#461： The Spartan Regime
Episode Stats
Summary
For thousands of years, the spartans have captured the imaginations of westerners. In ancient Greece, the city-state was admired for its military prowess, civic unity, and dedication to leisurely athletic pursuits. Today, we make movies about the Spartans and name sports teams after them. When we moderns think of spartan warriors, we typically think of them simply as fierce warriors. But while the spartsans were indeed fierce warriors, their culture is much more complex. On the show, we unpack some of these complexities with historian Prof. Paul Ray.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast for thousands of
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years the spartans have captured the imaginations of westerners in ancient greece the city-state was
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admired for its military prowess civic unity and dedication to leisurely athletic pursuits
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today we make movies about spartans and name sports teams after them when we moderns think of
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spartans we typically think of them simply as fierce warriors but while the spartans were indeed
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fierce warriors their culture is much more complex today on the show i unpack some of these
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complexities with historian paul ray paul is working on a series of books with yel university
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press which explore both the military and political strategy of the spartans we begin our conversation
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discussing why it's hard for us moderns to truly understand sparta we then dig into the history
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and culture of spartans including where they came from their economic setup and relationship
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with the helot population and the strenuous upbringing of boys that made them fit for battle
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we then talk about the mixed government of the spartans and we end our conversation discussing
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how the city-state faded into obscurity and why the spartans yet live on in modern culture
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after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash sparta and find links to resources
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we're going to delve deeper into this topic paul joins me now via clearcast.io
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paul ray welcome to the show pleasure to be here so you are a professor of history political history
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and you've written some books you're working on a series of books about sparta so the spartans i
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think are interesting because they they enjoy a very prominent place in our collective and popular
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culture there's movies written made about spartans books written about spartans teams are
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named named after spartans so i think we feel like we know them well but in your book the first one
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in this series you quote winston churchill his phrase describing russia where he used it for the
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spartans saying they're a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma so do we actually know much
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less about the spartans than is commonly thought well it depends on what you mean by the word
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no if if you mean do we have less information about them than about other communities the answer is
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we have more information about them than about most communities the obstacle to our understanding
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is the way we see the world we live in a liberal regime it's it's a product of a certain kind of
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political science and we're used to thinking in terms of say the primacy of economics uh are you
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better off now than you were eight years ago being the sort of thing a presidential candidate could say
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in in running against someone who is in office but also we think primarily in institutional terms
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separation of powers separation of powers federalism and so forth the ancient greeks thought in different
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terms and let me give you a an example of of how that might be in the 19th century we forced japan to
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open up and the japanese horrified by our military intervention in tokyo harbor sent the crown prince
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to the great capitals of europe and they invited the european powers to send embassies to japan they
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were looking for support against us and in england a conversation i'm told took place between a an
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english civil servant and one of the attendants of the japanese crown prince and the english civil servant
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asked what were your instructions and the japanese the attendant to the crown prince said i don't quite
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know what you're me what you mean and he said well we sent an embassy to japan and our instructions were
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to find out what do they produce that we might buy what don't they produce that we might sell to them
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what are their defenses like do they have navigable rivers and so forth and the japanese the attendant
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to the crown prince responded ah now i see he said we were asked to find out what do the english bow
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down to well we don't when we think of a political regime or form of government that's not the first
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question we ask but in a way that's the first question you have to ask in order to understand the
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spartans so when when when i talk about the spartan regime i'm talking about a whole way of life
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a set of practices that that begin with birth and end with death that are set by the spartan laws and
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and by spartan customs that essentially have the force of law and not just about the distribution of
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powers between different magistrates when you look at it that way we have a great deal of information
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about sparta because aristotle was interested in this plato was interested in this and plutarch
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was interested in this xenophon was interested in this and plutarch had access to certain writings
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of aristotle the constitution of the lack of daemonians that we don't have and he drew rather heavily on it
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so we get a kind of of comprehensive picture of sparta if you put together what we're told by
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herodotus and thucydides and plato and xenophon aristotle and plutarch and you can begin to see
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how the whole way of life works so that's one obstacle another obstacle is we tend to think of a city
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as urban but the greek polis actually was rural in character there was a town but the vast majority of
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the citizens were farmers from the countryside and that distinguishes by by the way the the ancient
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greek city and ancient rome from places like venice and florence where it's the cittadini who live in
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the città in the city who are citizens and the contadini who live in the rural district called the contado
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are not citizens they're subjects so the the the greek city is agricultural in character
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and that shapes it profoundly yeah so i mean i go so i guess the problem is it's hard to know because
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it's just in a way it's very foreign to us we tend to think of sparta the greek city states using what
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we know about politics or what a city is and when we do that there's a mismatch and so we you miss the
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mark a bit right we we we read certain elements in the makeup of say athens and we put great emphasis
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on them because they're familiar to us or there's something like what we know and then we miss what
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is alien now that that's a that's a common phenomenon you know and it it it infects uh international
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relations a great deal we have a tendency to read our own predilections into foreign countries and
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the consequence is we very often misinterpret what they're up to because it's so alien to us we we
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don't play pay much attention to what we would call cultural differences but what the ancient greeks
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called regime differences so okay so another thing that makes it mysterious then too so we we have
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descriptions from ancient historians and ancient philosophers or ancient political scientists
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like aristotle of the spartan way of life and so because sparta was really a way of life right like
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it you know it's not like today where we can look at our government as you were saying earlier
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and see these institutions that define us like for sparta like government or the regime it was like it was
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internal like it was actually something in like it was baked into the person and so to really
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understand it you have to see it in action or see descriptions of it in action you can't just
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look at a constitution and get i mean get some glimpse of it but you're not going to get the whole
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picture that's right you've got to look at the way of life it's as if to understand america you had
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to understand monday night football right right no yeah that makes sense and but also were the spartans
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secretive in any way like were they very uh reluctant to allow outsiders into their community
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they were secretive in two different ways they were laconic they they uh our word comes from
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from a name for them lacones they were laconic meaning they prided themselves on the brevity
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of of of what they said so you you it's like the vermont farmer who answers every question yep
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yep that was one aspect of it set of habits second aspect of it is they didn't allow foreigners to
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come to sparta except with permission and they didn't often give permission and they didn't allow
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their own citizens to travel freely once again you had to have permission and they didn't give
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permission for young people to leave like a dime on so they were a mystery even in their own time
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and sometimes it was hard to get information thucydides in one passage talks about the
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krypton taste poly polytheas the the secretiveness of the regime and for example he he's trying to figure out
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how many soldiers they put in the field and it's hard to get a fix on it for him and he's actually
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spent time at sparta so they they're they're terse they're brief in what they say they're secretive
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and then they have institutions that make it hard for you to get access to them okay well let's talk
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we'll get into more of the these institutions here in a bit but let's talk about the origins of the
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spartans they settled in an area but they're not originally from there where did the spartans come
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from and why did they settle in this one part of greece well we we can only we can only speculate on the
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basis of legend they seem to come from northern greece from the other side of the corinthian gulf
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they there is a legend that they crossed the corinthian gulf on rafts which it's quite possible to do
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there's one place where there's only a mile across and they they see themselves as invaders now
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ordinarily that would be something you wouldn't say about yourself that you are alien to the place
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because it undercuts your claim to be the legitimate landholders there so the athenians for example
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insist that they're born from the earth that is to say that they sprung up from the territory their
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blood in the soil are one in the same the spartans make a different claim about themselves and it's
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probably true because it's to their disadvantage they counter the the the attack on them that would
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be made that they were interlopers didn't belong there claiming that they are the followers of the
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true owners of the land who are the descendants of the hero heracles who was a prince from the northern
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peloponnesus who is said to have earned by his labors a claim to the peloponnesus as a whole
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and his his heirs down the generations had made multiple attempts to make good on that claim and they only
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succeed when they are leading these lacedaemonians into the peloponnesus and then they move into the
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richest part of the peloponnesus in terms of good land which would be laconia they are dorians they
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say and the mycenaeans are dorians too and came at the same time and the argives are dorians too
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and came in the same invasion so these are three peoples who have a common legend i'm inclined to
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think there's probably something to the legend these things tend not to be made up out of whole cloth
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they tend to be tends to be a kernel of truth and around that kernel of truth that gets charted up
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in in a variety of ways we know that there is a new people and we know this from archaeology
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in lacedaemon somewhere around the the 10th century and around sometime in the 8th century bc
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we can be begin to see evidence of uh farming settlements these people may have have invaded
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and they may have brought flocks with them that may have been the way they operated they there's
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much in their mythology that would suggest a connection with transhumans that is to say with
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conducting flocks from uh from the highlands uh where they would be in the summer down to the
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lowlands in the winter we can't be sure about any of this right but how how so how soon did we start
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seeing a political organization that started you could say that was okay this is starting to look
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like something like sparta uh the first the the the evidence would suggest by about 750 you're beginning
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beginning to see something more than bands led by chieftains and you're beginning to see a settling down
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and a turn towards agriculture and there appear to be five villages and there's four in in one place and
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then there's a fifth village uh a bit to the south that seems to have been incorporated into
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lacedaemon there's clearly a population in laconia which is where they first go before they get there
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and we have legends about that you can see it in homer's odyssey and the account of telemachus's
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voyage from initially from ithaca to pylos in mycenaia and then on to lacedaemon where he meets
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menelaus and helen and recently and i mean in the last five six years they've discovered a mycenaian
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palace in southern laconia not where sparta is but south of where sparta is and that may well be
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the palace that telemachus is supposed to have visited there is a kind of overrunning by the
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lacedaemonians of laconia and whatever population is there when they arrive much of it gets turned
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into helots subjects yeah let's talk about the helots yeah there there are two kinds of helots there are
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helots in laconia sometimes they're called by the spartans the old helots the old helots they are
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probably achaean in origin you've you've got to think about the the population that existed
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under menelaus and helen then there are the helots of mycenaia sometime towards the end of the 8th
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century and our our dates become a little more solid when you get towards the end of the 8th century
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say 720 715 the spartans cross mount taigatos which is a range of mountains that run north and south
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between laconia in the east and mycenaia in the west they cross those mountains and they conquer the
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river valley in mycenaia the river valley the valley of the pymesos which is even richer than than the river
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valley in laconia where they live and they subject the people of mycenaia who are dorians like the
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spartans and they then draw income mainly in in the form of agricultural products from mycenaia and
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it's at this point that the spartans begin uh we have some reason to think to develop a way of life
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based on leisure and on leisure devoted to gymnastics and to sports and of course to war
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so so the helots i mean people often think of them as slaves were they slaves like similar how other
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greek city states practice slavery was it different no they're not slaves in the traditional sense
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they're not chattel they can't be sold they're not owned by a particular spartan individual
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they are subject to sparta as a community and in a sense are owned by sparta as a community
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but they they don't operate for the most part in the households of individual spartans
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they operate on farms from which they are required to provide a kind of competence for individual
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spartans so there's an allotment of land assigned to each individual spartan more or less at birth
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probably takes possession of that land when he completes the agoge and becomes an adult
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and then he receives from that land a portion of the crop so these helots are like sharecroppers
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but they're also like serfs because they're bound to the land and there's something like slaves
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because they they really have very limited rights once a year the spartan efforts declare war
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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
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unenviable status to say the least but it's not like slaves so for example if you go to athens they
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have loads and loads of slaves most of these slaves are barbarians and they are owned by individual
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athenians and they don't have families they're not settled on land that they have some sort of
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claim to the helot has a claim to the share to a share of the crop that he produces from the land
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that he works so it's it's a more complex status in some ways better off than slaves are because
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these helots have families and they have some sort of claim to a share of the crop in other ways
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which have to do with the brutality of the spartans maybe they're worse off than slaves and but another
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interesting thing about the helots is that they outnumbered the spartans considerably i think it
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was that one number was estimated seven to one the information we are provided by herodotus suggests a
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ratio of seven to one there are modern scholars who think that's impossible on the basis of sort of
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social science analysis of the land and how many people it will support and so forth i'm skeptical of
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such analyses so i mean how did but how did the i mean okay whatever the number was how did
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the spartans keep these guys in control so there's the annual killing i mean how else did the helots
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outnumbering them influence how they organize themselves or organize their culture probably and
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we don't have evidence for this but it's it's hard to believe that the spartans didn't have
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garrisons in mycenia and it's hard to believe that they didn't have magistrates that oversaw
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the helots in particular areas but the main the main thing that they used to keep the helots down was
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terror and it worked in two ways one this annual declaration of war and second they had a way of
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training 18 year olds you you complete the agoge which is the upbringing the kind of formation that
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runs from about seven age seven to about 18 and looks like a rather more serious version of the cub
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scouts and the boy scouts and the explorers and they then spend a year in which they are given a dagger
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and they they hide out and they have to steal their food and my guess is that a lot of this takes
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place in mycenia and the food is stolen from helots and they do it by night and one of the reasons that
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they that they may have this institution of the cruptea is there are mountainous areas in mycenia
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in particular and it's extremely difficult to police mountainous areas so if you look at the persian
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empire for example there are certain mountainous areas that sometimes the persian king has to travel
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through and he doesn't really control those mountainous areas there are wild tribes that
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control them and he has to pay a kind of penalty for passing through and the reason is it's it's not
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worth the effort and the expense of putting soldiers into those mountains and keeping them there to to
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police those mountains and there's a long history in the balkans and elsewhere in the world where there are
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mountainous areas of bandits in a bandit gangs that maintain control in these wilder areas one way to
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counteract that possibility within mycenia is you send out young spartans with daggers and their task is
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not to bring back scalps in the little literal sense but their their task is to kill these helots
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runaways so you mentioned the ago game which started age seven like because to walk us through so you
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said it's like an extreme form of cub scouts boy scouts so what was it like you're seven years old
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what happens when you turn seven if you're a boy okay you leave your mother and you leave your father
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now your connection with your father is is is not that strong because he's he doesn't really live at home
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he visits he he lives in the sisidia with his fellows in a kind of squad and takes his meals there and
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spends the night there most of the time may slip off to visit his wife from time to time but you take
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the boy away from his mother and you take him into a kind of camping arrangement with other boys his age
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and you teach him the traditions of sparta but you put him through exercises all the time
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and you teach him poetry there's a kind of their choirs that of spartan boys uh music is is central
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to spartan life and as you move from seven to twelve there are kind of boundaries in this and then on to
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17 and 18 there there are you rise through age you're a member of an age class and as you get
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older they they do different things with you in the way of the games that you play in the ways of the
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ordeals that you go through so it gets more and more intense as time goes on and more and more
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physically demanding you're being prepared for full citizenship and full citizenship involves
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military service but you're also being prepared for being cunning and being able to operate on your
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own one of the striking features about sparta in say the fifth century is you the spartans can send
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one spartan to siracusa to help the siracusans against the athenians and that can be decisive
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a single spartan providing leadership and guidance can so hearten the siracusans that they outwit the
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athenians and defeat them similarly you can send brassidas with a group of emancipated helots and a
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mercenary army no other spartans up into northern greece towards amphipolis and thrace and he can wreak
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havoc because the kind of education that he has received makes him self-reliant to a degree that
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is astonishing for the other greeks so a single spartan can tip the balance we're going to take a
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quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show well okay so you mentioned a few
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things there that i like to unpack so you mentioned part of the yagogi training was poetry singing
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songs which is interesting because i think a lot of times when people think spartans they think oh
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they had no culture they didn't have an appreciation for art but right there that's they have an
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appreciation for art yes yes and actually at least in the early days the art that is produced within
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laconia and i'm thinking of pottery is quite beautiful there there seems to be a turning away from
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that later but poetry is absolutely central to their lives and the poetry is focused on war on the
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accomplishments of individual spartans in particular situations we have snatches of it from a poet called
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tertius who's a contemporary uh he's sort of two generations after the original conquest of mycenaia
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at a time when mycenaia rebelled and the spartans are reconquering it and his poetry mostly has to
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do with that reconquest but it's very impressive and they memorize it they memorize large swaths of
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poetry poetry may be more central to spartan life than it is to athenian life yeah that's interesting
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that's counterintuitive we think that the athenians are more cultured and they would put an emphasis on
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on that yeah it's a different kind of culture focused on um comedy and tragedy which you don't
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have in sparta sparta what you've got is lyric poetry and these are kind of like ballads of great
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deeds yes that's right so i mean okay that's the other question i mean it's like why like why
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so the spartans were able to live this life of leisure thanks to the the helots why did they decide
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we're just going to spend all that leisure time that we have freed up time to become the best
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warriors possible where you know another city state say like athens they'd be like well uh when you
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have lots of leisure that allows you to do philosophy um why didn't why did the the spartans go that way
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well you got to be a little careful about this claim about athens and philosophy okay uh the the
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people who did philosophy were considered uh freaks they were marginal in character it's not an
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accident that socrates was executed the the ordinary athenian his focus would be more on tragedy and
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comedy than on philosophy philosophy really is marginal it's very important to us it's the thing
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about athens that may be the most important to us but it's not so terribly important to fifth century
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athenians at least to the common people now the well-to-do the hoity-toity the the the men of great
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aristocratic families they dabbled in it so what you have to when you think about sparta you have to
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think about it as a kind of combination of a military camp and maybe a baseball camp where you're working out
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before the season begins and you have to think about the spartans as people who love sports they
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love sports they love horse races they love hunting in other words there it is not altogether grim
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they do not eat meals that you and i would enjoy and in fact they're they're notorious for the sort of
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simplicity of their fare but when you move into the sphere of sports it's a kind of exciting life that
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they lead and it's a life of leisure that that the upper classes elsewhere in greece envy the spartans
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for and that's another thing we have trouble with we admire athens but the greeks generally admired
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sparta much more than athens what what do they admire about it they just admire their pursuit of
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excellence and they admired their accomplishments on the battlefield so when pericles in the funeral
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oration that thucydides lays out that wants to make the case for athens the foil is always sparta
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and the deciding factor you know the thing that decides that athens is superior to sparta
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is athens wins on the battlefield you've got to that's the standard and it's the accepted standard
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even in athens so the spartan success on the battlefield is envied their leisure is envied that's
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:57:19.780
relative success in stopping the whole persian army at a choke point you know until xerxes sends 10,000 persians
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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manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy the show you've gotten something out of it
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i'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on itunes or stitcher that helps out a lot
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and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with a friend or family
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member who would think we'd get something out of it as always thank you for your continued support
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until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly