that's a that's a common phenomenon you know and it it it infects uh international

00:07:17.720 relations a great deal we have a tendency to read our own predilections into foreign countries and

00:07:25.520 the consequence is we very often misinterpret what they're up to because it's so alien to us we we

00:07:34.180 don't play pay much attention to what we would call cultural differences but what the ancient greeks

00:07:40.820 called regime differences so okay so another thing that makes it mysterious then too so we we have

00:07:46.700 descriptions from ancient historians and ancient philosophers or ancient political scientists

00:07:50.880 like aristotle of the spartan way of life and so because sparta was really a way of life right like

00:07:58.820 it you know it's not like today where we can look at our government as you were saying earlier

00:08:02.980 and see these institutions that define us like for sparta like government or the regime it was like it was

00:08:10.260 internal like it was actually something in like it was baked into the person and so to really

00:08:15.300 understand it you have to see it in action or see descriptions of it in action you can't just

00:08:19.700 look at a constitution and get i mean get some glimpse of it but you're not going to get the whole

00:08:24.400 picture that's right you've got to look at the way of life it's as if to understand america you had

00:08:30.480 to understand monday night football right right no yeah that makes sense and but also were the spartans

00:08:36.380 secretive in any way like were they very uh reluctant to allow outsiders into their community

00:08:42.720 they were secretive in two different ways they were laconic they they uh our word comes from

00:08:50.140 from a name for them lacones they were laconic meaning they prided themselves on the brevity

00:08:58.380 of of of what they said so you you it's like the vermont farmer who answers every question yep

00:09:06.280 yep that was one aspect of it set of habits second aspect of it is they didn't allow foreigners to

00:09:15.600 come to sparta except with permission and they didn't often give permission and they didn't allow

00:09:22.900 their own citizens to travel freely once again you had to have permission and they didn't give

00:09:30.120 permission for young people to leave like a dime on so they were a mystery even in their own time 0.96

00:09:38.260 and sometimes it was hard to get information thucydides in one passage talks about the

00:09:44.800 krypton taste poly polytheas the the secretiveness of the regime and for example he he's trying to figure out

00:09:54.600 how many soldiers they put in the field and it's hard to get a fix on it for him and he's actually

00:10:01.760 spent time at sparta so they they're they're terse they're brief in what they say they're secretive

00:10:11.140 and then they have institutions that make it hard for you to get access to them okay well let's talk

00:10:16.340 we'll get into more of the these institutions here in a bit but let's talk about the origins of the

00:10:19.980 spartans they settled in an area but they're not originally from there where did the spartans come

00:10:26.180 from and why did they settle in this one part of greece well we we can only we can only speculate on the

00:10:33.320 basis of legend they seem to come from northern greece from the other side of the corinthian gulf

00:10:41.680 they there is a legend that they crossed the corinthian gulf on rafts which it's quite possible to do

00:10:49.080 there's one place where there's only a mile across and they they see themselves as invaders now

00:10:56.160 ordinarily that would be something you wouldn't say about yourself that you are alien to the place

00:11:02.440 because it undercuts your claim to be the legitimate landholders there so the athenians for example

00:11:10.740 insist that they're born from the earth that is to say that they sprung up from the territory their

00:11:16.080 blood in the soil are one in the same the spartans make a different claim about themselves and it's

00:11:21.900 probably true because it's to their disadvantage they counter the the the attack on them that would

00:11:29.520 be made that they were interlopers didn't belong there claiming that they are the followers of the

00:11:35.760 true owners of the land who are the descendants of the hero heracles who was a prince from the northern

00:11:43.800 peloponnesus who is said to have earned by his labors a claim to the peloponnesus as a whole

00:11:51.920 and his his heirs down the generations had made multiple attempts to make good on that claim and they only

00:12:00.780 succeed when they are leading these lacedaemonians into the peloponnesus and then they move into the 0.99

00:12:08.760 richest part of the peloponnesus in terms of good land which would be laconia they are dorians they 1.00

00:12:15.900 say and the mycenaeans are dorians too and came at the same time and the argives are dorians too

00:12:22.340 and came in the same invasion so these are three peoples who have a common legend i'm inclined to

00:12:29.840 think there's probably something to the legend these things tend not to be made up out of whole cloth

00:12:36.680 they tend to be tends to be a kernel of truth and around that kernel of truth that gets charted up

00:12:42.940 in in a variety of ways we know that there is a new people and we know this from archaeology

00:12:50.340 in lacedaemon somewhere around the the 10th century and around sometime in the 8th century bc

00:13:00.120 we can be begin to see evidence of uh farming settlements these people may have have invaded

00:13:08.200 and they may have brought flocks with them that may have been the way they operated they there's

00:13:13.920 much in their mythology that would suggest a connection with transhumans that is to say with

00:13:19.900 conducting flocks from uh from the highlands uh where they would be in the summer down to the

00:13:25.900 lowlands in the winter we can't be sure about any of this right but how how so how soon did we start

00:13:32.660 seeing a political organization that started you could say that was okay this is starting to look

00:13:38.300 like something like sparta uh the first the the the evidence would suggest by about 750 you're beginning

00:13:47.700 beginning to see something more than bands led by chieftains and you're beginning to see a settling down

00:13:55.400 and a turn towards agriculture and there appear to be five villages and there's four in in one place and

00:14:04.740 then there's a fifth village uh a bit to the south that seems to have been incorporated into

00:14:11.540 lacedaemon there's clearly a population in laconia which is where they first go before they get there

00:14:20.760 and we have legends about that you can see it in homer's odyssey and the account of telemachus's

00:14:28.220 voyage from initially from ithaca to pylos in mycenaia and then on to lacedaemon where he meets

00:14:36.820 menelaus and helen and recently and i mean in the last five six years they've discovered a mycenaian

00:14:45.060 palace in southern laconia not where sparta is but south of where sparta is and that may well be

00:14:52.340 the palace that telemachus is supposed to have visited there is a kind of overrunning by the

00:14:59.980 lacedaemonians of laconia and whatever population is there when they arrive much of it gets turned 0.84

00:15:11.200 into helots subjects yeah let's talk about the helots yeah there there are two kinds of helots there are

00:15:18.060 helots in laconia sometimes they're called by the spartans the old helots the old helots they are

00:15:26.220 probably achaean in origin you've you've got to think about the the population that existed

00:15:33.380 under menelaus and helen then there are the helots of mycenaia sometime towards the end of the 8th

00:15:42.680 century and our our dates become a little more solid when you get towards the end of the 8th century

00:15:50.160 say 720 715 the spartans cross mount taigatos which is a range of mountains that run north and south

00:16:00.800 between laconia in the east and mycenaia in the west they cross those mountains and they conquer the

00:16:08.260 river valley in mycenaia the river valley the valley of the pymesos which is even richer than than the river

00:16:17.340 valley in laconia where they live and they subject the people of mycenaia who are dorians like the 1.00

00:16:25.480 spartans and they then draw income mainly in in the form of agricultural products from mycenaia and

00:16:35.060 it's at this point that the spartans begin uh we have some reason to think to develop a way of life

00:16:42.580 based on leisure and on leisure devoted to gymnastics and to sports and of course to war

00:16:52.040 so so the helots i mean people often think of them as slaves were they slaves like similar how other

00:16:58.040 greek city states practice slavery was it different no they're not slaves in the traditional sense

00:17:04.180 they're not chattel they can't be sold they're not owned by a particular spartan individual

00:17:12.820 they are subject to sparta as a community and in a sense are owned by sparta as a community

00:17:21.500 but they they don't operate for the most part in the households of individual spartans

00:17:28.100 they operate on farms from which they are required to provide a kind of competence for individual

00:17:38.180 spartans so there's an allotment of land assigned to each individual spartan more or less at birth

00:17:45.600 probably takes possession of that land when he completes the agoge and becomes an adult

00:17:51.560 and then he receives from that land a portion of the crop so these helots are like sharecroppers 0.97

00:18:00.240 but they're also like serfs because they're bound to the land and there's something like slaves

00:18:07.740 because they they really have very limited rights once a year the spartan efforts declare war

00:18:15.620 on the helots and it's it's it's an opportunity to kill a helot if you want to kill a helot so it's an 0.50

00:18:23.800 unenviable status to say the least but it's not like slaves so for example if you go to athens they

00:18:31.240 have loads and loads of slaves most of these slaves are barbarians and they are owned by individual 0.84

00:18:38.240 athenians and they don't have families they're not settled on land that they have some sort of

00:18:45.620 claim to the helot has a claim to the share to a share of the crop that he produces from the land

00:18:51.380 that he works so it's it's a more complex status in some ways better off than slaves are because

00:19:01.080 these helots have families and they have some sort of claim to a share of the crop in other ways

00:19:07.740 which have to do with the brutality of the spartans maybe they're worse off than slaves and but another

00:19:13.900 interesting thing about the helots is that they outnumbered the spartans considerably i think it

00:19:18.040 was that one number was estimated seven to one the information we are provided by herodotus suggests a

00:19:24.040 ratio of seven to one there are modern scholars who think that's impossible on the basis of sort of

00:19:30.600 social science analysis of the land and how many people it will support and so forth i'm skeptical of

00:19:37.120 such analyses so i mean how did but how did the i mean okay whatever the number was how did

00:19:42.540 the spartans keep these guys in control so there's the annual killing i mean how else did the helots

00:19:50.000 outnumbering them influence how they organize themselves or organize their culture probably and

00:19:55.540 we don't have evidence for this but it's it's hard to believe that the spartans didn't have

00:20:00.700 garrisons in mycenia and it's hard to believe that they didn't have magistrates that oversaw

00:20:08.880 the helots in particular areas but the main the main thing that they used to keep the helots down was

00:20:15.460 terror and it worked in two ways one this annual declaration of war and second they had a way of

00:20:22.420 training 18 year olds you you complete the agoge which is the upbringing the kind of formation that 0.99

00:20:29.020 runs from about seven age seven to about 18 and looks like a rather more serious version of the cub

00:20:36.540 scouts and the boy scouts and the explorers and they then spend a year in which they are given a dagger

00:20:46.980 and they they hide out and they have to steal their food and my guess is that a lot of this takes

00:20:56.600 place in mycenia and the food is stolen from helots and they do it by night and one of the reasons that 0.96

00:21:04.980 they that they may have this institution of the cruptea is there are mountainous areas in mycenia

00:21:12.680 in particular and it's extremely difficult to police mountainous areas so if you look at the persian

00:21:21.080 empire for example there are certain mountainous areas that sometimes the persian king has to travel

00:21:26.180 through and he doesn't really control those mountainous areas there are wild tribes that

00:21:30.540 control them and he has to pay a kind of penalty for passing through and the reason is it's it's not

00:21:37.740 worth the effort and the expense of putting soldiers into those mountains and keeping them there to to

00:21:46.940 police those mountains and there's a long history in the balkans and elsewhere in the world where there are

00:21:54.020 mountainous areas of bandits in a bandit gangs that maintain control in these wilder areas one way to

00:22:03.280 counteract that possibility within mycenia is you send out young spartans with daggers and their task is

00:22:13.940 not to bring back scalps in the little literal sense but their their task is to kill these helots 0.99

00:22:20.460 runaways so you mentioned the ago game which started age seven like because to walk us through so you

00:22:26.660 said it's like an extreme form of cub scouts boy scouts so what was it like you're seven years old

00:22:31.700 what happens when you turn seven if you're a boy okay you leave your mother and you leave your father

00:22:37.620 now your connection with your father is is is not that strong because he's he doesn't really live at home

00:22:44.640 he visits he he lives in the sisidia with his fellows in a kind of squad and takes his meals there and

00:22:53.960 spends the night there most of the time may slip off to visit his wife from time to time but you take

00:22:59.820 the boy away from his mother and you take him into a kind of camping arrangement with other boys his age

00:23:07.180 and you teach him the traditions of sparta but you put him through exercises all the time

00:23:14.160 and you teach him poetry there's a kind of their choirs that of spartan boys uh music is is central

00:23:23.420 to spartan life and as you move from seven to twelve there are kind of boundaries in this and then on to

00:23:32.880 17 and 18 there there are you rise through age you're a member of an age class and as you get

00:23:42.940 older they they do different things with you in the way of the games that you play in the ways of the

00:23:51.620 ordeals that you go through so it gets more and more intense as time goes on and more and more

00:23:59.300 physically demanding you're being prepared for full citizenship and full citizenship involves

00:24:06.020 military service but you're also being prepared for being cunning and being able to operate on your

00:24:16.800 own one of the striking features about sparta in say the fifth century is you the spartans can send

00:24:24.700 one spartan to siracusa to help the siracusans against the athenians and that can be decisive

00:24:31.140 a single spartan providing leadership and guidance can so hearten the siracusans that they outwit the 0.71

00:24:39.300 athenians and defeat them similarly you can send brassidas with a group of emancipated helots and a

00:24:48.220 mercenary army no other spartans up into northern greece towards amphipolis and thrace and he can wreak

00:24:56.640 havoc because the kind of education that he has received makes him self-reliant to a degree that

00:25:05.840 is astonishing for the other greeks so a single spartan can tip the balance we're going to take a

00:25:11.940 quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show well okay so you mentioned a few

00:25:17.620 things there that i like to unpack so you mentioned part of the yagogi training was poetry singing

00:25:23.060 songs which is interesting because i think a lot of times when people think spartans they think oh

00:25:26.820 they had no culture they didn't have an appreciation for art but right there that's they have an

00:25:32.520 appreciation for art yes yes and actually at least in the early days the art that is produced within

00:25:39.060 laconia and i'm thinking of pottery is quite beautiful there there seems to be a turning away from

00:25:46.080 that later but poetry is absolutely central to their lives and the poetry is focused on war on the

00:25:56.220 accomplishments of individual spartans in particular situations we have snatches of it from a poet called

00:26:04.800 tertius who's a contemporary uh he's sort of two generations after the original conquest of mycenaia

00:26:13.340 at a time when mycenaia rebelled and the spartans are reconquering it and his poetry mostly has to

00:26:19.840 do with that reconquest but it's very impressive and they memorize it they memorize large swaths of

00:26:26.320 poetry poetry may be more central to spartan life than it is to athenian life yeah that's interesting

00:26:32.600 that's counterintuitive we think that the athenians are more cultured and they would put an emphasis on

00:26:36.680 on that yeah it's a different kind of culture focused on um comedy and tragedy which you don't

00:26:43.980 have in sparta sparta what you've got is lyric poetry and these are kind of like ballads of great

00:26:50.600 deeds yes that's right so i mean okay that's the other question i mean it's like why like why

00:26:56.760 so the spartans were able to live this life of leisure thanks to the the helots why did they decide

00:27:03.600 we're just going to spend all that leisure time that we have freed up time to become the best

00:27:09.000 warriors possible where you know another city state say like athens they'd be like well uh when you

00:27:13.900 have lots of leisure that allows you to do philosophy um why didn't why did the the spartans go that way

00:27:19.360 well you got to be a little careful about this claim about athens and philosophy okay uh the the

00:27:25.180 people who did philosophy were considered uh freaks they were marginal in character it's not an

00:27:31.580 accident that socrates was executed the the ordinary athenian his focus would be more on tragedy and

00:27:40.300 comedy than on philosophy philosophy really is marginal it's very important to us it's the thing

00:27:47.660 about athens that may be the most important to us but it's not so terribly important to fifth century

00:27:54.820 athenians at least to the common people now the well-to-do the hoity-toity the the the men of great

00:28:03.100 aristocratic families they dabbled in it so what you have to when you think about sparta you have to

00:28:09.500 think about it as a kind of combination of a military camp and maybe a baseball camp where you're working out

00:28:19.920 before the season begins and you have to think about the spartans as people who love sports they

00:28:27.060 love sports they love horse races they love hunting in other words there it is not altogether grim

00:28:34.300 they do not eat meals that you and i would enjoy and in fact they're they're notorious for the sort of

00:28:42.300 simplicity of their fare but when you move into the sphere of sports it's a kind of exciting life that

00:28:51.040 they lead and it's a life of leisure that that the upper classes elsewhere in greece envy the spartans

00:28:58.220 for and that's another thing we have trouble with we admire athens but the greeks generally admired

00:29:06.620 sparta much more than athens what what do they admire about it they just admire their pursuit of

00:29:11.220 excellence and they admired their accomplishments on the battlefield so when pericles in the funeral

00:29:16.920 oration that thucydides lays out that wants to make the case for athens the foil is always sparta

00:29:24.660 and the deciding factor you know the thing that decides that athens is superior to sparta

00:29:31.540 is athens wins on the battlefield you've got to that's the standard and it's the accepted standard

00:29:38.580 even in athens so the spartan success on the battlefield is envied their leisure is envied that's

00:29:48.160 that's what everyone would like to have not to have to work their use of that leisure for horse racing

00:29:55.400 for hunting that that is also admired and the the role of music in their lives that is also admired

00:30:06.720 the people in greece who are most critical of the spartans are people like plato and aristotle

00:30:12.620 who intimate that the spartans raise their children like beasts but if you look at at the at the well

00:30:19.340 to do throughout greece throughout you know fossos and amphipolis and so forth what they admire

00:30:27.260 is is is this way of life which of course is based upon a very large subject population

00:30:36.140 no one in greece feels any shame about enslaving other human beings that's another thing we have 0.55

00:30:45.940 trouble getting our minds around it's it's just an accepted institution aristotle in his politics

00:30:53.840 raises the question whether or not a lot of the people who are in practiced enslaved are worthy to

00:31:01.300 be free men with the implication that perhaps a lot of the people who are free men are worthy to be

00:31:07.100 enslaved so he sets another kind of standard but you've got to keep in mind the philosophers are on

00:31:13.820 the margins here the mainstream of people are proud of their domination of other peoples i think you

00:31:21.700 mentioning that the other greeks like upper class greeks and other city states admire the spartans

00:31:25.880 didn't some of them actually send their kids to the spartan agogi well yes xenophon did for example

00:31:32.460 an athenian there wasn't a whole lot of that and it may not have happened in the fifth century

00:31:38.540 it certainly happens in the fourth century because we begin hearing about it in the fourth century

00:31:44.000 and the spartans open up a bit in the fourth century because after the peloponnesian war which they

00:31:50.320 win they establish an empire throughout greece more or less in imitation of the empire that the athenians

00:31:58.280 had had and in establishing an empire they have to they have to open themselves up to the larger world

00:32:07.080 and that that is consistent with bringing people to sparta and putting them through the spartan agogi

00:32:14.600 one consequence of this by the way is our best information about sparta comes in the fourth

00:32:22.340 century when they're forced to open up in this way in the writings of xenophon plato and aristotle

00:32:28.820 so we mentioned the agogi that's what something that the kids went through is their education

00:32:32.540 what happened after that you mentioned they kind of got assigned to a squad basically well in between

00:32:39.600 comes the cruptea the sort of testing time where as individuals they're given a dagger and they are

00:32:47.160 sent out to fend into the wilds to fend for themselves so that's a rite of passage and at the

00:32:54.140 end of this rite of passage they can be elected to a particular sissidia which is a men's dining

00:33:02.440 club slash military squad it is one of the elements within the spartan army so if you were to fight

00:33:09.860 in the spartan army you will fight alongside or quite near in the battle line the members of your sissidia

00:33:16.980 and until you're 45 at least that's what i think there are others who think that there's an earlier

00:33:24.300 date on this you take your meals in the sissidia with your fellows who have elected you to membership

00:33:32.960 in it and one of them doesn't want you they can blackball you so it's it's like certain fraternities

00:33:39.420 and second you spend the night with your squad so sparta is like an encampment a military encampment

00:33:49.040 there are houses for the women and the children the men have something to do with those houses

00:33:54.840 but they tend to spend their nights with the military squad so in an emergency a king can have

00:34:03.840 a an instrument called the sol pinks blown and they can rise up they're already in their military units

00:34:10.820 they can rise up form up into a battle line and fight what what do they do in these clubs they just

00:34:18.660 like i mean they just talk and joke what do they do in these dining clubs telling stories telling

00:34:25.480 jokes it it is it is this that gives rise to their their brevity in other words there's there's a

00:34:35.620 certain style it's a little bit like twitter you you've got to get everything into a certain number

00:34:42.860 of words so quips are something that they're very proud of and it's a kind of of literary style

00:34:50.660 so you'll you'll say something to a spartan and he'll have a zinging comeback you know not not not

00:34:58.320 unlike a fred astaire ginger rogers movie i i can think of one where a woman says to ginger rogers 0.97

00:35:05.520 you're not as dumb as you look and she says i wish i could say the same for you that's the kind of

00:35:11.260 comeback that a spartan would have did so the you said the spartans every now and then when saw their 0.99

00:35:15.660 families when did they go see their families they may have visited them in the daytime you know in

00:35:21.600 between the other things that they're doing there there are stories about them slipping off at night

00:35:28.240 to visit their wives which is how procreation takes place interesting so it sounds like the life 0.96

00:35:35.980 of a spartan it was very public you didn't really have much of a private life like everything you did

00:35:41.160 everything with other people there really wasn't much going on that you had for yourself no there's

00:35:47.000 not much after 45 maybe there's a little more if you live that long and of course not everybody lives

00:35:54.460 that long the likelihood is that when you get to be 45 you're in the grave but not always

00:36:01.900 and then they live at home but there's another side to it this this attack on privacy pulling

00:36:09.980 young people into the public sphere at age of 70 a seven when they leave their mothers and the the

00:36:17.540 keeping of of of the men in the public sphere through the sicilia until they're 45 it may provoke a

00:36:26.540 reaction one of the interesting things is that we have the sayings of the spartan women you'd think 0.69

00:36:33.440 the spartan women would be inconsequential and yet we know much more about spartan women than we know

00:36:39.160 about athenian women it could be that if you take a boy away from his mother at the age of seven you

00:36:45.720 intensify the the relationship between the boy and the mother by depriving him of the close contact

00:36:55.220 and a lot of the sayings of the spartan women are sayings of spartan women to their sons you know

00:37:02.100 with come back with your shield or on it meaning come back with your shield not having thrown it

00:37:07.460 away as a coward does or on it as a dead man those are the choices think of having a mother like that

00:37:13.820 so it also it could be that the relations between spartan men and their wives are quite intense

00:37:20.880 because they're kept apart the way they're kept apart and so you cherish the time together much

00:37:27.880 more it's very hard to tell but you know when you have a society that is organized in such a way that

00:37:34.120 it emphasizes the public you may get a kind of natural human reaction that emphasizes the private

00:37:41.800 and i mention this because one of the other things that we're told about the spartans by plato in

00:37:47.520 particular is their houses are very simple on the outside but they're very luxurious on the inside

00:37:55.720 another thing we're told and it seems almost certainly to be true is the spartans are notoriously

00:38:02.580 open to bribery in other words there there there there is a kind of suppressed private concern for wealth

00:38:09.120 and the suppression intensifies it rather than eliminating it yeah i mean that so yeah the spartans

00:38:16.180 also are famous for their sumptuary laws where they couldn't even own money publicly right they

00:38:21.260 use these big but apparently in the houses there's money buried right so yeah that's that's interesting

00:38:26.720 as you said when you suppress it when you say oh we do not we do not do this for money we do everything

00:38:32.660 for glory if you suppress that desire for wealth then people privately are going to go crazy with wealth

00:38:39.040 yeah yeah look if you have separate schools for boys and girls their interest in one another

00:38:47.100 is intensified not reduced so we haven't talked about sparta's government tell us about that how is

00:38:53.680 unique from other greek city-states yeah sparta is the first constant has the first sort of

00:38:59.460 institutional structure that we know of that involves what you might call a distribution of powers

00:39:07.180 and a kind of checking and balancing so in the beginning uh the dominant figures at sparta are the two kings

00:39:17.240 there are two kings two different families both tracing their ancestry back to heracles

00:39:24.340 purportedly at some time very early in spartan history a king had twin sons and the kingship was

00:39:34.100 divided between them and so you have the europontid house and you have the aegid house 0.96

00:39:39.240 and sparta almost certainly begins as two bands of raiders led by chieftains each of whom claims to be

00:39:49.920 heraclid derivation around 750 there appears to have been a kind of rebellion by the notables within

00:40:01.920 sparta and what you get out of that is the establishment of a council of elders it's called

00:40:09.940 the gerousia and and gerousia has the same root as geriatric or gerontology it refers to old people

00:40:17.620 uh in the period where we know a lot about it you have to be 60 years old to be eligible for election

00:40:23.900 to the gerousia and it's drawn from certain families in that period which suggests that there is a time

00:40:31.100 in which an imbalance is established between a spartan aristocracy an aristocracy within the spartan

00:40:38.540 community and the two kings later and and there's an office that is used to check the king

00:40:46.940 that is called the effort the the ephoroi they are called and there are five of them

00:40:53.280 perhaps one to each of the constituent villages of sparta but maybe not that way in the beginning

00:40:59.080 and in fact maybe there are only three in the beginning representing the three ancestral tribes

00:41:05.700 of the dorians there there's there's some indication there are spartan colonies that only

00:41:10.900 have three efforts which suggests that very early on there were only three

00:41:14.660 and that suggests that they that they are drawn from the well-born within these three tribes

00:41:22.700 these three dorian tribes but by the middle of the 7th century the there there seemed to be five

00:41:31.700 efforts which would fit the five constituent villages and there appears to have been a kind of

00:41:37.440 democratic reform one that left intact the garcia changing nothing there left intact the kingship the two

00:41:49.940 families but took the effort and democratized it and there's reason to think this takes place in the

00:41:59.840 seventh century in connection with a military reform that takes place in which you have the emergence of

00:42:07.860 the hoplite phalanx this is built on a particular piece of equipment called the aspis and sometimes called

00:42:15.340 the hoplon which is carried by a hoplite and what it is is it's a large circular shield of the sort that

00:42:23.240 people see on greek vases for example and at the center of the shield is a hook you put your left arm

00:42:30.860 through that hook and you carry the weight on the left arm based on that hook and a hook on the right

00:42:39.900 rim of the shield so you you have your arm through the hook in the middle of the shield and you grasp

00:42:46.340 the the hook uh on the on the right side of the shield and if you think about this this is a shield

00:42:54.020 that will cover your left side but not your right side and so it's a shield that's only good in a phalanx

00:43:02.220 where the man next to you in the battle line holds a shield that covers your right side and his

00:43:10.400 uh left side and the shield would be disadvantageous in ordinary fighting because it leaves your right 0.86

00:43:19.740 side uncovered and it's very hard to make use of that shield to cover the right side so it seems to be

00:43:25.580 designed for a particular military formation and that's the hoplite phalanx well the strength of the

00:43:32.680 hoplite phalanx depends to a very great degree it's an infantry phalanx it depends to a very great degree

00:43:39.560 on the number of people in it so what you want to do if you're forming a hoplite army is to maximize

00:43:46.520 the number of people in the battle line in the battle line of the of the phalanx and it's eight

00:43:53.620 men deep in the standard battle line so if somebody gets killed somebody else shoves in to replace them

00:43:59.680 in the position that they hold and here's the virtue of the hoplite phalanx a a cavalry charge can't

00:44:08.320 affect it because the horses will not go through a shield wall they will rear they will pull back

00:44:15.040 they they you can't get a horse to do what human beings sometimes do bang their head against a wall

00:44:20.340 a horse that is uh blind a horse that is mad with uh pain might plow into a phalanx but the other

00:44:33.040 horses they're going to veer away from it so you form this shield wall and you're pretty much

00:44:40.180 impervious to cavalry except on your flanks and of course if they come at you from behind

00:44:44.860 and then the battle is actually like a rugby scrum with shoving and pushing and and something you don't

00:44:53.320 get in a rugby scrum at least ordinarily stabbing and and killing and you need manpower for this to

00:45:02.140 make this thing work whereas the old manner of fighting suggested in homer may involve cavalry

00:45:09.820 that at certain points dismount well horses are very expensive it's like owning a porsche

00:45:17.000 so the cavalry warfare is the warfare they're wealthy in all human periods infantry warfare

00:45:26.220 especially the kind that you see with the hoplite phalanx is is the um is the warfare carried on by

00:45:33.540 ordinary men and quite naturally if you're going to fight for your country you're going to want to

00:45:43.600 have a say in the decisions of whether to go to war or not so there appears to be at sparta a

00:45:52.360 constitutional change that takes place 650 somewhere around that time then the whole thing is pretty much

00:46:02.120 set and so what you have is a monarchical element with the two kings an aristocratic element with the

00:46:11.960 gerasia elected from among certain families and a democratic element with efforts who seem to be

00:46:19.920 at least according to plato chosen by some sort of method that has kinship with a lottery to represent the

00:46:28.760 common people and the final element in it is there is an assembly and in that assembly it's one man one vote

00:46:37.380 so it's a mixed regime and different elements in it have different powers so for example

00:46:44.940 once a month the kings get together the two kings with the five efforts and the kings swear they'll

00:46:52.460 uphold the laws and the efforts well swear that they will uphold the power of the kings as long as they

00:46:59.660 uphold the laws and there's a threat in that and we know that in the fifth century i know of only

00:47:06.580 three kings in the fifth century who are not known to have been put on trial by the efforts on a

00:47:15.660 capital charge so there's there's there's a lot of infighting that goes on within the spartan

00:47:23.720 constitution and it seems to turn on the two kings and the evidence we have mainly from the fourth

00:47:31.480 century suggests that each king has his adherence it's almost as if you have a a two-party system

00:47:39.960 one representing the europontid line and the other representing the ageid line and the trial if a king

00:47:47.740 is tried takes place between before a court made up of the ephors and the gerousia there are 28 members

00:47:55.300 of the gerousia plus the two kings and their five efforts so the gerousia plays a crucial role at that

00:48:02.720 point and when the assembly meets it's the gerousia working as a probable unit council that sets the

00:48:10.040 agenda for the assembly so it's a very complicated political system and its function seems to be

00:48:18.120 to prevent anything from happening unless there's consensus and to produce consensus

00:48:24.000 and the agoge and the spartan way of life is also aimed at producing consensus

00:48:31.140 there should not be at sparta any kind of competition for wealth because everyone is provided for with an

00:48:40.160 allotment farm by helots and the city provides them with that so the kind of competition that comes from

00:48:47.660 a difference of economic interest would be eliminated the kind of competition that might come from

00:48:53.960 religious interests is eliminated because they all share a common religion it is a religious community

00:48:59.520 the kind of competition that comes from a difference of opinions is restricted because they receive a kind of

00:49:09.420 indoctrination during the agoge from age 7 to 18 and they live in a highly communal setting because of of the sicidia 0.96

00:49:21.520 so what competition is left well the rivalry for honor and for glory and of course the rivalry between the two royal houses

00:49:31.700 i'm curious during all this uh these reformations that happened to establish these these checks on

00:49:38.100 different groups did lycurgus was he a real person did he play a role was that or is that just sort of a myth

00:49:43.600 that was invented well again i don't think anything is very likely to be completely invented but there may be

00:49:53.180 accretions by the fifth century if you ask the spartan what did their form of government come from in their way

00:50:02.000 of life they would say lycurgus did everything but we have other evidence suggesting that the kingship

00:50:09.960 goes way way back that the gerosia and perhaps three efforts go back to about 750 and there was a list of

00:50:19.380 efforts of of the of the lead effort of the eponymous effort after whom the year was named they don't give

00:50:25.640 numbers to years they name them after the eponymous effort goes back to about 753 that suggests the

00:50:32.560 change at some point there clearly was a change from three efforts to five efforts and that seems to come

00:50:39.540 with hoplite warfare so who was lycurgus the most likely answer is he is the figure a member

00:50:49.240 of the royal family of one of the two royal families but not in line to be a king who led the

00:50:56.260 aristocratic opposition that produced the gerosia in other words if you if you if you look at the

00:51:03.240 evidence at what we're told about him clearly there are accretions that is to say things are attributed to

00:51:10.400 him that couldn't have been done by one person because they're done at radically different times

00:51:15.480 and the legendary character of him the fact that he's kind of lost in legend suggests that he lived

00:51:23.040 early and the likely time is about 753 we are told a story in plutarch which is almost certainly

00:51:31.680 derivative from aristotle's constitution of the lacedaemonians that points to that early period

00:51:38.340 and to his connection with setting up the gerosia and that makes perfect sense and the later changes

00:51:48.520 with regard to the effort there are sources that attribute those to two spartan kings acting in

00:51:55.560 cooperation with one another a europontid and an aegiad and we can date those spartan kings in a rough 0.90

00:52:02.900 and ready way to the first half of the seventh century so sparta had a very you know pretty

00:52:08.800 sophisticated political regime set up how long did it last well it depends on on on what you mean by

00:52:17.220 lasting right the the the spartans are rather successful from about 750 down to 320 362 excuse me

00:52:29.080 bc and actually a little before that say 371 bc and the foundation that emerges that allows them to be

00:52:39.100 such a force is their conquest of mycenaia so they have all this land and they have all of these laborers 1.00

00:52:45.460 which allows them to articulate their way of life and to be a military power you deprive them of

00:52:52.820 mycenaia which is what the thebans under apomenandus did in the second quarter of the fourth century bc

00:53:00.560 you deprive them of mycenaia and in the process you are undermining their capacity to put an army of

00:53:10.240 any size into the field and they never really come back after 371 if you mean by their way of life

00:53:20.040 life in laconia and as a kind of backwater something like disneyland it survives into the later roman

00:53:28.540 empire so there's a strong tradition there there are helots in laconia and there are small number of

00:53:37.160 spartiates many many smaller than there had been in the fifth century and they continue to lead a life

00:53:43.620 of leisure dedicated to hunting and gymnastics and so forth but they're completely inconsequential

00:53:49.380 and one of the reasons that that sparta the the sparta the hellenistic period and the roman period

00:53:56.620 is not destroyed is why bother they're inconsequential it's a kind of relic of an earlier age

00:54:04.240 but the real thing is over when apomenandus frees mycenaia and it is confirmed at the battle of

00:54:13.220 mantonia in 362 when the spartans try to make a comeback and they fight the battle to um to a

00:54:21.400 stalemate so nothing changes mycenaia remains independent arcadia which had is to the north

00:54:28.920 of sparta had been organized into a league by apomenandus and a city established to the northwest

00:54:36.380 west of sparta sort of between in an area to the north of sparta and mycenaia between sparta and

00:54:43.700 mycenaia in other words to the north of mount taigatos uh at a place called megalopolis the big city

00:54:49.660 that remains too so it's pretty much done for the spartans in 371 and their attempt at a comeback in

00:54:57.420 362 fails so it's about a 400 year rung yeah which is pretty good it's pretty good i mean we haven't

00:55:04.100 made it 400 years yet haven't made it yeah no we've got quite a while to get to that point so i mean we

00:55:10.040 throughout this conversation you've been talking about and i've kind of slipped into it too where

00:55:15.720 we praise and we feel like we have the most in common with athens but what's interesting and you

00:55:21.700 mentioned this in your book is that you know sparta figures much more prominently in our popular culture

00:55:26.360 like i said at the beginning we don't make movies or write books about athens really not so very many

00:55:31.680 not so very many well i mean here's the and even if when we do they're not that popular compared to

00:55:35.020 the ones about spartan like so like steven pressfield um he's written all those fictional accounts of

00:55:40.340 athens in in sparta he did one about the battle thermopoli with the gates of fire and the 300 and

00:55:47.420 that's got over 1500 views on amazon and then he has a novel uh that centers on athens and that only

00:55:53.220 has tides of war that only has 182 reviews like what do you think we feel like we have more in

00:55:59.320 common with athens but we actually when we make our choices about what we want to watch or read it's

00:56:05.020 about sparta well or what we want to name our football teams after right yeah we you know i'm in

00:56:11.240 michigan here and and michigan state has the spartans and i i wish that they would invite me to

00:56:18.100 give a lecture during halftime at a michigan state game about the real spartans but they haven't done

00:56:24.300 that yet i haven't even been invited to give a talk on sparta at at the university proper yet someday it

00:56:31.900 may come someone may think gosh we really ought to do this but the yeah it's thermopoli that that gives

00:56:41.220 the spartans their their sort of cultural leverage you have 300 men who fight to the death against an

00:56:49.600 invading persian army knowing perfectly well that they're going to die and this impressed the greeks 0.97

00:56:55.680 it actually impressed the spartans back home a lot it set a standard for them that was hard to live up to

00:57:02.940 and it impressed the greeks enormously the athenian victory at salamis was extremely important but it didn't

00:57:11.760 impress the greeks as much as the spartans willingness to die at thermopoli in in the way they did and their 0.97

00:57:19.780 relative success in stopping the whole persian army at a choke point you know until xerxes sends 10,000 persians 0.98

00:57:29.060 around the mountain to get behind the spartans that story is very very powerful so you know if you look

00:57:36.720 at the public schools in britain but they weren't modeled on athens they were modeled on sparta

00:57:42.300 if you think about the united states marines they're not modeled on athens they're they're modeled on sparta

00:57:50.000 so it's it's odd within a bourgeois society organized around commerce around sort of global

00:57:59.020 trade and so forth that more nearly resembles athens we still don't think first of athens

00:58:06.980 the scholars do the literature on athens is probably a thousand times as great as the literature on sparta

00:58:16.540 the secondary literature and until i started writing these books on sparta no one had ever written more

00:58:22.660 than one volume on sparta it was sort of an anthropological oddity from the perspective of

00:58:30.260 the scholarly world and so people would write a single volume sort of describing spartan institutions

00:58:35.600 and spartan practices but to actually look at their history and to to study the the situations they find

00:58:44.460 themselves in and how they cope there's very little on that everything is athenocentric but in the

00:58:50.520 popular world sparta is more of a focus than athens or even rome really you're working on a series of

00:58:58.240 books about sparta there's the spartan regime and then there's the grand strategy of classical sparta

00:59:03.800 you is there any more coming out in this series yes in next september yale university press

00:59:09.940 will publish the sparta's first attic war the grand strategy of classical sparta 478 to 446 bc

00:59:19.820 that book is in press now it's been copy edited it is about to be sent into production which means

00:59:27.220 they'll they'll produce page proofs there is a book coming after that it has been accepted for

00:59:33.240 publication by yale it is called sparta's second attic war the grand strategy of classical sparta

00:59:39.920 sparta 446 to 418 bc so the the first of these two volumes is about what scholars have called the

00:59:48.220 the first peloponnesian war writing from an athenian perspective it's the peloponnesian war but which at

00:59:54.220 the time was called by people in the peloponnesus the first attic war and then the the second volume is

01:00:02.140 about what scholars call the great peloponnesian war thucydides peloponnesian war and it's about the

01:00:08.360 the first 14 years of that war and the onset of that war which was called sparta's second attic

01:00:16.660 war so i'm following i'm trying to look at this this world through spartan eyes and that'll come

01:00:24.000 out in september 2020 okay well paul this has been a great conversation thanks for coming on my pleasure

01:00:29.900 my guest today was historian paul ray he is now working on a series of book about ancient sparta

01:00:34.720 you can find two of them right now the spartan regime and the grand strategy of classical sparta

01:00:39.160 on amazon just look up paul ray that's r-a-h-e and he's got a few more coming out in this series so be

01:00:44.680 on the lookout for that also check out our show notes at aom.is slash sparta where you can find

01:00:49.220 links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of

01:01:05.360 the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of

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01:01:24.260 until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

01:01:46.860 thank you for joining us

01:01:51.460 you

01:01:52.200 you

The Art of Manliness - November 26, 2018

#461： The Spartan Regime

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