Sparta Reconsidered

“Memorial” by Alice Oswald – A Review

2012-02-11T11:50:00.003+01:00

"Memorial" is a poem based on the Iliad in which the prize winning English poet Alice Oswald seeks to capture the spirit more than the narrative of the ancient work in modern language. Or, as Alice Oswald words it in her introduction: it is “a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story.” This is an audacious task, to say the least, and hence the most remarkable thing about Oswald’s work is that it succeeds remarkably well.

The Iliad is a lengthy, complex work in which Gods, heroes and mere mortals interact on a grand canvas that stretches from the fertile valley of the Eurytus across the broad Aegean to the towering walls of Troy. The names of the principal protagonists have echoed down the centuries: Achilles and Hector, Helen and Paris, Menelaos, Agamemnon, Ulysses, and the rest. The Iliad, for most of us, stands for the story of Helen’s abduction (whether voluntary or not), and the war that ensued, ending in the utter destruction of a great city. The Iliad is about ambition, hubris, pride, lust, jealousy, cowardice, betrayal, conjugal and fraternal love, heterosexual and homosexual love, vengeance, grief – and just about any other human emotion that I may have overlooked.

Oswald’s poem, in contrast, is just 70 sparse – not to say laconic - pages. Nor does it attempt to reconstruct a story that Oswald (like Homer himself) expects her readers to already know. The charm of “Memorial” is that reminds us that the Iliad itself was intended as a verbal memorial to the dead. Oswald draws the reader’s attention to the Greek tradition of “lament poetry.” This was burial ritual of the ancient world in which the mourners remembered the dead in verse composed specifically to record the deeds of the deceased. The Iliad is littered with the laments for individual combatants.

Oswald’s poem makes us stop and consider these men – Protesilaus, Echepolus, Elephenor, Simoisius. Never heard of them? That is exactly the point. These are men, mortals, not the demigods, the kings, the heroes. Yet they too gave their lives. Oswald’s poem reminds us of them.

Oswald’s images are brutal because she has translated the original, which was infamous for its reality. Thus, “Diores...struck by a flying flint, died in a puddle of his own guts, slammed down into the mud he lies, with his arms stretched out to his friends….” Or: “Pherecles…died on his knees screaming. Meriones speared him in the buttock and the point pierced him in the bladder.”

Yet this poem is anything but an orgy of blood and guts. On the contrary, rather than glorifying the violence and brutality, it makes it all the more horrible by directing it at individuals that are – sometimes with only the barest outline or a mere brush-stroke in words -- given individuality and humanity. Thus Pherecles was “brilliant with his hands and born of a long line of craftsmen,” while Pylaemenes had a heart “made of coarse cloth and his manners were loose like old sacking.” Harpalion was “not quite ready for life, not quite solid, always shifting from foot to foot, with his eyes sliding everywhere in fear.” Yet another woman’s son “was the tall one, the conscientious one, who stayed out late pruning his father’s fig trees.” Or simply: “Koiranus…of Crete was a quiet man, a light to his loved ones.”

And their families too are brought to life with vivid urgency: “The priest to Hephaestus, hot-faced from staring at flames, prayed every morning the same prayer, “Please God respect my status, protect my sons Phegeus and Idaeus, calm down their horses, lift them out of the fight…Hephaestus heard him, but he couldn’t hold those bold boys back, riding over the battlefield too fast they met a flying spear….” Or: Laothoe, one of Priam’s wives, never saw her son again. He was washed away. Now she can’t look at the sea. She can’t think about the bits unburied being eaten by fishes.”

Yet even this might have been too much blood, guts and grieving, if Oswald had not interspersed her laments with sublime similes that are so evocative they are breath-taking.

Like winter rivers pouring off the mountains,

The thud of water losing consciousness

When it falls down from the high places….

Or:

Like fawns running over a field

Suddenly give up and stand

Puzzled in their heavy coats

Or:

Like the blue flower of the sea

Being bruised by the wind

Like when the rain-wind

Bullies the warm wind

Battering the great soft sunlit clouds

Deep scoops of wind

Work the sea into a wave

And the foam follows wandering gusts

A thousand feet high

Other images, however, evoke more than nature itself. Like a flash of lightning, they briefly illuminate scenes from the age of Homer, or offer vignettes of everyday life in the age of Achilles.

For example:

Like a good axe in good hands
Finds out the secret of wood and splits it open

Or:

Like two mules on a shaly path in the mountains
Carrying a huge roof truss or the beam of a boat
Go on mile after mile giving it their willingness
Until the effort breaks their strength

Or:

Like a goatherd stands on a rock
And sees a cloud blowing towards him
A black block of rain coming closer over the sea
Pushing a ripple of wind inland
He shivers and drives his flocks into a cave for shelter.

Memorial is a poem, not an epic poem, novel, play or history. Its magic lies in its ability to evoke an image and an emotion with the minimal use of words. As such, it is both laconic and laconian. I recommend it.

Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad, by Alice Oswald, faber and faber, London, 2011.

Secrets of Sparta's Syssitia

2012-02-04T13:25:00.003+01:00

Observers of ancient Sparta noted the peculiar Spartan custom of dinning clubs or syssitia at which adult Spartan citizens were required to share their evening meals. These clubs were viewed as one of the key features of Spartan society that distinguished it from all other Greek cities. Although it was common, popular and indeed considered a matter of pride for men (never women!) to dine together in Athens as well, the Spartan dining clubs were considered peculiar because: 1) they had fixed membership (for life), and 2) they were a compulsory pre-condition for attaining citizenship; failure to be accepted or failure to pay mess fees could cost a man his citizenship.

The origins of this peculiar tradition are controversial. A large number of theories have been put forward over time including the desirability of men of different ages dining together (so that young men would learn respect and benefit from the wisdom of older men) to the conscious desire of the Spartan state to weaken family ties.

This later thesis is put forward forcefully by Anton Powell, for example, in his contribution to Michael Whitby’s Sparta. Powell argues that totalitarian states, recognizing the influence of the family as inherently inimical to state control, have consistently tried to break down family ties. He cites examples from National Socialist Germany, although Soviet Russia and Communist China both provide more compelling examples of anti-family policies designed to – and incidentally more successful at – undermining family structures and influence.

The problem with the comparison to 20th Century totalitarian states is two-fold. First, whether Nazi Germany or Communist China, these modern anti-family societies were consciously revolutionary. They sought to undermine the family because families are inherently conservative. Yet Powel himself stresses the fundamentally conservative nature of Sparta in his essay. If Sparta was essentially conservative, then no institution was better designed to reinforce conservative values than the family. It is when family structures break down that societies become most vulnerable to change – not the other way around.

The other problem with Powell’s thesis is that men eating one meal together at a club is not a particularly good way to undermine family structure. It may be a modern truism that “families that eat together stay together,” but most men today nevertheless eat at least one meal away from their families. The most common pattern in Western industrialized societies is for men (and often women) to eat the mid-day meal away from home. Why should it be more destructive of family life to eat the evening meal away from home than the morning or mid-day meal? In many, particularly agricultural societies (such as ancient Sparta) it is the mid-day, not the evening meal, that is most important.

I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that full Spartan citizens (31 years and older) did not eat the morning and mid-day meal with their families. On the contrary, given the intimacy of Spartan society, I think it is very likely Spartans ate both breakfast and dinner (mid-day) with their families, and went to the syssitia in the evening for what was essentially a light supper.

Certainly, as all accounts agree, Spartan men returned from the syssitia to their homes (or barracks) sober before it grew too late. Furthermore, to the disappointment of visiting foreigners, syssitia were notorious for the absence of flute-girls and courtesans, unlike the traditional Athenian symposia. At the latter, men allegedly caroused together until the dawn and then staggered home drunk after indulging themselves with prostitutes both male and female. From a wife’s point of view, the Spartan custom of syssitia was infinitely preferable to the Athenian symposia, and in consequence it is arguable that the syssitia did far more to strengthen family life than to disrupt it. In short, attempts to portray the syssitia as a component of a totalitarian Spartan state’s systematic destruction of family and individuality reveal an alarming lack of objectivity.

A more appropriate parallel to the modern world might be membership in fraternities. Applicants to syssitia, as to fraternities, had to be accepted by existing members. This meant that far from being uniform, Spartan syssitia had different characters. Some syssitia would have been more intellectual than others, some more musical, some more conservative, and others outright radical. Some syssitia might have had close affiliations to one or the other royal house, and every Spartan with ambition would have expected and relied on support from his “fraternity brothers” throughout his life.

Spartan syssitia also shared some characteristics of political associations. We know that Spartans scorned the Athenian custom of men hanging around in the agora discussing public affairs. Instead, Spartan men were supposed to discuss affairs of state behind the closed doors of their syssitia where, presumably, no helots, perioikoi or foreigners could hear them. While this may seem indicative of a paranoid or secretive society, it may in fact have been intended to encourage men to speak up more freely and more candidly that was possible in public. There are many people, after all, who shy away from speaking in a crowd or among strangers, yet nevertheless have opinions worth hearing. The syssitia would have provided a context in which such men could debate issues of importance and made their opinions heard.

Of course, to the extent that members of a syssitia were similar in their interests and inclinations and familiar with one another since childhood, the character of a syssitia may have the closest parallel in the modern world to the German “stammtisch” – that table in the local pub at which a group of men meets night after night to discuss everything from football to fashion and politics to pop-culture. Every “stammtisch” has its own clientele, its own group dynamics, and its own character – and they all get turned out at closing bell and sent home to their families, just as in Sparta.

Understanding Leonidas: Leonidas's Childhood

2012-01-28T10:27:00.002+01:00

Modern physicians and psychiatrists recognize that childhood has a significant impact on a person’s physical and mental development, learning abilities, emotional maturity, and interpersonal skills. Information about a person’s childhood can therefore provide insight or at least hints about the motives or reasons of later actions. To the extent that we are interested in historical figures, it is useful to look at their childhood. Leonidas is no exception.

Although Leonidas’ stand at Thermopylae is widely viewed as the epitome of “Spartan” behavior, it was in fact unique in Spartan history. No king had ever died in battle before Thermopylae, and famously, less than hundred years later in 425 BC, over a hundred Spartiate hoplites trapped on the island of Sphacteria surrendered rather than die to the last man. Nor was this later incident the act of isolated, dishonorable individuals. The Spartan government was so anxious to prevent their deaths that it sued for peace. Only after the peace overtures had been rejected, did the troops surrender. Nor did this surrender lead to their humiliation and rejection. On the contrary, the Spartan government continued to negotiate feverishly to obtain their release and on their return to Sparta they were, after only a short period of collective disgrace, reinstated to full citizenship rights.

So, far from doing only what he had been raised to do, Leonidas’ stand at Thermopylae was a very personal one. To understand it, it is useful to look at him as an individual – starting with his childhood. Two aspects of Leonidas’ childhood may shed light on his later life: the bitter rift within his family and his education in the agoge.

By the time Leonidas was born, his father had – very much against Spartan custom – taken a second wife. The circumstances were notable. King Anaxandridas, according to Herodotus, was “devoted” to his wife, the daughter of his sister, but their marriage was childless for years. The ephors, concerned about the extinction of one of the royal houses, urged Anaxandridas to put aside his apparently barren wife and marry again. Anaxandridas flatly refused. Not only that, he explicitly stated that his wife was “blameless,” and he called a divorce “improper.” (A Spartan way of saying “absolutely unthinkable.”) The ephors reconsidered and came back with a new proposal; they suggested Anaxandridas take a second wife for the sake of the dynasty. A key aspect of this deal was clearly that the former princess and now queen was allowed to retain her status not only as wife but as queen and that she almost certainly remained in the royal palace.

Anaxandridas’ second wife was a “child of the people” – probably selected by the ephors because she was the direct descendent of Chilon the Wise, the man usually attributed with greatly increasing the power of the ephors, effectively turning them from mere agents of the kings into independently powerful representatives of the Assembly. Anaxandridas “did his duty” and sired a son on this second wife, but it is unlikely that she lived under the same roof as his favored, first wife, or that she enjoyed his affection or attention after she had performed her dynastic function. Certainly, she bore no children beyond the one son, Anaxandridas’ eldest son and heir, Cleomenes.

On the other hand, Anaxandridas’ first, allegedly barren, wife became pregnant shortly after the birth of Cleomenes. Despite suspicions that this was a trick of some kind, she gave birth -- in the presence of the ephors -- to a healthy son, Doreius. What is more, she went on to give Anaxandridas two additional sons: Leonidas and Cleombrotus. In short, Anaxandridas continued to cohabitate with is first, beloved wife, while his second consort was apparently ignored and neglected.

The importance for Leonidas is that although he would initially have grown up in an apparently in tact family unit, he would soon have been confronted with the underlying rivalries between his older brothers, Cleomenes and Doreius. While we cannot know what Anaxandridas’ first wife felt about his second (or the fact that her husband allowed himself to be persuaded into sharing her bed), we can be certain that she favored her own son over her rival’s. Because Cleomenes had been born first, however, he was technically the heir apparent. Herodotus further claims that even as a child Cleomenes showed signs of mental instability (“was not quite right in the head”). Dorieus, in conctrast, was the “finest young man of his generation.” This undoubtedly fed the hopes of his mother – and Doreius himself -- that he would take his father’s place on the Agiad throne when the time came. Herodotus records that Doreius was “confident” he would succeed his father, and was correspondingly “indignant” when “the Spartans” (the ephors? The Gerousia? The Assembly?) made Cleomenes king instead. So indignant, we are told, that he could not bear to remain in Sparta under his half-brother’s rule. Instead, he set off with men and ships – but without the approval of Delphi – to set up a colony in Africa.

Notably, Leonidas did not go with him. Nor did Leonidas go with Doreius on his second, (this time sanctioned by Delphi and so more respectable) adventure to Sicily, several years later. There could be any number of reasons why not, but one plausible explanation is that Leonidas was more at loggerheads with his older brother Doreius than his half-brother Cleomenes. Assuming that Cleonmenes was raised in a separate household and did not attend the agoge, Leonidas may not have known Cleomenes very well at all. Doreius, on the other hand, would have been constantly in front of him, the “perfect” elder brother, who did everything right (as the finest in his generation) and very likely his mother’s darling as well. Leonidas, on the other hand, would have been the middle child of three same-sex children born to his mother. Such children commonly display distinct characteristics.

The middle child of three same-sex children is often rebellious, difficult, irresponsible, and a brilliant under-achiever. Alternatively, they can be the “peace-makers,” sensitive but secretive, more focused on peer-groups than family. The most consistent characteristic of middle-children is that they are almost always the opposite of their older sibling.

This might explain a key feature of Leonidas’ personality. Because his older brother was rebellious and convinced of his superiority and destiny to lead, Leonidas might have become obsessively loyal, the quintessential “team player.” He might have been the “peace-maker” between the two, antagonized branches of the family, and as such been rewarded with the physical symbol of reconciliation, the hand of Cleomenes’ daughter Gorgo.

Leonidas’ education in the agoge, on the other hand, united him with his subjects in a unique way. The hardships of the agoge were designed to make youth bond together. A common upbringing, shared hardships and follies, can even today create a sense of belonging between class-mates that bridges political differences and is more powerful than business partnerships. The more difficult, rigorous and elitist such “school ties” are, the most enduring they are likely to be. The Spartan agoge appears to have worked remarkably well in giving Spartan citizens a sense of common identity and responsibility for one another. Usually, the kings and future kings were excluded from this close-knit society, however, because the heirs to the throne (in Leonidas’ generation Cleomenes) did not attend the agoge. But Leonidas, like Doreius, did. He would have forged close bonds with his classmates, and been accepted as “one of the boys” even by those who did not particularly know or like him.

Furthermore, Leonidas did not became king until later in life. Certainly he was a full citizen. Possibly he had been an “ordinary” Spartan for almost half a century before he ascended the throne. Most of his life he was therefore remained “one of the boys.” He belonged to the club, but he wasn’t the leader, not like Doreius. This might have undermined his authority at one level. One quote is recorded in which allegedly someone challenged him saying: “Except for being king, you are no better than the rest of us.” This quote reinforces the image of Leonidas as having being “ordinary,” rather than “extraordinary” before he came to his brother’s throne. It would also fit in with the pattern of an underachieving middle child.

But once he was king, Leonidas could count upon double loyalty from his subjects. He could count upon not only the loyalty Spartans owed their kings as descendents of Heracles and demi-gods, but also upon the more visceral, emotional, blind loyalty of his comrades. Leonidas was both a king and one of the boys.

I think this is an important aspect of Leonidas’ appeal. At Thermopylae, he was not so much commanding subordinates or subjects as rallying comrades. They paid him back in the highest currency known to man: with their loyalty unto death.

Sparta's Mad King

2012-01-13T09:53:00.058+01:00

Herodotus tells us that King Cleomenes I of Sparta (c. 520-490) went mad and committed suicide in a gruesome manner. In fact, he claims that Cleomenes “began to mutilate himself, beginning on his shins. He sliced his flesh into strips, working upwards to his thighs, and from them to his hips and sides, until he reached his belly, and while he was cutting that into strips he died.” (The Histories, 6:75). This is an exceptionally graphic description, which in itself suggests an exceptionally well-informed source. Nothing about this description is vague, mysterious, imprecise or contradictory – as one would expect if it were simply speculation, hear-say, or a planted fabrication following what modern historians like to portray as fratricide/patricide “under mysterious circumstances” leading to a “cover up.” (See my earlier blog entry from May 13, 2011 on “Leonidas the Murderer?” also Paul Cartledge “The Spartans,” pp. 97-100.)

Modern historians appear to have two problems with Cleomenes’ suicide. First, such a gruesome death seems aberrant and alienating and so it’s more comfortable to assume Herodotus's description was just an exaggeration or fabrication than to accept that it accurately describes the event. This is understandable, but not sufficient reason to dismiss such an explicit and detailed description. Second, Herodotus’ explanations (punishment for sacrilege and excessive drinking) do not satisfy modern understandings of mental illness.

For this reason I would like to take a closer look at what modern science says about one form of mental illness that – as W.G. Forrest pointed out in his A History of Sparta – in many ways explains Cleomenes behavior throughout his life, namely paranoid schizophrenia.

Let’s start with what schizophrenia is not. According to the Mayo Clinic’s website “schizophrenia isn't split personality or multiple personality. The word ‘schizophrenia’ does mean ‘split mind,’ but it refers to a disruption of the usual balance of emotions and thinking.” Furthermore, schizophrenia is “a chronic condition, requiring lifelong treatment. “

The Mayo clinic goes also provides a list of symptoms, most – if not all -- of which uncannily describe aspects/incidents of King Cleomenes life and reign. These are:

• Auditory hallucinations;

• Delusions “such as believing a co-worker wants to poison you”

• Anxiety

• Anger

• Emotional distance

• Violence

• Argumentativeness

• Self-important or condescending manner

• Suicidal thoughts or behavior

Of these symptoms, Cleomenes clearly demonstrated violence (his massacre of surrendered Argives after the Battle of Speia, anger (attacking anyone who failed to show him respect), self-important or condescending manner (bribing the Pythia at Delphi), argumentativeness (repeated clashes with his co-regents and fellow citizens), and – most important – suicidal behavior. Delusions “such as believing a co-worker wants to poison you” would explain his consistent hostility to Demaratus. And while we have no historical record of “auditory hallucinations,” Cleomenes is on record claiming to have received “signs” from the statue of Hera at a temple during his campaign against Argos. According to Herodotus (Histories, 6:82): “When…he attempted to get a favorable sign by offering a sacrifice at the temple of Hera, a flame shot out from the breast of the goddess’ statue, and he knew from this with absolute certainty that he could not capture Argos.” Since no one else was present at this sacrifice, Cleomenes might simply have been lying (in which case he was certainly showing a “self-important and condescending manner” to the ephors of Sparta.) But it is also possible, if we accept that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, that he honestly believed he had seen this flame. Schizophrenics, psychiatrists agree, often cannot distinguish between what they imagine and what is real.

Of the known symptoms for this severe, lifelong illness, the only two for which we have no direct historical evidence in King Cleomenes are “anxiety” and “emotional distance.” Yet, nothing in his known behavior is inconsistent with these traits either. Indeed, as a novelist, it would be easy to weave these character traits into a portrayal of a man with his historical track record.

Furthermore, Herodotus himself describes Cleomenes at the end of his life as “quite mad.” Herodotus makes it clear that he is not relying on a single source for this assertion. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to provide various explanations of the Spartan king's madness – all of which underline the fact that Cleomenes had a widespread reputation for madness that extended far beyond the borders of Sparta to Athens and Argos and elsewhere in Greece. It hardly seems plausible that so many other Hellenes – including enemies of Sparta - would have considered Cleomenes mad without justification. It is even less likely that they would accept the official version of his death without question, if they had not found it plausible. This suggests that Cleomenes’ behavior during his lifetime had given rise to doubts about his sanity long before he took his life in such a grim manner.

I would also like to note, before looking more closely at the suicide itself, that paranoid schizophrenia usually first appears in a person’s late teens and worsens with time. Again this is highly consistent with what we know about Cleomenes. He came to the throne as a young man, possibly not yet twenty, and at first seems to have been a vigorous and popular leader. But with time, one incident after another revealed erratic, overweening, and violent behavior. He freed Athens of a tyrant and then tried to restore tyranny. He invaded Argos and then refused to destroy it. He forced Demaratus into exile and then promptly started fighting with Leotychidas. He fled to Arcadia and started to stir up rebellion, and then meekly returned to Sparta. There appears little coherent policy in this, and even his alleged anti-Persian stand is questionable. He notoriously did not support the Ionian Revolt, and it was “the Spartans” – not her kings – who threw the Persian ambassadors in a well. His intrigues on Aegina could have a hundred other explanations, including delusions about Demaratus’ ambitions, that had nothing to do with staunch opposition to Persia.

But let’s return to the issue of self-mutilation which modern historians find so implausible that they prefer to interpret it as a “hushed up” murder by a man who, at the time he allegedly committed/ordered this fratricide/patricide, had been a loyal subject of Cleomenes for thirty years. In fact, self-mutilation – particularly with knives – is a well-documented, psychological disorder. The Mayo Clinic has the following to say about self-mutilation: “Self-injury is the act of deliberately harming your own body, such as cutting or burning yourself. It's not meant as a suicide attempt. Rather, self-injury is an unhealthy way to cope with emotional pain, intense anger and frustration.”

Note that in Herodotus’ account, Cleomenes – a Spartan King – had just been ordered confined to the stocks for attacking citizens. For a king, any king, this would certainly have produced “intense anger and frustration.”

The fact that the intention was not suicidal does not make Cleomenes suicide implausible, because as the Mayo clinic notes, “with self-injury comes the possibility of inflicting serious and even fatal injuries.”

The evidence of both ancient sources and modern psychology overwhelmingly support the thesis that Cleomenes I of Sparta was indeed “quite mad,” most probably with an advanced stage of paranoid schizophrenia at the time of his death. There is no need to postulate murder to explain his death – thereby slandering not only his heir and successor, Leonidas, but his only surviving child, Gorgo, as well. Please refer to my blog entry "Leonidas the Murderer?" for more discussion of why it is implausible that Leonidas was responsible for his father-in-law’s death.

Note: I have had the misfortune to encounter paranoid schizophrenia within my close circle. This first hand experience with the mental illness reinforces my firm conviction that Cleomenes I was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

Next week I will be on Kythera with no internet access. The next entry will be posted January 28.

Review of "Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge"

2012-01-07T09:39:00.001+01:00

Paul M. Bardunias posted the following review of Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge on amazon.com. He gave the book five stars as well! I am always excited by a good review -- but I learn from the critical ones, so either way a review is a good thing. I sincerely encourage all my readers to write and publish reviews of my books on line. The opportunity for real readers to say what they think about books is, in my opinion, one of the most positively democratic aspects of the World Wide Web. Now, here's Paul's review.

Helena P. Schrader has, in "Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge", prescribed a welcome antidote to the skewed visions of ancient Sparta put forth in works such as "Gates of Fire" and "300". If you have an interest in the real Sparta, without supermen in capes and Speedos, then this is a book for you. The book is wholly appropriate for teen readers, and would be a great holiday gift that sneaks an education in with the entertainment. While obviously a book for boys, girls would find in Sparta characters who have a confidence and power in their own right that does not derive simply from being coveted for marriage by competing men. This is a rare thing in novels set in the ancient world. If at times you feel you are reading "Ender's game" or Harry Potter with shields, this is only because those analogies are far more accurate than the "Full Metal Jacket" or 1940s war movie that you are used to.

All authors of historical fiction must draw from modern analogy to breathe life into long dead Spartan education system or Agoge. Other books have looked to the unlikely parallel of the barracks life of conscript marines, but she rightly sees the more accurate connections to an elite boarding school system. You realize in reading her novel, just as Leonidas does as the pages unfold, that the Agoge is not designed simply to make soldiers, but form Spartan citizens. The system produced men who would be hailed as a nation of philosophers as well as unmatched warriors. Just as importantly the system also produced women who scandalized the misogynists of other ancient societies with their unmatched freedom.

Schrader weaves a considerable amount of teaching into her novel in a remarkably readable fashion. I run a fairly successful blog on ancient Sparta and I found myself often trying to determine what sources she drew from for particular bits of information and where she inserted her own imagination. Much of this is accomplished through allowing us to see the lives of other characters through the lens of young Leonidas. While the young King is the focus of the novel, events often happen around him rather than to him, and I can understand why some would find this confusing if they were expecting a biography. But this book is as much about Spartan society as it is the life of one man.

Helena is a skilled writer, but the sheer density of information about characters and Spartan society conspire to slow the pacing of the early pages of the novel. She soon hits her stride though and does not look back. Chapter three alone is worth the price of the novel, providing insight into the complexity of Spartan social structures that are often glossed over. At once we can see why the system that made Sparta great also contained the seeds of her own destruction.

The Myth of the Spartan Thief

2011-12-29T08:28:00.002+01:00

Every scholar of Sparta knows Xenophon’s descriptions of how Spartan youths and boys were kept hungry so they would learn how to steal, and were punished only for being caught, rather than for theft itself. Credible as Xenophon generally is, his commentary on this aspect of Spartan society is very questionable. Aside from the fact that thieves in any society can only be punished when caught, and many robbers undoubtedly view punishment as the price of poor performance rather than theft itself, the greater problem with this common depiction of Sparta is the notion that Sparta’s youth were continually stealing just to keep alive.

Admittedly, a nation of thieves may well fit Athenian views about their enemy. The French referred to the English as “perfidious.” Americans and Soviets routinely attributed treachery to each other throughout the Cold War. The Israelis and Arabs have no end of adjectives to describe the deceitful character of the other side. Rather like calling your enemies “fags” and their women “whores,” attributing sly dishonesty and immorality to the enemy is standard fare in propaganda wars regardless of culture or century.

A nation of thieves does not, however, fit well with a society that even her enemies considered remarkably stable and orderly. How do you keep a society orderly, if the entire male population between the ages of 7 and 20 are actively encouraged to steal? More important, how do you keep an economy functioning at the high levels of efficiency needed to finance a brutal, 30 year war, if every farm, shop, house, workshop and warehouse must be locked and guarded against hoards of desperate, half-starved youth? There are thieves in every society, but high levels of theft are destructive to social stability and political credibility.

Admittedly, the theft of food alone might not be so disruptive as general theft, but the accounts usually cited, supplemented with details such as the absurd story of a youth caught stealing a fox (which is not on anyone’s menu), suggest that theft as such was encouraged. It is this picture of Spartan youth which dominates modern portrayals of Sparta.

To his credit, Anton Powell, in his article “Dining Groups, Marriage, Homosexuality,” in Michael Whitby’s Sparta, notes that “theft offended against two ideals of Spartan society: obedience and respect for elders.” (Sparta, p. 102). However, rather than questioning if Xenophon’s account is accurate or complete, Powell tries to argue that the military benefits of teaching youth stealth and deceit outweighed the disadvantages of corrupting their morals.

The problem with this argument is that such skills were conspicuously not necessary to the phalanx warfare at which Sparta was so good. Powell attempts to make a connection between guerrilla warfare and the custom of theft despite the fact that Thucydides states explicitly that prior to the Pylos campaign the Spartans had little experience of brigandage. Unable to square such a statement with his own image of Sparta, Powell hypothesizes a long history of (completely unrecorded!) helot revolts in which the Spartans learned guerrilla warfare – and so needed training in theft and stealth, but which Thucydides and Herodot knew absolutely nothing about.

Admittedly, the kryptea was an organization in which the skills of deceit and theft would have been useful, but we are told that only selected Spartan youth ever served in it, not all of them. Furthermore, as Dr. Nic Fields so significantly pointed out, Sparta probably did not have that repulsive institution unit until after the helot revolt of 465. There is, in fact, no credible indication whatsoever that Sparta had to deal with helot revolts of any kind prior to 465 – unless one counts the Second Messenian War as a major “helot” uprising.

Rather than inventing unrecorded wars, I think it makes more sense to examine the presumption that Spartan youth were encouraged to steal. It is far more likely, as Nigel Kennel argues in The Gymnasium of Virtue, that if Spartan youth were encouraged to learn stealth and theft at all, it was only in a very limited and restricted context, or possibly only after the degeneration of Spartan society had set in in the mid-fifth century BC.

The Sacrilegious Seducer: Aristomenes of Messenia

2011-12-17T11:49:00.003+01:00

Last week I summarized the most dramatic episodes of the legend of Aristomenes that portray him as a heroic, martial figure. In the tales told last week, Aristomenes routed the Spartans in battle repeatedly, devastated their economy and confounded them in the very heart of their city by his daring escapes. These tales are well suited to give a defeated people pride, and to buoy them up even in defeat. But the legend of Aristomenes includes other characteristics that are less obviously “heroic,” albeit very much in the Homeric tradition of fallible heroes.

One of these characteristics, perhaps inevitable in a popular hero, is Aristomenes undeniable sex appeal. On at least two occasions, Aristomenes is freed from captivity by women who fall in love with him. In one instance, he is rescued by the “virgin” daughter of a Messenian farmer, who at Aristomenes’ urgings serves too much wine to Aristomenes’ Cretan guards, and then, when the Cretons are in a drunken stupor, cuts Aristomenes’ bonds so he can kill his erstwhile captors and escape. In a second, more sensational episode of the Aristomenes legend, Aristomenes is shown charming (seducing?) a (presumably virgin) priestess of Demeter.

This second seduction is one of three incidents in the Aristomenes legend in which Aristomenes seeks to to capture unarmed Spartan women and girls for ransom. In the incident referenced above, Aristomenes and his companions try to carry off unarmed women celebrating a festival to Demeter at Aigila in Laconia, but the women defended themselves so effectively with their sacrificial knives and spits that they succeed in either killing or frightening off his companions while capturing Aristomenes himself. Aside from Aristomenes’ prowess as a seducer (since he subsquently seduces the chief priestess), this incident is not terribly heroic. Not only does he attack unarmed women, he fails in his attempt and -- on top of all that -- is himself captured by mere women.

The other two legends about the capture of maidens are more ambiguous. To be sure, in both the other episodes involving the capture of women, Aristomenes’ is successful. In one case he snatches girls dancing in honor of Artemis at Caryae and in the other he snatches fifteen virgins (presumably from Sparta itself) when “the defeated Spartans were celebrating some nocturnal rites called the Hyacinthia.” (See David Ogden, Aristomenes of Messene: Legends of Sparta’s Nemesis, p. 39) The Messenian version of this latter event significantly recounts how some of Aristomenes men try to rape the girls, but Aristomenes kills his own men rather than let the captive girls be violated, thereby demonstrating his high moral character. Furthermore, he returns the girls "intact" to their fathers after their ransoms are paid, and the grateful girls later plead for his life when he is captured by the Spartans and put on trial. (Note: no further information about when this trial occurred and if whether the Spartans heeded the pleas for mercy by the grateful girls is provided by my source.)

The Spartan version of these epidsodes is (not surprisingly) quite different. The Spartans claim the girls were carried off and raped and then killed themselves from shame. Alternatively, King Teleklos rushed to their defense, only to be killed by the Messenians – and this incident triggered the First Messenian War. Then again, according to another interpretation in Messenian legend, the “girls” were in fact “beardless” youth who attacked the Messenians, and they, in self-defense, killed the youth disguised as girls, but this understandable act of self-defense was wickedly used by King Teleklos as a transparent excuse to attack Messenia, as he had always intended form the start…..

Returning to Aristomenes, there is another aspect of all three of these incidents that would have been more obvious to ancient Greeks than to us: in each case Aristomenes seized (or attempted to seize) the girls when they were in the act of worshiping one or another deity. In short: all three episodes constitute an act of sacrilege. One other legend underlines Aristomenes sacreligious character particularly dramatically.

Ogden provides the following quote from Polyaenus, (Ogden, p. 63):

When the Spartans were making a public sacrifice to the Dioscuri, Aristomenes the Messenian and a friend mounted white horses and put golden stars around their heads. In the course of the night, they manifested themselves at a moderate distance before the Spartans, who were celebrating their festival outside the city with their women and children. They thought there had been an epiphany of the Dioscuri and launched themselves into drinking and great pleasure. But Aristomenes and his friend dismounted from their horses, drew their swords and slaughtered a great many of them before riding off again. (Polyaenus 2.31.4)

This was clearly an act of inexcusable sacrilege. It entails not just attacking unarmed men (with their wives and children present), who were in the act of worshiping the gods, it involves impersonating the gods themselves. If, as Ogden suggests, this incident was intended to explain how Aristomenes incurred the enduring hostility of the Dioscuri, it would have to pre-date the Battle of the Boar’s Grave and so would have occurred at the very start of the Second Messenian War. This in turn suggests that at that time the Messenians could ride right up to the border of Sparta. If combined with the capture of Spartan maidens at another festival, it might have provided the kind of provocation that made the notoriously pious Spartans mad with rage and determined to defeat Aristomenes at all costs. In short, the incident may might significant insight into the roots of the Messenian Wars – or at least the bitterness with which they were apparently pursued.

It is also noteworthy that the conquered Messenians would keep alive legends in which their greatest hero shows decidedly sacrileges tendencies. One explanation would be that they preferred to attribute their defeat to the hostility of the gods than to their own failing. They needed, however, to explain the unrelenting hostility of the gods, and Aristomenes’ impudence did just this. Another explanation might be that, as a conquered people, they felt abandoned by the gods and identified with a hero who was impious. Precisely because the Diosouri were some of Sparta’s most honored gods, being disrespectful of them was in effect being disrespectful to Sparta, so this particular legend might have been particularly popular – especially since it shows the Spartans being duped by such a cheap trick.

Another consistent feature of the Aristomenes legend is the frequency with which the hero is humiliated. Aristomenes is not just captured by women and (lowly) Creton archers, he is wounded in the buttocks, loses his shield (by divine intervention) in the middle of a battle, is turned back during another night raid by Helen (of all martial figures!), forced to retreat to a fortress, then to flee his homeland, and yet he remains defiant and capable of outwitting and escaping his opponents. In short, for all his failings and defeats – or rather because of them – the Legend of Aristomenes is ideally suited to giving a defeated people hope. Aristomenes is defeated – but never killed (unless we want to believe that story with the hairy heart), and so he was an ever-present companion to the Messenians, promising a better future -- just as soon as the bias of the gods in favor of Sparta ended….

The Invincible Loser: Aristomenes of Messenia

2011-12-10T09:34:00.001+01:00

Sparta's greatest enemey, Aristomenes of Messenia, was an “invincible” hero that lost the war. As such he provided the defeated Messenians with a hero they could be proud of and admire, while nevertheless transferring the blame for their defeat to others. Here is a short summary of Aristomenes heroic feats.

According to Pausanias, in the first three years of the Second Messenian War, Aristomenes led the Messenian army to victory in three pitched battles against the Spartans, the Battle of Derai, the Battle of the Boar’s Grave and the Battle of the Great Trench. As Pausanias tells the story, Aristomenes won the first of these battles outright and in consequence was offered the crown of Messenia by his grateful compatriots, which he declined. The following year he routed the Spartans so that they took flight “without shame.” Unfortunately, Aristomenes was brought to an abrupt halt in the midst of his pursuit of the defeated foe by the Dioskouroi. These deities, sitting in a pear tree in the middle of the battlefield, with unadulterated pro-Spartan bias made Aristomenes lose his shield as he chased after the fleeing Spartans. Aristomenes stoped to search for it, breaking off his pursuit and (presumably) enabling the frightened Spartans to escape, regroup, and live to fight another day. The following year, having recovered from their shock it seems, the Spartans rallied and again confronted the Messenians in a pitched battle which came to be known as the Battle of the Great Trench. Again, Aristomenes was winning the battle – until Messenia’s allies, the Arkadians, treacherously changed sides. So, due to no fault of their own or that of their leader, the Messenians were forced to take refuge it the fortress of Eira.

With the retreat to Eira, the hero Aristomenes transforms from a battlefield hero like Achilles into a guerrilla leader. In all legends describing the later phases of the Second Messenian War, Aristomenes distinguishes himself not in pitched battles but with daring raids and even more miraculous escapes. In one daylight attack, he is said to have captured dozens of Spartan maidens dancing in honor of Artemis and held them to ransom. In a night raid, he attacked an entire army of Corinthians coming to Sparta’s aid and slaughtered them in their sleep, killing, it is said, more than 100 men personally. Perhaps less heroic but more significant, he was credited with plundering Amyclae and generally making life on the western edge of the Eurotas so uncertain that the Spartans abandoned much of their farmland. This in turn led to food-shortages, civil strife and then revolution. In his most daring raid of all, Aristomenes allegedly slipped under cover of darkness into Sparta’s principle temple, the temple of the Bronzehouse Athena, and there dedicated either a captured shield or his own shield. The dedication of his own shield would be the most prominent kind of “calling card,” but would have deprived him of the very shield he supposedly dedicated later to a different temple (Trophonius in Boeotia), and from which it was later borrowed by the Thebans before confronting the Spartans at Leuktra. The dedication of a captured Spartan shield (one of the kings’ or polemarchs’ shields perhaps?) would have been equally shocking and humiliating to the Spartans.

The legends of Aristomenes miraculous escapes are, if anything, even more spectacular than the stories of his victories and raids. These include (aside from getting out of Sparta unharmed after the above shield dedication): seducing a priestess of Demeter after being captured and bound up by unarmed women and seducing the virgin daughter of a farmer after being captured and bound by Cretan archers. Without doubt the most spectacular and exciting of his escapes, however, followed being knocked out by and brought to Sparta unconscious. Here he and all other captured Messenian troops were thrown off a precipice into a gorge that should have ended in certain death. Aristomenes' companions, we are told, all died, but -- depending on which version of the legend one prefers -- either Aristomenes’ shield itself acted as a primitive parachute to catch the wind and soften his fall or an eagle (possibly the eagle emblem on the face of the shield itself) caught him on its wings and brought him safely to the floor of the gorge. On regaining consciousness, Aristomenes found himself in a dark crevice surrounded by the bones and rotting corpses of those who had been thrown off this precipice before him. Having survived the fall, Aristomenes was still at risk of starving to death in this macbre rock chamber. According to legend, he spotted a fox feeding on the corpses, and took hold of its tail. The fox (involuntarily and biting Aristomenes the whole way!) led Aristomenes out of the pit, as it fled by the way it entered the crevice.

Yet all these deeds of valor could not halt the inevitable – Sparta’s conquest of Messenia. The ancient Greek sources explain that the gods had (for whatever reason) set their hearts against Messenia. After fourteen years of defying Sparta, eleven of them from the fortress Eira, Aristomenes and his seers received a sign warning them of impending defeat. As the legend makes clear, Aristomenes did not see it as his duty to die in an already lost battle. True to his incarnation as guerrilla leader (rather than his Achillian earlier phase), he ordered “those providing cover in their bravery” to keep fighting, while he led the women and children out of the fortress under cover of darkness (by some accounts, incidentally, with Spartan complicity).

Aristomenes according to legend led the column of refugees to safety in Arkadia with his son commanding the rear guard. Here, so the legend goes, Aristomenes and five hundred of the bravest Messenians conceived a plan to attack Sparta by night (presumably while the bulk of the Spartan army was still besieging a now all-but-abandoned Eira). Unfortunately, the Arkadian king Aristocrates again betrayed the Messenians (one wonders why they fled to Arkadia in the first place?), and so the plan was abandoned. Aristomenes sent the surviving Messenians off to establish a colony on Sicily, while remaining behind to continue his fight against Sparta.

There are two versions of Aristomenes’ end. One version sees him going to Rhodos with his youngest daughter and her husband. There he allegedly died and was buried, and it was from here that the Messenians of the 4th Century retrieved his remains for a shrine in the re-established Messenia. The other version of his end is more obscure. Although it is not explained how, in this version of Aristomene’ life he somehow fell into Spartan hands again and this time they took no chances with throwing him off cliffs. Instead, they dissected him, discovering in the process that he had a “hairy” heart. Unfortunately, no one knows just what this signified, but curiously, according to Ogden, hairy hearts were attributed by the ancient Greeks to six other men including “Aetolia, the beloved of Herakles” and Leonidas I, the hero of Thermopylae!

Sparta's Greatest Enemy

2011-12-03T16:18:00.001+01:00

Sparta had many opponents over the centuries, but only one man stands out as the consummate enemy. That man was Aristomenes of Messenia, the commander of Messenia’s armies during the Second Messenian war. Aristomenes is credited with routing Spartan armies on three occasions, with killing King Theopompos, with capturing Spartan maidens and carrying them off for ransom, with sneaking into the heart of Sparta to dedicate a shield in the most sacred of Sparta temples, of escaping death after being cast down a chasm, of leading the Messenian civilians out of their besieged fortress of Eira, and ultimately of rising from the dead to fight with the Thebans at Leuctra to ensure Sparta’s final humiliating defeat. This is clearly a hero of Homeric proportions that deserves much more attention than he has received to date.

To my knowledge, the most extensive, modern study of Aristomenes is provided by David Ogden in his concise yet comprehensive study, Aristomenes of Messene: Legends of Sparta’s Nemesis (published by the Classical Press of Wales in 2004). This short but dense book provides an excellent analysis of the known legends about the almost forgotten Messenian hero and his historical roots. While many modern historians prefer to think of Aristomenes as an invention of the (re-)founders of Messenia in the mid-fourth century BC, Ogden argues convincingly that Aristomenes was at least in part a legend kept alive by oral traditions in exiled and enslaved communities. It seems reasonable to me that Aristomenes, much like King Arthur, was a real historical figure, whose legend was embellished and expanded over the centuries by story-tellers. Perhaps some deeds subsequently attributed to Aristomenes had been committed by other, now nameless, men, and surely the most fantastical adventures were pure fabrications, but that does not make the legend of Aristomenes less interesting to students of Sparta.

On the contrary, it can be extremely productive and educational to examine the complicated relationship between Sparta and Messenia through the lens of legend. Before turning to Aristomenes’ legend itself, therefore, I want to first review the importance of the conquest of Messenia for Sparta.

As far as we can make out based on the historical and archeological record, Sparta was founded sometime in the 9th or 10th century BC by invading “Dorians” from the north. The invading Dorian tribes settled in what is called Laconia after first subduing a population already occupying the fertile Eurotas valley. Several things are notable about this subjugation. First, although it must have involved bloodshed and violence, the ultimate solution was amazingly mild. The pre-inhabitants, rather than being driven out altogether (like the American Indians), massacred and enslaved (like the Trojans by the Achaeans or later the inhabitants of Melos by the Athenians), were allowed to continue living by their own laws in freedom on the edges of the valley, while the invaders took control of the heartland and established a city there. Thus, an entire body of “second class” citizens was from the very start a feature of Spartan society. While it is never pleasant to be “second class,” the perioikoi, as these non-Dorian, pre-inhabitants of Laconia were called, knew that things could have been much worse (extermination, exile) and rewarded the Spartans with roughly 1,000 years of astonishing loyalty.

Second, there was apparently a second group of conquered people in the Eurotas valley when the Dorians arrived. One theory based on linguistic studies (that makes a great deal of sense to me) is that these peoples, ethnically different from the perioikoi, were descendants of a yet earlier population that had, in unrecorded history, been conquered by those peoples that became Sparta’s perioikoi. The name given to these people, the helots, is probably derived from the a word that meant “capture,” and the helots were very probably already slaves – the slaves of the perioikoi – at the time of the Dorian invasion. This explains why they had even less privileges than the perioikoi, but comparatively more privileges than chattel slaves in the rest of the Greek world. Conceivably, the perioikoi (about whose society prior to the Dorian invasion we know nothing) had instituted the curious system of slavery more akin to serfdom than chattel slavery that the Spartans continued. But this is pure speculation.

What seems certain is that the Spartans had control of the entire Eurotas valley by the start of the 8th century BC and then, like every other successful, city state of the age, started to expand. Meanwhile, however, the valleys to the northeast and to the west of Laconia, had also been conquered and settled by Dorian tribes. To the northeast were the Argives and to the west the Messenians.

Geographically, the Paron range to the east of the Eurotas valley is a less formidable barrier than mighty Taygetos, and it is probable that the Spartans first tried to expand to the northeast. The Argives, however, proved a hard nut to crack, and so the Spartans turned their attentions to the west, probably outflanking Taygetos and crossing into Messenia via the Mani peninsula and then advancing up the eastern coast of the Gulf of Messenia.

What is absolutely certain is that the Messenians, like the Argives, resisted the Spartan invasion. What is more, they resisted so effectively that at least one and possibly two very long wars ensued. The “First Messenian War” is assumed to have lasted 19-20 years based on fragments of a poem by Tyrtaios, a participant in the Second Messenian War. The Second Messenian War is believed to have lasted almost as long (14-15 years), so that the entire armed conflict with Messenia lasted roughly 35 years with a break of one or two generations somewhere in the middle. This alone is evidence not only of the fierce resistance put up by the Messenians, but also of near parity of forces.

It seems to me that too little attention has been paid to the question of why the Spartans gave up against Argos, but persisted so bitterly in their war against Messenia. A number of explanations are possible: simply greater riches in Messenia, sheer stubbornness on the part of the Spartans, or even invasion attempts by the Messenians. Perhaps, after winning the first war, the Messenians became agressive and brought the Seconde Messenian War to Sparta? After all, Spartans would not have been fighting fully pitched battles in the Second Messenian War (as Tyrtaios unquestionably describes), if the Messenians had already been defeated and subjugated in the First Messenian War.

In short, it is far more likely that Sparta lost the First Messenian War, and that this defeat led to a domestic crisis that resulted in the introduction of a new constitution and a complete reorganization of society. In short, the loss of the First Messenian War led to the changes in Spartan society that made it so unique – and these changes laid the foundation for victory in the second clash with Messenia that followed a generation or two later. (See "Sparta's Forgotton Defeat" for a detailed description and explanation of this thesis.)

There is no doubt, however, that Sparta won the Second Messenian War, and imposed a notoriously brutal regime on the defeated Messenians. The primary source and evidence of Sparta’s “exceptionally” oppressive regime in Messenia (although how it could be more oppressive than Athens on Melos no one has yet been able to explain to me) is a fragment of poetry from Tyrtaios in which he describes the Messenians “like asses exhausted under great loads to bring their masters fully half the fruit their ploughed land produced.” (Tyrtaios, fr. 6). This vivid image is repeated in nearly every book on Sparta, particularly by those that like to portray Sparta as particularly brutal and unjust. Undoubtedly, this fascination with the phrase comes from the fact that it stems from a Spartan poet, and so can be assumed to be genuine (not just propaganda). In addition, the vivid image conjured up by the phrase “assess exhausted under great loads” catches the imagination and is easily remembered.

There is, however, a problem. Tyrtaios here makes explicit that the Messenians had to surrender one half (50%) (“fully half” as he words it) of their produce. Slaves everywhere else in the world surrendered all (100%) of the fruits of their labor. In short, Tyrtaois’ poem, far from being evidence of an excessively oppressive regime, is evidence of an astonishingly mild form of slavery – and of the wealth of Messenia. Another way of reading this passage is: “although only surrendering one half of the fruit of their ploughed fields, they were like assess exhausted under the great loads.” Messenia was rich, and once Sparta had control of it, they could not “afford” to let it go again.

In summary, the conquest of Messenia was a defining moment in Spartan history that had at least three profound effects on Spartan society and history. 1) the conquest itself caused the unrest that led to revolution and the introduction of a new constitution; 2) the conquest made Sparta and all Lacadaemon self-sufficient in food and so uninterested in trade and colonies to the same extent as other Greek cities, and 3) it created a subject population unlike the perioikoi and Laconian helots. It was a population that retained a memory of independence -- and heroic deeds.

This is where Aristomenes comes in. The legends of Aristomenes preserved traditions of a free and heroic Messenia. The tales bolstered Messenian pride and fostered hope of regaining independencein the future. In short, the legend of Aristomenes helped make the Messenians dissatisfied with their current status; it made Messenians more rebellious.

Spartan treatment of Messenians might have been objectively better than that of chattel slaves, but subjectively it was an intolerable indignity because the Messenians retained their national identity. While chattel slaves were uprooted and cut off from even their families, Messenian helots remained on the land of their forefathers with unbroken ties to their gods and heroes. People with proud, martial traditions are more likely to rebel, and the need to keep the Messenian under control in turn made Sparta over time increasingly militaristic and paranoid.

Given the importance of Messenia in defining Sparta’s development and character, it is useful to look more closely at Messenia’s greatest hero even – or especially – if he was only apocryphal. Next week, I will look more closely at specific aspects of the Aristomenes legend in the hope of shedding some more like on Sparta’s relationship with Messenia and helots.

Loving Life in Lacedaemon

2011-11-26T15:08:00.001+01:00

Sparta’s enemies allegedly joked that it was no wonder the Spartans were willing to die in battle -- because no one would have liked to live the way they did. Aside from the fact that these commentators probably knew very little about the way Spartans actually lived, the assumption is that lack of luxury and the pervasive deprivation to which Spartans were condemned by their laws made them unhappy men.

Yet Xenophon, a noted Laconophile who lived and campaigned with Spartans for decades, argued the other way around: that precisely because the Spartans learned to get along with very little, they were actually happier. Certainly modern efforts to measure happiness have produced various indexes which prove that there is no direct correlation between wealth and happiness. Unscientifically, I would add that in my personal experience the Nigerians, surrounded by corruption, pollution and collapsing infrastructures, are much happier and have a greater joie de vivre than do the Norwegians, who have one of the highest standards of living and enjoy one of the most equitable and developed societies on earth.

Without getting too deeply into the philosophical topic of what constitutes happiness, I would like to suggest that happiness has less to do with objective circumstances and more to do with a state of mind. We all know that whether a glass is described as half empty or half full depends on whether the observer is a pessimist or an optimist. However, as my father pointed out: the optimist and the pessimist are both wrong – but the optimist is happier.

When outsiders looked at Spartiate society and (based on what they knew) decided such a life wasn’t worth living, they may indeed have accurately described how they would have felt if forced to live the way the Spartans did. However, they tell us nothing about the way the Spartans themselves felt. They are describing Spartan society as “half empty” – but that is not necessarily the way the Spartans saw it. The historian has to look beyond the opinion of outsiders and search for hints about Spartans attitudes toward their society.

Returning to the opening comment, I would argue that, in fact, men are very rarely willing to die for something they don’t think work preserving. Troops notoriously break, run and surrender when they have lost faith in what they are fighting for. If Spartan rankers thought that their way of life wasn’t worth living, then they would have welcomed defeat as a way of introducing revolution and constitutional reform. Indeed, if young Spartans thought the Spartan way of life was so abdominal that it was better to die than live as they were supposed to live, then idealistic young Spartans would have deserted to the Athenians in droves, helped defeat the oppressive regime they hated, and introduced Athenian-style democracy. In short, witty as the Athenian joke is – and it made me laugh out loud – it does not describe the Spartan frame of mind.

So how do we come closer to the Spartan attitude toward life? What made Spartans willing to die for Sparta? Was it really just a mindless fear of showing fear? A fanatical devotion to a code of honor? Or was Xenophon on the right track when he suggested that the Spartans learned to enjoy life – and love it better – by learning self-control and restraint?

As evidence of a certain, if not joie de vivre, at least contentment, I would like to first draw attention to those pieces of Spartan art that we have to date uncovered. Unlike the art of some warlike cultures (notably the Aztecs), Spartan art depicts many peaceful scenes: farm animals, lions and mythical beasts, bulls and horses (lots of horses!), riders with and without hunting dogs, chariots with horses and charioteers, girls running, married couples side-by-side, a king watching the correct weighing of goods for export, youths and maidens and hoplites, lots of hoplites. It is notable that the facial expressions on the human figures are uniformly benign. A convention certainly, but I would argue that a society that rarely smiled would not have conventionalized the smile as the expression in its art.

As witness to Sparta’s love of life I would also like to call Sparta’s most famous philosopher, Chilon. According to a variety of ancient sources, Chilon was the origin of the quintessential laconic advice “Know Thyself” – inscribed in the forecourt to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Maria Papadopoulos points out in her contribution to “Sparta: A city-state of Philosophers: Lycurgus in Montaigne’s essais” (Sparta: Journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek History, Vol. 7, No. 1, July 2011), however, that this expression is a condensation of the longer command from Apollo to “know that you are not a God, know that you are mortal, know that the finitude called death is an irreducible component of life. Live accordingly.” If Papadopoulos is correct, then Chilon’s admonishment to “know thyself” was not so much advice to know one’s own abilities and limitations, but advice to live each day in anticipation of death. In short, it meant much the same thing as “Carpe Diem,” a phrase usually translated as “use each day.” Arguably “using” each day is not the same as enjoying each day, and yet as Papadopoulos goes on to note: “The ancient Spartans trained hard but they enjoyed themselves [too]: feasts, dancing and singing, creative imagination and satirical banter and a temple dedicated to the God of Laughter….”

Combined, these fragments of evidence suggest that the Spartans themselves did not find their lifestyle so burdensome and certainly not intolerable. The “deprivations” and hard work that strangers found so depressing were in contrast of little importance in a society that learned to love life itself in full consciousness of its transience. A man who keeps in mind the alternative (death) loves even the simplest things in life. This, I postulate, was the secret of Spartan attitudes that can be interpreted as a very deep-seated love of life.

New Review of "A Peerless Peer"

2011-11-19T12:23:00.001+01:00

The following review of Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer was recently published. Thank you, Geoffrey!

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer, by Helena Schrader, picks up where her first book about his childhood leaves off. She writes about relationships he built over his life, his life coming up in the ranks as he served in the military, and his exploits in battle against enemies, wildlife, and natural disasters. He learns about diplomacy, maritime warfare, and other cultures. During this period, Leonidas continues to learn and grow in the Spartan culture. He even marries and starts his own family. Since he is an Agiad prince, he has family complexity that he skillfully considers, and then navigates his life and career accordingly.

I have never been a fan of historical fiction, but these books really bring history to life. While it is not a story of fact, it contextualizes what we know with what might have been about that time and place. If you want to learn about Sparta during the fifth century BC, this book is a worthwhile read.

In the book’s historical notes section, Schrader explains why she routes the story in the manor she does, and she makes a lot of sense. She does not fear going against commonly accepted conjecture about Sparta, and calls out unsupported myths for what they are. Her challenges are supported with her own hypothesizes using what she and others know about that period. She shares a refreshing perspective.

The author is writing a third and final book about Leonidas, and I cannot wait for its completion and release. I have not been this excited about a book for as long as I can remember. Quite a strange feeling, so I am compelled to cheer Schrader on in her endeavors. I believe this author and historian deserves more notoriety than she gets. Read these books if you want to learn while being entertained at the same time.”

Geoffrey Smigun

Infanticide in Sparta -- and Athens

2011-11-11T18:48:00.000+01:00

One of the ugliest aspects of ancient Sparta to capture the modern imagination is the idea of “unworthy” infants being tossed off a precipitous cliff to their death by cold-hearted elders. I recently stumbled across another blog where the outraged comments about this custom far outweighed all other comments about the “weird” Spartans.

The tradition of Spartan infanticide has its roots in Plutarch, who specifically describes this cruel custom (Lycurgus: 16), but I personally have number problems with the way the custom is handled in modern literature.

First, of course, is the simple fact that the alleged site of these murders on Taygetos has indeed revealed many skeletons – but only of adult males not infants. In short, there appears to be some truth to the notion that people were executed by being thrown off a particular cliff, but no evidence whatever that infants were killed in this way. That said, the actual method of murder is a more-or-less irrelevant detail; the issue is the systematic murder of infants deemed unlikely to grow up healthy and hardy enough to survive the agoge and be good hoplites.

My second problem with Plutarch’s account is King Agesilaus II. Agesilaus was King Agis’s brother, and allegedly attended the agoge because he was not heir apparent. He was also “lame.” So how did an infant that was lame and not the heir apparent to the throne avoid being murdered as an infant and survive the agoge? Did his lameness develop later? Possibly, but the historical record makes no reference to an accident or injury. It appears that at least by the late 5th century the definition of “unworthy” could be very subjective and even lameness was not necessarily grounds for elimination.

Still, neither the lack of infant skeletons nor the singular case of Agesilas II actual refute or disprove Plutarch either. So we must admit the possibility that he is correct. Nevertheless, I still have a major problem with the modern discussion of Sparta’s policy, and it is the lack of context.

Most ancient Greek families were small. We do not hear of families with dozens of children as in the Middle Ages. Contemporary literature from comic opera to court documents make the notion of widespread sexual abstinence an unlikely explanation of the low birthrates. On the contrary, despite the ready availability of slaves, prostitutes and concubines, Greek literature, comedy, philosophy and legal proceedings assume frequent sexual contact between men and their wives. Birth control therefore had to come from contraception or infanticide. The documentary evidence is that infanticide in the form of abortions and exposure of unwanted infants after birth were the only effective contraceptive known in ancient Greece.

Historians hypothesize that at a woman in ancient Greece would have borne on average 4 to 6 children – and watched 2 to 4 of them die either due to intentional exposure or due to neglect. Most of those neglected/murdered infants would have been female because ancient Greek society was misogynous. Women were considered mentally and physically inferior to men, and they were a financial burden because they required dowries. In societies today with similar attitudes (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, east Africa, traditional China), female fetuses are more likely to be aborted, and female infants are more likely to die of neglect. It is estimated that 2 million female infants die each year because they are unwanted. The Greek comic poet Posidippus put it this way: “Everybody raises a son even if he is poor, but exposes a daughter even if he is rich.”

In short, exposing unwanted children was a common (not to say universal) practice in ancient Greece. What shocked male commentators from the rest of Greece about the Spartan practice was that 1) it applied to males rather than (worthless) females, and 2) it was left to the state (elders of the tribe) rather than the father to decide a infant’s fate. It was not the fact of murdering children that other Greeks found offensive, but the fact that a father did not have absolute control over the fate of his sons. In Sparta and Sparta alone, an outsider (a tribal elder) could interfere in a father’s despotic control over his own family.

None of this makes the Spartan practice of murdering “unworthy” infants more palatable. It is and remains an aspect of Spartan society that I too find alienating. But I would welcome more recognition of the fact that infanticide was not one of the aspects of Spartan society that made it “weird” and different from the rest of Greece. Infanticide was the norm throughout ancient Greece – including in “enlightened” Athens.

The Headlong God of War: A Tale of Ancient Greece and the Battle of Marathon

2011-11-05T07:27:00.000+01:00

Peter Krentz in The Battle of Marathon (Yale Library of Military History) describes in detail the equipment, terrain and tactics that shaped the Battle of Marathon, but he singularly fails to make Maraton an exciting story or to bring the characters to life. While his facts and analysis make an important contribution to understanding Marathon -- a battle that was arguably more significant than Thermopylae, his failure to excite our emotions as well as inform our minds detracts significantly from the impact of the book. Martin's The Headlong God of War makes up for these deficits and is as a result an excellent companion to Krentz's book for the scholar while being far more accessible to the laymen. If I could recommend only one book on Marathon, I would prefer Martin's account to Krentz' because it is both good history and a good story.

Particularly impressive is Martin's ability to make Miltiades, the Athenian commander at Marathon, comprehensible and likeable. The historical Miltiades is at best complex and at worst a shady character. His relationship to both the Persians and Athenian democracy was ambivalent, not to say treacherous. Yet Martin succeeds in turning him into a character that the reader can readily identify with. I especially liked the way Martin portrayed his relationship to his sons, something that is based on the historical record and described with great sympathy.

But Miltiades is not the only historical character Martin effectively brings to life in this novel. His portrayal of the tyrant Aristagoras is likewise excellent -- and chilling. Few scenes from any novel have stayed with me as long as Marin's description of the arrival of Histiaios' messenger at Aristagoras' court. Likewise, his Persian characters have greater depth and differentiation than is common. For the sake of a good, historically accurate story with believable characters, I'm willing to overlook the occassional typos and editing errors.

Of Martin's three books on ancient Greece this is my favorite. I recommend it to anyone interested in Marathon specifically or ancient Greece generally.

The Physical Appearance of Spartan Women

2011-10-29T13:05:00.000+02:00

On September 10, I speculated about the physical appearance of Spartan men. I'd like to expand that discussion today with some thoughts on Spartan women.

Admittedly, we known even less about what Spartan women might have looked like than we know about their men. To my knowledge, no human remains that can be definatively identified as Spartan women have yet been uncovered. There are also far fewer contemporary portrayals of women in ancient art than men. Furthermore, unlike the images of men, women in ancient sculpture and pottery are almost invariably shown well clothed. Aside from debunking modern voyeuristic fantasies about adult Spartan women going about very thinly clad, these do not reveal much about the real women they are intended to depict.

The written record is hardly more satisfying. Obviously, we have the Iliad and the tradition of Helen, the most beautiful woman on earth, a demi-goddess, and a Spartan. Herodotus tells of other beautiful Spartan women as well, notably the wife of King Ariston. But beauty, as we all know, is in the eye of the beholder and individual women, no matter how legendary their beauty, tell us nothing about the general appearance of Spartan women.

More revealing is Aristophanes description of Lampito, the Spartan female character in his farse Lysistrata. This play from the late 5th century BC intended to amuse Athenian males after their devastating defeat at Syracuse, reflects Athenian steriotypes of contemporary Spartan women. As such, it tells us almost nothing about what Spartan women actually looked like since the audience didn't have a clue either. In a sense, Aristophanes description is no more relevant to reality than depictions of Russian women in American movies from the Cold War as brawny tractor-drivers and factory workers. Still, even the most exaggerated characatures usually have a grain of truth, and therefore I would like to quote Aristophanes:

Lysistrata: Dear Spartan girl with a delightful face, washed with the rosy spring, how fresh you look in the easy stride of your sleek slenderness. Why you could strangle a bull!

Lampito: I think I could. It's from exercise and kicking my arse.

Lysistrata: What lovely breasts you have!

What this description suggests is that while Athenians, perhaps in deference to the tradition of Helen, were willing to concede Spartan women might have a pretty face, they presumed Spartan women, because they were known to exercise, developed massive, muscular bodies so unfeminine that they looked like they could "strangle a bull." I would note that portraying enemy women as masculine and non-vulnerable is a useful tool in reducing/eliminating any latent pity men might otherwise have felt for the women of the foe, and so this description may also serve overall propaganda purposes of making Spartan women repulsive to the Athenian audience.

Turnig to the grain of truth this description might provide, as I noted in my earlier essay on Spartan appearance, Spartans were apparently generally taller than their contemporaies, which is probably the result of more meat in their diet. Since one of the most striking differences about the rearing of girls in Sparta compared to treatment of female infants and children elsewhere is Greece was that they received the same food as their brothers, this meat-heavy diet would have been fed Spartan girls too. Yet elsewhere in Greece, girls and women were fed a different, "simpler" diet with no "extras," (to use Xenophon's words) than their brothers. In short, the difference in height between Spartans and the citizens from other cities would have been even more extreme when comparing women to women than men to men.

In addition, Spartan girls were expected to run and even race -- hence Aristophanes' reference to Lampito's "easy stride." Indeed, if we are to believe Xenophon and Plutarch, Spartan girls were taught wrestling, and were expected to master the bow and javelin, and certainly to master horses -- all things that might make a comedian compare them to women capable of "strangling a bull."

Certainly, Spartan girls could run, swim and dance. They took part in races both on foot and driving chariots, and they took part in public dances. All this entailed spending a good deal of time outside in the fresh air, and that meant that Spartan girls were exposed to the elements and their skin would have tanned the Greek sun. It also meant that they grew up getting a great deal of excercise -- probably more than most girls get today, and they would very likely have been sleek and lean like their brothers, at least while growing up and in the agoge. After all, Xenophon and Plutarch stress that the girls were being treated like their brothers that regime produced the tall, lean youth of the agoge.

Girls in other Greek cities were, in contrast, not allowed to set foot outside their houses and were expected to be "sedentary." So while the Spartan girls grew tall and fit, women in the rest of Greece grew up stunted from a diet short on protein, rarely had access to fresh air, and did not exercise. The impact on physical appearance of other Greek women would have been women significantly shorter than their own men (much less Spartans) and without muscles -- though not necessarily thin. (A girl who eats too much of a carbohydrate-intensive diet and does not move more than a few feet in the course of a day can still grow fat, but she is not likely to be lean much less strong.) In short, the contrast between the physical appearance of Spartan and other Greek girls and maidens would have been much more striking than between Spartan and other Greek boys and men.

Admittedly, after marriage Spartan women, unlike their husbands, were no longer compelled to exercise or to eat at common messes, so they might have become comparatively soft and fat. However, they still had responsibility for their households and this entailed considerable amounts of outside work and exposure to fresh air and sunlight so that it seems unlikely that Spartan women competely lost their physical condition. Furthermore, because Spartan women did not marry until their late teens/early twenties, they would have been brought to childbed at the optimal age, while girls in other Greek cities generally married much younger and bore their first child at 15 or 16, with all the known negative consequences for their health.

Finally, I would like to suggest that Spartan women's education, literacy and economic power also had an impact on their appearance. Women who are raised to think they are important to their society, who are literate and encouraged to voice their opinions, women who have real power tend to stand straighter, hold their head high and move with confidence. I find it hard to image Spartan women sitting hunched over with bowed heads as the women of Athenian pottery do.

In conclusion, Spartan women would generally have been taller than other women, more physically fit, tanned, and over time they would have aged better -- indeed the very probably had a much longer life expectancy than women elsewhere in Greece! In addition, they would have held themselves with self-assurance and moved with greater confidence. Perhaps the combination of these things would indeed have made them seem strong (and brave) enough to "strangle a bull" when compared to their contemporaries.

Scenes from a Spartan Marriage

2011-10-22T12:39:00.000+02:00

The full text of "Scenes from a Spartan Marriage" was published in Sparta: Journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek History, Vol. 6, # 1, Markoulakis Publications.

When modern man tries to imagine Spartan society and institutions, he is immediately confronted with the problem of sources. Quite aside from the usual catalogue of problems – incompleteness, unreliable transcriptions, poor translations, and the like – sources on Sparta are notorious for coming from foreigners and for dating from a period long after the institutions and society allegedly described. Worst of all, many of the most famous depictions are a conscious attempts to describe the ideal society created by a legendary figure (Lycourgos) rather than an observed society. This is rather like taking Marx’s vision of socialist society as a guide for what life was like in the “real existing socialism” of the Soviet Union.

Arguably, nothing about Spartan society was so radically different from the rest of the Greek world as the role of women and so, ipso facto, marital relations. Yet none of our sources on Spartan marriages were participants in one. Rather, the observers upon which historians must rely for a description for this inherently private and intimate sphere are men who came from a radically different culture. In short, relying on the historical account of Spartan marriage is rather like trusting a member of Iran’s Islamic Council to describe marriage in America. Recognizing this fact, it is useful for anyone seriously interested in trying to understand Spartan society to try to think “outside the box,” to venture into the uncharted areas beyond the written record and use common sense to hypothesize realistic modes of behaviour consistent with the known facts.

A classic example of the need for common sense in viewing the Spartan marriage is provided by Plutarch’s “Life of Lycurgus.” First Plutarch describes how girls were required to “run and wrestle and throw the discus and javelin,” stressing that “young girls no less than young men grow used to walking nude in processions, as well as to dancing and singing at certain festivals with the young men present and looking on.” (Plutarch, Lycurgus: 14) He goes on to describe the way girls watched the boys and youths in their exercises, making fun of the inept and composing songs of praise for their favourites. In short, he paints a picture of young people growing up together in close proximity and actively involved in observing and performing for one another. He even underlines the point that the interest of youth in the opposite sex was consciously and intentionally sexual. Then in the next section, he claims that because men married while on active service and were required to sleep in their barracks, that some men “might have children before they saw their own wives in daylight.” (Plutarch, Lycurgus: 15). What? Spartiate men married the very same girls they had seen racing, swimming, singing and dancing at festivals, the girls who had cheered or jeered their own accomplishments; they had seen each other in full daylight– including in the nude - innumerable times before they even got married!

Furthermore, while the young men on active service (aged 21-30) might have been required to spend the night in barracks, they were not imprisoned. The young men were expected to exercise, swim, and hunt. They were free to take part in chorus, certain team sports, ride, race and presumably had responsibility for their estates or at least took an interest in breeding Lacedaemon’s famous horses and dogs. Is it reasonable to expect that two young people who married at least in part due to sexual attraction did not use their free time to meet with one another? Plutarch himself says that “the bride…devised schemes and helped plan how they might meet each other unobserved at suitable moments.” (Plutarch, Lycurgus: 15)

Using a little common sense, therefore, it seems most likely that because of the requirement for men on active duty to sleep in their barracks, young Spartan couples were most likely to meet during the day. It was probably a lot more risky for a young Spartiate to be AWOL from his barracks at night than to tryst with his bride while out “hunting” or exercising his horses or checking up on his estate. The fact that Plutarch could not imagine this and slips into the assumption that all the “trysting” was done in the dark of night is simply a function of his own cultural bias.

Because women elsewhere in Greece could not cross the threshold of their homes without disgrace, were physically unfit, and neither knew how to ride nor drive and so were dependent on men for any kind of mobility, Plutarch imagines all a young couple’s trysts taking place in the home. Since it might indeed be hard for a young man to go to his wife’s home unseen except at night, Plutarch concludes most of these trysts took place in the dark of night. But Spartan women had no restrictions on their movement. On the contrary, they were expected and required to leave their homes for a variety of reasons, and observers noted with shock that they were everywhere in evidence. Furthermore, they could ride and drive chariots. No one was going to stop them from meeting up with their husband at a designated place such as a rural estate or a favourite glen at will.

As for eating dinner at the syssitia, most men nowadays eat the mid-day meal – which can also be called dinner and is in many societies the main meal of the day - away from their wives every day of their working lives too. This has not made modern wives notably lesbian or induced them to seize control of their husband’s affairs. Why should it have had that effect on Spartan women?

The rhythum of a Spartan day was undoubtedly different from ours. To avoid the oppressive head of mid-day, vigorous activity – whether drill for the army or strenuous sport – was more likely to be conducted early in the morning or later in the evening, at least in the summer months. The same heat would dictate that markets and much agricultural activity also halted during the hottest part of the day. Most probably, all people, rich and poor, male and female, slowed down their activity, sought out the shade, and refreshed themselves during that period when the sun was at its zenith. Very likely then, this was the period in which families came together, probably for a common meal, talked about common interests and, when inclined, made love.

Let us suppose this was the case: that Spartan wives went about the business of running their husband’s estate, purchasing necessary materials and selling surpluses during the “business day” from dawn to mid-morning and again from mid-afternoon to dusk. This would still leave them a lengthy and leisurely mid-day period in their homes with their husbands, who would likewise have a break in their routine of drill and sport before returning to the city for dinner. Was the time a Spartan couple spent together in these circumstances substantially less than what a modern couple with two careers and active children has?

Many modern couples complain that the demands of jobs, commuting, and child-rearing leave too little time for interacting with one’s spouse. Marriage counsellors recommend spending “at least one hour” a day exclusively with one’s partner. It is hard to imagine that Spartan couples did not manage at least one hour together every day in a society less dominated by instant communication and the ever-present boss. Why then should Spartan marriages have been less viable or less balanced than our own?

For the full text and the references see Sparta: Journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek History, Vol. 6, # 1, Markoulakis Publications, pp. 46-49.

New Reviews of Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer

2011-10-16T16:39:00.001+02:00

Excellent description of difficult period

by Brenda Miller (North Carolina), Sept. 30, 2011

Helena Schrader has done it again, amazingly. In this, her second volume in the Leonidas trilogy, she has brought an admittedly difficult period in Leonidas' life to a level of sustained reader interest. The earlier volume covering the agoge period had an easily identifiable theme and historical framework, and the last volume, which will emphasize Thermopylae, also has an identifiable historical framework to build on. It is this interim period, about which very little is actually known, where Ms Schrader shows her skills as an historical novelist. It bears repeating here that Ms Schrader does and has done, her "homework" on ancient Sparta in this period. Her research is beyond reproach and although she embellishes (as she must),she does not make up her own facts. Although my own field of Greek historical interest is a much earlier period, I know enough about 5th Century Sparta to recognize the accuracy of her descriptions. I can also state that based on my 23 years as an Infantry officer in the US Army, Ms Schrader has clearly done a significant amount of research on armies, soldiers, and what motivates them and makes them cohesive winners.

As she states in her prefaces, Ms Schrader aims to correct general opinion of Sparta as being some sort of brutal producer of robot-like ironmen. She succeeds, to the point where I and I suspect other, at least male, readers, might say that she has gone a bit too far in describing Sparta as a "touchy-feely", sensitive, place where a straight-arrow, incorruptible, nice guy, like Leonidas could even survive, much less become a King and army commander. But there is no arguing with Ms Schrader's research and if such is the Sparta she has uncovered, then so be it.My only disappointment is that I have to wait now for a seemingly interminable period for the final volume of this trilogy!

Ms Schrader has done a superb job here putting flesh on the few historical bones that we have of Leonidas. She has written an absolutely excellent historical novel which should have widespread appeal and which, with the other two volumes, would make a fascinating movie. I would not hesitate to buy the completed trilogy as a gift for members of my own family of very different ages.

An extremely readable historical/biography

by M. Lignor (New York, NY), Oct. 7, 2011

A good start for a review concerning Sparta might be for the layman to know just where Sparta is located. Sparta is on a plain, completely surrounded by mountain ranges. It was a Greek city/state but not fortified as most of the cities of Greece were at that time. Sparta was a collection of small villages built over a large rural area and six very low hills. The highest served as the acropolis and location of the Temple of Athena. Sadly, there's not much of it left to see.

Now on to Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer. The Administrators of the Spartan government tried to get the King of Sparta to set aside his wife and take another as she had not produced a child. The King refused and in an attempt to get an heir, the Administrators agreed to allow the King to take a second wife without putting aside his first. The new wife soon had a son, Cleomenes.

A year after the birth of Cleomenes, the King's first wife gave birth to a son, Dorieus, followed by twin sons, Leonidas and Cleombrotus. As Leonidas was considered to be her third son, he didn't have a chance to become King so he had to go to the agoge (a public school that all Spartan sons had to complete in order to qualify for citizenship).

King Cleomenes has to deal with a co-monarch, King Demaratus, and this King is a fighter while Cleomenes is more interested in sticking his nose into the affairs of Athens. Demaratus is against this move and soon the kings are at odds. Trading on this conflict, the Corinthians are challenging the Spartan's control of the area. At the same time, other Greek cities are asking for aid from Sparta in a rebellion against Persia.

Leonidas, if you remember, is the youngest half-brother of Cleomenes and is not really interested in politics. He has just obtained his citizenship from the school and doesn't think that this revolt by his countrymen will affect him in the slightest. He is an ordinary soldier in the Spartan army and a lot more interested in taking care of his own life. His biggest concerns are to find people to take care of his ruined estate and looking around for a suitable woman to become his bride.

He sets his cap for Gorgo; she is intelligent and tough - qualities that were not the norm for marriageable women in Ancient Sparta. They get married, and they are a good team. Gorgo is extremely clever and this helps Leonidas to take care of his people and the pair become very well thought of monarchs. But, that is for the next book in this very readable series to cover. This book is book two in the Leonidas saga. The first volume: Leonidas of Sparta, A Boy of the Agoge, deals with Leonidas' birth, growing up in Sparta and his schooling at the Agoge. This second volume is about his citizenship before he became ruler, his marriage, the battles (which were frequent) that he fought, and the politics that he learned to handle.

Readers will enjoy this book even if they have not read the first in the series. A Peerless Peer will definitely stand alone and is also a good lead-in to the final book in the series. When readers finish this story they will be anxious to see what happens to Leonidas and Gorgo when his fortunes change for the better.

The author is a superb writer of Historical/Fiction/Biography. The story was very readable and Ancient History buffs will be able to put themselves in the middle of these great battles and the politics that brought them to the attention of the author.

4.0 out of 5 stars

Helen of Sparta - What Homer's Helen Tells Us About Sparta

2011-10-01T12:03:00.000+02:00

Raphael Sealey in his study Women and Law in Classical Greece (Chapel Hill: 1990) makes a strong case that the marriage customs and status of women as portrayed in the works of Homer are incompatible with customs in classical Athens. He argues that: “The Athenian and Homeric concepts of marriage are so markedly different that one cannot have developed from the other.” (p. 126)

Sealey furthermore argues that the depiction of Helen in both the Iliad and the Odyssey is not the evil, vain, greedy and sex-crazed Helen of Athenian theater but a dignified princess/queen and a wise woman. In the Iliad, Priam honors her, calling her “dear child,” while Hektor, the paragon of Homeric virtue, shows her courtesy and respect. Most important, Menelaos takes her back to be his Queen. In the Odyssey, Helen is depicted in Sparta apparently enjoying the respect of the entire population and providing wise advice to her husband. It is striking that such a portrayal of Helen is consistent with Spartan tradition, where Helen was honored alongside Menelaos, temples were built to her and an annual holiday was celebrated in her honor.

One particularly intriguing aspect of the Helen portrayed by Homer in the Odyssey is that she, like Gorgo, is shown to be cleverer than the men around her! She is the first to recognize Telemachos (Odyssey 4:138:32), and it is Helen who deciphers the significance of an eagle carrying a goose (Odyssey 15:160:78).

This begs the question if Homeric traditions with respect to women had a stronger influence on Sparta, particularly Archaic and pre-revolutionary Sparta, than they did on Athens. Is it possible that Doric traditions generally owed more to the world described in the works of Homer than did Ionian traditions? Admittedly, we do not know just what society the Iliad and Odyssey actually describe and many argue that the world of Homer, like Homer himself, is completely fictional. Yet repeatedly, archeological evidence has come to light that verifies elements of the great epics previously dismissed as “fiction” (e.g. helmets with boars tusks).

We know that women in Sparta enjoyed exceptional freedom and status compared, particularly, to women in Athens. While this difference is traditionally attributed to the laws of Lycurgus, it is unreasonable to presume that something as fundamental as attitudes toward women would change over night. It is far more likely that women in Sparta already enjoyed higher status and that the revolution in Sparta that followed the First Messenian War only codified, institutionalized and developed to new levels pre-existing tendencies. The fact that Cretan women, Achaian women and women in Gortyn also had notably more freedom and status than women in classical Athens is further evidence that at least in Doric societies there was a wider, pre-classical tradition which contrasted sharply to the misogynous practices and laws of classical Athens.

It would be interesting to know if Doric traditions differed markedly to Ionic traditions in other spheres as well – and equally intriguing to investigate to what extent (if any) Ionic traditions were influenced by Asiatic customs. Is it possible that Athenian misogyny had more to do with the influence of the East – of Babylon and Persia – than with the roots of Greek civilization? Was Sparta’s comparatively greater respect for women perhaps more genuinely “Greek/Hellenic”?

Sparta’s Happy Helots: A Closer Look at Helot Society

2011-09-24T13:26:00.000+02:00

The common view of Sparta is of a society divided between the wealthy, politically privileged (albeit underfed, cowed yet brutal etc. etc.) Spartiates, and the oppressed, helpless, despised helots. As I have noted in earlier entries, this ignores the vitally important role of perioikoi, but today I wish focus on helot society, particularly the fact that it too was highly differentiated. Not all helots were equal – nor equally miserable.

Historical sources make reference to helots in a variety of positions. First and foremost, of course, the helots worked the land. But helots also played a – singularly undefined – role in the Spartan army. Helots accompanied the Spartan army to Plataea, for example, and they were ordered to set fire to the sacred wood after the battle of Sepeia. These army helots appear to be a collective body under the command of the king, not the individual attendants of Spartan rankers. But each Spartan hoplite did, apparently, also have a helot body servant to look after his kit and help him arm. We hear too of “Lacedaemonian” wet-nurses being highly valued, and finding service as far away as Athens, where such a nurse allegedly breast-fed the ultimate Athenian aristocrat Alcibiades. While not explicitly a helot, it is hard to imagine a Spartiate or even perioikoi woman taking a position that was usually held by a chattel slave. The same is true of hereditary “town-criers, flute-players and cooks” listed by Herodotus (The Histories:6:60). Because all these functions were important to the army, I have argued elsewhere that they were not despised professions, but it is unclear whether the jobs were filled by perioikoi or helots; either interpretation is possible. Last but not least, although not explicitly mentioned, implicit in a highly civilized society with a very tiny elite such as Sparta, were people doing all the menial tasks necessary to keep a developed but still non-mechanized society functioning. In short, helots most likely did all those tasks done by chattel slaves in the rest of the ancient world. Someone in Lacedaemon built roads, dug ditches, cleaned latrines, quarried stones and extracted ore from mines etc., and I think it is safe to assume that these jobs were done by helots.

As we look closer at helot society, let’s remember that rural helots retained a substantial fixed portion (probably 50%) of the produce of that land they worked. Allegedly, at the time of Lycurgus’ Great Reforms, there was one adult male helot on each kleros, who tilled the land for the benefit of himself and the Spartiate “master.” Officially, neither the Spartiate nor the helot actually owned the land, which belonged to the state. Both were hereditary “tenants.” As long as there is only one male heir to each tenant, such a system is more or less sustainable indefinitely. Unfortunately, however, human demographics do not produce perfect replacement and even in countries with primogeniture (such as medieval England) families die out in the male line on average every three generations. Without primogeniture, however, an excess of heirs can rapidly reduce a family to penury. To avoid these consequences, societies evolve inheritance and marriage laws to regulate the distribution of wealth over generations.

Stephen Hodkiinson in his excellent study Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (London, 2000) traces the impact of inherence laws on the concentration of wealth in Spartiate society, but helots were not land-owners and could not buy or sell land. Rather, they were transferred with the land from one Spartiate owner to another. Still, the ancient historians tell us that some helots were wealthy enough by the end of the 5th century to buy their freedom. In short, the accumulation of wealth – albeit not land – was clearly possible even in helot society. Some helots were definitely richer than others. But how?

The key to understanding this is again demographics. Unlike chattel slaves in the rest of Greece, helots had family units. In consequence, the sexual relations and off-spring of helots were not controlled by their masters for their own purposes, but developed more naturally.

In Athens and elsewhere, the off-spring of slaves were unwanted extra mouths to feed (that also reduced the concentration and working life of a female slave) and so intercourse between slaves was prevented to the extent possible. The fact that it was not always possible to prevent slave women from getting pregnant would not have worried slave-owners unduly because in the ancient Greek world it was common to expose unwanted children – even of citizen children. The unwanted children of chattel slaves would therefore simply have been left to die. Athens did not suffer from a growing slave population because it could keep the slave population under control effectively by these methods and by selling off slaves who were superfluous on the international market. Unwanted Athenians slaves, therefore, could end up in Persia, Egypt or Italy.

In Lacedaemon, in contrast, Spartiates could not sell helots outside of Lacedaemon, and helots lived in family units. As everywhere else on earth where families exist, fathers would have taken pride in at least their male off-spring. Male children would have been nourished and raised to adulthood to the extent possible. Females would have received less attention, food and affection (if the evidence of societies across the globe is any guide), but enough girls would have survived to adulthood to ensure survival of the family. Barring catastrophes, populations grow over time. Thus we can hypothesize a growing helot population from the age of Lycurgus (whenever that was) to the classical period – that fateful age when the helot population outnumbered the Spartiate population many times over (though probably not more than serfs outnumbered noblemen in Medieval Europe, by the way.) This is an important dynamic that explains why the imbalance between Spartiate and helot populations was so much greater than the imbalance between the Athenian citizen and slave populations.

This simple demographic fact might also explain why helots, who could not acquire land as their Spartiate masters clearly did, would have effectively become poorer over the generations. After all, if all the descendants of the original helot tenant of a kleros were tied to the same plot of land, then a finite plot of land would have been required to sustain entire clans rather than just one nuclear family by the time two hundred years had passed. In short, each individual would have been much poorer than his ancestor. And while there may have been a general tendency toward impoverishment, it was clearly not the fate of all helots or there would have been no wealthy helots able to buy their freedom, and no one doing all the other jobs noted above.

Instead it appears that some form of voluntary or involuntary primogeniture evolved over timte that ensured that only one helot had the status of “tenant-in-chief” on each kleros. He might have many children and many sons, but he had only one “heir.” If there were no sons, then very likely a son-in-law became the “tenant-in-chief,” and if there were no surviving children at all, the kleros was “vacant” and the Spartan state had to find new tenants from a pool of available helots.

In the more common case of a man having more than one son, the non-heirs (most likely the younger sons) would have been forced to earn a living off the family farm. As the property of the Lacedaemonian state, of course, helots could not leave Lacedaemon, but to my knowledge there is no reason to think they could not hire themselves out within the boundaries of Lacedaemon.

Some younger sons would have been apprenticed to learn crafts scorned by the perioikoi and prohibited to the Spartiates. Through apprenticeship to those that had taken this path before them, they would have become tanners and tinkers, cobblers and coopers, masons and dyers. As a master craftsman, able to retain 100% of their earnings, these helots would have been in a position to found families, build houses and accumulate wealth.

Other young men unable or unwilling to embark on such a slow, hard career, would have sought employment as laborers for the Spartan army or state, or to individuals. Thus they could have become the personal attendants to Spartan hoplites or agricultural day-laborers, going from estate to estate. Others would have worked for wages as teamsters and mule-drivers for the Spartan army or as construction workers, bath attendants, gardeners and repairmen for the Lacedaemonian government. Still other could have found employment in perioikoi factories and business - as miners, quarry workers, rowers, etc. etc..

Meanwhile, helot girls unable to find husbands would, like the daughters of the poor in every society across the globe over the last three thousand years, have found work as nursemaids and housemaids. They would have waited on the women and children of those better off than themselves, and made up the bulk of the household labor on Spartiate and perioikoi estates and homes.

In other words, helot society was more complex than Spartiate society. On the land there would have been at least three classes of helots. There would have been “tenants-in-chief” on the prosperous estates of wealthy (even royal) Spartiates, who retained a large portion of significant revenues from the fertile land. Such helots would probably have been able to build substantial dwellings and to hire household help and additional labor when necessary (harvest etc.) without dividing up the inheritance and so keeping it in tact. They would probably have lived better than many free men in other societies. (A good example of this pattern is the wealthy serfs of southwest England who built houses hardly distinguishable from the manors of the gentry.) At the same time there would have been helots on poor, run-down or marginal estates that -- like their Spartiate masters -- were constantly on the brink of failure. Conceivably, Spartiate masters living in fear of losing their citizenship or barely able to make agoge fees were harsh masters, constantly trying to squeeze more from the kleros or looking for ways to cheat the helots out of their share. Finally, at the bottom of rural society would have been the itinerant agricultural workers without homes of their own, who sold their labor by the day or hour,

But, as I pointed out above, helot society was not exclusively rural. Urban helots too would have been divided into different strata living very different life-styles. Those helots working hired laborers for the Spartan state and army, would have lived in barracks or in small rented rooms, and would have formed a kind of urban proletariat similar to poor craftsmen in Athens and elsewhere. However, there would also have been skilled craftsmen with workshops and stores. While some of these might have barely scraped by, living in miserable slums or dark attic rooms rented from their more prosperous neighbors, others – as anywhere on earth – would have had a talent for business and sales. Exceptional craftsmen would have been able to charge more for their goods or found other ways to make money. These would have been able to afford apprentices and even slaves of their own. The more succuessful they became, the easier it would be for them to accumulate wealth by investing and lending. Such men, like the privileged “tenants-in-chief” on the land, would have lived in comparative luxury and would later be in the position to buy their freedom.

In short, in addition to the oppressed, abused and miserable helots familiar to every student of Sparta, there were also large numbers of comparatively well-off helots, who enjoyed considerable freedom, a reasonable standard of living for their age, and were far from discontented with their lot in life. These helots were what enabled the Spartan state to function so well throughout the archaic period.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer -- The First Reviews

2011-09-17T16:09:00.000+02:00

Just ten days after the release of Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer two reviews have already been posted on amazon.com. That's exciting -- especially when both are from people I do not know and to whom I did not send review copies. I hope this is a good omen and the book will continue to attract positive attention.

5.0 out of 5 stars

So Good It Will Make You Stay Up Past Your Bedtime..., September 8, 2011

By
Kathleen Ann Langley "Lucky 7 Tattoo Kings Beach" (Lake Tahoe, California)

(REAL NAME), Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is for: Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer (Paperback)

Yes, once again Ms Schrader has kept me up WAY past my bedtime for "just one more chapter." Rarely in historical fiction does this happen for me. I will hit a boring spot in a book and easily put it down until next time. Not so with the second book of this Leonidas trilogy "Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer." She had a tough job to outshine herself after the first part of this 3 part series, " A Boy of the Agoge" yet the author met the challenge with gusto.

All the main players of ancient Sparta are back, and some new ones add to the story without becoming confusing. Gorgo comes into her teenage years with timeless problems we can relate to. Leonidas becomes a man we would all desire to have in our lives as the ultimate compassionate alpha male. And the folks who surround these 2 ancient royal players have their own stories told too. Not a boring one in the bunch either. It's like a soap opera set in antiquity!

Now that I have plowed my way through this second book I once again cannot wait until the 3rd and final book comes out next year! If you even have a vague interest in what life may have been like for Leonidas, or the Spartan people at this time and place in history, you will dig this book.

AND

5.0 out of 5 stars

Thin rations, September 4, 2011,

Jessica Allan Schmidt (People's Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States)

(REAL NAME)

This review is for: Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer (Paperback)

William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner once commented that a historical novelist did best when given "thin rations". This book takes those scant rations available from the historical record and extrapolates them, using common sense as well as classical sources, to construct what life may have been like for Leonidas I. There are some interesting inconsistencies with the historical records -- for instance, it is not known if Cleombrotus was Leonidas' twin or younger brother, yet the series paints him quite convincingly as Leonidas' elder twin -- but on the whole, it provides a very interesting look at the dynamics of an unusual society.

Sparta is often treated by modern scholars as a nation of simple brutes, but records do not hold with this -- if the training of youths was simply a matter of testing them until they broke, Greek leaders from all over the peninsula would not have competed to send their sons to the agoge for whatever periods they could. Like military schools of today, Sparta's educational programme was much more clearly devoted to military *and* practical learning, but the relative dearth of universal military training during this period means that its military nature is over-emphasised. Moreover, the fact that attendance at the Spartan agoge meant for some préstige among other Greeks strongly implies that it was seen as a specialist school that was a great honour for youths inclined to eventually rise to rôles of command in their own city-state's military.

The examination of what Spartan adult life was like is an interesting view of comparison and contrast. In the era before supertankers and jet aircraft, military engagements were by necessity no more than half the year, before mud and rain made it impossible to manoeuvre effectively, and, even more importantly, avoid disease decimating the ranks (a killer that was more likely than death by battle wound up through the Second World War), and therefore, even though Spartans were certainly careful to keep themselves in training year round and maintain constant operational readiness, they also had personal, civilian lives that were just as important to them, if not more so. As any tactician can tell you, the most motivated fighter is one who fights to defend a society he feels is integral to his life. Were Sparta a brutal place dedicated to warfare and only warfare, there would be no society to defend.

In this book, it is interesting to see the evolution of Queen Gorgo from girlhood to womanhood, even though most of it is conjecture based on what *is* known of the training of Spartan women. This book is also surprisingly engaging for the middle part of a trilogy, traditionally a time when *any* storytelling lags. The agoge is notorious, and Leonidas' death is equally well-known, but this period could have been fairly dull, yet it is as engaging as the first book in this series. I recommend it strongly.

The Physical Appearance of Spartans

2011-09-10T13:38:00.000+02:00

As a novelist, I have given considerable thought to what the Spartans in the Age of Leonidas might have looked like, as well as how they would have groomed themselves and dressed. From comments and correspondence, I gather that this is a topic of interest to many of my readers as well, so I thought it might be worth some joint speculation.

In terms of physical build, I have not heard of any archeological evidence based on skeletons, but would welcome any information you may have heard or read about. In the absence of such forensic evidence, I may dependent on mixing ancient sources with modern experience and common sense.

Both Plutarch and – more importantly Xenophon – stress that Spartan youth (i.e. during the critical years of physical development and growth) were not allowed to eat “too much.” Xenophon speaks of “just the right amount for them never to become sluggish through being too full, while also giving them a taste of what it is not to have enough. [Lycurgus'] view was that boys under this kind of regime would be better able, when required, to work hard without eating, as well as to make the same rations last longer, when so ordered; they would be satisfied with a plain diet, would adapt better to accepting any type of food, and would be in a healthier condition. [Lycurgus] also considered that a diet which produced slim bodies did more to make them grow tall than one in which the food filled them out.” (Spartan Society:2)

Plutarch, the less reliable source, writes: “The aim of providing [Spartan boys in the agoge] with only sparse fare is that they should be driven to make up its deficiencies by resort to daring and villainy. While this is the main purpose of their scanty diet, a subsidiary one is claimed to be the development of their physique, helping them in particular to grow tall. When people over-eat, their breathing is labored, thus producing a broad, squat frame. In contrast, if breath suffers from only slight delay and difficulty and has an easy ascent, the body is enabled to develop freely and comfortably. Good looks are produced in the same way. For where lean, spare features respond to articulation, the sheer weight of obese, over-fed ones make them resist it.” (Lycurgus:17).

It is startling the way Xenophon’s explanation of why the Spartans restricted the diet of youth to the necessary is focused on virtues very useful to an effective army in the field, while Plutarch’s speculation is more about cheating and “villainy.” Indeed, if one follows Plutarch’s reasoning, Spartan youth didn’t suffer any deprivation at all because they simply stole what they didn’t get in their official rations and the clever and better they were at theft, the fatter they would have become, defeating any “secondary” aim of improving the physique.

Notable, however, is despite the different explanations of why the Spartans instituted a regime of sparse rations for youth, both authors suggest that it produced “tall” and (in Plutarch’s case) handsome men. To my knowledge, however, too little food in fact stunts growth, not the reverse. Clearly the ancient commentators postulated a causal effect where there was none, but such a thesis would presumably have been based on two known facts: that Spartan youth ate less than their Athenian etc. equivalents and Spartans were, on average, taller than their enemies.

(The modern observer should take careful note of the fact that if Spartans were apparently on average taller than other Greeks, they probably did not suffer any real deprivation as children. Whatever “short” rations were common in the agoge, they were not so short that growth was in any way impeded since even if some youth may have been adept at theft, most would not have been.)

Returning to the theme of physical appearance, however, we clearly have a reasonable indication that Spartans were on average notably taller than most of their contemporaries. Since the ancient explanation (they received too little to eat as children) is implausible, we need to look for other possible explanations that would make the thesis (Spartans were generally taller) credible. Here the experience of modern Japan might be a useful corollary. As long as the Japanese diet was dependent almost exclusively on fish for protein, the Japanese were notoriously short; the introduction of meat led to the average height in Japan skyrocketing by roughly a foot in just two generations. If we remember that fish was the preferred food in Athens and the most readily available protein for all the island Greeks, while Spartans were envied for their rich pastures and game-filled forests, I think it is fair to postulate that the Spartan diet was more meat heavy than that of their major rivals. It is reasonable, therefore, to picture Spartans as unusually tall by contemporary standards.

It would be wrong to conclude, however, that they were broader as well as taller than their contemporaries. On the contrary, the ancient commentators stress that Spartans were slim, something they attributed to the fixed rations at the syssitia. Yet men who are too tall and too thin would have been incapable of marching long distances or fighting exceptionally well in a phalanx. So we are talking about lean, not skinny, men.

While it might be tempting to picture a Spartan in his prime looking something like a linebacker, I would caution that Sparta’s military successes were not soley a function of Spartan troops being able to push harder, but also march more rapidly (and move at night) and to cover difficult terrain. Likewise the emphasis on hunting, particularly for men in the reserves, suggests to me that Spartans were not excessively “top heavy,” but rather lithe and fleet of foot as well as broad shouldered and strong-armed. In conclusion, I postulate that Spartans had an all-round athletic build developed over decades of physical activity from sports and hunting to military drill and combined with a healthy, but protien-heavy diet that made them tough and lean but not stocky.

Turning to grooming, let me start by dismissing modern artistic depictions of Spartans that show them as shaggy, unkempt men with scrawny, chest-long beards and wild, tangled hair hanging to their shoulders alà Richard Hook’s illustrations in Osprey’s The Spartan Army. Likewise, I reject descriptions such as those of Otto Lendle, who describes Spartans as stinking, filthy and slovenly. These images contradict the historical record and existing archeological evidence.

Herodotus, for example, makes a great point of how the Spartans groomed themselves before Thermopylae, and no one would be tempted to stress the beauty of Spartans as Plutarch does if they had been repugnant for their lack of grooming and hygene. More important, a statue fragment found in the heart of Sparta and dating from the early fifth century (commonly – or affectionately – referred to as Leonidas) shows a man with a clipped beard and neat hair. Earlier archaic artwork unanimously shows men with short beards and long, but very neat, “locks” of hair. (Note, for example the hoplites on the magnificent frieze of the Siphnian Treasure at Delphi dating from Leonidas’ lifetime, the Krater of Vix also from this period, and the figurines of known Laconian origin now displayed in the Museum of Ancient History in Berlin or pictured in Conrad Stibbe’s Das Andere Sparta.)

In addition to these sources, the admittedly dubious Plutarch claims Spartan men took particular care of their hair especially in the face of danger, and refers to an alleged quote from Lycurgus that long hair was preferred because it rendered a handsome man better looking, and an ugly one more frightening.

Whether the locks depicted in ancient sculpture were in fact braided or plaited is not possible to tell from the stylized nature of the evidence. However, it is physically impossible to keep long hair in neat, orderly strands when engaged in sports and other strenuous activities unless it is carefully confined in some way. Thus, practical modern experience suggests that Spartan men did braid their hair, something that is consistent with – though not definitely proved -- by the archeological evidence.

Braiding has the added advantage of being something that can be done quickly and alone if necessary, or done elaborately with help. Thus it could have beean a means for men to express individual taste and personality within the rigid limits of the Spartan prohibitions against displaying wealth in dress or personal ornament. I personally like to think of conservative, “old-fashioned” men just braiding their hair to keep it out of their faces, while the “dandies” of Spartan society innovatively braided their hair at diagonals or in crossing patterns etc. – as in Africa today. This gave a man a great deal of freedom for individual expression – all without breaking any taboos about the use of jewelry or other oranaments.

As for clothes – I think I better address that in a separate entry. This one is long enough already!

As always, I welcome feedback.

A Tribute to Gorgo -- The Bride of Leonidas

2011-09-03T12:09:00.002+02:00

The second book in the Leonidas Trilogy, Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer, is available for purchase on amazon in both trade paperback and Kindle formats. Gorgo plays an important role in this book, which describes her childhood as well as Leonidas' years as a "young man," serving in the Spartan Army. That's why I'd like to devote this entry to Gorgo.

The most remarkable thing about Gorgo, wife of King Leonidas I of Sparta, is that we know anything about her at all. Herodotus and other ancient Greek historians are far more likely to mention Persian queens than the wives of Greeks – not because Persian women were more powerful than their Greek counterparts but because Persians had several wives and so it was sometimes useful to record by which of them a certain Persian prince had been born. Since Greeks had only one legitimate wife, there was no need for such clarification when it came to prominent Greek citizens. Even the names of Sparta's Queens are rarely mentioned. We do not know, for example, the names of either Leonidas’ mother or his step-mother, the “second wife” who caused all the trouble in the Agiad family in the second half of the 6th Century BC.

The near complete absence of Greek women in ancient history (as opposed to Greek mythology and drama) is a function of the fact that ancient historians were predominantly Athenian males from the Classical or Hellenistic Periods. Athenians of these periods did not think women should be seen - much less heard – in public. Women had no public role and so no business in politics or history. As Pericles said in one of his most famous speeches, “the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about, whether they are praising you or criticizing you.” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2:46.) Gorgo was by that standard a hopeless piece of scandal.

The first time she is recorded opening her mouth, she was already interfering in the affairs of state. She told her father to send away the powerful tyrant Aristagoras, who requested Spartan military aid for his planned rebellion against Persia. Gorgo’s father, King Cleomenes, had already told Aristagoras that his proposal was “improper” and asked him to leave Sparta, but Aristagoras then started to offer Cleomenes bribes. As these became ever larger, Cleomenes appeared to be weakening until his daughter intervened, saying: “Father, you had better go away, or the stranger will corrupt you.”

Gorgo allegedly offered this advice at the tender age of “eight or nine.” Even if, as there is good reason to believe, Herodotus exaggerated her youth to make her father seem foolish, it would be hardly less remarkable if a maiden of 18 or 19 did what Gorgo did. In no other Greek city but Sparta would a female of any age have been allowed to be present much less heard and heeded at a meeting between Heads of State.

Gorgo’s advice was all the more remarkable because it was good. It was Athenian aid for the Ionian revolt that brought the wrath of Persia down on mainland Greece. This led some people to quip that it was easier to bamboozle thirty thousand Athenian men than one Spartan girl. Ironically, had the Athenian Assembly been as wise as Gorgo, then Gorgo might not have been widowed twenty years later by the Battle of Thermopylae.

Perhaps the fact that she was genuinely and exceptionally bright explains why as a wife too she was consulted and her opinions respected. This is evidenced by the incident in which a blank wax tablet was sent to Sparta from the exiled king Demaratus then at the Persian court. “No one,” according to Herodotus, “was able to guess the secret until… Gorgo, who was the wife of Leonidas, divined it and told the others that if they scraped the wax off, they would find something written on the wood underneath. This was done; the message was revealed….(Herodotus, The Histories, 7:239.)

There is little doubt that Gorgo was clever, but what else do we know about her?

It is probably safe to say that Gorgo was not particularly pretty. Had she been, it would have been mentioned by somebody. The beauty of other Spartan women, notably Helen and Demaratus’ mother, is legendary or at least recorded. Some people have suggested Gorgo was ugly based on her name which conjures up the mythical Gorgon, a female beast with snakes for hair so hideous that all who looked at her turned to stone. But this seems to be taking things too far in the other direction. It is hard to imagine a truly ugly woman being so well-loved by either her father or her husband – or so well adjusted and self-confident. Furthermore, we are told that men “made advances” to her, which also seems inconsistent with an unattractive woman. Gorgo was probably simply “ordinary,” and so her looks were not worthy of comment.

Whatever her looks, Gorgo was the quintessential Spartan woman in spirit. She was educated, self-confident, out-spoken and involved in the body politic. She was neither vain nor materialistic. She showed Spartan scorn of affectation when she thought Aristagoras had no hands because he let a slave dress him, and when she accused an elegantly dressed man of not being able “to play even a female role.”

This second quote is again very telling because it suggests Gorgo was familiar with theatre – something an Athenian woman would almost certainly not have been. Athenian women, as we have seen above, were not supposed to be seen or talked about. It was a disgrace for them to be seen even standing in the doorways of their houses much less at the market place. How then should they have been tolerated in the crowds that attended Athenian theater? While it is just possible to imagine them (veiled and heavily escorted by their male relatives) attending tragedies, the sexual explicitness of Athenian comedies is utterly unimaginable if respectable Athenian women were expected to be in the audience. Gorgo’s reference to “playing a female role,” however, makes it very clear that she had seen plays performed.

There is even a chance that she saw these plays performed in Athens. We know that Leonidas’ short reign began with the Persian invasion that led to the Battle of Marathon and ended with the Persian invasion that crushed him and his 300 at Thermopylae before continuing on to burn Athens to the ground. In short, Leonidas’ entire reign was dominated by the Persian threat and the need for the Greek city-states to unite against the common enemy. It is therefore reasonable to postulate that Leonidas spent a good deal of his time lobbying for support in the other important cities especially Athens. The very fact that he was elected the commander of the coalition forces including nominal command of the Athenian fleet suggests that leaders in other cities were familiar with – and trusted - him. It is not fanciful to hypothesize that on at least one of his trips to Athens, he took Gorgo with him.

The evidence that Gorgo traveled to Athens is further corroborated by her most famous quote. An Athenian woman is said to have asked her why “only Spartan women rule their men.” Since it is inconceivable that an Athenian woman would have traveled to Sparta, the only place where such an exchange could have taken place was in Athens itself.

The thought of Gorgo in Athens is rather like the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court. She must have been a sensation – and one imagines Leonidas with his dry sense of humor enjoying every minute of it! For example, note that the Athenian woman asked why only Spartan women “ruled” their men, implying that Gorgo had been seen giving Leonidas advice – and he had been seen to accept it, just as Cleomenes had done before him. As Gorgo’s response makes clear, the willingness of Spartan men not to discount good advice just because it came out of the mouth of a woman is what made Spartan men more manly – at least in Gorgo’s eyes! Understandably, perhaps, Spartan men, who measured their virility on the battlefield more than in the debates of the Assembly as in Athens, were less worried by the words of women.

But we should not picture Gorgo as a shrew. Gorgo’s role was that of advisor, companion and lover. She is not depicted telling Leonidas off (as she did her father), but rather helping him solve the mystery of the apparently blank wax tablet and obliquely bragging about his masculinity. And while other Spartan queens (notably Helen) are accused of adultery, Gorgo is portrayed rejecting unwanted advances. She was the mother of at least one child by Leonidas, his son and heir, Pleistarchos, and there is no reason to believe this was their only child. The fact that Pleistarchos was still very young at his father’s death suggests the opposite: that there had been elder children who died or had all been female.

When Leonidas marched out to die at Thermopylae, Gorgo asked him for instructions. His answer was a final compliment to her. He said: “Marry a good man and have good children.” Not sons, children. Leonidas wanted Gorgo not to mourn him but to be happy, and he valued daughters as much as sons – probably because he had learned from Gorgo the importance of clever and loyal women.

Gorgo plays a major role in the second book of the Leonidas Trilogy, Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer, now available for purchase on amazon or directly from the publisher, Wheatmark.

New Review of "Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge"

2011-08-20T13:43:00.001+02:00

Master Gunner "Blue 7" posted the following review of Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge on amazon. He gave the book five stars as well!

I made the mistake of watching the movie "300" before reading Steven Pressfield's "Gates of Fire," one of he most inspiring books I have ever read (so good, in fact, that I got 35 copies of the book for my platoon to read and keep.) One of the best draws of the Spartan legacy is the incredible value they placed on small-unit team-building and self-reliance. In Gates, Pressfield takes a good look at the upbringing of Spartan youths within the agoge, and how the training led to incredible acts of heroism and sacrifice at the Battle of Thermopylae.

Which brings me to this book.

Helena Schrader looks even deeper into the agoge system, and personalizes it even further by showing us through the eyes not of a freeborn helot youth (as in Pressfield's case) but through the eyes of Leonidas himself. This book is everything: political intrigue,inter-family jealousy, and teen angst. But most importantly, it's well-researched and moredetailed than anything else I havee read on Sparta. (And I've read Herodotus!) Schrader takes research by historians, who have "reverse engineered" (sorry, but it's the closest word I can think of to what I mean) the Spartan agoge by studying the Roman version, which was based on the Spartan system. Taking into account the different terrain (Sparta vs Rome), different governmeent and beliefs (though not incredibly dissimilar), different time periods, and clues in writings by Greek historians, my guess is that this is probably more accurate than most.

Finally, sprinkled throughout the book are important themes of self-reliance, and self-determination, respect for laws and traditions, and the importance of comraderie.

I whole-heartedly suggest this book for anyone looking for inspiration in team-building, a curiosity about Sparta life, or just a great book to lose yourself in.

Products of the Spartan Agoge

2011-08-13T17:16:00.003+02:00

There is general consensus among both ancient and modern commentators that the Spartan agoge was a state-run institution intended to produce ideal soldiers for the Spartan army. Thus Spartan youth were taught only as much literacy as “was necessary,” and great emphasis was placed on physical strength, endurance and discipline. Most modern writers have taken this to mean that Spartan youth were essentially illiterate brutes, who allowed themselves to be whipped to unconsciousness while growing up and after gaining the citizenship dumbly accepted the decisions of the Gerousia and/or king in Assembly and obeyed orders like robots in the army.

Without even addressing the issue of literacy, which has been handled elsewhere (see Ellen Millender’s excellent article “Spartan Literacy Revisited” in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 20/No.1/April 2001 and/or Jean Ducat’s essay “Perspectives on Spartan Education in the Classical Period,” in Sparta: New Perspectives, ed. Stephen Hodkinson and Anton Powell, 1999), I have a number of problems with this interpretation of Spartan society.

First, as any officer can tell you, the best soldiers are not robots who wait for orders but thinking, self-confident men and women who can take initiative and act without – or even against – orders, if necessary. Furthermore, the famous case of Amompharetus refusing to obey Pausanias’ orders on the eve of the Battle of Plataea is a dramatic case in point demonstrating that Spartans not only didn’t always obey orders – not even on the battlefield, much less in other circumstances. Furthermore, it highlights the fact that superiors in the Spartan army did not feel that they could coerce obedience. Amompharetus was not, after all, summarily executed or even relieved of his command. Instead, Pausanias tried to reason with him and finally ordered the rest of the army to move out. Last but not least, Sparta also had sufficient confidence in the judgment of its individual commanders to repeatedly send men of “ordinary” status out act as advisors to foreign powers, such as Gylippus in Syracus.

Second, the Spartan Assembly, in which all products of the agoge exercised their rights as citizens, was by no means powerless or docile. The Assembly had real powers, indeed more than the kings. The Assembly elected the ephors every year and members of the Gerousia whenever vacancies occurred due to death. Hence men with political ambitions had to lobby and ensure a majority of votes against rivals. Also, according to most interpretations of the Great Rhetra, the Assembly had “the final say” on legislation. The Assembly forced more than one king into exile (e.g. Cleomenes I, Leotychidas, Pleistoanax) and could condemn commanders who exceeded instructions from Pausanius to Phoebidas.

Most important, however, the Spartan assembly was made up of her soldiers and her soldiers knew that they represented the might and power of Sparta. A body in which a large minority was composed of virile young men, in peak physical condition, who have been raised to think of themselves as the elite of their profession is unlikely to have been docile. The men who were to be officers and admirals, magistrates, governors, ambassadors and military advisors around the world rose through the ranks of the army – and all had a voice (and probably a following) in the Assembly. Even if some citizens were indifferent to politics and willing to do what others advised, in every generation there are ambitious young men willing to challenge existing authority. We know for a fact that the Spartan Assembly could be outright rowdy on occassion -- as when the Assembly (“the Spartans” – not the ephors or Gerousia) threw the Persian emissaries of Darius down a well.

What the above demonstrates is that Spartan citizens were anything but mindless robots manipulated by their officers and political leaders. They were self-confident citizens with a highly developed sense of their own power and confidence in their own capabilities. And they were the products of the Spartan agoge.

In short,the agoge was not designed to produce blind-obedience, senseless acceptance of suffering, or mute endurance of hardship but citizens, who would serve Sparta long after they went off active service in a variety of political and diplomatic capacities. Sparta did not want or need docile political pawns or mindless slaves but rather thinking and responsible citizens capable of assuming responsibility and command. Only if one recognizes these broader objectives of the agoge is it possible to understand how it worked.

The Land of Leonidas

2011-08-06T12:47:00.003+02:00

It is hard to imagine what Sparta would have looked like in Leonidas’ lifetime. The city was destroyed by earthquakes more than once, flooded and the site completely abandoned for more than a thousand years. Today, what few ruins remain date predominantly from the Hellenistic or Roman periods, and an unattractive modern town has been dumped upon the ancient site.

So naturally our images of the ancient city-state have been shaped by what we have been told about Spartan society. Spartan society was characterized by rigid discipline, a disdain for luxury, and endurance of hardship. We are told that the boys suffered a childhood of deprivation in which they had to steal to get enough to eat and were allowed only one garment per year. Allegedly the women were prohibited from wearing jewelry or taking pride in their weaving. Indeed, gold and silver was banned entirely, and so could not adorn even the temples of the Gods. The houses, we are told, were not painted (as else where in the Ancient world), and the cuisine was infamous for its lack of sophistication and variety. (See my blog entry from July 10 "The Secrets of Spartan Cuisine" for more thoughts on Spartan cooking.)

It is understandable if one imagines that such a society could only have developed in an austere, plain, indeed barren, landscape. After all, a society deprived of food and clothes, and lacking all forms of decoration and fine cuisine sounds like a desperately poor society. It is easy to assume that Spartan society evolved to make a virtue out of necessity.

But the valley of the Eurotas River, the heart of ancient Lacedaemon, is anything but barren! It is green and fertile and stunningly beautiful - like riches cupped in the hands of the gods. From the blooming oleander to the wild iris, the valley is a garden. Orange orchards stretch as far as the eye can see, brazenly advertising the abundance of soil and sun and water. Most spectacular of all, the Eurotas valley is one of those few places on earth that offers the sensually stimulating sight of palm trees waving against a back-drop of snow-capped mountains.

Nor is this richness a product of modern fertilizers and irrigation. The ancient historians also speak of Sparta’s agricultural wealth. Sparta’s hinterland produced in abundance every staple of ancient Greek agriculture from grain to grapes, and from citrus fruits to olives. Furthermore, ancient Laceademon was famous for its forests and pastureland. The former provided exportable timber and abundant game to enrich the Spartan diet, while the latter nourished sheep, cattle, goats and fine horses. Finally, Lacedaemon had exploitable mineral resources such as lead, tin, copper and marble.

Sparta took full advantage of these natural blessings. The fact that the ruling class, Sparta’s full citizens or Spartiates, were prohibited from engaging in any profession other than arms, has led many modern observers to imagine Lacedaemon was devoid of industry, trade and commerce. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Sparta’s tiny elite of professional soldiers had the luxury to devote themselves to perfecting their skill at arms precisely because Lacedaemon had a large population of helots and perioikoi who ensured the economic prosperity of the Lacedaemonian state.

Both helots and perioikoi are believed to be the descendents of the peoples who inhabited Lacedaemon before the Doric invasion. While the helots had a status similar to medieval serfs and enjoyed only limited freedom, the perioikoi were fully free men. The perioikoi had abdicated control of foreign policy to Sparta, but they otherwise governed their own affairs by their own customs and laws. They were not bound by the Spartan Constitution attributed to Lycurgus regarding dress, diet, profession or the possession of gold and silver. Among the perioikoi there were artisans and architects, merchants and bankers, tradesmen and shipbuilders – just as in any other Greek city. The perioikoi produced everything from mundane domestic articles to exportable quality works of art in bronze, ivory and stone, and they traded from a variety of ports with direct access to the Aegean and Ionian Seas. (See my blog entry from April 9: "Shopkeepers and Shipmasters.")

In short, Leonidas’ Sparta was not poor, but the center of the powerful city-state of Lacedaemon. It was the administrative hub of large territory with an abundance of natural resources and agricultural produce, good lines of communication, and an active commercial and trading community. It was also the leading nation of the Peloponnesian League, a powerful defensive alliance of independent city-states – the NATO of its age. Last but not least, it was the site of annual vocal and dance festivals that attracted mass tourism from around the ancient world. It was most decidedly not a provincial back-water lost in a barren and inaccessible landscape.

Modern writers, however, have often been misled by the disparaging remarks made by Athenian observers about their hated rival. Nicolas Nicastro in his The Isle of Stone (p.67), for example, describes the capital of the dominant superpower of Greece as no more than “an agglomeration of sleepy villages.” Jon Edward Martin, an author whose research is on the whole very sound, writes in The Headlong God of War (p. 83) that “large buildings were few” and depicts the city as having only “a small collection of civic buildings clustered to the southeast of the acropolis.” Steven Pressfield in his best-selling novel Gates of Fire (p. 188) has one of his characters describe Sparta as “… a pile of stones,” and go on to claim: “It contains no temples or treasures of note, no gold….”

Yet Pausanias, whose travel guide to Greece was written in the 2nd Century AD – long after Sparta’s decline from prominence under Leonidas – needed 26 sections and more than 60 pages to describe only the noteworthy architectural sites of the ancient city! Far from being a backwater, Sparta was a large, prosperous and important city in the lifetime of Leonidas. But, as the Athenian commentary suggests, it was also very different from other Greek cities.

Visitors to Leonidas’ Sparta would have come expecting the capital of this rich and powerful state to be like other power-centers of the civilized world. Whether tourists, coming for the dancing and singing at the annual festivals, or diplomats, coming to plead for Spartan troops to support some distant conflict, foreign visitors would have compared Sparta to Susa, Babylon and Memphis no less than Athens or Corinth. These foreigners came expecting a city enclosed by walls whose strength matched Sparta’s military reputation. They expected to pass through imposing gates into a city crammed with brightly painted, colorfully tiled and elaborately decorated public buildings. They expected to find temples laden with gold crushed between pompous civic buildings. They expected to find a confusing maze of residential streets crammed with humanity humming incessantly with activity. They expected – as in other crowded cities – these back streets to be clothed in the perpetual shadows cast by the tall walls which shielded the private spheres and women of the inhabitants from public view. They expected a commercial capital as well as an administrative one. It is hardly surprising that they were disappointed with what they found at Sparta.

Sparta was different from other Greek cities, but it was not necessarily without its unique charms. For example, we know that in ancient Greece most statues and temples were painted vivid colors and the statues of the gods were dressed in robes, ivory, gold and jewels. Spartan temples were not. But isn’t it precisely that simplicity of white stone structures of flawless proportions and life-like naked marble statues that we find striking in ancient Greek architecture and sculpture today? Would we admire the Parthenon in Athens as much if it was dressed – as it was in the age of Leonidas - in vivid paint? Would we prefer to see Venus de Milo painted in flesh tones with red lips and blond hair?

Sparta’s ethos and aesthetics were different from other Greek cities, but that doesn’t mean it lacked beauty or refinement. Yes, Leonidas’ Sparta had no walls, but this meant it could spread out graciously upon its valley as all major European cities did after their confining walls were torn down. No one today would call Paris, Vienna or Rome “a collection of villages.” Yet all did in fact begin as collections of villages, which later grew into a single metropolis after the need for fortifications disappeared and economic growth fueled urbanization. Why should we assume that just because Sparta was made up of five distinct villages in pre-Archaic times that it was not – by the age of Leonidas when it was at the height of his glory – a cohesive, dynamic city?

Spartan homes may indeed have lacked elaborate interior paintings, but then maybe such decoration was not necessary because, unlike their Athenian counterparts, they were not compressed into the back allies of an over-crowded city and surrounded by high, protective walls. Spartans could afford to build their houses on generous plans. They could incorporate interior courtyards planted with fruit trees and herbs. They could surround themselves with gardens and orchards. Spartans could have decorated their homes - as they did themselves – with things of nature: cut flowers, bowls of fruits, running water. Even without gold or silver, their homes could still sparkle with sunlight glinting off the water of courtyard fountains.

Ironically, Leonidas’ uniquely Spartan city might well have been more pleasing to modern taste than Athens or Babylon of the 5th Century BC.

Picture a city spread across the broad floor of the Eurotas valley before the backdrop of snow-capped Taygetos. Picture a city of wide, tree-lined avenues along which the white-washed civic buildings, marble monuments and graceful temples stretched like pearls upon a green thread. Imagine a city of sun-soaked theatres and imposing but airy stoas. Imagine a city where the barracks and civic buildings with their long porches and batteries of Doric columns face green, open spaces set aside for running and horse-racing. Imagine a city decorated with fountains and flowering trees which gradually spreads out into the suburbs where large villas set in blooming gardens sprawl out toward the mountains on either side of the Eurotas. That image will bring you closer to the Sparta of Leonidas.

Austerity-hit Spartans resent Athens - from the BBC

2011-07-30T08:42:00.001+02:00

House guests this weekend, so rather than my own entry, I thought I'd share this article about Sparta today from the BBC.

BBC News, Sparta

The BBC's Paul Henley detects stirrings of dissent in Sparta as middle-class Greeks hit by the country's economic woes aim their ire at the Athens government.

Yiannis did not expect to be back in his sleepy home town of Sparta, in the Greek Peloponnese, at the age of 30. He sees his return as a personal defeat. Up until 18 months ago, the business graduate had a career in Athens for a finance company. But his job was a casualty of a national economic collapse that dwarfs most others in Europe and, ever since, he has been unable to find work. He ended up moving back in with his parents where he grew up. Having made constant unsuccessful applications for work, he says the growing feeling of uselessness is reducing him as a person.

"Now" he says, "I can't dream as I did before, I can't be optimistic about life or have any real ambitions. Perhaps my only chance is to move abroad."

War against Athens

Yiannis is one of a group who call themselves the "Indignant Spartans" and who went on a 250km protest march to Athens. The three-day march, in May, was a vent for their anger and a way of publicly underlining their belief that ordinary Greeks had been betrayed by their political elite and by the murky world of international finance.

About 10 of the group are sitting around a table, at dusk, at a friend's pavement cafe. They are, frugally, drinking water in the shadow of a statue of Sparta's ancient king, Leonidas, a symbol of the days when Sparta waged a bitter war against Athens. These days, much of that bitterness is returning.

The "Indignant Spartans'' stories are a microcosm of the troubles facing citizens everywhere in Greece, as another national austerity package kicks in, living costs and taxes rocket, consumers rein in spending, wages fall and jobs are lost.
And although the calm, olive and palm tree-lined streets these Spartans inhabit, amid the constant hum of cicadas, seem a world away from the tear gas and the pitched battles outside parliament in Athens, the spirit of provincial rebellion seems to be growing fast.

Vasilis, who is 33, puts it like this: "Sometimes during the past two months I have started to understand how easy it would be to turn, in an instant, from being a good, law-abiding, tax-paying citizen - into a terrorist."

He is not the idle, state-reliant Greek familiar from mocking articles in the foreign press recently.
Vasilis is an entrepreneur who built up a highly successful business chain from scratch during a working life which began, he says, at the age of 12 and has regularly involved 18-hour days. In the past year, he says he has lost €800,000 ($1,150,000; £700,000. Vasilis's restaurant and catering business faces bankruptcy. A single cafe became a collection of restaurants and a mobile catering business with regular wedding and business contracts. As customers began to trail off, Vasilis put his capital into a scheme to build a hotel on the coast. But the scheme was reliant on government-approved loans and grants which disappeared in the crisis. The hotel was never finished and he is looking bankruptcy in the face.

"I feel very angry inside," he says. "When you try to do the best for your country and your children and your neighbours, you still get treated like garbage by the authorities," he says. "It is psychological violence. Maybe the terrorists we see on the television - this is the process they have gone through."

His words are greeted with nods around the table.

Constantina says she has been independent since she was 17 and now, at the age of 43, finds herself borrowing money from her parents. She set up a graphic design business eight years ago. Labels for agricultural products and flyers for local shops are her mainstay. Constantina's graphic design business is starved of business All her clients are desperate to save money. She feels penalised by a tax system she predicts will be the final straw for her business within the next year.

"Maybe marching is the only way I can remain an active citizen of this country," she says.

George, who is 45, is a secondary school teacher and one of those supposed to feel thankful for the relative security of his job. "I do not feel at all lucky," he says. Civil servants' salaries were a number one target in the cuts and that will continue." He feels the faith he had in the future has gone. A house he was building for his family has been left a concrete shell. "The next few years will be the hardest of our lives," he says. "The Ministry of Education has already begun closing schools."

"The situation makes me want to revolt," says Panagiotis, a pastry chef in his 40s. The business he set up with his nephew is at risk from a dramatic loss of customers recently and a simultaneous hike in costs. The macaroons, mini ice-creams and chocolate eclairs he makes are among the first to be crossed off people's shopping lists in difficult times. The handful of people they employ have already taken pay and some could soon be made redundant. "I worry for my family," he says. "What will happen if I can not pay back the loans on the business? I want to go out into the streets and shout about it."

His words are a thinly-veiled warning to Athens: "I want people to understand that my personal revolution must become a national revolution."

Thespeia and Thermopylae

2011-07-23T15:53:00.000+02:00

The reason I made no post last week is that I was in Greece. A sudden change of plans made it possible for my husband and I to get away for almost ten days. With the help of cheap airlines and a willingness to improvise, we took off for Thessaloniki.

On our fourth day, we reached Boiotia and after driving several hours in the blistering summer heat (ca. 100 F), we made the turn-off to Thespeia. We left the flat cultivated fields beside the National Road, with its road-side taverns, furniture show-rooms and telephone lines, and headed into low, rolling hills. The character of the land changed almost instantly. The valleys were golden with the stalks of harvested wheat broken here and there by olive orchards or stands of other trees, and the hills were semi-arid.

Eventually, we came to a T-intersection in an obscure village without signs, but at once a young man got up from the roadside cafe, and offered assistance in educated English. He seemed a little surprised that we wanted to go to “the village” of Thespeia, but when we assured him that was our destination, he told us to turn left and go until we reached the school then turn right and continue six kilometers.

His directions were exactly correct. After six kilometers, we found ourselves facing a marble monument dominated by the larger-than-life statue of a hoplite. Despite my rudimentary Greek, it was possible to decipher enough of the dedication to know the monument was erected to commemorate the 700 Thespians who died with Leonidas at Thermopylae. The dedication included a quote from Herodotus.

We continued into the modern village, which perched on top of a low, but steep, hill with a surprisingly good view of the surrounding countryside. To the east, not far away, was another long, curving hill. To the north the plain, and to the west and south distant mountains almost lost in haze beyond gently rolling, cultivated countryside. The village was surprisingly large – larger than other villages that rated a dot of equal size on my Baedeker map. There were numerous shops and cafes of the type not intended for tourists, churches, of course, and, in a school play-ground surrounded by bright colored children’s carousels, a more human-sized hoplite also commemorating the dead of Thermopylae. Yet, as far as I could see, no other memorials marked Thespeia’s history – no heroic leaders from the wars of independence, no resistance fighters against the Germans, neither statesmen nor novelists, nor men of science. In short, Thespeia appears to have played no role in history worth mentioning even on home-town monuments -- except for those 700 citizens willing to die rather than retreat before the invading army of Xerxes.

We returned by the road we’d come, still perplexed by why this little city had made such an enormous sacrifice in 480 BC. The loss of 700 citizens must have been far more devastating for little Thespeia, than the loss of 300 Spartiates to the powerful state of Lacedaemon, Why did the Thespeians alone voluntarily stay behind with Leonidas on the third day of the Battle of Thermopylae?

Back on the national road, we continued north up the broad central valley of Boiotia. Was this the route Leonidas took north? Having collected troops in Thebes (whether willing nor not) and Thespia, wouldn’t he have followed this easy route through the fertile plane, in the hope/expectation of gathering more troops from the other cities of Boiotia? After all, they were the cities most immediately threatened by Persia, if the Pass at Thermopylae failed to hold.

Certainly, this was the route by which the Athenians, Thebans and other Greeks went forth to confront Philip of Macedon. The “Lion Monument” still marks the spot where the Macedonians prevailed over the Greek alliance, allegedly standing on the spot where the members of Thebe’s Sacred Band were buried. Although like Thermopylae, this monument marks a Greek defeat, unlike the monument at Thermopylae this one is not defiant. The lion is not roaring or fighting, or even lying slain with hundreds of arrows in his corpse as does the Lion of Luzern. This lion is simply sitting like a great cat, his tail curled around his legs, and staring with hate-filled eyes into the distance (at the now vanished mound of Macedonian dead.)

Not far beyond the above monument at Chaironeia, we turned east to cross the Kallidromo before the slopes became too high, believing this would have been Leonidas’ most probable route to Thermopylae. This proved extremely informative because, while the mountains did not appear terribly formidable from the plane on which we had been driving, we soon discovered we were actually on a plateau and a deep gorge and rugged terrain separated us from the coast.

After winding our way on increasingly difficult roads for some time, we came around a curve and suddenly could see the sea in the distance. In Leonidas’ time the coast, however, was much nearer than now, and all the flat, cultivated land had to be imagined away. We continued our descent, but, I confess, we missed a turn or two and joined the National Road just a mile or so south of Thermyplae itself. This was too close to have been the route Leonidas took with his thousands strong force, but the last part may, in fact, have followed the general contours of the route taken by the Immortals when they circumvented the defended pass to fall on Leonidas in the rear. The Persians, of course, would have had to first cross much more difficult terrain to the north before joining the last portion of our drive down to the coastal road.

So we had reached Thermopylae. It was late afternoon, the sun still high and blistering.

The National Highway has been widened at this point to allow tourists to halt. To the right is the official monument with a very nice frieze and the larger-than-life sculpture of Leonidas with raised spear. There are also two boards providing brief historical information about the site including useful diagrams of the three phases of the battle. Beyond, on the same side of the road, is a monument marked by an bronze eagle, to all who have given their lives for Greek democracy.

To the left of the road is the actual site of the battle. Most prominent is the mound or hillock believed by most historians to have been the site of the final stand of Leonidas’ troops after his own death. Hundreds of Persian arrowheads were found in the mound, but apparently no human remains as would be the case if it were the traditional mound raised over a mass grave. (Note: beneath the Lion of Chaironeia the bones of exactly 297 men were found.)

From the hillock one has an excellent view north across three “walls” that clearly post-date the battle and may or may not represent someone’s (more or less informed) attempt to mark the likely position of the ancient walls. Certainly one can gain a feel for the landscape -- if one remembers that the coastline would have run where the national road now forms a concrete and asphalt border to the killing fields.

For me, the mood and my ability to focus on the distant past was slightly impaired by the bizarre activities of a half-dozen young people in red t-shirts and white trousers that had set up an improvised altar with a Corinthian helmet, small replicas of the Leonidas statue and other trinkets. They were harmless enough, but one wonders what and who they were trying to deify? Leonidas? Their gestures seemed a tawdry contrast to the unpretentious but profound nature of Leonidas and his actions.

Not more than 300 yards beyond the last of these walls are the “hot springs” for which Thermopylae is named. These still gush hot, sulfurous water into a small pool. Given the heat and the smell, they were hardly inviting, but we did re-fill our water bottles at the spring in front of the monument on the far side of the road. I hope Leonidas and his troops also had ready access to fresh, drinking water. Just walking to the top of the hillock in the Greek summer sun left me drenched in sweat.

It was a long journey for me to Thermopylae, which lies thousands of miles from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was born, and took me almost half a century to reach, but it was worth the trip. I would not have felt right writing the third book of my Leonidas Trilogy without having been there personally – and I’m glad I went in the height of summer. I hope my readers will benefit from this pilgrimage even more than I, and that my books will in part fulfil the adminishment of the ancient monument that urged passers by to tell of Leonidas' obedience to Spartan law.

"Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,

that here, in obedience to her laws, we lie."

The Secrets of Spartan Cuisine

2011-07-10T01:00:00.006+02:00

Spartan cuisine has a terrible reputation. It is consistently described as scanty, primitive and boring. The “black broth,” allegedly served at every Spartan mess, has come in for particular derision, with the usual assumption being that it was an unappetizing broth at best and – for the clique of Sparta-haters that like to see in Sparta some kind of evil cross between orcs and Nazis – it was a soup made of clotted blood. I have even read books where Spartans are described eating dogs (presumably because this makes them seem more barbaric and bestial), although there is not a trace of evidence, to my knowledge, that the breeders of the much prized Kastorian hounds were dog-eaters. Modern conceptions of Spartan cuisine was most humorously expressed in a banner ad run by a restaurant while the film “300” was showing in cinemas that said: “Forget about Sparta, Persian cuisine was better.”

Leaving aside the modern descriptions that have more to do with fantasy than history, ancient references to the shortfalls of Spartan cuisine came, of course, from the pens of foreigners. One wonders just what exposure to Spartan cooking these commentators actually had? Nor are the oldest accounts so negative. To my knowledge – and please correct me if I am wrong – Herodotus says little about the nature and quality of Spartan food beyond stressing that the kings had double portions and received the meat of sacrificial bulls at set intervals. He also notes that the kings did not eat double rations, but shared out their extra portions with those they wished to favor/reward. Presumably, in Herodotus’ time Spartan cuisine wasn’t bad enough to rate a bad review.

Xenophon, the classical Laconophile, does devote some space to describing Spartan diet. He stresses that in the agoge the eirenes were supposed to “furnish for the common meal just the right amount for [the boys in their charge] never to become sluggish through being too full, while also giving them a taste of what it is not to have enough.” (Xenophon, Spartan Society, 2) He goes on to say that Lycurgus fixed the rations in the messes of the citizens “in such a way that they should have neither too much nor too little food.” Clearly, both of these passages address the issue of quantity not quality.

Returning to Herodotus, it is noteworthy that he listed three hereditary professions in Sparta (Her. 6:60): heralds, flute-players and cooks. This passage is part of Herodotus’ description of the privileges of Sparta’s hereditary kings, and implicit is that hereditary office was a mark of distinction. Given Sparta’s modern reputation for bad cooking, the inclusion of cooks in the ranks of the hereditary professions is striking – if usually ignored. Equally important is the fact that they are mentioned alongside heralds and flute-players, professions that had clear relevance for the army. This suggests that cooks too were considered important for the readiness of the army, possibly because cooks provided food when the army was in the field. On the other hand, maybe the importance of cooks came from the fact that syssitia cooks were responsible for enforcing Lycurgus’ laws on moderate rations and no excessive drinking? If the latter, then cooks clearly had a very important function in Spartan society!

Whatever the reason cooks were viewed with particular respect, however, it is hard to imagine men who viewed their profession as a privilege taking no pride in their work. It likewise seems unlikely that men who learned their profession from their fathers and taught it to their sons were lacking in skill and dedication. Certainly, cooking is an art, and some people are naturally better than others, but every Spartan cook would have learned from his father and grandfather a great variety of ways to prepare a meal, and the usual assumption that a meal at a Spartan mess was a “Spartan” version of a bad institutional meal today seems questionable.

The bad reputation of Spartan cuisine may have originated from the fact that most Greeks favored sophisticated cooking with complicated preparation, spices, crusts, sauces and heavy on fish. Spartan cooking was simpler and included more meat, especially game. The lack of elaborate sauces, crusts, exotic spices and seafood may have made Spartan cooking seem plain to an Athenian aristocrat’s palate, but that is not necessarily the same thing as being bad.

Syssitia cooking would have been based on the contributions which members brought from their kleros. Any kleros in Lacedaemon would have provided fresh and/or preserved fruits and nuts – apples, pears, plums, apricots, figs, lemons, almonds and chestnuts. There would have been olives and olive oil as well as grapes and wine, all freshly produced. Fresh eggs, fresh milk and homemade butter and cheese from cattle, sheep and goats would have been readily available too.

Each syssitia cook would have been able to collect fresh bay leaves, rosemary, mint, oregano and thyme from the fields to help garnish roast pork, kid, and lamb grilled over an open fire. They would also have had kitchen gardens for growing coriander, leeks, beans, asparagus, fennel, cucumbers, peas, squash and cabbage. And while Spartan cuisine may have been short on seafood, full citizens were encouraged to hunt and to share their game with their messmates. The surrounding forests were rich in pheasant, hare, deer and wild boar. These meats too would have been grilled and then garnished with leeks and onions, bay leaves, chestnuts or other variations of native produce we cannot imagine.

Last but not least, a Spartan diet would have included fresh, warm bread, including white bread, as Lacedaemon was one of the city-states with soil suitable for wheat, and Xenophon specifically mentions that wealthy men contributed wheat flour to the messes. In short, even without seafood and fancy sauces these raw ingredients – meats grilled over open fires, vegetables and herbs fresh from the garden, bread still warm from the oven – need not have been bland or monotonous.

I even suspect that Spartans (at least secretly) enjoyed the native honey, tasting still of pine, yew and wild-flowers. Sweet bread with raisons or sesame seeds, cakes with crushed nuts drowned in honey, apple tarts and plum pies are all perfectly imaginable based on what can be produced natively and is still sold in the region today.

If this was the nature of Spartan cuisine, Spartan children might grow strong and Spartiates grow old on it -- and never even notice how “deprived” they were.

Sparta’s Forgotten Defeat?

2011-07-01T20:28:00.000+02:00

Modern histories of Sparta tend to brush over the Messenian War(s) in considerable haste and without providing a great deal of detail. The reason is obvious. As Paul Cartledge stresses in Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300 to 362 BC (one of the few general histories of Sparta to focus seriously on the early history), the literary evidence is almost nil and the archeological evidence ambiguous. Indeed, he describes Tyrtaios, a poet whose works have been handed down to us only in fragments, as the “only” reliable literary source, while pointing out that the ancient sources Herodotus and Thucydides refer to only one war.

Yet, arguably, nothing was more important to the evolution of Sparta into a city-state with a radically unique constitution than the Spartan conquest of Messenia. W.G. Forrest argues, for example, that the conquest of its agriculturally rich neighbor reduced the need for distant colonies and so the interest in the wider world, while the agricultural basis of Spartan wealth reduced Sparta’s interest in industry and trade. Others argue that the conquest of such a vast territory and the subjugation of an entire people resulted in permanent fear of revolt that in turn created the need for a militaristic state. Sparta as we know it – with its unique institutions from the agoge to citizens permanently under arms – is a function of its conflict with Messenia.

The facts of conquest which are undisputed are quickly summarized: Sparta controlled Messenia completely by the start of the 6th century BC. Sometime in the 7th Century, during the life of the poet Tyrtaios, Sparta was engaged in a bitter struggle with the Messenians, a struggle that Tyrtaios clearly describes as one involving pitched battles between hoplites (though not phalanxes). Tyrtaios furthermore refers in his poems to the great deeds of “our father’s fathers,” which is usually interpreted to mean that the initial conquest of Messenia occurred two generations earlier. Tyrtaios also speaks of a struggle that lasts 20 years. Both the references, however, may be purely poetical; the first may mean little more than “our forefathers,” and the latter be a literary device to stress that it was “a long struggle” by making the fight in Messenia exactly twice as long as the conquest of Troy. Archeologically, we can trace a gradual expansion of Laconian influence into Messenia starting in the late 8th Century.

We also know that in the first quarter of the 7th century BC, Sparta adopted a new constitution attributed to Lycurgus. (I know there has been scholarly debate about the exact dating of the Spartan constitution, but I find W.G. Forrest’s arguments dating the Spartan revolution to the period between 700 and 670 cogent and convincing. See A History of Sparta, 950-192 BC, pp. 55-58.) Furthermore, we know that Sparta’s only colony was established at the turn or very end of the 8th Century BC, traditionally in 706 BC. Both the introduction of a radical, new constitution sanctioned explicitly by Delphi and the establishment of a colony are attributed by ancient sources to internal unrest in Sparta.

Conventionally, these facts are woven together as follows: Sparta invaded and conquered Messenia in the late 8th Century, subjugating the local Messenian population. This conquest was allegedly followed by a period of intense internal unrest that led, first, to the founding of Sparta’s only colony, and second to the Lycurgan reforms. The later, however, are usually seen as contemporary with Tyrataios and were, therefore, implemented during a second period of conflict with Messenia, usually described as “the Second” Messenian war. If one presumes that Sparta won the initial conflict with Messenia, this can only be explained by a revolt of some kind. So the allegedly brutally oppressed Messenians were suddenly and within just two generations capable of financing hoards of hoplites and fielding entire hoplite armies.

This taxes my imagination. Periods of intense domestic unrest rarely follow victorious wars – particularly not wars of conquest that have greatly increased the wealth of a state. Likewise, slave revolts do not involve pitched battles between hoplite armies and don’t take two decades to defeat.

The history of modern revolutions shows that revolutions most commonly occur during economic crises or after military defeats. Classical revolution theory says that revolutions occur when a period of rising living standards and expectations ends abruptly in a crisis that threatens recent gains. If we apply this to the Spartan revolution we get some interesting hypotheses – that square remarkably well with the (scanty) historical record.

What if, following a period of growing prosperity, productivity and population, Sparta’s kings/leadership decided to conquer neighboring Messenia, invaded – and then got bogged down in a terrible war that they failed to win? What if, to obtain/retain support, Sparta’s kings and aristocratic elite promised the poorer and lower classes land in Messenia? What if they then couldn’t deliver on that promise? What if, as the war dragged on, casualties mounted, and popular support for a lost war waned? What if, the Messenians became increasingly successful and aggressive, bringing the war to Laconia?

Such a situation would have produced all the features of mid-seventh century Sparta that we know existed: the domestic unrest, the calls for a redistribution of land, impetus for the founding of an external colony, and finally readiness to accept a new, revolutionary constitution and lifestyle – as well as the continuing conflict with organized, well-armed Messenian forces.

Furthermore, if Sparta lost the First Messenian War (at least in the sense that it did not obtain its objectives) and it took three generations to subdue the Messenians, then we have a better explanation of why Sparta became a militarized society. Only sustained conflict and perpetual threat could force a society to adapt a system of government that is so singularly focused on ensuring military preparedness at all times.

The paranoid excesses of late classical Sparta (krypteia, mass executions, etc.) followed the Helot Revolt of 465, but they probably took the disproportionate form the did because there was still popular memory of the first lost war. A first lost war that traumatized Sparta would explain why Sparta responded with unparalleled harshness toward the rebellious Messenians two hundred years later. We need only consider how memories of past wars still shape, for example, British-Irish, or Russian-Polish relations today. I believe it was more likely the trauma of a lost war than an unbroken series of victories by an invincible army that made Sparta what it was.

Review: “The Battle of Marathon” by Peter Krentz

2011-06-26T10:38:00.002+02:00

Peter Krentz provides a meticulous analysis of the Battle of Marathon in his recent release with Yale University Press, The Battle of Marathon (London: 2010). He provides a succinct description of the events leading up to the Persian-Greek confrontation on the famous plain north of Athens and then carefully dissects every aspect of the battle itself from the equipment to the topography. Krentz knows his sources well but does not drag his reader down into the weeds of academic bickering. Rather, he marshals the evidence in a coherent and comprehensible fashion, topic by topic. Particularly impressive is his analysis of the geography of the plain of Marathon (and how it has changed over the centuries), and the physical stamina required to run a mile in full panoply.

Krentz goes a long way to refute aspersions cast on the credibility of Herodotus’ account by later historians, and effectively defends the ancient historian’s version of events. Krentz’s key argument is that Athenian hoplites could indeed have “run” (defined as jogging at ca. 4.5 miles per hour or more) for one mile across a plain in full battle gear. He also does an excellent job of explaining why this would have been desirable. His analysis of the battle itself is altogether convincing and plausible.

Another outstanding feature of the book is the illustrations. The maps, charts and reproductions of contemporary art illustrate the points made in the text cogently. The variety of images, far more diverse that the standard fare found in most books on the topic, is impressive. I came away better able to visualize Persian forces, something I have long wanted to do. Indeed, Krentz’s impressive collection of contemporary art showing Persian warriors shames other sources that singularly fail to make it possible to imagine how these fierce fighters dressed and fought.

Yet, while Krentz’s book is a good reference, it is not a narrative. Anyone interested in the tale of Marathon will be disappointed. Krentz provides some skeletal, biographical facts about the key actors in the drama, but fails to describe or even sketch the personality of any of the leaders, not even Miltiades, much less bring them to life. He outlines the causes of the conflict, without conveying a sense of the “life and times,” or the society and issues at stake in a way that makes the reader identify with the protagonists. Most important, despite its merits, this book is evidently not intended (and so not constructed) to arouse emotions or create suspense. Maybe I am too much of a novelist, but I firmly believe it is possible – and more effective - to tell the story of Marathon in a way that is not only 100% accurate, but also exciting, moving and inspiring.

A Spartan Childhood

2011-06-18T10:24:00.001+02:00

Anyone who has had the privilege to grow-up – or at least holiday on – a family farm will appreciate just how glorious a Spartan childhood might have been. The happiness of any childhood depends on many factors – parents, siblings and a child’s own inclinations – but life on a farm has unique charms for children too young to fully appreciate all the work and worries of their elders. I have rarely met anyone, who spent time on a farm as a child, who did not remember it with nostalgia.

Spartan children, boys and girls alike, would have spent a great deal of their first seven years and many holidays thereafter on their parent’s – and possibly their grandparent’s – kleros. Because the kleros represented the essential economic foundation of public education and citizenship, it was, except among the very rich with multiple estates, the center of family life. No man or his wife (again with the exception of the very rich) could afford to neglect the kleros, and this meant that it could not be fully entrusted to paid (perioikoi) or unpaid (helot) overseers all of the time.

By my calculations, many kleros were located too far outside of Sparta to be within easy reach on foot or horseback. This is the reason that, as anyone who has read one or more of my novels knows, I hypothesize that many Spartans maintained small townhouses or apartments in the city of Sparta close to barracks and syssitia. Yet the very fact that kleros could only be visited during longer holidays (many Spartan holidays lasted from five to ten days), increases the likelihood that they were indeed visited during these holidays.

For the parents, the visit to the kleros would have been a busy time of taking inventories, checking on the health of livestock, making (or ordering) repairs to house, barns and the all-important pasture and property walls. There would have been inspections, discussions or sometimes altercations with helot tenants, and complaints or excuses to hear. The parents would have been faced with decisions and would have needed to leave behind instructions. Undoubtedly, for many parents these visits were associated with worries about whether the estate was yielding enough to pay syssitia and agoge fees. Any set back – a drought, a livestock illness, an insect plague, a fire – could threaten the status of the Spartiate or his sons.

But for the children, the holidays on the kleros would have been relatively care-free, a welcome break from the group-living, organized instruction and hardships of the agoge. It was a time without eirenes or mastigophoroi. The more a boy suffered in the agoge, the greater would have been his longing and affection for the days and weeks spent on the family farm, where he was free of institutional discipline and peer pressure.

Ultimately, whether a boy enjoyed the agoge or not, it was still school, and most would have looked forward to the holidays. These were opportunities to idly soak up the sunshine of southern Greece, or run barefoot not in competition on the race-courses of the city but purposelessly through pastures littered with scores of different sorts of wild flowers. It was a time when little boys could climb upon the motherly arms of the patient olive trees and older boys could scale the heights of the mightiest plane trees. It was a time to tend the many farm animals, to play with the puppies and cuddle with the cats of the kleros. It was a time to help herd the goats through the craggy upper pastures where gorse and thistle bloom bright, or wade in crystal clear creeks stumbling over rocks at the foot of narrow gorges. It was a time for rock-climbing and cave-exploring, and, for those near the coast, for sailing and fishing. Boys returning from an adventure dusty and sweaty could stop at one of the many fountains where chilly water bubbles out of the mountainside to wash away the sweat and dust before enjoying a home-cooked meal.

Whatever “Sparta” might have been, the Lacedaemonian countryside is one of the most beautiful and restorative places anywhere on earth. Spartan children would have learned early to appreciate it, treasure it and remember it with the fondness we all save for our favorite childhood memories. These memories would have contributed to the Spartan love of Lacedaemon and made the Spartan army stronger by reinforcing intellectual patriotism for Sparta’s laws and society with emotional attachment to the land itself.

Hippeis and the Royal Bodyguard

2011-06-04T11:00:00.000+02:00

While reading Herodotus the other day I came across the following passage:

"The prerogatives of the Spartan kings are these: ...they have a bodyguard of a hundred picked men...." (Herodotus, 6:56)

I stumbled over this because I, perhaps naively, had assumed up to now that the three hundred hippeis were the equivalent of the royal bodyguard. After all, according to other sources, "They were ... an infantry bodyguard for the king." (A.H.M. Jones, Sparta, New York, 1967, p. 63). Or, Carledge describes them as "the crack royal bodyguard selected from the ten youngest age-classes." (Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300 to 362 BC, London, 1979, p. 176.)

However, on re-reading Xenophon, I noted that he only describes how the three hundred hippeis are selected and the rivalry that Sparta encouraged among young men for the sake of winning the honor of such selection, but he does not describe their function, much less call them a royal bodyguard.

There is also the question of why, if each king was entitled to just 100 guardsmen, there were there three hundred hippeis?

Is it possible then that the royal bodyguards were something separate and apart from the hippeis? Did each king have a hand picked body-guard of 100 men, while the hippeis were appointed (indirectly) by the ephors and represented no a royal bodyguard but an elite unit under the control of the ephors?

There would be a certain logic to such a system. The hippeis would then represent the executive force and "bodyguard" of the elected representatives, i.e. the democratic elements of the Spartan state. Perhaps the hippeis were even formed at a later date (as the ephors became more powerful) to counter-balance -- and out-balance -- the ancient tradition of royal bodyguards?

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated! I will be travelling next week and my next entry will not be until June 18.

Religious Festivals and the Spartan Army

2011-05-28T14:31:00.000+02:00

According to Herodotus, in 490 BC Sparta agreed to send troops to assist Athens repel the Persian forces at Marathon, but said they “could not take the field until the moon was full.” Since the Spartans did respond vigorously when the time came, historians have puzzled for millennia about why exactly the Spartans “could not take the field.” There have been persistent attempts to find evidence of a helot revolt, for example, and W. P. Wallace (“Kleomenes, Marathon, the Helots, and Arkadia,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 74 (1954), pp. 32-35) came up with a theory of Arkadian discontent and intrigues. I myself have suggested a command crisis, which I explained in detail in my blog entry on Jan. 8, 2011. Yet the bottom line is that all these theories are essentially the product of dissatisfaction with the notion of a religious festival.

However, before we reach for alternative explanations to that which is readily available, a religious festival, we ought to admit to ourselves that we know very little about Spartan religious festivals. Most especially, we do not how they affected the readiness of the Spartan army. The assumption that a religious festival might delay departure of the army simply because of pious scruples may be entirely wrong.

What if, for example, the Spartan Army was given leave during religious festivals, or reduced to a skeleton of “duty officers” for each unit? Such a procedure would be perfectly normal in most societies because religious festivals, in all cultures over all times, are generally family occasions. Why should Sparta have been an exception? The very fact that there is no mention of how “odd” the Spartans were in this regard suggests that their behavior conformed to that of other Greeks and so elicited no comment.

If, as elsewhere, religious holidays in Sparta were celebrated in the family, then most likely the young men were exempt from sleeping in barracks and all men exempt from dining at their messes. Again, the fact that this is not explicitly mentioned is no evidence that it was not the case. There is no mention of men being exempt from duty and collective dining to participate in the Olympic Games either, but Spartan athletes were very prominent at the Olympics and they had to train in Elis for a month before the events just like all the other competitors. Likewise, Spartan spectators at the Games could not be eating and sleeping in Sparta while they were at Olympia. In short, the rules about living in barracks and eating at the messes were for “ordinary” days. The Olympics, war, and, arguably, religious festivals were “extraordinary” or “exceptional” days.

We know, further, that Spartans all had at least a state kleros, while wealthier Spartans had more extensive estates. Without knowing the yield of an acre of land using contemporary agricultural methods, I have no way of estimating just how large a kleros would have been, and without know how large each kleros was, I cannot estimate how many could have been located within easy walking/riding distance of Sparta’s barracks and messes. However, I think it is fair to say that not all 8,000 – 9,000 kleroi could have been within easy reach of the heart of Sparta. It is far more likely, that many kleroi were more than a half-day away from Sparta. Some may even have been located in Messenia, on the far side of Taygetos, or on Kythera. Reaching these estates to check up on things and to collect rents would have taken Spartans away from Sparta for days on end.

The requirement to be present in Sparta most of the time, meant that most of the time the estates were left in the hands of helots, perioikoi overseers or wives. Yet the fact that Spartiates were absent from their estates most of the time only reinforces the need for them to be present some of the time. Particularly if Spartiate/Helot relations were as bad as most commentators suggest, no Spartan would have risked leaving his kleros entirely in the hands of his helots or even perioikoi overseers. It would have been an essential for every Spartiate to periodically check up on things at his kleros or risk having it so mismanaged that he could not meet his syssitia (and, if he had sons, agoge) fees. If a kleros was left to a wife, the desire to visit periodically would have been even greater, particularly if she had the couple’s young children with her.

In short, Spariates would have periodically travelled to their distant kleroi and while doing so they would have been excused both from their military duties and exempted from eating at their syssitia. Probably, any man could apply for leave to go to his estates whenever he felt it necessary. Possibly, it was traditional for men to go to their estates during holidays, when men were given leave to be with their families in any case.

For the wealthier Spartiates from the so-called “better” families, the 400-500 families that made up Sparta’s elite, the need to visit estates would have been even more acute than for the poorest with only one kleros. The elite would have had multiple estates to look after, not to mention horse-farms, kennels, orchards etc. They would have needed to be away from Sparta more often than the others as a result. And it was this elite that, at least in the later years of the 5th century BC, occupied most of the positions of authority and power in the Spartan state.

So if I am right and many citizens spent major (particularly long) holidays like the Karneia at their estates, then Pheidippides may have arrived in a Sparta when the army was dispersed and the commanders scattered about Lacedaemon on their distant estates. The ephors would have needed to recall at least the members of the Gerousia and the officers of the army as well as cancel leave for those units they wanted to send to Athens. The ephors could, I suspect, calculate pretty accurately how long it would take messengers to reach the lochagoi and other senior officers, and how long they would need to call up their troops and get them ready to march. That time frame alone – and nothing so impenetrable as piousness, helot revolts, foreign policy considerations, or even command uncertainties – might have determined the earliest possible day on which the Spartan army was able to march out for Marathon.

Of Those Who Died at Thermopylae…. Simonides on Leonidas

2011-05-22T17:39:00.001+02:00

In his article “Simonides, Ephorus, and Herodotus on the Battle of Thermopylae” (The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 2 (1998), pp. 365-379) Michael A. Flower quotes an excerpt of an apparently longer poem written by Simonides about the Battle of Thermopylae. It was the first time I had run across this poem and thought you, my readers, might also enjoy the fragment, incomplete as it is, and poor as this English translation may be:

Of those who died
at Thermopylae,
glorious is the fortune,
fair is the fate.

Their grave is an altar.
Instead of lamentation,
they have remembrance,
for pity they have praise.

Such a shroud
neither mold
nor all-subduing time
can make obscure.

This shrine of noble men
chose the good reputation
of Greece
as its inhabitant.

Leonidas also bears witness,
king of Sparta,
who left behind a great adornment
of valor and ever-flowing fame.

Leonidas the Murderer?

2011-05-13T21:45:00.000+02:00

It has become fashionable to denigrate the memory of Leonidas by associating him with suicide bombers (Cartledge) or by accusing him of murdering his brother. Thus Dr. Nic Fields in Thermopylae 480 BC: Last stand of the 300 dismisses Herodotus’ version of King Kleomenes’ death on the grounds that “the Spartans were notoriously abstemious” and concludes instead that: “It seems more likely that Kleomenes’ reign was cut short [sic] by murder, arranged and hushed up, on the orders of the man who succeeded him on the Agiad throne.” (p. 14)

There are a large number of problems with this thesis. First and foremost, of course, is that there is not a shred of historical evidence for it. Not one ancient source accuses Leonidas of fratricide. Herodotus, as Fields notes, has a completely different version of events. So we are talking about nothing more than a modern commentator’s fabrication.

Fields feels justified fabricating this story because, according to him, all Spartans (every last single one of them over hundreds of years) were “abstentious” and since none ever drank in excess, a Spartan king who drank too much is a historical (physical?) impossibility. Frankly, that’s a little much. Even Spartans were human beings, and human beings are fallible. Furthermore, we are talking here about one of Sparta’s kings. Even if one could argue that peer pressure on an ordinary citizen would have been too great in Sparta’s overweening society to ever allow anyone to deviate too far from the norms, a Spartan king clearly did have more leeway. The fact that Herodotos mentions the Spartans blamed his madness on his drinking habits underlines the facts that Kleomenes’ behavior was not considered normal in Sparta. Spartans as a rule were abstentious, Kleomenes was not. Fields’ argument is untenable.

Of course, Fields is not the first historian to conclude that the hero of Thermopylae was really a murderer on the run. Most accept the fact that Kleomenes might have had a drinking problem, but cannot believe that anyone would try to flay themselves alive. Because they cannot imagine something so appalling and hence cannot accept Herodotus at face value, they feel justified in accusing Kleomenes’ successor of regicide, fratricide and patricide (since Kleomenes was not only Leonidas’ king, but also his brother and father-in-law) all at once.

Yet, as W. G. Forrest points out in his excellent, concise work A History of Sparta: 950 – 192 BC : “A recent psychological study has pointed out that the details of [Kleomenes’] final self-mutilation are in fact consistent with a paranoid schizophrenic suicide.”

As so often, the evidence is with Herodotus – not those, who lack the imagination to believe him.

Yet even if we were to dismiss Herodotus’ version of Kleomenes’ death as implausible, would that justify pointing the finger at Leonidas?

W. P. Wallace in his excellent article, “Kleomenes, Marathon, the Helots, and Arkadia” (The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 74 (1954), pp. 32-35), at least suggests some plausible reasons why the Spartan state might have wanted to rid itself of Kleomenes. Wallace presents some weak but nonetheless cogent evidence that an Arkadian league formed at about this time and Herodotus also speaks of Kleomenes stirring up trouble in Arkadia. Wallace argues that, if Kleomenes was being successful in turning some of the Arkadian states against Sparta, than the Spartans may have felt he had to be taken out of circulation once and for all. But even this does not justify putting the blame for any surreptitious regicide on Leonidas.

People, who subscribe to this theory, argue that because Leonidas succeeded to the throne, he had to have the most to gain from murdering his brother, and so he must have been the man behind it. But Leonidas was Kleomenes’ heir at the latest from the day his elder brother Dorieus died, possibly from the day Dorieus departed Sparta. Why would he have waited almost 40 years until he was over 50 years of age to suddenly become ambitious and covet his brother’s throne? Did he, after serving Kleomenes almost his entire life, suddenly turn against him because of “troubles” in Arkadia? Surely Kleomenes had made other, more dramatic blunders, from Athens to Argos, that would have given him a pretext for murder -- had he been so inclined. But we hear nothing of Leonidas being disloyal after Kleomenes’ earlier debacles.

Another thing I would like to know from those who charge Leonidas with murder is what Gorgo was doing while her husband murdered her father? Gorgo, of all Greek women, is known for being out-spoken. Are we to believe that she just stood by and let her husband kill her father without a word of protest? More: that after her husband murdered her father, she continued to be a loyal wife, assisting him and asking for his instructions as he marched out to his death? Surely, the woman, who as a child had told her father not to take bribes, would have gone on record protesting her father’s murder and then avenging his death or scorning the murderer?

Or are we to believe she was an accomplice? That she supported her murderous husband like some ancient Lady MacBeth?

If so, someone needs to provide an explanation of why Kleomenes’ only child and heir, evidently greatly favored by him as a child, suddenly wanted him murdered in a barbaric fashion. Trouble in Arkadia hardly seems a sufficient reason for such an appallingly unnatural sentiment. Indeed, explaining why Gorgo allowed her husband to kill her father is psychologically a great deal more difficult than explaining how a man as consistently instable as Kleomenes came to commit suicide!

Last but not least, what action or statement by the historical Leonidas and/or Gorgo justifies imputing to them the level of moral perversion inherit in fratricide and patricide? What did Leonidas or Gorgo ever do or say to give historians the right to dismiss them as brutal, self-serving criminals? The arrogance is staggering.

It is sad that modern commentators feel compelled to propagate errant nonsense about a historical figure. To be sure, we know too little about the real Leonidas to know what sort of man he was, but that hardly justifies untenable accusations of sadistic fratricide just because we are uncomfortable with the disturbing but completely plausible explanation provided by Herodotus.

A Review of “Xerxes” by Ren A. Hakim

2011-05-07T12:15:00.000+02:00

Ren A. Hakim’s work Xerxesis a film script which describes Xerxes’ reign, and particularly his campaigns against the Greeks, predominantly from the Persian perspective. As far as I can tell (and I am not an expert on Persian history), the book is on the whole accurate, with many scenes and quotes taken directly from Herodotus. It certain bears no comparison – in the positive sense – with the script of “300” with its comic-book and supernatural elements.

The most remarkable aspect of the work, however, is that Hakim effectively makes Xerxes a multi-dimensional human being. At last, Xerxes is not an abnormal monster or flat caricature of a despot. Hakim’s Xerxes is human and he is understandable. I was particularly impressed by Hakim’s ability to pull me onto Xerxes side during the Battle of Salamis. During this episode I found myself fully identifying with Xerxes rather than the Greeks.

Other aspects of Xerxes’ character were less convincing. Xerxes’ relationships with women were on the whole mishandled. On the one hand, we have an honorable man with what we are told is an undying love for the woman married to his best friend. We also see a husband, who is patient and forgiving to a selfish and insolent wife. Then more than half-way through the script we discover that he also has a large harem. While not inherently inconsistent, I found it irritating that for half the book (script) Xerxes was portrayed as a virtuous, monogamous man faithful to his wife and scrupulously respectful of his best-friend’s wife, and then suddenly he turns into an oriental despot sleeping with multiple women – and not, as we are explicitly told, because he has changed but merely because the author failed to reveal this side of him earlier in the manuscript. I personally found the relationship between Xerxes and his adored, but untouchable, Suraz trite in the early part of the novel, and his relationship with his wife implausible, mostly because his wife is a caricature, without positive attributes that would explain Xerxes’ loyalty to her. Xerxes reaction to Suraz’s daughter, later in the script, was in contrast highly believable.

Politically, I find it hard to believe that there would have been so many revolts against Persian rule (Babylon, Egypt, Ionia – all more than once), if Darius and Xerxes had been as benevolent and just as Hakim portrays them. Yet the hyperbole is justified, I think, by the fact that most accounts err in the opposite direction. Hakim is probably right that most accusations of personal atrocities and vindictiveness are fabrications by Persia’s enemies, particularly the Greeks.

Hakim is, furthermore, clearly drawing a parallel between the Persian invasion of Greece in retaliation for the sack of Sardis and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. To make this point, the Persian kings are shown to see themselves as the enlightened rulers of a just world fighting against barbaric elements that wreck murder and destruction on innocent people. The thesis is completely legitimate; no doubt the Persian kings did see themselves as the “civilizing” power of their own age, and Americans need to be aware that we are seen as an “evil empire” in much of the world today -- no matter how we see ourselves. In this respect, Hakim’s Xerxes makes a valuable contribution. I hope that Hollywood will not do too much damage to her ambitious undertaking.

As for the minor historical errors, readers of this blog need to be prepared for the complete eradication of the Eurypontids, who are replaced by Leonidas’ brother Cleombrotus. Less inaccurate than implausible is a personal duel between Leonidas and Xerxes which Xerxes wins. (Why he then has Leonidas’ head cut off and displayed is not explained.) Last but not least, the Spartans are given no credit for either enduring Persian fire stoically or, indeed, having any significant role in the Battle of Plataea. Otherwise, most depictions of Spartans – from Demaratus craving revenge to Pausanias’ greed – are within the realm of serious, historical fiction.

The Significance of Recent Excavations on Kythera

2011-05-01T10:17:00.000+02:00

Last week I summarized the archeological finds on Kythera with relevance to Kythera’s Lacedaemonian ties. Aside from personal interest, the finds are important for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, they prove definitively that perioikoi settlements were not, as Graham Shipley suggested in “Perioecic Society” (Sparta, ed. Michael Whitby, pp. 182-189) merely “peasant communities” with little urban character and that Perioikoi “never … erect[ed] monumental civic buildings or temples.” (p. 186). Mr. Tsaravopoulos’ very cursory investigation of the site at Paleokastro on Kythera have already revealed key features of urban settlement, notably fortification walls and temples. This was in just one month of digging with amateur helpers. There is every reason to believe that further excavations will uncover more evidence of an urban center from fountain houses and gymnasium to, possibly, theaters. If a perioikoi city that is not, to my knowledge, hardly mentioned in ancient sources could be this urbanized, it is only reasonable to assume that Gytheon, Pellana, Geronthrai, Epidauros Limera, and other more frequently named perioikoi settlements were considerably larger and more urbanized.

Second, the digs at Paleokastro also indicate that the Spartans did not scorn walls in all circumstances. If, as Mr. Tsaravopoulos believes, the walls date from the Lacedaemonian period, then we can conclude that Sparta was probably the exception rather than the rule and other cities in Lacedaemon were fortified.

The really exciting aspects of Spartan Kythera, of course, remain to be discovered. Was there a permanent Spartan garrison stationed on the island, and if so how large was it? Did Spartiates have property on the island and so a personal interest in it? Or was all land held by perioikoi? What other gods besides the Dioskouroi, Poseidon, Asclepios and (allegedly) Aphrodite were honored here? And given Kythera’s prominent position on one of the busiest sea-lanes of ancient times, what role did Kythera play in Sparta’s naval strategy? Were there shipyards here? Were squadrons of Lacedaemonian triremes stationed here, ready to launch at short notice and prey upon enemy merchantmen or engage enemy warships? Is there any truth to Mr. Tsaravopoulos’s thesis on how the island was captured by Nicias?

I’ll stay in touch with Mr. Tsaravopoulos, try to visit the digs on my next trip and hope to learn more about Spartan Kythera as it is slowly rediscovered.

Ancient Kythera

2011-04-25T13:58:00.000+02:00

Kythera was magical as always, and this time I learned a little more about Kythera’s ancient past, particularly her ties to Lacedeamon. In this and the next entry, I will provide the highlights of my findings.

The island of Kythera sits off the southwest tip of Cape Malea on the Peloponnese and has been inhibited for millennia. Historical reference to Kythera goes back at least as far as the Iliad, and the archeological evidence suggests a thriving Minoan metropolis existed here about 2000 BC. According to legend, Kytheria was the first place in the Greek world where the goddess Aphrodite was worshiped. Except for brief periods of occupation by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War, Kythera was an integral part of Lacedaemon for approximately 500 years, from roughly 600 to 100 BC.

The first evidence of Lacedaemonian settlement on Kythera was discovered less than 20 years ago, and money for extensive archeological research has not been made available. However, in 2010, archaeologist Aris Tsaravopoulos from Greece’s 26th Ephorate of Classical and Prehistoric Antiquities carried out a limited project with a team of twenty international, amateur volunteers supported by the local community and Bishop Seraphim, Kythera’s Metropoliti. These digs suggest that the role and influence of Sparta on the island was more significant than previously believed.

Although only able to (literally) scratch the surface during the one month of work in 2010, Tsaravopoulos is confident of finding additional artifacts and foundations which will undoubtedly enable more comprehensive conclusions if excavations continue. Tsaravopoulos found sponsors and volunteers for at least one more summer project, scheduled for July 2011. Unfortunately, Mr. Tsaravopoulos was not on Kythera during my stay, but I spoke with him by phone and his son was able to show me the site of a city dating from the Lacedaemonian period and answer a number of questions.

The classical capital of Kythera was a walled city perched on a steep hill just west and inland from the site of the old Minoan port of Skandeia. It housed about one thousand inhabitants and remained occupied from roughly 600 BC to 100 AD. Although the city would have been predominantly perioikoi in character, Tsaravopoulos believes there was a Spartiate garrison stationed in the city at least during the Peloponnesian war.

The city contained an agora and a number of temples and civic buildings. Initial digging, which uncovered only the youngest layer of the ancient city spanning the hundred years before and after the birth of Christ, revealed pottery, tiles, and coins, mostly from the Roman period. However, impressive Doric pillars from a late 7th/early 6th century temple to the Dioskouroi were incorporated into a Byzantine church built on the site in 1290, giving testimony to strong Spartan influence at the time of the city’s founding.

Outside the capital city, there are indications of a Laconian watch-tower on a hill north of the capital. The site provides a good view to the north and, when weather conditions permit, to the Straits of Malea and the Peloponnese (Laconia) beyond. Also visible from the city or the watch-tower are two tiny islands, the Dragonara. The larger of these, Megali Dragonara is the site of a temple to Poseidon. A large number of offerings from the 5th century have been found here, and Tsaravopoulos believes that sailors routinely put in to the sanctuary either to entreat or thank Poseidon for safe passage around the dreaded Cape Malea.

In addition, a sanctuary dedicated to Asclepios (Aiglapios in Laconian dialect) has been identified, but nothing to Aphrodite yet. According to the younger Tsaravopoulos, a large number of valuable offerings were found at the site of a major Minoan temple to an unidentified deity, and he believes this may be the source of the legend about an Aphrodite temple.

Mr. Tsaravopoulos also found a number of interesting objects in a grotto in the next bay north of ancient Skandeia, which he believes suggest the tactics used by Nicias to seize Kythera in 424 BC during the Peloponnesian War. Mr. Tsaravopoulos believes two Athenian vessels put ashore at night near the port of Skandeia, over powered the men at the watch tower and sent a signal to the rest of the Athenian fleet laying offshore. (Thucydides gives the size of the expeditionary force at 10 ships and 2,000 hoplites.) In the morning, the Lacedaemonian garrison, seeing only two Athenian ships on the beach below the city, came down from their fortress to attack the apparently weak invading force. Meanwhile, however, the full Athenian force had landed at the beach to the north (modern day Diakofti), hidden from view at shore level by a large hill. While the Lacedemonians were attacking the two ships at the foot of their city, the full Athenian force came over the hill and attacked them in the rear, presumably wiping them out.

Unfortunately, Mr. Tsaravopoulo said he did not yet have sufficient evidence to publish this thesis. It is not, however, completely inconsistent with Thucydides. According to the latter, the attacking Athenians found “all the inhabitants draw up ready to meet them. Battle was joined, and for some time the people of Kythera stood firm, but finally they were routed and took refuge in the upper city. Afterwards they came to terms with Nicias….” (Thucydides, 4:54) Thucydides was clearly not present at the capture of Kythera and he may not have known how the Athenians lured a strong fighting force down from their fortifications in the upper city into the port. He appears only to have heard (or reported on) the second phase of the encounter, after the full force of Athenians arrived to find the Lacedaemons were in the port and in full fighting order, ready to meet them. Certainly, accounts agree that the battle took place in the port, rather than in the fortress. If the Spartan garrison was slaughtered in the battle and only perioikoi escaped to the fortress, this would explain further why Nicias was willing to come to terms with them as he did.

Shopkeepers and Shipmasters: The Perioikoi in Spartan Society

2011-04-09T12:10:00.000+02:00

It is one of the ironies of recorded history that we generally know much more about the tiny, ruling elite in any society than about the masses that actually composed it. Thus we know about the lives and loves of medieval kings, but little about the peasants that represented more than 90% of their subjects. Likewise, Lacedaemonian history is dominated by the tiny class of Spartiates, albeit a great deal has also been written about the allegedly unjustly oppressed helots. The segment of Lacedaemonian society that has received the least scholarly attention is the “middle class” – the perioikoi.

The lack of modern literature on the perioikoi is undoubtedly a result of the lack of historical and archeological information about this segment of Spartan society. The fact is, we know almost nothing about them -- not their origins, their history, the density of population, their laws or the nature of their relationship with the ruling Spartiates or their relationship to helots.

The lack of archeological finds has led some historians to hypothesize that they were an essentially rural population, hardly better off than the helots themselves. Yet the very fact that they provided hoplites in at least equal numbers as the Spartans casts serious doubt on this conclusion. I would also note that the archeological finds in Sparta itself hardly reflect the might and wealth that we know Sparta enjoyed. For whatever reasons, the existing archeological evidence from Lacedaemon is an incomplete, indeed inadequate, reflection of the society that inhabited the region in the 7th to 3rd Centuries BC.

John Chadwick in “The Mycenaean World" claims that the Mycenaeans found a native population on the Peloponnese, which they subjugated. When the Dorians invaded, they conquered the remnants of the Mycenaeans. This sequence of events might explain the three class system in Lacedaemon: the helots were the original inhabitants already reduced to serf-like status by the Mycenaeans, and the Mycenaeans became the perioikoi after the Dorian invasion. All three groups were essentially ethnically distinct and status depended on who had conquered whom. The situation appears to have been stable until the Spartans invaded Messenia and subdued another Dorian population. But all this is speculation.

Yet, while we know almost nothing about the perioikoi, we can infer a great deal. We know, for example, that in the later years of the Peloponnesian war, perioikoi hoplites were fully integrated with Spartan units – and that implies comparable levels of training, equipment and above all trust. While the enemies of Sparta (and modern commentators) make much of the hostility of the helots to Spartiate rule, the loyalty of the perioikoi is rarely questioned – or mentioned, despite its significance. We know Sparta had a fleet but that Spartiates had virtually no opportunity to gain the extremely complex knowledge necessary to build and sail ancient vessels. We know that Spartiates were prohibited from pursuing any profession other than that of arms (and civic administration – see my last entry), but Lacedaemon had extensive international trade. We know further that Lacedaemon produced and exported timber, pottery, and bronze works. It had mines and quarries, and, of course, every kind of craft necessary to daily life in the ancient world from carpentry and metal working to tanning and basket-weaving. Who provided the manpower and the know-how for all these various industries, if the Spartiates were prohibited and the helots were working the land?

The logical answer is the perioikoi. Furthermore, by ascribing to the perioikoi these various urban professions generally held by citizens in other Greek cities, we quickly see a way in which the perioikoi could have been both integrated and co-opted into Spartan society despite their undeniable second-class political status. The Perioikoi had no voice in Spartan policy and yet were expected to risk their lives side-by-side with the Spartiates. It hardly seems credible that they would have accepted this situation for long – particularly in the bad years of the Peloponnesian War – if they had not enjoyed other benefits.

The financial benefits of a monopoly on industry and trade throughout the rich territory of Lacedaemon could be such an incentive. The very restrictive nature of Spartan citizenship, which confined Spartiates to the army and civic duties, opened immense opportunities for the perioikoi to enrich themselves. Even if completely excluded from land-holding (which to my knowledge they were not, but which might have been the case when the Spartiate population was expanding in the archaic era), there would still have been ample opportunities to not only earn a living but make a fortune as well. The experience of other societies shows that a manufacturing and trading middle-class can indeed prosper even when politically disenfranchised (see, for example, Medieval France). This, I believe, is the key to perioikoi loyalty and the essential character of the Spartiate-Perioikoi contract.

While Spartiates reserved political power to themselves and evolved a culture that disdained the public display of wealth; the perioikoi traded political enfranchisement for the dual benefits of economic freedom and security. Behind the shields of Sparta’s incomparable army, the perioikoi were free to enrich themselves for generations. Only after Sparta fell into decline and her citizen ranks grew too thin to guarantee the protection of Lacedaemon did the Spartiate-Perioikoi contract begin to unravel. The decline of Spartiate population forced an increasing dependence on perioikoi troops, which put perioikoi at ever greater risk. As long as Sparta was winning wars, that might have been acceptable, but once Sparta was defeated at Leuktra a perpetual disenfranchisement of the periokoi became untenable. Throughout the archaic period, however, the division of labor between Spartiate and perioikoi appears to have worked admirably.

My next entry will be posted April 25 as I will be travelling in Greece until then. Happy Easter!

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peeress Peer

2011-04-02T17:11:00.002+02:00

Leonidas is arguably the most famous of all Spartans. Numerous works of art depict him. He was the hero of two Hollywood films. There is even a line of chocolate confectionery named after him. But no serious biography has ever been written, and what is most often portrayed is his death. Leonidas is remembered for commanding the Greek forces that defended the pass at Thermopylae against an invading Persian army. He is revered for refusing to surrender despite betrayal that made defeat absolutely certain. Thus Leonidas came to symbolize the noblest form of military courage and self-sacrifice. The events leading up to the three-day battle and death of Leonidas with three hundred other Spartans and seven hundred Thespians at Thermopylae have been the focus of historians, writers, and artists from Herodotus onward.

But Leonidas was not a young man at the historic battle where he gave his life. He had lived close to half a century (if not more) and reigned for ten years before he took command of the Greek alliance defying Persia. It was those years preceding the final confrontation with Persia that made him the man he would be at Thermopylae. To the extent that we admire his defiant stand, learning more about his early life and tracing the development of his character is important. Yet so very little is actually known about his early life that historians have been discouraged from attempting a biography.

Novelists, fortunately, enjoy more freedom, and what we do know about Leonidas’ early life is enticing. This is why I chose to devote a three-part biographical novel to Leonidas of Sparta. The first book, A Boy of the Agoge, was published last year. In it I built upon known facts about Leonidas’ birth and family situation and Sparta’s unique educational system to construct a plausible picture of Leonidas’ boyhood.

This week I delivered to my publisher the second book in the trilogy, A Peerless Peer. In this second book, I focus on the next stage of Leonidas’ life, the years when he was a common citizen before he became a king. This is the period in which he married his niece Gorgo and gained experience in battle and politics. Building on the few known facts, listening to the sayings attributed to Leonidas and Gorgo, and knowing how Leonidas met his destiny at Thermopylae, I have written this novel.

While based on all known facts about Leonidas, Gorgo and the society in which they lived, the novel goes beyond the bare bones of the historical record. It interpolates from these facts a reasonable hypothesis of what Leonidas and Gorgo might have been like and what they might have done, thought, and felt. The characters that emerge are greater than the historical input. Leonidas is consciously portrayed as the quintessential archaic Spartan, because that is what he has become in legend. Gorgo, likewise, epitomizes that which set Spartan women apart from their contemporaries—without robbing her of individual traits and personality. The two principals are surrounded by a large cast of secondary, largely fictional characters, each of which is unique and complex. In short, this novel is quite candidly fiction.

As the publication date approaches, I will post more information about release dates, price etc., and eventually provide a link to amazon.com for those of you (hopefully many of you!) interested in purchasing this novel.

Merciless Exploiters of Their Neighbors?

2011-03-25T19:38:00.000+01:00

In his introduction to Persian Fire Tom Holland argues that “Sparta’s greatness…rested upon the merciless exploitation of her neighbors.” The sentence made me stumble. Is Holland truly unaware that the Peloponnesian League at this point in history gave every city-state an equal vote in the League Council? Is Holland unaware that some city-states in the League chose to march north with Sparta to fight the Persians at Thermopylae and Plataea?

Since Holland goes on to contend that “to people who had suffered under Spartan oppression for generations, Xerxes rule might almost have felt like liberty,” I gather that Holland is really talking about the helots. He apparently believes that the helots and perioikoi and other Peloponnesians, who fought with the Spartans at Plataea, were all “mercilessly oppressed” Spartan slaves fighting against their own best interests. One wonders how 5,000 Spartans managed to keep 40,000 oppressed slaves under control and prevented them from defecting to their Persian liberators, while simultaneous defeating the Persians on the battlefield? Spartans must have been truly superhuman indeed to succeed at such a feat!

It is a particularly notable feat when one considers that the mere proximity of a potential liberator induced 20,000 Athenian slaves to defect in 413. The freedom loving, benevolent and ever democratic Athenians apparently didn’t treat their slaves as well as the “merciless oppressors” of Sparta or 20,000 Athenian slaves would not have “voted with their feet” by abandoning Athens for Sparta.

It also seems incredible that Sparta would have been elected to supreme command of the Greek forces opposing the Persian invasion – including Athens, if at that time it was widely perceived as a brutal oppressor of its neighbors. Would the United States at any time in its history have elected Nazi Germany the leader of a joint coalition? Would we have asked the Soviet Union to assume command of joint NATO and Warsaw Pact forces to fight a joint enemy? It tries my imagination.

Whatever else one says about Sparta’s treatment of helots (and firmly believe they were far better off than chattel slaves in the rest of Greece, not to mention Persian), to suggest that Sparta “mercilessly oppressed” its neighbors is a gross distortion of the historical record. It is sad that such sweeping allegations are still standard fare in modern treatments of the ancient world.

From Choral Masters to Quartermasters: Sparta’s Invisible Professions

2011-03-18T21:22:00.000+01:00

As everyone with even a cursory knowledge of Sparta knows, Spartan citizens were professional soldiers. Spartiates trained for war in the agoge, they spent the first ten years of their adult lives (ages 21-30) on what amounted to “active duty,” and the next thirty years of their lives in the ancient equivalent of the reserves. Not only this, but, we are told, Spartiates were prohibited from learning and pursing other professions and so there were no potters and no carpenters, no shipwrights and no smiths among Spartan citizens. These undisputed facts have led most people to see Spartan citizens as soldiers only, ignoring the fact that despite their life-long service in the military, Spartan citizens could in fact be much more than soldiers. They were also the administrators of a large, prosperous and exceptionally complex state.

Lacedaemon stretched from the Ionian to the Aegean Sea and had an estimated population of 60,000 or more. It had at least three classes of inhabitants (helots, perioikoi and Spartiates). It had a public school – unlike any other city of its age. It had a great number of public festivals with complex rituals involving choral, dance and athletic competitions. It successfully competed in the pan-hellenic games. It pursued extensive diplomacy throughout the then known world. And all this in addition to pursuing a brutal war that dragged out over generations in the second half of the fifth and early fourth century. In short, Sparta was a highly sophisticated society, which could not have been managed by two bickering kings, 28 men in their dotage and five amateurs elected for a single year. Sparta’s centuries of pre-eminence in the ancient world, and its reputation for good governance and order, can only be explained by hypothesizing a well-functioning administration that kept Sparta’s institutions operating.

This logical conclusion is supported by various sources which make oblique reference to various, often ill-defined, dignitaries that apparently supported the operation of the Spartan state. For example, the Paidonomos and his assistants, priests, magistrates, and heralds. While there is no explicit evidence (except with respect to the Paidonomos) that these positions were filled by Spartiates, it is unlikely that the Spartans would have entrusted the education of their children, their relationship with the Gods, communication with the enemy or the enforcement of their laws to helots or perioikoi. In short, there were many things beyond soldiering that almost certainly must have been performed by Spartiate full-citizens after they had been released from active duty.

Let’s start with the agoge. Although Xenophon and others speak only of “the” Paidagogos, as if one man alone controlled the entire agoge, such a notion illogical. We know that effective education requires low ratios of instructors to pupils, and even taking into account an age cohort of eirenes providing a degree of internal discipline each year, it is not credible that there were no other agoge officials. It is far more likely, given the size and importance of the agoge to Spartan society, that there were a relatively large college of instructors, or at least Deputy and Assistant Paidagogoi, maybe the Mastigophoroi usually portrayed as a bunch of whip-wielding thugs, but more likely responsible and respected educators.

Descriptions of Spartan life suggest a variety of other activities that would also have been performed by Spartan citizens if not “professionally” then, nevertheless, with the conscientiousness expected of full or part-time public service. For example, Sparta was famous for its choruses and dance performances. Anyone who has engaged in either knows that large groups of people cannot be brought to perform harmoniously together without someone choreographing, directing, or conducting. Sparta undoubtedly had chorus masters, and it is seems highly unlikely that for performances during Sparta’s sacred festivals that choral and dance masters would have been drawn from the ranks of the helots or perioikoi. Just as with the agoge instructors, it is far more probable that these were full citizens.

We also know that the Spartan kings kept records and maintained archives. Control of such delicate material as oracles from Delphi, communication between the kings and their permanent representatives, correspondence between the ephors and commanders in the field or ambassadors to foreign capitals would hardly have been entrusted to anyone but Spartiates. In all probability, therefore, there was at least one “archivist” for each royal house, and this position was probably filled by a Spartiate, who was either appointed or elected.

Then there is the issue of taxation. Taxation was particularly important in Sparta because citizenship itself depended on paying two kinds of tax: the agoge fees when immature, and the syssitia fees after attaining citizenship. Someone had to keep track of who paid how much, and they had to do that each and every month. Maybe each syssitia had a part time “treasurer” too keep track of fees, but the agoge was large and would have required at least one (and probably more) full-time “treasurers.” It is not credible that perioikoi would have been entrusted with control of records that revealed (and in part determined) the strength of the citizen body and so the army in future generations. Finally, taxes also had to be collected from the helots and perioikoi. Spartiates who collected too much from their helots were subject to sanctions, so someone – and it had to be one of their peers – must have been keeping track of how much was due and how much collected.

Even if not explicit, it is also fair to assume that the perioikoi were subject to taxation, just as metics in Athens. Again, an institutionalized means of assessing and collecting those taxes would have been necessary to ensure everything functioned properly, and at least until Sparta’s population decline became critical, such an apparatus would have been headed by Spartiates. Given the size and expanse of Lacedaemon, my guess is there would have been many more than one citizen engaged in tax collection!

Once taxes were collected, they had to be put to work, so we come next to the realm of financial management. Sparta would have needed some mechanism to allocate funding to various state expenditures. Money was needed for the army, of course, but also for the fleet, and for public works like roads and fountains and drainage systems and for public buildings from temples to theaters, monuments and barracks. Managing such projects requires full-time public servants committed to ensuring that the intentions of the state (as expressed, one assumes, by the Assembly via the ephors) are fulfilled and that funds are not misallocated.

And finally there was the Spartan army. Friend and foe alike admired the Spartan army not only for its relatively good performance on the battlefield but also for its organization and professionalism. Yet as most soldiers will tell you, an army’s effectiveness is not simply a matter of fighting capacity. A good army is well fed, well equipped, and well-supplied. It has effective command-and-control mechanisms, efficient lines of communication, and adequate, flexible transport. A good army has a medical corps and in centuries past good veterinaries as well. In short, there is a great deal more to creating an effective fighting force than drill with weapons. Sparta’s army must have had not just good soldiers and officers, but good quartermasters as well.

While all these various positions were “honorary” in the sense that they were without remuneration, they were nevertheless jobs requiring considerable time, energy, dedication and skill. Spartiates may not have earned a living from these jobs, since they all had their estates, but they probably viewed their performance in such jobs as honorable public service. Whether elected or appointed, ambitious Spartiates would undoubtedly have competed for these positions and performance would have contributed to a man’s reputation and prestige. I suspect that men who did well in these public function were most likely to be elected ephor, but whether they attained that honor or not, men in these positions would in turn have been influential.. They would have been part of the complex network of “leading” citizens that helped shape Spartan policy behind the scenes. There is nothing sinister about this. It happens in every society – including our own.

Women in the West: Sparta's Contribution

2011-03-11T20:47:00.000+01:00

International Women’s Day, March 8, is celebrated here by parties, newspaper articles, speeches – and red roses. I was invited to give the keynote address at an event, but while, as expected, I outlined the major milestones of the women’s movement in the U.S.A., I couldn’t leave it there. The condition and position of women in many parts of the world is so incomparably worse than in the “West” that I felt an International Women’s Day should not focus exclusively on the demands of rich and successful Western women for more, but on the need for solidarity with the truly oppressed and misused.

The statistics are truly appalling. A woman dies in childbed every single minute. Two million female infants are either aborted or killed before they reach their first birthday. Five to six thousand women are murdered each year because their fathers or brothers think they did not behave “modestly.” Ten times as many women are trafficked across international borders each year in the 21st Century than Africans were transported across the Atlantic during the height of the African slave trade. A million children each year are forced into prostitution, and ten million children are currently sex-slaves, the bulk of these are girls. Women are not only denied education, access to medical treatment and excluded from economic and political power, they are tormented, enslaved, humiliated, neglected, and murdered – simply because they are women. In many societies, the position of women can only be described as systematic subjugation based on contempt, scorn, loathing and palpable hate.

What does all this have to do with Sparta? Maybe nothing at all, but it did strike me that women in “the West” have status, respect, and legal protection to a degree that is exponentially higher than women in other parts of the world. Furthermore, women in “the West” have enjoyed status, respect and legal protection for literally thousands of years. No, women were not “equal” to men in ancient Rome or in the Middle Ages, but the status of women in Rome and in Medieval England, France and Scandinavia, for example, was significantly higher than in many parts of the world today. Respect for women (not equality) is an integral part of “Western” civilization.

But what is “Western” civilization? It is not just Christianity (although that is an important component!). The “West” also claims the traditions of pre-Christian, ancient Greece as part of its heritage. That is the reason Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae are often portrayed as the defense of “the West” against the Orient.

But we have a slight problem here. Women in Athens – that favored example of all things “golden” in the ancient world – were treated pretty much like women under the Taliban today. They were denied a healthy diet and exercise, and confined to the cramped, dark “women’s quarters” – just like women in Afghanistan today. They were kept illiterate, and married off at 12 or 13 to die in droves like the child-brides of Africa and Asia today because their immature bodies could not cope with childbirth. They could not inherit or even control property worth more than a bushel of grain. If they were raped, their husbands were compelled to discard them or lose their own citizenship. They had no part of Athens famed culture. They did not even attend the symposiums unless they were sex-slaves. As Pericles put it, the less one talked about or saw Athenian women, the better. In short, they were an embarrassment that Athenian men would rather have done without – how the Taliban would have understood and applauded Pericles! If Athens is the source of our “Western” traditions with respect to women, than Christianity alone is the source of the higher status of women in the West. Possible.

But Sparta had a very different tradition with respect to women. In fact, the status of women in Sparta was notoriously high. Spartan women certainly had economic power – hence Aristotle’s diatribes against them and Sparta itself. They were educated. They received the same food as their brothers and engaged in sport. They were not married until they were sexually mature and had a better chance of surviving the rigors of childbirth.

In the contrast between the Athenian and Spartan treatment of women, we have a microcosm of the modern world -- with Athens firmly located in the regions in which women are most exploited and despised. If ancient Greece had any impact on modern Western attitudes toward women, then we are following – quite unconsciously in most cases – the example of Sparta. In short, Sparta’s influence on Western civilization may be greater than most people – raised on adoration of Athens’ intellectual and artistic accomplishments – realize.

Appeal for a Photo of the Pass at Thermopylae

2011-03-04T21:33:00.000+01:00

The covers of the books in my Leonidas trilogy are composed of photos showing Greek landscapes combined with images that evoke ancient Greece. My aim is to remind the reader that ancient Greece was blessed with the same magnificent landscape as modern Greece and to hint at the fact that these books, while set in the ancient world, are an attempt to bring the ancient world to life.

The image on the cover of A Boy of the Agoge shows the view from the Eurotas to Taygetos from Sparta -- a view Leonidas would have seen daily when growing up in the agoge.

The image in the background of the cover of A Peerless Peer shows a white-washed wall on a shed on Kythera. I chose this because I wanted to suggest that this was a book focused more on domestic issues -- hence an orchard and a shed and a family scene. Thanks to all, who helped select the latter!

For Book III, A Disposable King, I would like to have an image of the Pass at Thermopylae in the background. I had hoped to take the photo myself, as I did the photos for Books I and II. Unfortunately, I will not be able to make it to Thermopylae in time.

So, I am requesting your help.

If you, or anyone you know, has a color photo of Thermopylae and like the idea of having your photo on the cover of a book, please send me a file with the photo to hps_books@yahoo.com, along with written permission to use the photo for this purpose. I will give full credit for the photo in the acknowledgements of the book.

I look forward to seeing your photo!

Thank you!

A Nation of Theives?

2011-02-25T21:29:00.000+01:00

Every scholar of Sparta knows Xenophon’s descriptions of how Spartan youths and boys were kept hungry so they would learn how to steal, and were punished only for being caught rather than for theft itself. Credible as Xenophon generally is, his commentary on this aspect of Spartan society is very questionable. Aside from the fact that thieves in any society can only be punished when caught, and many robbers undoubtedly view punishment as the price of poor performance rather than theft itself, the greater problem with this common depiction of Sparta is the notion that Sparta’s youth was continually stealing just to keep alive.

Admittedly, a nation of thieves may well fit Athenian views about their enemy. The French referred to the English as “perfidious.” Americans and Soviets routinely attributed treachery to each other throughout the Cold War. The Israelis and Arabs have no end of adjectives to describe the deceitful character of the other side. Rather like calling your enemy’s men “fags” and their women “whores,” attributing sly dishonesty and immorality to the enemy is standard fare in propaganda wars regardless of culture or century.

A nation of thieves does not, however, fit well with a society that even her enemies considered remarkably stable and orderly. How do you keep a society orderly, if the entire male population between the ages of 7 and 20 are actively encouraged to steal? More important, how do you keep an economy functioning at the high levels of efficiency needed to finance a brutal, 30 year war, if every farm, shop, house, workshop and warehouse must be locked and guarded against hoards of desperate, half-starved youth? There are thieves in every society, but high levels of crime are one of the most destructive factors to social stability and political credibility.

Admittedly, the theft of food alone might not be so devastating to an economy as the theft of all goods, but the accounts usually cited, supplemented with details such as the absurd story of a youth caught stealing a fox (which is not on anyone’s menu), suggest that theft as such was encouraged. It is this picture of Spartan youth which dominates modern portrayals of Sparta.

To his credit, Anton Powell, in his article “Dining Groups, Marriage, Homosexuality,” in Michael Whitby’s Sparta, notes that “theft offended against two ideals of Spartan society: obedience and respect for elders.” (Sparta, p. 102). However, rather than questioning if Xenophon’s account is accurate or complete, Powell tries to argue that the military benefits of teaching youth stealth and deceit outweighed the disadvantages of corrupting their morals. The problem with this argument is that such skills were conspicuously not necessary to the phalanx warfare at which Sparta was so good. Powell attempts to make a connection between guerrilla warfare and the custom of theft despite the fact that Thucydides states explicitly that prior to the Pylos campaign the Spartans had little experience of brigandage. Unable to square such a statement with his own image of Sparta, Powell hypothesizes a long history of (completely unrecorded!) helot revolts in which the Spartans learned guerrilla warfare – and so needed training in theft and stealth, but which Thucydides and Herodot knew absolutely nothing about.

Admittedly, the kryptea was an organization in which the skills of deceit and theft would have been useful, but we are told that only selected Spartan youth ever served in it, not all of them. Furthermore , as Dr. Nic Fields so significantly pointed out, Sparta probably did not have that repulsive institution unit until after the helot revolt of 465. There is, in fact, no credible indication whatsoever that Sparta had to deal with helot revolts of any kind prior to 465 – unless one counts the Second Messenian War as a major “helot” uprising. It is far more likely that both helots and perioikoi prospered throughout the archaic period.

Rather than inventing unrecorded wars, I think it makes more sense to examine the presumption that Spartan youth were encouraged to steal. It is far more likely, as Nigel Kennel argues in The Gymnasium of Virtue, that if Spartan youth were encouraged to learn stealth and theft at all, it was only in a very limited and restricted context, and/or only after the degeneration of Spartan society had set in in the mid-fifth century BC.

Two New Reviews of The Olympic Charioteer

2011-02-16T08:12:00.000+01:00

Jennifer Walker of SharedReviews (http://sharedreviews.com/) wrote:

The Olympic Charioteer:

Soon after politician and chariot horse breeder Antyllus buys the slave Phillip from the quarry, it becomes clear that his new purchase is not just any slave. Phillip possesses a remarkable level of pride for his station; but more than that, he has a death wish. He nearly manages to achieve that goal when Antyllus purchases him just in time to prevent a horrifying end. Antyllus soon learns just how unusual Phillip is. For one thing, despite his insolence and liberal sarcasm, Phillip has apparently been trained in rhetoric and deportment. For another, his ability to handle horses rivals that of anyone Antyllus has ever met.

Antyllus hopes for an Olympic victory with the team of horses he bred, but he needs a skilled driver to give him the best chance. He teaches Phillip to drive them and assist in training sessions, and Phillip learns so quickly that he soon surpasses Antyllus in skill. Antyllus decides that he has found his Olympic charioteer, but when Phillip surprisingly refuses, the mystery of the slave's background is finally solved.

The Olympic Charioteer transported me back to ancient Greece and plunged me into a world of politics and intrigue. Author Helena P. Schrader deftly paints a picture of social and political life in Tegea and Sparta of the times, which I found fascinating. Schrader’s story is fictional, but she obviously has an intense level of knowledge of the time period, which brings the story to life in a very authentic way. She explores in this story the conflicts between these two city-states--a conflict that eventually led to the formation of the Peloponnesian League through a series of non-aggression pacts.

I found Helena P. Schrader’s The Olympic Charioteer to be a brilliant tapestry of Ancient Greece, with robust, lifelike characters and scenery. This story has a little something for everyone: it is a realistic historical fiction for those readers, with a sweet romance for those fans. There is even mystery, action and drama. It was a brilliant and fascinating read that I truly enjoyed. This book retails for $22.95 and is 416 pages. It is available at Amazon and other online retailers.

Overall Rating: 5.0
Acquired by: It was a gift
Category: Fiction Books
Published: Jan 31, 2011

Feature Ratings:
Genre: 5.0
Author / Illustrator: 5.0
Length: 5.0
Content: 5.0

Review Author: Jennifer Walker

ALSO, April Renn of http://mybookaddictionandmore.worldpress.com/ wrote:

THE OLYMPIC CHARIOTEER by Helena P. Schrader is an interesting historical fiction set in Archaic Greece. It is well written with depth and details. It is a tale of one slave,two men with Olympic ambitions, two cities at war and the finest charioteer in Greece. It has tragedy, olympic triumph, romance, slavery, intrigue, alliances, struggles, Archaic Spartan society, love won and lost. It is about the struggle of one slave who will become the greatest Olympic charioteer of all and his sacrifices, triumphs and the first non-aggression pact: the Peloponnesian League. This is a very intense story with many faceted characters. It expands on the Spartan culture and shows much research was done in order to write this story. It is packed full of action, adventure, tragedy, and is fast paced. If you enjoy learning more on the Spartan culture, their trials, triumphs, slavery and be transported to a different time and place this is the book for you. It is a great read and is fast paced. This book was received for the purpose of review from AME Virtual Author Tours and details can be found on amazon.com.

RATING: 4

REVIEWED BY: April Renn

Sparta's far from Insignificant Fleet

2011-02-07T11:04:00.000+01:00

The Peloponnesian War is often seen as a conflict between a great sea-power (Athens) and a great land-power (Sparta), and in many history books disparaging remarks about Sparta’s “inability” to grasp the importance of sea-power can be found. Generally, there are dismissive references to its “insignificant” fleet – despite the fact that Sparta ultimately defeated Athens at sea rather than on land. Clearly, Sparta’s pride was her army, not her navy, and clearly the Athenians were the “lords of the sea” throughout the Classical period, but I think it worth noting that the clichés about Sparta’s lack of maritime power are overdrawn.

Sparta, unlike Athens, was not dependent on the sea for its very existence. Because it was self-sustaining in food and other necessities from ore to wood, Sparta did not need to trade and because it was not dependent on trade it did not need to control the trade routes. It did need to control its bread-basket Messenia, but that could be done with its army. Thus, far from being negligent or backward (as some commentators suggest), the relative unimportance of Sparta's fleet was a logical consequence of her geo-political position. In fact, the ability of Sparta to deploy a fleet at all is rather surprising.

Furthermore, based on Herodotus, it is arguable that Sparta had a credible fleet before Athens did. Sparta’s first attempt to depose Hippias entailed, we are told, sending an army by sea (5:63). Sparta would hardly have sent its own modest fleet, if it had been facing a major sea-power, and significantly the force dispatched was defeated on land by Thessalian cavalry. This is an important early example of Sparta's vulnerability to cavalry, but equally importantly means that Sparta successfully landed troops in Attica, something that seems astonishing if the Athenians had truly had command of the sea at the time.

When Aristagoras convinced the Athenians to aid his rebellion against Persia, we are told the Athenians sent 20 triremes. That is respectable, but not overwhelming considering islands like Chias and Naxos could deploy fleets a hundred strong. Obviously, Athens might have consciously chosen not to send too many ships, yet it seems odd they would risk the wrath of Persia with only a token force. Twenty triremes probably represented a sizable portion of their available fleet.

More to the point, Themistocles is credited with having convinced the Athenians to build a navy. He would hardly have earned the reputation as “father” of the Athenian navy if Athens already had a substantial fleet. If the Athenian navy was indeed built up from a modest, auxiliary component of Athens’ military forces to her pride and primary arm in the ten years between 490 and 480 BC, then it is less surprising than usually assumed that a Spartan, Eurybiades, was nominally in command of the combined Greek fleets opposing Persia in 480.

On the contrary, it is arguable that at the time of Eurybiades’ appointment, Athens' new fleet and most of her crews were completely untested. Sparta’s fleet may have been smaller and not notably successful, but apparently the allies felt it was more experienced than Athens.’ In fact, it is less odd that Sparta was given precedence over Athens than that Sparta was given precedence over Corinth. Corinth had a substantially larger fighting fleet and is credited by naval historians with having evolved the trireme – not Athens.

Once Athens had won the battle of Salamis, however, Athens’ domination of the seas began. The navy was an instrument well suited to Athens radical democracy because it gave poorer citizens a means of contributing directly to Athens military power. Radical democracy in turn gave Athens the manpower to man her fleet. Middle class Athenians could remain hoplites and the sons of the wealthy could form the cavalry, while the great magnates financed the construction and commanded the fleet. But it was Athens citizen crews that made her fleet so good. No trireme manned by slaves or mercenaries could be depended upon to row so fast or fight so hard.

And Sparta’s fleet? We know that Spartiates were appointed to command the fleet as navarchos. Beyond that, to my knowledge, the names of no Spartan who served at sea has been recorded. The assumption is that Spartiates were required to serve in the army and did not man the fleet. This means that the Spartan fleet must have been manned by either perioikoi or helots or both.

Helot crews would, of course, have been similar to slave crews – highly problematic since disloyalty or mere disinterest could cost a battle. Does this explain the lackluster performance of the Spartan navy throughout most of the Peloponnesian War?

Yet, helots would hardly have been capable of building and paying for the ships nor is it likely they would have been capable or entrusted with command aboard them. This suggests perioikoi most likely financed and commanded Sparta’s fleet. This is yet another area in which the role of the perioikoi has been seriously overlooked. The fascination of ancient and modern observers with the unique live-style of the Spartiates themselves, and to a lesser extent their relationship with the helots has resulted in serious academic neglect of an essential component of Lacedaemon’s success: the perioikoi.

Dining in the Dark

2011-01-29T10:13:00.000+01:00

Observers of ancient Sparta noted the peculiar Spartan custom of dining clubs or syssitia at which adult Spartan citizens were required to share their evening meals. These clubs were viewed as one of the key features of Spartan society that distinguished it from all other Greek cities. Although it was common, popular and indeed considered a matter of pride for men (never women!) to dine together in Athens as well, the Spartan dining clubs were considered peculiar in the ancient world because: 1) they had fixed membership (for life), and 2) they were a compulsory pre-condition for attaining citizenship and failure to make the designated fixed contributions to the mess could cost a man his citizenship. To the spoiled palate of other Greeks -- most of whom would never have eaten at a Spartan syssitia -- it was furthermore assumed that the fare offered at these dining clubs was dismal.

Aside from the debatable question of the quality and taste of food prepared by different cooks at different messes over centuries, these characteristics of Spartan dining clubs are well established. Yet the reason(s) the Spartans instituted and maintained this peculiar tradition is controversial. A large number of theories have been put forward over time including the desirability of men of different age cohorts dining together (so that young men would learn respect and benefit from the wisdom of older men) to the conscious desire of the Spartan state to weaken family ties.

This later thesis is put forward forcefully by Anton Powell, for example, in his contribution to Michael Whitby’s Sparta. Powell argues that totalitarian states, recognizing the influence of the family as inherently inimical to state control, have consistently tried to break down family ties. He cites examples from National Socialist Germany, although Soviet Russia and Communist China both provide much more compelling examples of anti-family policies designed to – and incidentally more successful at – undermine family structures and influence.

The problem with the comparison between 20th Century totalitarian states and Sparta is three-fold. First, it is questionable whether Sparta can be counted a "totalitarian" state at any period of its history, but it most certainly was not totalitarian during the archaic age, yet syssitia existed in this period also. Second, whether Nazi Germany or Communist China, these anti-family societies were consciously revolutionary. The reason they sought to undermine the family was because they recognized families as inherently conservative. Yet Powel himself stresses the fundamentally conservative nature of Sparta. If Sparta was essentially conservative, than no institution was better designed to reinforce conservative values than the family. It is when family structures break down that societies become most vulnerable to change – not the other way around.

The final problem with Powell’s thesis is that men eating one meal together at a club is hardly a good way to undermine family structure. It may be a modern truism that “families that eat together stay together,” but the fact is most men today also eat at least one meal away from their families. The most common pattern in Western industrialized societies is for men (and often women) to eat the mid-day meal away from home among their work colleagues rather than their family. Why should it be more destructive of family life to eat the evening meal away from home than the morning or mid-day meal? In many societies, particularly agricultural societies (such as ancient Sparta), it is the mid-day, not the evening meal, that is most important.

Certainly, as all accounts agree, Spartan men returned from the syssitia to their homes (or barracks) sober before it grew too late. Furthermore, syssitia were not noted for the entertainment of flute-girls and courtesans, unlike the tradition of Athenian symposia. At the latter, men allegedly caroused together until the dawn and then staggered home drunk after indulging themselves with prostitutes both male and female. From a wife’s point of view, the tradition of the Spartan syssitia was infinitely preferable to the custom of the Athenian symposia. In short, it is arguable that the syssitia did far more to strengthen family life than to disrupt it. Attempts to portray the syssitia as a component of a totalitarian Spartan state’s systematic efforts to undermine family and sexual relations reveal an alarming lack of objectivity.

Promotion in the Spartan Army

2011-01-22T13:16:00.000+01:00

Given the importance of the Spartan army in Spartan society and history it is surprising how little is known about the system of promotion to officer status. Stephen Hodkinson, in his contribution to Michael Whitby’s Sparta titled “Social Order and the Conflict of Values in Classical Sparta,” rightly stresses the fact that patronage and family background appears to have been at least as important as outstanding ability and success. However, he fails to put his discussion in context or to provide key information about the promotion of junior and mid-level officers.

The issue of context is particularly irritating. Hodkinson’s article criticizes Sparta for failing to promote purely on the basis of merit. Hodkinson sees nefarious influences at work, and cites command appointments as evidence that Spartan society was not truly egalitarian. Yet, it should not surprise anyone that in any society -- even those with a goal of creating equality among members such as Communist China or Soviet Russia – there are always some members who are “more equal than others.”

Far more relevant is: how did Sparta’s system of promotion and appointment to command compare to the systems used by contemporary societies? Weren’t Persia’s armies commanded by her kings and noblemen? Even in democratic Athens, it was only those wealthy enough to finance ship-building, who commanded triremes. Furthermore, even the nominally elected generals were all from the so-called “better families.” Can anyone explain to me why no one appears to think Athens less democratic just because the opulently wealthy Miltiades or Alkibiades were also commanders, but the presence of wealth in Sparta or the appointment of commanders with connections to the royal families is treated as scandalous, dangerous and offensive?

It would also be useful to remember that even in today’s modern Western societies promotion to senior positions whether in the army, politics or business is not a matter of pure objective advancement by merit. As they saying goes, “it’s not what you know, but who you know.” The Germans speak of the importance of “Vitamin B” for Beziehungen (contacts) - we would call it vitamin C. Americans talk of “networking” and “mentoring.” Why should we attach so much approbation to Spartans seeking to capitalize on relationships when we do it ourselves?

Turning to the issue of promotion in the lower ranks, I believe this deserves topic a great deal more attention because promotion to these ranks was probably an essential pre-condition to promotion to higher ranks. To my knowledge, however, no one has attempted to explain how it occurred, which has led me to speculate on possible procedures.

For example, boys in the agoge elected their herd leader so it is not completely unimaginable that they elected their enomotarch. Since an enomotia was a relatively small, close-knit unit similar in many ways to a herd of boys in the agoge, such an arrangement might even have helped solidify cohesion and discipline. The same, however, cannot be said for the election of pentekonteres and lochagoi, however. In these larger units, it would have been difficult for all members to know the qualities of the others and far more difficult to find consensus. Elections and competition for the position of commander would therefore undermine discipline rather than reinforce it. Nevertheless, it is possible that a modified election procedure was used for these more senior ranks in which only the enomotarchs elected the pentekoneres and only the later elected the lochgoi. Yet, while the election of officers is not inconceivable, in the absence of positive evidence to support it, the thesis seems a bit radical. After all, the hippeis were appointed by the hippagretai, who first had been appointed by the ephors. This suggests a top-down approach more consistent with military experience the world-over and up to the present time.

Assuming that officers were appointed rather than elected, we are left with the issue of who did the appointing. The kings, of course, took precedence in war and commanded Sparta’s armies, but they were often at loggerheads with one another and for all their vaunted influence, there is to my knowledge no evidence that they could simply appoint officers. Furthermore, as noted above, the ephors appointed the hippagreta, and as Hodkinson outlines they also played a role in extraordinary appointments such as nauarchos, harmosts and polemarchs. It would appear that at some level the promotion system entailed a formal process involving the ephors. Yet especially for these more senior posts, it is hardly likely that the ephors acted on their own. The ephors were essentially executives, operating -- except under exceptional circumstances -- on the guidance given by the Gerousia and/or Assembly.

The involvement of the Assembly in the promotions of nauarchos, harmosts and polemarchs is particularly plausible. The Assembly was involved in the declaration of war or peace. It could demand the exile or recall even the kings themselves. It does not seem a stretch to picture the Spartan Assembly at least approving senior appointments or selecting a candidate among a short-list presented by the Gerousia/ephors as Hodkinson suggests not only for harmosts and nauarchos but for polemarchs and lochagoi as well. But how practicable would it have been to put forward to the Assembly the names of each candidate for an enomotai? I think this unlikely.

Nor does it seem likely that the Gerousia was the body responsible for appointing junior and mid-level officers. By definition it was composed primarily of old men and their familiarity with the age-cohorts suitable for more junior levels of command would have been limited.

Given the example of the hippagretai, I think it most likely that polemarchs and lochagoi were selected by a combination of Gerousia/ephors making a recommendation that then had to be ratified by the Assembly similar to the procedure used for nauarchos and harmosts, but that they then appointed their pentekoneres, who in turn appointed the enomotarchs. I would suggest further that given the professionalism of the Spartan army and organization of the entire society along age lines, that only men with a set amount of experience would be eligible for each rank.

It would be most logical, as in other military organizations over the centuries, that advancement to a senior rank was only possible after serving in the next lower rank. Thus no man could be a pentekontes without first being an enomotarch, and no one could become a lochagos without first serving as a pentekontes. If this is hypothesized, then the number of men eligible for senior positions would be reduced to a number that would be manageable – the short list that the Gerousia/ephors would present to the Assembly for a final vote. It would also mean that promotion depended heavily on winning the favor of those above you in the chain of command -- system that can be stiffling to the advancement of outsiders, individualists and radical thinkers!

While this procedure seems logical and appears consistent with what we do know, I admit it is almost pure speculation. I’d appreciate your comments on this thesis.

The Significance of Marathon for Sparta - and Leonidas

2011-01-08T10:44:00.000+01:00

Marathon was an Athenian-Plataean victory. Although Athens fielded her maximum force and the Plataeans sent every available man, the Persians still significantly outnumbered their combined strength. Yet when Miltiades finally led the assault, the victory went to the Athenians and Plataeans. According to Herodotus, 6,400 Persian soldiers lost their lives on the plain of Marathon, at the price of just 192 Athenians and an unnamed, but certainly smaller, number of Plataeans. The Spartans were nowhere to be seen.

And yet, Marathon is a significant chapter in Spartan history. First, the Athenian request is an indication that they believed halting Persian incursions in Greece was sufficiently important to Sparta to override any other considerations arising from their less than harmonious past relations. Second, Sparta agreed to send help, although Persian wrath was directed exclusively at Athens and Eretria at this point in time, and Sparta would have been justified telling the Athenians to face the consequences of their support for Aristagoras’ revolt alone. Yet Sparta did nothing of the kind.

Sparta, according to Herodotus, was “moved by the appeal [for help], and willing to send help to Athens,” but was unable to respond immediately because they “did not wish to break their law. It was the ninth day of the month, and they said they could not take the field until the moon was full.” (Herodotus, 6:107). Most historians interpret this to mean that Sparta was at the time celebrating the Carneia, a ten-day festival, and could not march until it was over.

That the promise was not empty is evidenced by the fact that, again according to Herodotus, after the full moon “two thousand Spartans set off for Athens.” They covered roughly 120 miles of in part very rugged terrain to reach Athens on the third day after leaving Sparta – a notable achievement for an army on foot. They arrived in Athens allegedly on the day following the Battle of Marathon and continued on to Marathon to see the bodies of the slain.

The fact that Sparta delayed responding to the Athenian call for help has occupied historians for generations. Given the urgency of the request and the evidently genuine desire to help, modern readers find it hard to believe the phase of the moon or a festival would have been allowed to get in the way. Speculation about a possible helot revolt has been particularly popular. Yet I find it hard to believe a revolt could be of such a predictable nature that the Spartans could know in advance it would be over by the full-moon -- and then in fact be so completely subdued that 2,000 men – the entire active army by some accounts - could march out exactly on schedule. Hints of a revolt prior to the major insurrection of 460 may be credible, but are insufficiently precise to prove a revolt took place at exactly this point in history, in my opinion.

Equally significant but, to my knowledge, less frequently noted, is that Herodotus does not identify the Spartan commander of the 2,000 Spartans that arrived in Athens too late. Up to this point, Sparta’s armies abroad were commanded invariably by her kings jointly or, after the debacle of Cleomenes and Demaratus quarrelling openly while campaigning against Athens at the end of the previous century, by one of the kings. It seems very odd, that suddenly, for such an important confrontation, no king is mentioned.

The absence of a king is particularly odd given the large numbers involved. Herodotus speaks of 2000 “Spartans.” While this need not necessarily mean Spartiates and could, at a stretch, include perioikoi, it certainly excludes Allies. Furthermore, based on the assumption that the force of 5,000 Spartiates sent to Plataea represented the maximum strength of a citizen force including 15-20 age-cohorts of reservists, 2,000 men probably represents the size of Sparta’s standing army, the citizens aged 21-30, at this time. Such a force represented the very flower of Spartan manhood and would hardly be entrusted to anyone less than a king.

But in the summer of 490, Sparta was in the midst of a dynastic crisis. The Eurypontid Demaratus had been denounced as a usurper and dethroned by a judgment of Delphi only a couple years earlier. After being humiliated by his successor Leotychidas, Demaratus fled Sparta, only for it to then come to light that Delphi’s judgment had been bought by King Cleomenes. This cast grave doubts on the legitimacy of Leotychidas in the eyes of most Spartans, yet it appears to have been impossible to recall Demaratus. Meanwhile, Cleomenes himself had gone mad and was in self-imposed exile. Thus in the summer of 490, the Spartans literally had no king to whom they could entrust their army.

This situation might not have been revealed to the outside world, if the Persians had not chosen to launch their invasion of Attica at precisely this time. Under the circumstances, the Spartan government recognized the need to confront the Persians, but, without a king to take command, Sparta was in no position to respond at once. The Spartans first had to agree among themselves how to deal with this unprecedented situation by appointing a non-royal commander. The delay in responding can, therefore, best be explained by the time needed to find a consensus candidate, which undoubtedly entailed debating the issue in the Gerousia, drafting a bill for the ephors to present to the Assembly, and calling an extraordinary Assembly. It was possible to calculate how many days that would take, and easier to blame religion than confess to the Athenians that the Spartans had a dynastic/leadership crisis. After all was said and done, the Spartan army marched out under someone other than one of the kings.

Herodotus is silent on who led the 2,000 men to Marathon. We will never know for sure. But one candidate stands out as the most likely commander: Leonidas. Leonidas was an Agiad. He was heir to the throne. He was a mature man, probably with considerable military experience by this point in time. At a minimum, he would have fought at Sepeia against Argos just four years earlier. It is hard to imagine that anyone else in Sparta at the time could claim equal right to lead the Spartan army in the absence of her ruling kings.

If Leonidas indeed led the Spartan army that arrived in Athens one day too late for the Battle of Marathon, it would have given him the opportunity for him to meet Athenian leaders – and win their trust. This may in turn have been a contributing factor to Leonidas’ election as commander of the joint Greek forces in 480. Perhaps equally significant, arriving one day too late for Marathon may have left a psychological scar that made Leonidas determined not to come too late to Thermopylae. In 480, Leonidas refused to await the end of the Carneia and took his advance guard out of Sparta before the end of the festival. I think Leonidas was determined not to be late again.

PLEASE NOTE: NEXT WEEK I WILL BE CRUISING THE NILE AND THE NEXT POST WILL BE MADE ON JANUARY 22.

More about Thespia

2011-01-02T17:49:00.000+01:00

On December 23, the entry "Thespian Catastrophe," was posted on the blog http://www.300spartanwarriors.com/. The short post pointed out both how over-looked and how significant Thespian losses at Thermopylae were. I was very heartened to see the article because I have long felt that the Thespian contribution in the Persian war has been unjustly neglected and that more attention and tribute to the Thespians is long over due.

In fact, I'd like to make a contribution to drawing more attention to the Thespian role at Thermopylae by giving the Thespians a higher profile in my biographical novel of Leonidas. (The first book in the three-part biography, Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge was released last year.) To do so, however, I need to know more about Thespia.

WIth this entry, therefore, I would like to appeal for assistance in finding out more about Thespia in the early 5th Century BC. Most important, does anyone know more about the Thespian constitution? How democratic was Thespia?

Does anyone know about it's alliance systems? It appears from Herodotus that Thespia was a located near to Thebes - near enough for the Thebans to view Thespia as within their "sphere of influence." But this clearly did not stop the Thespians from joining the anti-Persian alliance while Thebes "medized." Does anyone know a reason why Thespia should have been such a determined opponent of Persia? Was it to spite Thebes - or was there some other reason?

Herodotus also gives the adult male population of Thespia as 1,800 - after the loss of 700 men at Thermopylae. Could anyone give me a rough idea of how a city with 2,500 male citizens of fighting age would compare to other cities of the period (other than Sparta and Athens)? I.e. is Thespia roughly the same size as Plataea? Smaller? Larger? How would it have compared to Corinth or Thebes at this time?

In short, given my level of ignorance I would welcome any hints, tips, or suggested reading that would help me understand Thespia and its role in the war against Persia (490-479) better.

Thank you!