A Unique Institution - The Spartan Agoge

Thanks to films like "300," the Spartan Agoge is commonly viewed today as a brutal -- not to say savage -- training regime in which boys and youths were taught nothing but survival skills by sadistic instructors. In earlier entries, I pointed out that this image is an illusion created in part by the artificial agoge of the Roman era and in part by poor historiography on the part of scholars copying from each other carelessly. 

Yet even after removing the grotesque mask created by later generations, the Spartan educational system was characterized by unique elements which attracted the praise of many ancient observers -- including Plato. A summary follows.

The one feature of the Spartan agoge most admired by Athenian political philosophers was the fact that it was compulsory and universal, i.e. all future citizens of the city-state had to have completed their education before they could be admitted to the ranks of the citizens. The Athenians thinkers recognized that poorly educated citizens undermined the very basis of democracy. Yet in no other city -- not even in the city that prided itself most on its democracy, Athens -- were citizens required to obtain an education at all, much less meet specific standards. Sparta was alone in making education a criteria of citizenship.

The second key distinguishing feature of the Spartan "upbringing" or "agoge" was the fact that it was it was public. In other cities, notably Athens, each citizen was responsible for his son's education. Although the sons of the wealthy benefited from private tutors drawn from the impressive intellectual pool of the city, the sons of the poor might get none at all. In between were the vast majority of boys who got a spotty education by attending private schools irregularly for indefinite periods. In short, the quality of education varied from outstanding to non-existent. On average it was haphazard, individual and inadequate. Indeed, the fact that Athenian education system as a whole was worthless is one of the few things on which Athenian philosophers agreed! (They disagreed on how to fix it.)

In Sparta in contrast, the state ran the educational system, which was supervised by officials of the Spartan state. The curriculum and standards were set by the state. There were age-cohorts and public rituals in which the pupils had to participate in front of the entire city. Furthermore, responsibility for the education of youth was collective. By this I mean that any citizen had the right, and was expected to, take an active part in education the all children -- not just their own.

In addition, the Spartan educational system contained exceptionally draconian discipline combined with democratic elements. Particularly shocking to the ancient world was the employment of flogging as a means of discipline. In the rest of the Greek world, flogging was a punishment for slaves. The idea that the sons of citizens, even the (younger) sons of kings could be flogged for transgressions was viewed with voyeuristic horror that eventually mutated into the grotesque whipping contests of the Roman period. Yet in their shock over this tool, many commentators lose sight of the fact that Spartan youth elected some of their leaders, and the agoge itself enabled the sons of non-citizens to obtain citizenship - strikingly democratic features.

Last, yet arguably the most radical aspect, the Spartan agoge was that it was co-educational. To the horror and disgust of other Greeks -- much less barbarians, the daughters of Spartan citizens also attended the agoge, albeit for a shorter period of time. This meant they too shared in the common experience of living in barracks, eating institutional food at the common messes, wearing identical clothes, competing in sports, and participating in festivals.

Over the next four months, I will be looking at the above unique features of the Spartan agoge, examining what we know about them and speculating on its purpose -- i.e. why Sparta might have chosen to include these particular elements into their public educational system.

Next month I will look more closely at the "Compulsory and universal" aspects of the Spartan upbringing.

Meanwhile, the Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

    

       Buy Now!                                         Buy Now!                                     Buy Now!

 

Removing the Roman Mask

In my last entry, I explained that with the sole exception of Xenophon, all surviving ancient sources describing the Spartan educational system or agoge depict the Roman -- not the Spartan -- institution.  This Roman-age school used Archaic nomenclature and paraded itself as "authentic" archaic Spartan tradition, but it was actually the creation of a society which no longer had a unique constitution or culture.  Furthermore, to the extent that it was based on something older, it was the reconstruction of an institution created (consciously) by an Athenian stoic philosopher.

When searching for the Spartan agoge, the educational system that produced Chilon the Wise, Leonidas, Brasidas and the other great Spartan leaders of the Archaic and Classical periods, we must first remove the Roman mask and consider only those features that were recorded in classical sources such as Xenophon, Thucydides, and Herodotus, or can be deduced based on common sense and human nature.

Today, I focus on those familiar features of "the agoge" for which we have no evidence from the Classical and Archaic periods, in short the aspects that were NOT part of the agoge.

The most authoritative source we have for the Spartan (as opposed to the Roman) agoge is a work known as The Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, widely attributed to the Athenian general, historian and philosopher Xenophon. Xenophon was born in Athens in the 420s BC, and he was a follower of Socrates -- something that got him banned from Athens as a young man. He served as mercenary in the service of the Persian prince Cyrus and became friends with the Spartan King Agesilias. Eventually, he was given an estate in Lacedaemon and his two sons attended the Spartan agoge. He wrote a number of books including an account of his campaign in Persia (the Anabasis), a book on education for Prince Cyrus, a biography of Agesilias as well as his study of the Spartan constitution, a book on horsemanship and, in his old age his memoirs, titled A History of My Times. 

In his tract on the Spartan constitution, Xenophon does not provide us a comprehensive picture of the agoge, but what he does say is the closest thing to facts that we have.  Furthermore, if he says something that is at odds with reports by ANY other source, particularly later sources, then we can assume that Xenophon is describing the Spartan agoge and the other sources are describing the Roman agoge. In short, Xenophon is our most important "litmus" test for any feature of the agoge.

Xenophon is extremely explicit on a three points that continue to be widely misrepresented in the popular -- and sadly even many academic -- portrayals of the agoge.

First, Xenophon states categorically that institutionalized pederasty was prohibited in the agoge. Xenophon writes: "It strikes me that a word should also be said about men's love for boys, since this too has some connection with their education. Now what happens elsewhere in Greece may be be illustrated from Boeotia, where man and boy form a union and live together, or Elis where beautiful youths are won by favours;...[Lycurgus on contrast] laid it down that at Sparta lovers should refrain from molesting boys just as parents avoid having intercourse with their children or brothers with their sisters. It does not surprise me, however, that some people do not believe this, since in many cities the laws do not oppose lusting after boys."(1)

Xenophon could hardly have been more explicit, and the evidence of pederasty in  Hellenistic and Roman Sparta does nothing to weaken or undermine his statement. The fact that homosexual relationships became common in Sparta after it had lost its constitution, independence and unique way of life, only demonstrates the degree to which Spartan society had become corrupted. Widespread pederasty in later Sparta is testimony to the fact that Sparta had become like other Greek states. It had lost its unique character -- not least with regard to its previously exceptional and uncompromising attitude to pederasty. (For more on the evidence that Archaic Sparta was characterized by a near complete absence of homosexuality see: http://www.spartareconsidered.com/sexuality.html) 

Second, Xenophon's description of the deprivations of the agoge fall far short of the extremes found in later descriptions. Xenophon notes that Spartan boys had only one himation, but not that they had no other clothes. His point is not that they were naked and freezing most of the time, but rather that they were not spoiled like their Athenian counterparts with new and different garments the year through.  

Regarding diet, Xenophon puts it like this: "[Lycurgus] instructed the Eiren to furnish for the common meal 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. His view was that the boys under this 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. He also considered that a diet that produced sim bodies would do more to make them grow tall than one in which the food filled them out."(3) Note, the emphasis is avoiding too much food that leads to "sluggishness" and fat -- not a diet that is deficient in any way!

This leads us to Xenophon's paragraph on theft, the third point, albeit one of the most confusing in his entire essay.  At first he appears to say that Spartan youth was encouraged to steal in order to ward off starvation. Yet this is a clear contradiction of the paragraph before in which he said they received sufficient rations. It is only two thirds of the way through the paragraph that becomes clear he is talking only about a specific period in a youth's education that ends with the ritual of stealing cheeses from the alter of Artemis Orthia. Kennel, drawing on other sources as well, concludes: "on a specific occasion (kairos), it was the custom (nenomisto) for ephebes to steal whatever they could without getting caught...Spartan boys only stole at particular times established by custom."(5)

Kennel goes on to point out that had all the boys from seven to twenty been stealing all the time "either the city would have degenerated into anarchy or the act of stealing would have become a counterfeit, with food set aside especially for the boys to filch."(6)
(For more on this see: http://www.spartareconsidered.com/theives.html)

Another common feature of popular depictions of the agoge for which we find no evidence in Xenophon is the notion that the boys grew up cut off from their families in the wild and so more like beasts than children. Xenophon, on the contrary, notes that Lycurgus ensured that the boys were never without someone "in charge" of them. This was done by 1) the creation of a magistrate with complete authority over the boys, 2) by providing the magistrate (head-master) with whip-wielding assistants, 3) by authorizing any citizen to give the boys instructions or punish them, and 4) "to ensure that someone was in control of the boys even when no adult happened to be on the spot, he deputed the smartest of the Eirenes to take command of every squadron." (7)

In short, far from running wild, the boys of the agoge were under constant supervision: first by the eirene (20-year-old) assigned to their unit, next by any adult Spartiate who happened to be present, and third by the agoge authorities themselves, including head-master, his assistants, teachers and coaches and chorus masters, etc. etc. etc.

Likewise, the myth that Spartan children were separated from their families at the age of seven and never had anything to do with them ever again is completely unsustainable based on the available archaic and classical evidence. There is, in fact, no evidence that they lived in barracks before they were roughly fourteen years old, and, even if they did, these were located in the heart of Sparta, where they would have encountered their siblings and parents on an almost daily basis -- and gone home for the frequent religious holidays.

Last but not least, the evidence is overwhelming that Spartans obtained in the public agoge a standard of literacy and numeracy equivalent or better to that enjoyed by citizens of other Greek city-states. The Spartans conducted diplomacy; they sent written instructions and orders to distant commanders; they wrote dispatches; they made countless dedications to the Gods (even as school-children!); they built monuments with inscriptions. Paul Cartledge concludes that: "Between the ages of seven and twelve a Spartan boy 'studied' pretty much the same subjects as his Athenian counterpart: read and writing, music and dancing, and physical exercise."(8)

What we don't know is how they learned these "class-room" skills, but the logical explanation is that they learned them exactly as children have in every other society known to man: by someone teaching them. The very fact that Xenophon says nothing about how they learned to read suggests that the method of learning was so similar to the methods used elsewhere that it was completely unworthy of comment.

(1) Xenophon, 2.4, Richard J.A. Talbert (trans), Plutarch on Sparta. Penguine Classics, 1988, p.170.

(2) Xenophon, 2.2, p. 168

(3) Ibid, p.168-169.

(5) Kennel, Nigel. Gymnasium of Virtue:Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 122.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Xenophon, 2.3, p. 169.
(8) Cartledge, Paul. Spartan Reflections. Duckworth, 2001, p. 85

    

       Buy Now!                                         Buy Now!                                     Buy Now!

 

In Search of the Spartan Agoge

It has been argued by leading classical scholars that the importance of the "agoge" -- Sparta's educational system - "in determining the character of the Spartan state cannot be over-estimated." (1)  

Yet the sad truth is we do not have a single authentic Spartan source that describes this vital institution. Everything that we know about the "agoge" comes from foreigners -- many of whom never visited Sparta -- and most of whom wrote 200 to 800 years after the period of Sparta's glory -- the Archaic and Classical Ages.

In a seven-part series starting today, I intend to re-examine the evidence we have about the agoge, to identify the elements common in the popular picture of the agoge for which there is NO evidence, and then reconstruct a plausible theory of what the Spartan agoge might have looked like based on evidence, common sense and an understanding of human nature.

 

When attempting to understand the Spartan educational system commonly referred to as the "agoge," it is important to understand that this unique word -- about which Professor Cartledge makes a great fuss because it is also used for raising cattle -- is in fact an invention of the 3rd Century BC. It is not used in any earlier source about Sparta -- an alarm signal that ought to warn scholars that the entire "agoge" itself is largely a fiction, an artificial creation of a post-classical Sparta. 

Nigel Kennel is his comprehensive and seminal work The Gymnasium of Virtue notes: "The story of the Spartan education system is far more complex than has hitherto been appreciated. Its single constant was change, as the system adapted to meet different historical situations."(2)

What we think we know is based on a large number of works by foreign writers purporting to describe the Spartan state and its institutions, most of which were written as much as 800 years after Thermopylae and Sparta's days of glory. Only one source, Xenophon, actually wrote in the classical era, lived in Sparta and sent his sons to the agoge. Yet even Xenophon's account, as Kennel notes,  already "has a palpably nostalgic, utopian air about it."(3) By the time he was writing in the 4th century, Sparta was already in decline, and its institutions were no longer what they had been in the Early Classical and Archaic periods.

All other surviving sources were written by authors with no direct experience of Sparta and living at a much later date. The bulk of these were theoretical tracts attempting to compare and contrast systems of government. They were tools for political debate, not records of observed facts. The most famous of the later writers, because his writings are particularly detailed and vivid, is Plutarch, who lived between 46 and 120 AD. Please note: that is roughly 600 years after the death of Leonidas at Thermopylae. In other words, he was as far removed from Classical and Archaic Sparta as we are from the 13th and 14th centuries. Pausanias, another "ancient" source full of colorful details, lived even later, between 110 and 180 AD.

But the situation is made even more complex and deceptive by the fact that these later commentators thought they knew Sparta and its agoge very well. Indeed, they had personally visited and studied in a place called Sparta, a city on the same location of the ancient city of Sparta, yet arguably only marginally related to the Sparta of Leonidas because by this time Sparta had been governed by different laws for generations. Fatefully for us and our understanding of Sparta, they saw a "Spartan agoge" in practice, but it was not the same "agoge" that had operated in the Archaic and Classical periods.

At the very latest, that ancient agoge had ceased to exist by 244 BC, but it had been in decline long before that. Already in the fourth century BC, Sparta's famed military was humiliated, and the loss of Messenia had destroyed the Spartan economy. In short, Sparta had already become moribund, and it is inconceivable that the agoge was not impacted by these changes. 

Certainly, the public system of education had collapsed by the time King Cleomenes III came to power in 235 BC with a powerful "reform agenda" that included "restoration" of the agoge. However, as Kennel puts it,  "under the guise of revival," he invited an Athenian stoic philosopher to develop a system of education for Sparta.(4) This man, Sphaerus, consciously introduced his own ideas of what made a good education into Cleomenes' new school-system. While Sphaerus pretended that his innovations were nothing but a "restoration" of the ancient agoge, in fact his philosophy of education was not based Sparta's past or the intentions of Sparta's archaic lawgivers.

Thus, while the outward dressing or facade was "Archaic and Laconian," the content was Athenian stoicism. This was consistent with Cleomenes other reforms that he styled as a "return to the ways of Lucurgus," while butchering the Lycurgian constitution.  Thus, for example, he blithely abolished both the dual kingship and the ephorate, and radically altered the the nature of the Gerousia by reducing the term of members to a single year. 

Nor did the distortions end with Cleomenes and his Athenian stoic philosopher. Cleomenes agoge was suppressed after just 39 years. Sparta (after a series of poor alliances, rebellions and much intrigue) was eventually defeated by and submitted to the Achaean League, losing its very independence. It was forced in this period to give up its constitution altogether and adopt Achaean laws and customs. That included eliminating the agoge.

Thus the agoge that Plutarch and Pausanias visited and described was yet another "revival."  This agoge had been created under Roman hegemony in or about 146 BC -- or more than 200 years since the Battle of Leuctra had shaken Sparta to its foundations and more than 340 years since Thermopylae. The "agoge" that was now established, however, could not function -- even if it had wanted to -- as the agoge of the classical period because it no longer had a Spartan society, or a Spartan army, to support it. The Spartan culture and laws that had created and fostered the agoge in the age of Chilon and Leonidas had been obliterated. In their place was a Roman provincial city without any unique laws or ethos. The agoge created in this state, Kennel argues, was nothing more that "a sort of tableau vivant of Spartan culture in the midst of a society little different from those of its neighbors."(5)  

The Roman agoge included the infamous spectacle of youth lining up at the altar of Artemis Orthia to be whipped until they collapsed -- or died. Although we have no documented cases of youths actually dying under the lashes, most ancient commentators claimed to have "heard" that youths "sometimes" died. One can see that for a society that thought it was fun watching men kill each other or get devoured by beasts and saw burning humans alive as suitable entertainment for an imperial party, watching youths passively submit to flogging until they collapsed was a huge tourist attraction. The city dignitaries of Sparta apparently did very well in the department of tourist revenues. The connection to ancient Sparta, the Sparta of Leonidas, Chilon and Lycurgus, however, is exactly ZERO -- NOTHING. 

The same is true of almost everything Plutarch and other Roman and Byzantine sources tell us about "the agoge." They are describing an Roman invention, a Roman theater dressed up in Laconian costumes, or, perhaps we should call it, one of Rome's famous and elaborate spectacles. In the next six entries, I will remove the Roman mask in search of the real Spartan agoge.

(1) Chrimes, K.M.T. Ancient Sparta: A Re-Examination of the Evidence. Manchester University Press, 1952, p. 117.
(2) Kennel, Nigel, The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta. University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 143.
(3) Ibid, 135. 
(4) Ibid, 147.
(5) Ibid, 116

Meanwhile, Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

    

       Buy Now!                                         Buy Now!                                     Buy Now!