The Spartan Upbringing: Universal and Compulsory

Thanks to films like "300," the Spartan Agoge is commonly viewed today as a brutal -- not to say savage -- training in which boys and youths were taught nothing but survival skills by sadistic instructors. In my last 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.

Today I look more closely at the universal and compulsory aspect of the Spartan Upbringing.

 

Unlike the rest of Greece, where education was viewed as a strictly private and optional affair, the children of all Spartan citizens were required to enroll in the agoge. Furthermore, successful completion of the agoge was a prerequisite for citizenship. Indeed, a citizen risked losing his own citizenship if he failed to pay the agoge fees associated with each of his children -- a set amount of produce owed in kind to the agoge administration.

Citizenship in other cities was more like citizenship in most countries today: the only criteria for citizenship was to be born of married citizen parents (i.e. only the legitimate children of citizens were entitled to citizenship.) Education was not part of the formula. Thus, in Classical Athens, for example, parents were not legally compelled to educate their children at all, much less up to a specific standard. 
 
As we will examine in greater depth next month, the famed schools and symposiums of Athens, which honed human intellect as never recorded before and fostered a spirit of scientific inquiry fostered, existed only for the sons of the rich. Working and middle-class Athenians were too busy making a living to stay up all night talking, and their children learned a trade early rather than going to any kind of school. Futhermore, girls were viewed as only quasi-human with brains too small for any kind of abstract thought.

In the absence of compulsion, many Athenian citizens opted not to send their sons to school with the consequence that many Athenian citizens could not read or write at all -- something that politicians exploited shamelessly. For example, there are anecdotes of illiterate citizens being bamboozled into voting the opposite of their declared intentions. This, in turn, led "all classical Greek political philosophers, apart from the near-anarchist Cynics," to agree that comprehensive and compulsory education was essential for the creation of "good citizens" and so "good governance." (1)


It was precisely Sparta's insistence on education for all citizens that struck a chord with many of the Athenian intellectual elite. The Athenian political philosophers admired Sparta for requiring citizens' children to go to school. Even Aristotle, otherwise a severe critic of Sparta, admired the obligatory nature of the Spartan agoge. 

This would hardly have been the case if the Spartan agoge had failed to deliver a standard of education better than what was the norm (not for the elite but for the average citizen) in Athens.  In other words, while the Spartan agoge might not have taught youth up to the same standards as the rich could obtain with their tutors and coaches, it did deliver a standard equal or better -- yet more broadly and consistently -- to the basic Athenian education.

That "basic education" included "basic literacy (and possibly numeracy), music, and physical education." (2)  Musical education included both singing, dancing and playing the lyre and bagpipes. Physical education included running, long-jumping, javelin, boxing, and wrestling.  All these skills are patently evident in Sparta based on the records we have both of the festivals in which the children participated and based on Sparta's performance at the pan-Hellenic games. 

To repeat then, what was exceptional about the Spartan education, was not what it taught, but the fact that it was a prerequisite for citizenship. Even the legitimate sons of citizens could not obtain citizenship if they had not passed through the agoge. This is what made the agoge "universal" (as it applied to all future citizens) and "compulsory" as no citizen had the option of not sending his sons to school if he wanted them to become citizens.  Ducat, however, makes the important point that there were no penal sanctions for non-compliance.(3)  There was no punishment beyond the loss of citizenship for failure to send sons to the agoge. It is telling that this alone was compulsion enough; we know of no cases where Spartan citizens opted not to enroll their sons.

The motives for making the agoge a prerequisite of citizenship are exactly the same as the reason Athenian philosophers praising the practice: education made better citizens. Education, particularly literacy and numeracy, improved the overall quality of government by ensuring that every citizen could read the laws, the inscriptions, the judgment of the courts etc. Education made citizens better able to debate and deliberate, and citizens less likely to be bamboozled by their "betters." Compulsory, universal education remains to this days one of the most important means of securing and defending democracy around the world.
 

(1) Cartledge, Paul. Spartan Reflections, Duckworth, 2001, p. 83.

(2) Ibid. 

(3) Ducat, Jean. Hodkinson, Stephen and Anton Powell (eds). Sparta: New Perspectives. Duckworth, 1999, p. 85.

Next month I look more closely at the public quality of the Spartan educational system.  Meanwhile, Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:

    

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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:

    

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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

    

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