An Evening at the Syssitia - An Excerpt from "A Peerless Peer"

At the start of the month I discussed the Spartan custom of syssitia, or dining clubs. In today's excerpt from A Peerless Peer we see inside a syssitia. Gorgo, Leonidas' niece, has recently announced that her father intends to marry her to a foreigner, and she has named Leonidas as her preferred husband.

The entire syssitia fell silent as Leonidas entered, and they looked at him expectantly. He frowned. "If you're gossiping about me, I'll leave again so you can carry on."

"You'll do nothing of the sort!" Nikostratos countered.

Leonidas turned on his heel to leave. Nikostratos nodded to two of the youngest members of the mess, and they sprang to their feet to block the door.

"You'll come in and sit down with us and behave like an adult," Nikostratos told off the younger man.

"I'm not going to talk about this nonsense."

"Calm down and have your soup!"

Warily Leonidas eased himself down on the couch and held out his hands to the mess-boys. One of the boys held the bowl while the other poured water over his hands, and then handed him a towel.  Leonidas watched the entire ritual intently as if he were seeing it for the first time. The boys, both eight-year-olds, were very diligent, but just as they finished, one of them risked glancing up at him. Leonidas recognized the look of boyish delight at the prospect of hearing something worth telling their friends. Frowning, he sent the boys scampering back toward the kitchen.

A moment later they were back, rolling in the soup in a deep cauldron. The boys filled individual bowls with the thick stew while a loaf of warm bread was passed around. Leonidas tore off a chunk of bread and dipped it into the steaming-hot soup. Only after he had put the bread in his mouth did Nikostratos open his attack. "You realize your elder brother has outmaneuvered you, don't you?" he asked casually, not even looking at Leonidas -- but there was no question to whom he was speaking.

Leonidas looked up furiously, his mouth too full to retort, while Nikostratos continued, "King Cleomenes was called in to explain himself to the ephors, and he swore solemnly that you were his first choice for his beloved daughter -- but that you wouldn't take her. It was only because you'd already turned him down --"

Leonidas swallowed what was left in his mouth and insisted, "That's complete nonsense! He's lying!"

"Oh, I don't doubt he's lying, Leo. That's not the point. The point is, he has now publicly gone on record saying that you were his first choice as husband for his daughter, and only because you refused has he been forced to look for alternatives. He insisted that his daughter is too intelligent, independent, and precocious -- all of which is patently true -- to give to anyone but a prince or, short of that, a ruler.  He suggested that a Persian satrap would be more suitable than an ordinary ranker."

"That's ridiculous!" Leonidas scoffed.

"Maybe, but he has neatly shifted the blame for seeking a foreign bridegroom from himself to you," Nikostratos pointed out. "And made you look doubly bad, since you are well over thirty, unmarried, and childless, and so in open violation of the law already."

"Meanwhile, your other brother is talking divorce, so he would be free to marry Gorgo," Euryleon joined in.

"Brotus?" Leonidas asked, incredulous. "Brotus wouldn't last a day with Gorgo -- she'd dissect him!"

Euryleon laughed, but retorted. "But she'd do it so intelligently, he might not even notice -- thick as he is." The remark harvested a general laugh from their mess-mates.

Nikostratos, however, insisted seriously, "Well, as next in line to the throne, there is a certain logic to Brotus marrying Gorgo." He wiped the bottom of his bowl clean with his bread.

"There's no logic to it at all!" Leonidas retorted hotly. "Besides, Brotus has no grounds for divorce -- and Sinope will kill him if he even mentions it!"

"Well, in that case, for an Agiad prince there is always the precedent of two wives."

"That would only perpetuate the entire nightmare of two rivals for the throne. Pausanias would naturally claim the throne as the first born, and any child by Gorgo would claim it by right of his double royal blood. The ephors can't be that stupid!"

Nikostratos shrugged and signaled for more soup. "Leonidas, you may well be right. I admit the situation is unprecedented. Ever since the sons of Herakles came to this valley, there has never been a situation exactly like this. But you can't just look on this as a personal matter. There will be consequences to your refusal to marry your niece and not all of them will be to your liking."

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Sparta's "Peculiar" Dining Clubs

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. Today I take a closer look.

Although it was common, popular and indeed a matter of pride for men (never women!) to dine together in Athens, the Spartan dining clubs were considered peculiar because: 1) they had fixed membership (for life), and 2) they were a compulsory precondition 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 from 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 a conscious desire on the part 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, 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 than 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 formed 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.

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

    

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