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!

 

 

A Spartan Philosopher: Chilon the Wise

It may surprise many modern readers that Plato, writing a history of philosophy in the 4th Century BC, claimed that all early philosophers were “imitators, lovers and disciples of Spartan education.”  Furthermore, the seven “wise men” that Plato considered the fathers of philosophy included two Lacedaemonians, one of which was Spartiate: Chilon the Wise. In the 5th century BC, it had become common to speak about “seven” wise men, whose selection varied from writer to writer so that a total of 17 are actually named on one list or another.  

Significantly, Chilon is always among the seven.

So just who was Chilon of Sparta?

Based on the stories told about Chilon, which include personally meeting the famous writer of fables, Aesop, and Hippokrates, the father of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos, historians conclude that Chilon lived in the first half of the 6th century BC, or – one might say – in the Golden Age of Sparta.  Furthermore, he is said to have been an ephor during the 56. Olympiad, or between 556 and 554 BC, by which time, the sources say, he was “very old.” Modern historians such as Conrad Stibbe suggest he was somewhere between 60 and 75 when he was elected ephor in ca. 555 BC.

Chilon was a Spartiate, but apparently not from a “leading” or royal family. The fact that his descendants married into both royal houses, however, is an indication of just how highly he was regarded by his contemporaries and admired by subsequent generations of Spartans.  Particularly significant is the fact that a great-granddaughter of Chilon was selected by a later college of ephors as the bride for the then childless Agiad King Anaxandridas.  Anaxandridas had been married for many years to his niece, who appeared to be barren, and the ephors after futilely urging the king to set aside his wife and take a new wife, convinced him to take a second wife.  This wife (who is nameless in Herodotus) promptly became pregnant and gave birth to a male child, who later became one of Sparta’s most controversial kings, King Cleomenes I.  What is striking about this particular marriage is less that the college of ephors would put forward the name of a girl descended from one of their own predecessors, than that Anaxandridas, who would have been a reigning king at the time Chilon was an ephor, would accept one of Chilon's descendents as a worthy bride. The importance of this fact is best understood when we remember that Chilon is credited by ancient and modern historians with raising the status of the ephorate to a body almost as powerful as the kings. 

In any case, Conrad Stibbe in his excellent work on archaic Sparta, Das Andere Sparta (Mainz: 1996), credits Chilon with conceiving of the Peloponnesian League.  As he points out, throughout Sparta’s previous history, complete subjugation of a conquered people followed successful Spartan conquests. This was true for the conquest of the heartland of Lacedaemon, the Eurotas Valley in the ninth century and for the conquest of Messenia in the second half of the seventh century.

 Yet after a bitter war with Tegea during the first half of the sixth century BC, in which Sparta suffered at least one humiliating defeat resulting in the enslavement of Spartiate hoplites, Sparta chose a different path. Following a decisive victory over Tegea under the leadership of King Anaxandridas, Sparta made the revolutionary decision not to subjugate and occupy Tegea, but rather to form a defensive alliance with its defeated foe. This course was unprecedented in Greek history at the time. (Note: My novel The Olympic Charioteer deals with this period of Spartan history.)  Furthermore, the alliance with Tegea was not a one-off event, but rather signaled a completely new Spartan foreign policy that was pursued throughout the rest of the century. Under both Anaxandridas and his sons, Sparta built up her power and prestige not through direct conquest but through the formation of a system of alliances, first on the Peloponnese (under Anaxandridas and Cleomenes) and with all of Hellas under Leonidas.

Yet while Chilon sought peace and alliances with Sparta’s democratic neighbors, he was according to ancient tradition together with Anaxandridas the driving force behind a series of military actions undertaken by Sparta to depose tyrants in Sikyon, Samos, and Athens. The fact that Chilon and Anaxandridas are mentioned as working together to depose the tyrants is significant because it suggests a joint policy – something that makes the later marriage of Anaxandridas to a great-granddaughter of Chilon more understandable. 

Interestingly, Chilon is described in Herodotus as a seer and Chilon’s first act of extraordinary wisdom was advice that, had it been followed, would have spared Athens the tyranny of Peisistratos in the first place.  Chilon’s wisdom was thus associated with Sparta’s opposition to tyranny.  According to legend, when the father of Peisistratos, Hippokrates, was in Olympia, he received a sign from the Gods.  A cauldron full of sacrificial meat boiled over without a fire being lit under it.  Although Hippokrates recognized that this could only be a message from the gods, he could not interpret it, and turned to Chilon for advice.  Chilon told him not to marry and if he was already married to disown any son he already had.

 

The Spartan Chilon was according to ancient tradition also a contemporary of the fable-writer Aesop.  According to legend, Chilon told the former slave that Zeus’ job was to “humiliate the mighty and rise up the humble.” While this was clearly a reference to Aesop’s own fate, it was a strikingly revolutionary statement nonetheless – heralding the Christian notion that “the meek shall inherit the earth.”

Likewise with respect to women, Chilon set revolutionary standards of behavior that were uniquely Spartan.  While the Athenian philosopher Socrates showed utter contempt for the intellect of his wife, refusing to even take leave of her after he was condemned to death, Chilon was depicted on his grave sitting side-by-side with his wife. Even more impressive, one of his daughters, Chilonis, was recognized by name as a disciple of the philosphoer Pythagoras. In short, while the Athenians contended that women were permanent children with brains incapable of developing rational thought,[i] Sparta’s greatest philosopher encouraged his daughter to study under the greatest of his contemporaries.

But it was hardly for his attitude toward women or former slaves that Chilon attained so much fame among his fellow Greeks. Rather, Chilon was admired and honored by subsequent generations of Greek philosophers and their Roman and modern admirers primarily for his “wisdom.” Chilon was the author of some 600 verses familiar to the ancients that they admired greatly. Unfortunately, none of these have survived into the present, at least none have been identified as the work of Chilon. More famous, however, were three – typically Laconic – sayings that were carved over the entrance to the Delphic oracle and attributed to Chilon. Let me close this brief essay on Chilon by quoting him.  I think many would find his advice relevant even today:

Sponsorship brings misfortune.

Nothing in excess.

Know thyself.

[i] Good sources on Athenian attitudes for women can be found in the Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Waves and Slaves, (New York: 1975), Sue Blundell’s Women in Ancient Greece, (London:1995) and in the chapter on “Citizen Women in Athens,” in Anton Powell’s Athens and Sparta: Constructing Greek Political and Social History from 478 BC, (Portland, Oregon: 1988).

Sparta, the Divine Twins and Immortality

  Greek gods could be petty, selfish, immoral, arbitrary, cruel, fickle, dishonest, and everything else that humans can be.  Rather than serving as moral arbiters much less as examples of virtue, their very immorality often seemed to constitute an excuse for immoral behavior. In all this chaos and depravity, however, one story stands out as touchingly uncharacteristic – and tellingly it is the story of two Spartan princes particularly honored and revered in Sparta. 

The Dioskouroi

 

 

According to ancient Greek mythology, the Divine Twins, the Dioskouroi, were the brothers of Helen.  More precisely,  Polydeuces was Helen’s full-brother, likewise fathered by Zeus on her mother Leda, while Kastor was her half-brother, the son of Leda by her (mortal) husband Tyndareus, the king of Sparta. Raised at the Spartan court as twin sons of the king, the Dioskouroi lived the ideal lives of aristocratic youth in the age of heroes. They had great adventures, sailing with Jason on the Argo, hunting boar with Herakles, rescuing their sister from the Athenian king Theseus, who had abducted her – and then robbing two sisters from a neighboring kingdom for their own wives. Nothing about these adventures suggestions anything particularly virtuous or morally exemplary. They were, it seemed, just hot-blooded young Greek heroes.

And then, in a fight over stolen cattle, Kastor was killed. According to the myth, both brothers would have been killed, if Polydeukes hadn’t been immortal.  Because, however, Polydeukes is a demi-God, he lives on after his mortal end. He goes to his father’s home on Mount Olympus, while Kastor goes into the cold, dark grave, a prisoner of grim Hades, destined never to see the light of day or breathe fresh air or enjoy any pleasures of the senses ever again.

According the myth, Polydeukes was so distraught by his brother’s fate that he was unable to enjoy his own immortality. Seeing his son’s misery, Zeus took pity on him and allowed the twins to switch places on an alternating basis. Every other day, Polydeukes took his brother’s place in hell, so that Kastor could escape the grave.

There is, I think, something wonderfully Spartan about this tale. It includes both the love of life, which – contrary to popular opinion – was characteristic of ancient Sparta, and the spirit of self-sacrifice that we associate with Leonidas.

Thermopylae and Leonidas

Leonidas is remembered, admired and adulated because of his stand -- and death -- at Thermopylae. 
Oddly, despite dying in defeat, he is remembered better and more widely than the commander of the Spartan army that actually beat the Persians, Pausanias, or the Spartan that defeated Athens after the gruesome thirty-years war, Lysander.  Lycurgus and Chilon are familiar names only to classical scholars; Leonidas is a cult and comic-book hero -- not to mention there is a chocolate company named for him. 
Today I want to reflect on why.

Leonidas was, of course, a legend in his own time. The Spartans built him a monument at Thermopylae, notably separate from the monument to the rest of the 300, and a second monument was built to him at home in Sparta as well. His body was brought home after the Persians had been driven out of Greece.  But, unless it is an accident of archeology, larger monuments were built to the victors Pausanias and Lysander than to Leonidas.  In short, Leonidas’ appeal appears to have been greater in the modern world than the ancient. This might have many explanations -- starting with the political agenda of his successors (or those who controlled his immature son) or discomfort with commemorating a devastating defeat.  The modern world, perhaps influenced by the Christian tradition of honoring sacrifice, is impressed by Leonidas’ defiance and devotion to duty more than his defeat.

However, less understandable, is a modern tendency to assume that Leonidas’ behavior was “typical,” that he was indeed only doing what Spartan society expected of him, or acting “in accordance with the law.” This assumes that Spartans were “never” allowed to retreat and always chose death over retreat or surrender.  The Spartans, of course, knew better. 

Sparta had suffered many severe defeats before Thermopylae, and in no other battle did an entire fighting force die to the last man for a lost cause. For example, there is good reason to believe that Sparta lost the First Messenian War, and it was the ensuing economic and social dislocation that led to unrest and revolution.  Certainly, Sparta was given a resounding thrashing by the Argives at Hysiai in 669 BC, but even so the Spartans retreated rather than die to the last man.  Roughly one hundred years later, Sparta again over-reached herself in an attempt to conquer Tegea, and again there were survivors; they were enslaved in Tegea and forced to do agricultural labor for Tegean masters. In 525 BC, a Spartan expedition against Samos likewise ended in humiliating defeat, but not the extermination of the expeditionary force.  Finally, in the reign of Leonidas’ half-brother Cleomenes, a Spartan force under Anchimolius was attacked by Thessalian cavalry 1000 strong at Phalerum, and, according to Herodotus, “many Lacedaemonians were killed…and the survivors driven back to their ships.”  Note, again, the survivors were driven back to their ships, which they presumably boarded and used to return to Lacedaemon. There is not a word about dying to the last man.

Nor did “death rather than surrender” become the standard for future Spartan commanders after Thermopylae. The history of the Peloponnesian War is littered with Spartan defeats; none were massacres.  Even in the infamous case of 120 Spartiates trapped on the island of Sphakteria, the record shows that they surrendered and were taken off into (brutal!) Athenian captivity.  Nor were they written off by an indignant population as cowards, "tremblers" or otherwise disgraced as worthless.  Had they been so viewed, Sparta would not have sued for peace and made serious concessions to Athens to have them returned. Even their collective degradation from full-citizen status on their return is not indicative of disapproval of surrender. On the contrary, it more likely reflects fear that men who had been in Athens for almost four years might have become subverted (brainwashed, is the Cold War term) by Athenian democracy.  After an unknown period, they were collectively reinstated, and some even ran for public office. That would not have been possible if the majority of Spartans had felt they should have committed suicide rather than surrender.

Leonidas’ legacy was not one of blind, mindless self-sacrifice. His example was one of devotion to duty, even unto death, for a good cause.  Leonidas did not die for the sake of dying -- much less take his comrades with him to a senseless death.  He had clear military objectives that he hoped to achieve by his last stand: 1) giving the other Greek contingents time to withdraw and live to fight another day, and 2) increasing Persian respect for/fear of Spartans.  Once the pass at Thermopylae was turned, Leonidas knew the Persian army would advance unopposed into Central Greece. He could not know where it would next be confronted by land-forces, but he must have feared that it might sweep through Central Greece to the Isthmus of Corinth. He must have feared that Sparta might find herself virtually alone facing the onslaught.  Anything he could do to make Xerxes hesitate to take on a Spartan army must have seemed worthwhile.  That is a legacy worth preserving.

Last but not least, as a devout Spartan, Leonidas undoubtedly believed he had to fulfill the Delphic Oracle. He knew he had to die, if Sparta was to be saved. In that sense, he was from the start a sacrificial lamb, but not until the position at Thermopylae was betrayed, did his sacrifice inherently encompass defeat as well.  He probably hoped when he set out for Thermopylae that he could die in a victorious battle – or at least an indecisive one. He certainly hoped and expected that alive or dead his advance force over 6,000 strong could hold the Hot Gates until Sparta’s full army could reinforce the advance guard. 

When it became clear he would die in a hopeless situation, he tried to minimize the losses by ordering the withdrawal of the allied contingents (and almost certainly all the Perioikoi troops that would have been with him).  He even tried to save some of the Spartiates by giving them dispatches for delivery somewhere. They saw through him and refused. They refused out of loyalty, out of friendship, out of personal affection for Leonidas, both the man and the king. They did not act for military reasons but for personal ones. Yet their legacy too is worth honoring. 

Buy Now!