Lycurgan Sparta
An Atypical Polis
Sparta and the Peloponnesus
Typology of Polis Evolution
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Stasis: External Outlet for Internal Pressures
Colonization
Monetization
Trading Networks
Tyranny
Public Works provide Employment
Cultural Development/Intellectual Stimulation (Plastic Arts,
Lyric Poetry, Scientific Inquiry)
Sparta as “Abnormal State”: “Internal Colonization” with Brutal
Institutional Controls against Political/Social Revolution
Early Sparta
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Neolithic Community to the south of historical Sparta
Bronze Age settlement to the northeast
Archaeology: typical break at the end of the Bronze Age
Rudimentary conditions during the sub-Mycenaean and
Dark Ages (Spartan foundation associated with the
“Return of the Heracleidae” and the Dorian Invasion)
Incorporation of Sparta town and surrounding villages by
about 700 BCE (synoecism)
Early Prosperity: dedications at sanctuary of Artemis
Orthia
Visitations by Foreign Poets
Stasis: sending out of colony to Taras (southern Italy), ca.
700 BCE
Alcman’s “Maiden Song” (Seventh Century BCE)
Luxury of purple dye,
All we have can never help us,
Not the carved bracelet-snake,
Not the wimple sheer in gold,
Lydian, the pride and glory
Of the girls with delicate eyes.
Spartan Dancing Girl (Bronze Figurine)
Early Sparta: Ruins of Ancient Theater
Athletics in Ancient Sparta
Sparta: Ancient Walls
Sparta
Lycurgus and the Spartan Constitution
(Great Rhetra)
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Lycurgan Eunomia (legendary law giver, ca. 885 BCE?)
 Kings (Agids and Eurypontids). War Generals;
Religious Functions
 Gerousia = body of elders (28 aristocrats, age 60 or
older + 2 kings). Advisors; “Supreme Court”
 Ephors (5) - annually-elected; executive, judicial,
and disciplinary powers; but see Plutarch, Lycurgus
7, who states that the ephorate was established some
130 years after Lycurgus. Daily Administration
 Apella = assembly of Spartiates (full Spartan
citizens); see Plutarch, Lycurgus 6 on the powers of
the Spartan demos. Army and Assembly
Kings and Lycurgan Sparta
“I should like also to give an account of the compact established by
Lycurgus between king and polis: for this is of course the only
government which continues exactly as it was initially set up; other
states, it will be found, have undergone and are still undergoing
changes. He laid down that the king, by virtue of his descent from
the god [Zeus, father of Herakles], should offer all the public
sacrifices on behalf of the polis, and that he should lead the army to
wherever the polis might send it. He also gave the kings the
privilege of receiving portions from the sacrificial beasts, and
allotted them choice lands in many of the surrounding poleis,
enough to ensure them a moderate supply of everything but not
riches in excess.”
~Xenophon, Constitution of the Spartans 15
Elders and Lycurgan Sparta
Among the many innovations made by Lycurgus the first, and the
greatest, was the establishment of the gerousia. This, as Plato says,
when mixed with the ‘feverish’ rule of the kings and possessing
voting equality with them in matters of the greatest importance,
created a government secure and sensible. Previously the state had
been wayward, inclining at some times in the direction of the kings,
towards tyranny, and at others in the direction of the masses,
towards democracy. Now, however, it had the office of the gerontes
set at its center, creating equilibrium just as a ship’s ballast does,
and thus securing the safest and most orderly arrangement: when a
stand needed to be made against democracy the 28 gerontes
invariably sided with the kings, yet they also added strength to the
people in preventing the establishment of a tyranny.
~Plutarch, Lycurgus 5
Ephorate and (Post?) Lycurgan Sparta
This was how Lycurgus achieved the mixture in his
political system. The oligarchical element in it, however,
was still unmixed and strong; and his successors, seeing
it, as Plato says, ‘swelling and fuming, set the power of
the ephors as a kind of bridle on it.’ It was about 130
years after Lycurgus, during the reign of King
Theopompus, that the first ephors, Elatos and his
colleagues, were appointed.
~Plutarch, Lycurgus 7
The People and Lycurgan Sparta
(Plutarch, Lycurgus 6)
“When the populace was assembled, Lycurgus permitted no one else
except the Elders and kings to make a proposal, although the authority
to decide upon what the latter put forward did belong to the people.
Later, however, when the people distorted the proposals and mauled
them by their deletions and additions, the kings Polydorus and
Theopompus supplemented the rhetra as follows:
‘If the people should make a crooked choice, the Elders and the
founder-leaders are to set it aside’
that is, not to confirm it, but to withdraw it completely and to dismiss
the people because they are altering and reformulating the proposal
contrary to what was best.”
Lycurgus and the Mixed Constitution
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System of “Checks and Balances”
Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy
Spartan Eunomia
Admired by Plato and later Political Theorists
Inspiration for the British Constitutional Monarchy and
the American “Founding Fathers”
Spartan Hoplite and Phalanx
Messenian Wars: Dramatic Redirection
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Spartan Conquest of Messenia in later Eighth Century BCE
Spartans Defeated at Hysiae by Argos in 669 BCE (see Pausanias,
2.24.7)
Tradition of two wars against Messenia (“Second Messenian War” ca.
650 BCE)
Territory annexed; population enslaved (Helots)
Sparta evolves into militaristic, communistic state (disappearance of
luxury, imports, poetry, arts)
Spartiates: several thousand full Spartan citizens become full-time
hoplites, living together in common military barracks (syssitia); on
active service until after 60; debarred from agricultural labor and
business activity
State-arranged marriages; ephorate and new births; common
education for men and women (agoge); Spartiates as Homoioi
(“Equals”)
Krypteia (“Secret Police”) and Large Subject Population
Mount Taygetus
Tyrtaeus: Nationalist Spartan Poet
(Seventh Century BCE)
Our sovereign Theopompus, whom the gods
did love,
Through whom we took Messenia’s broad
dance-grounds,
Messenia good to plough and good to plant for
fruit.
To conquer her they fought full nineteen years
Steadfastly as ever, with endurance in their hearts,
those spearmen of our fathers’ fathers’ time,
And in the twentieth the foe took flight, and left
their fertile farms among Ithome’s heights.
Tyrtaeus: Nationalist Spartan Poet
(Seventh Century BCE)
Let every man, then, feet set firm apart,
bite on his lip and stand against the foe,
His thighs and shins, his shoulders and his chest
all hidden by the broad bulge of his shield.
Let his right hand brandish the savage lance,
the plume nod fearsomely above his head.
By fierce deeds let him teach himself to fight,
and stand out of the fire—he has a shield—
But get in close, engage, and stab with lance
or sword, and strike his adversary down.
Plant foot by foeman’s foot, press shield on shield,
thrust helm at helm, and tangle plume with plume,
Opposing breast to breast: that’s how to fight,
With the long lance or sword-grip in your hand.
Tyrtaeus: Nationalist Spartan Poet
(Seventh Century BCE)
[The enslaved Messenians were]
like donkeys suffering under heavy loads,
By painful force compelled to bring their masters
half
Of all the produce that the soil brought forth.
…making a wailing funeral chorus, they and
their wives,
When one of their masters met his destiny.
Spartan “Iron-Bar” Currency
He [Lycurgus] also set about dividing up their movable
property, in such a way as to abolish the inequality and
disparity once and for all; but when he saw that they were not
at all happy about having it taken from them directly, he
adopted another course and overcame their greed by political
measures. First of all he declared all gold and silver coinage
invalid and prescribed the use of iron currency only.
Furthermore, to a great and weighty bulk of this he assigned a
trifling face value, so that a quantity worth a considerable
sum required a large household storeroom to keep it in and a
pair of oxen and a cart to move it about!
~Plutarch, Lycurgus 9
Spartan Eunomia and Spartan Fear
Now we all know that Sparta is the place above all others where men
obey the officials and the laws (nomoi). I personally believe, however,
that Lycurgus did not so much attempt to establish this sort of
disciplined behavior until he had persuaded the most powerful men in
the polis to share his views. My proof of this? In other poleis the
more influential men do not wish even to give the appearance of being
afraid of those in office, which they consider to be an act of servility.
Yet in Sparta it is the leading men who are most deferential to the
officials, and whose greatest pride is to abase themselves—to run, not
walk, whenever they are called upon. They do this in the belief that if
they themselves lead the way in eager obedience the rest will follow;
and this is exactly what has happened.
~Xenophon, Constitution of the Spartans 8
Exiled Spartan King Demaratus
to Persian Monarch Xerxes I (Herodotus, 7.104)
And so it is with the Spartans: in single combat they are as
good as any, but when they fight together they are the best
soldiers in the world. And the reason for this? Well, they are
free men, certainly, but their freedom is not absolute: they have
a master set over them, Law (nomos), whom they fear much
more than your subjects fear you. At any rate, whatever this
master orders, they do; and what he orders is always the same
thing—never flee from the battlefield, no matter how large the
opposing forces, but stay in the line, to conquer or to die.”
Spartan Xenophobia
(Plutarch, Lycurgus 27)
This was the reason Lycurgus did not grant them freedom to leave
home, if they wanted to, and wander around picking up alien habits
and imitating the lives of uneducated peoples who lived under
different political systems. On the contrary he actually drove away
the multitudes who had streamed into the polis for no useful purpose.
This he did not, as Thucydides [2.39.1] asserts, out of apprehension
that they might wish to copy his constitution and learn something
advantageous about the pursuit of excellence (arete), but in order to
prevent their becoming teachers of any sort of evil. For the
inevitable fact is that alien people bring in with them alien principles;
and from novelty in principles follows novelty in decisions, something
which is bound to give rise to many experiences and policies
destructive to the harmony, as it were, of the established constitution.
So he thought it more necessary to protect the polis from being filled
with bad habits than to keep out infectious diseases.
Spartan Expansion (8th-5th centuries)
Sparta and Peloponnesus
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Perioikoi; Neodamones (Freedmen); Hypomeiones
(“Inferiors”); Mothones (Illegitimate offspring of
Spartiates and Helots)
Peloponnesian League
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League members help Sparta control Helot population
Sparta supports broadly-based oligarchies throughout the
Peloponnesus
Spartan Foreign Policy
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Conservative; averse to foreign ventures
Primary concern: Control of Helot population
“Narrow and Peloponnesian” viewpoint
Late Sixth/Early Fifth Century BCE: Reputation of Hoplite
Invincibility (Spartan “War Machine”)
Conspiracy of Cinadon (397 BCE)
In the streets also, the informer said, Cinadon pointed out as enemies here
one and there two who met them, and all the rest as allies [of the
conspirators]; and of all who chanced to be on the country estates belonging
to Spartiates, while there would be one whom he would point out as an
enemy, namely the master, yet there would be many on each estate named as
allies. When the ephors asked how many Cinadon said there really were in
the secret of this affair, the informer replied that he said in regard to this
point that those who were in on the secret with himself and the other leaders
were by no means many, though trustworthy; the leaders, however, put it
this way, that it was they who knew the secret of all the others—Helots,
freedmen, lesser Spartiates, and Perioikoi; for whenever among these classes
any mention was made of Spartiates, no one was able to conceal the fact that
he would be glad to eat them raw.
~Xenophon, Hellenica 3.3.5-7
Sparta, Helots, and Culture of Fear
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Spartiates outnumbered by Helots 7:1
“most institutions among the Spartans have always been
established with regard to security against the helots.”
(Thucydides, 4.80.3)
Helots “are like someone sitting in wait for disasters to
strike the Spartans.” (Aristotle, Politics, 1269a)