Spartan Education

Sparta, being a special example of the Greek archaic culture, naturally forms the second stage of our history. There we can see how Homer’s chivalric type of education persisted even when it was developing into something new. Sparta was essentially a military and aristocratic city, and it was never to go very far along the road towards what I have called “scribe-education.” On the contrary, it made it a point of honour to remain semi-illiterate. Even when its meticulous legislation covered nearly everything, including marital relationships, its spelling, by a curious exception, was never made uniform. In this field, as inscriptions show, there was the most remarkably smug anarchy. ( 1 ) With Crete, which was conservative, aristocratic and military like itself (2 ), Sparta has a special place in the history of Greek education, and Greek culture generally. It enables us to see the old Greek civilization in its archaic state and in an advanced state of development, at a time when Athens, for instance, has practically nothing to teach us. Even as far back as the eighth century, art was flourishing in Laconia, and the seventh was Sparta’s great age, reaching, in my opinion, its highest point — in about 600. ( 3) For this sudden development was subsequently abruptly checked. After leading the march of progress, Sparta reversed its role and became the supreme example of a conservative city grimly holding on to the old customs that everyone else had abandoned. It became in the eyes of Greece itself a country of paradox, dismissed as scandalous, or passionately admired by Utopian theorists. The archaic “peplos,” for instance, the robe open on the right side that was worn by the Lacedaemonian women, gave rise to malicious jibes from the more dirty-minded of the Athenians against “the women with the bare thighs.”

In fact what the Greeks themselves regarded as the originality of Laconian (and Cretan) institutions and customs seems to have been simply a result of the fact that in classical times these countries still retained certain features of the old civilization which had everywhere else been lost. It was not the result of any special spirit, any particular Dorian genius, as Müller tried to make out with his racial theories, that have been so popular in Germany for over a century. (4)

Unfortunately, the sources we have to rely on for any description of Spartan education are comparatively late. Xenophon and Plato only take us back to the fourth century, and their evidence is less explicit than Plutarch’s and that supplied by the inscriptions, most of which only date from the first and second centuries A.D. Now Sparta was not only conserva- tive but reactionary: in its determination to resist any natural development, to go against the current, to re-establish Lycur- gus* “traditional customs,” it was forced, from the fourth century onwards, into continual efforts at adjustment and restoration; and this led it to make many restorations of dubious validity, many false, pseudo-archaeological “integrations.” (5)

It would be necessary to probe beneath the surface of these later changes to obtain any real idea of the old Spartan education as it existed between the eighth and sixth centuries, and especially as it appeared in the splendid period that followed upon the final submission of Messenia, after the stubborn revolt of 640 610 ־had been crushed. But we know very little about the education of this golden age, compared with what we know of its culture.

THE CULTURE OF SPARTA IN THE ARCHAIC ERA

We know something about its culture from two sorts of evidence— fragments from the great lyrical poets Tyrtaeus and Aleman, and the astonishing results of the excavations conducted by the British School at Athens, particularly at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia (1906-1910). When we put these two complementary pictures together we see a Sparta that is very different from the usual picture of a harsh, barbarous city petrified in an attitude of morose distrust. On the contrary, in archaic times Sparta was a great cultural centre open to strangers, to the arts, to beauty, to everything it would later pretend to reject. It was then what Athens was not to become until the fifth century— the centre of Hellenic civilization.

ITS MILITARY AND CIVIC CULTURE

It is true that between the eighth and the sixth centuries Sparta was primarily a military state. By power of arms it had conquered and held a stretch of territory which after the annexation of Messenia (735-716) made it one of the largest states in Greece. Its military prowess gave it a prestige that remained unchallenged until the Athenian victories in the Persian wars. The importance of the military ideal in its culture appears in Tyrtaeus’ elegies on war, which were beautifully illustrated in contemporary works of art— all glorifying the fighting hero. (6)

We can therefore assume that in this archaic period Spartan education was already— or rather still— essentially military, and consisted of a practical and theoretical apprenticeship in the art of war.

But it must be realized that things had changed, technically and ethically, since the feudal days described by Homer. The Spartans were not brought up to be knights, but soldiers; the atmosphere was that of the city-state, not the castle.

Behind this transformation lay a technical revolution: battles were no longer won by single-handed encounters, as had been the case particularly in the old heroes’ duels, but as a result of the clash of two lines of close infantry. Heavy infantry— made up of “hoplites”— now decided the result of battle. (Sparta certainly had a special cavalry corps— but it seems to have been a kind of State secret police.) This tactical revolution, as Aristotle realized with extraordinary insight,1 had profound moral and social consequences. (7)

Whereas the old Homeric ideal of the knight as one of the king’s troop had been profoundly personal, the new ideal was collective— devotion to the State— the polis — which became something it had never been in earlier ages, the focus of all human life, of all man’s spiritual activity. It was the totalitarian idea: the polis was everything, turning citizens into men. Hence the profound feeling of solidarity between them, hence the enthusiasm with which they could devote themselves to the interests of their common land, ready to sacrifice themselves, who were mortal, for their city which was immortal. “It is a noble thing to be in the front of the battle and die bravely fighting for one’s country,” 2 said Tyrtaeus, the finest spokesman of the new ethic. (8)

It was a moral revolution, in fact, giving rise to a new con-ception of “virtue,” of spiritual perfection, an arete  very different from the Homeric quality of the same name. Tyrtaeus very consciously compares the new ideal with the old. “I should not consider a man worthy to be remembered, nor think highly of him, merely because he was a good runner or wrestler— even though he was as big and strong as the Cyclops, swifter than Boreus the Thracian, more handsome than Titho, richer than Midas or Cinyras, stronger than King Pelops, son of Tantalus; though his speech were softer than Adrastus’ and he enjoyed every kind of fame— unless he was also valorous in arms, unless he could stand fast in battle.3 . . . That is the true valour— apex —ל ו׳the highest reward that a man can obtain from his feflows. It is a good common to all, a service to the city and the people as a whole, when every man can stand firm on his two feet in the front line and rid his heart of all idea of flight.”4 (9)

It will be seen how energetically the new ideal subordinated the human person to the political collectivity. From now on the aim of Spartan education, as Jager so happily put it, was to produce, not individual heroes, but an entire city of heroes— soldiers who were ready to give their lives for their country.

SPORTING FEATURES OF THE SPARTAN CULTURE

Spartan culture was not merely a matter of physical training, however. Although it was not very “lettered’] (12) it was not unacquainted with the arts. As in Homeric education, there was the essential Homeric element of music, which was central to the whole culture and acted as a link between its various parts, connected with gymnastics through dancing and through singing with poetry, the only form of literature known to archaic times.

Plutarch,7 in his inquiry into the origins of Greek music— for much of which he seems to have depended on Glaucus of Rhegion (13)— tells us that Sparta was the real musical capital of Greece in the seventh and early sixth centuries.

The first two schools— mentioned in his history are Spartan. The first, which produced Terpander, was noted for its vocal and instrumental solos and was in existence for the first two-thirds of the seventh century. The second “catastasis,” which existed at the end of the seventh and the beginning of the sixth century, specialized more in choral lyrics and produced musicians like Thaletas of Gortyna, Xenodamus of Cythera, Xenocrites of Locres, Polymnestus of Colophon and Sacadas of Argos. These are now hardly more than names to us, but in their day they were quite famous.

Better known are poets like Tyrtaeus and Aleman, who, being lyrical poets, were musicians as well. The fragments of their work that have come down to us show them to have been full of talent, and, indeed, genius.

The fact that most of these artists were foreign— for though it seems unlikely that Tyrtaeus was an Athenian, Aleman certainly seems to have come from Sardis— does not mean that Sparta had no original creative power in the arts but that she had considerable powers of attraction (as London attracted Handel and Paris Gluck). If creative artists and virtuosos flocked to Sparta, it was because they knew they would get the right audience there and have a chance of becoming famous. And here again we come across the new role being played by the polis Sparta’s artistic life— and its sporting life too— were given corporate expression in displays that were State institutions— the great religious festivals.

Early Sparta had a wonderful series of festivities through- out the year. (14) When sacrifices were made to the city’s tutelary deities there were solemn processions— like those of the Hyacinthia, in which girls in chariots and boys on horseback paraded to the accompaniment of singing. And there were all kinds of athletic and musical competitions. At the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, for instance, boys of ten or twelve years of age took part in two musical competitions and Spartan a “hunting ״game. A race was always a feature at the banquets held at the national Dorian festival, the Carnea. The Gymnopediae, organized by Thaletas, in- eluded recitals by two choirs, one of boys and the other of married men. Some of these displays take one by surprise. In the dances— in honour of Artemis, for instance, the performers wore queer, horrible old women’s faces: the style of these masks is in certain respects reminiscent of Maori art. (15)

Generally speaking, the festivals seem to have reached a high artistic level. There is a marvellous atmosphere of grace, poetry, youth, of playfulness and indeed roguishness (16) in the fragments which have been preserved of Aleman’s Partheneion, incomplete though they are,8 in which a chorus of girls describes in the most glowing terms the beauty of their chieftainesses, Agido and Hagesichora. And there is another frag-ment9 in which their old teacher— such technical perfection needed a great deal of teaching, with trainers and masters— appears in a very tender and moving relationship with the young choir-girls. He laments the fact that his limbs are too old for dancing any more, and longs to become a bird, the male halcyon, which the female birds carry on their wings.

This is clearly something very different from the Laconian severity of classical times, from that Sparta whose one interest was war, which was a barracks for “men who were musketeers and Carthusians rolled into one,” as Barrès said, quoting the Maréchal de Bassompière; very different, too, from the current idea of Sparta as the home of a barbarous utilitarianism in things in general, and a harsh, savage attitude to education.

THE GREAT REFUSAL

But this wonderful early spring was followed by a disappointing summer. Most historians agree that Sparta’s steady development came to an abrupt halt in about 550. (17) It began with a political and social revolution in which the aristocracy, perhaps led by the ephor Chilon, destroyed the popular risings that may have been caused by the second Messertian war, and at once set about the business of finding suitable means to maintain its power. Thus began the divorce between Sparta and the other Greek cities, which, on the whole, far from returning to any kind of aristocracy, were tending towards a more or less advanced form of democracy which was helped on decisively at this stage by the incidence of tyranny.

Sparta voluntarily petrified herself at the stage of development which had made her the leader of progress. After the annexation of Thyreatis (c. 550) she ceased to be a conquering nation. Politically, the ephors dominated the kings and the aristocracy dominated the people. There was an oppressive atmosphere of secrecy and police tyranny that weighed upon the citizens— and of course on foreigners too, who had previously been welcomed so hospitably. Now they became suspect, and lived under the continual threat of expulsion.

With this went a gradual decline of culture. Sparta renounced the arts and even athletics— because they were too disinterested, because they tended to develop strong personalities. No more Laconian champions appeared in the Olympic Games. (18) Sparta became an out-and-out military barracks, a city in the hands of a closed military caste that was kept permanently mobilized, entirely absorbed in its threefold task of defence— national, political and social.
As a result of this new situation there developed the classical form of Spartan education, traditionally ascribed to Lycurgus, though in fact we only get our first glimpse of it with its own special organization and methods from Xenophon at the beginning of the fourth century. Already the conservative spirit was beginning to react too far. This was especially marked in Xenophon’s own circle, the “old Spartans” centring round Agesilaus, who fought against the moral laxity that always follows victory. This laxity had spread through Sparta after its defeat of Athens in 404, which brought to an end the dreadful tension of the Peloponnesian war. Claiming to represent the old traditional discipline symbolized in the person of Lycurgus, these “old Spartans” opposed the new spirit as exemplified for instance in Lysander.

Their influence went on increasing throughout the days of fourth-century decadence, of utter collapse in the Hellenistic period, and in the lowly municipal status to which Sparta was reduced in imperial times. The greatness of Lacedaemon became no more than a memory, and Spartan education grew petrified, exaggerating its peculiarities with an increasing despairing violence as its sense of its own futility increased.

(...)

A TOTALITARIAN MORALITY
But soldiering demanded morale as well as technical skill, and education took this into account. In fact, the point is particularly emphasized in all our sources. The whole purpose of Spartan education was to build up character according to a clearly defined ideal— an ideal that has reappeared in all its savage and inhuman grandeur in the totalitarian states of twentieth-century Europe.

Everything was sacrificed to the safety and interest of the national community. The ideal was an absolute patriotism, devotion to the State carried to the supreme limit of death. The only standard of goodness was what served the interest of the city; whatever helped to increase the greatness of Sparta was right. Consequently, in relationships with foreign powers Machiavellianism was the rule, and in the fourth century there were to be some shocking examples of Machiavellianism from Spartan generals. (26) The result of all this was that the young men who were being educated were taught to be crafty, to tell lies and to thieve.6

As far as internal affairs were concerned the aim was to develop a community sense and a sense of discipline. “Lycurgus,” says Plutarch,7 “trained citizens so that they had no wish to live alone and had lost even the capacity for doing so; like bees they were always united behind their leaders for the public good.” In fact the citizen’s fundamental and almost only virtue was obedience. The child was trained to obey in the most minute detail. He was never left to himself without someone over him. He owed obedience to all who were ranged above him, from the little... to the “paidonomos” (who by law had “whipcarriers”— by his side ready to carry out his sentences).8 The child was also obliged to obey any adult citizen he met on the road.9

This kind of public morality, which was a mixture of devotion to one’s country and obedience to the laws, developed in an austere, ascetic atmosphere that was as typical of Sparta as it is of the modern States that have tried to imitate her. As Mussolini used to say, Spartan virtue demanded a “severe climate.” Sparta was intentionally puritanical, consciously opposed to the refinements of civilization. Spartan educators aimed at teaching their pupils how to endure pain from the time they were twelve onwards the children had to learn how to live hard, and the barbaric harshness of their way of life increased as they got older.

They went around in poor clothes, hatless, with shaven heads and bare feet, and slept on a litter of reeds from the Eurotas, lined in winter with a padding of thistle-flock.2 And they got very little to eat: if they wanted more, they were told to go and steal it.3 Manliness and fighting spirit were developed by way of beatings: hence the fights between gangs of boys at the Platanistas or in front of the sanctuary to Orthia,5 in which the educational value of Discord so much praised by the old knightly ethic was taken very literally, not to say brutally. Hence too the krypteia, which in the beginning seems to have been not so much a terrorist expedition against the helots as a campaign exercise designed to accustom the future combatant to the harsh life of ambushes and war. (27)

THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS

So far we have been concerned with the boys. The girls too were brought up to be Spartans. Their education was rigidly controlled, with music, dancing (28) and singing occupying a less important place than gymnastics and sport.6 The grace they had had in the archaic era was sacrificed to a crude utilitarianism. Like the women under Fascism, their first duty was to produce as many bouncing babies as possible, and all their education was subordinated to this one end. They had to learn “to put aside all delicacy and womanish tenderness” by hardening their bodies and appearing naked at feasts and ceremonies. The idea was to turn virgins into strapping viragos with no illusions about sentiment, who would mate in the best interests of the race.7

THE SPARTAN MIRAGE

This, then, is the famous education that so many moderns, and ancients too, have so much admired. It is difficult for a French historian, writing in 1945, to speak of it with complete detachment. From K. O. Müller (1824) to W. Jàger (1932), German scholarship lauded it to the skies as a product of the Nordic spirit possessed by the Dorians— the conscious embodiment of a racial, militarist, totalitarian policy— a model, miraculously before its time, of the ideal which from the time of Frederick II, Scharnhorst and Bismarck to the Nazi Third Reich, never ceased to inspire the German soul. Barrès was prevailed upon to follow their example and admire Sparta for being “a magnificent stud-farm.” He described Greece as a “group of small societies concerned with the improvement of the Hellenic race.” “Those Spartans had as the source of their vitality the surpassing excellence of their system of breeding” (Le Voyage de Sparte, pp. 199, 239).

This enthusiasm had had its precursors amongst the ancients (29); in fact we know Sparta primarily through the romantic, idealized picture of her presented by fanatical partisans, especially those who were to be found amongst her old enemies in Athens. Towards the end of the fifth century and throughout the fourth, the triumph of democratic tendencies became more pronounced and their hold more secure, and the party of old Right Wing aristocrats or oligarchs fell back into a surly, sterile opposition, the victims of a veritable neurotic introversion, projecting onto Sparta their own frustrated ideals. The modern historian finds it difficult to get at the truth about this “Spartan mirage.” The Spartan bias prevalent in reactionary circles in Athens such as those in which Socrates moved was as strong as the French middle-class bias of “Popular Front” days in favour of the order and power of Mussolini’s Italy.

LOST ILLUSIONS

When the historical truth has been so distorted by passion am I supposed to remain unmoved? Or shall I too allow myself to be carried away, and denounce the moral obliquity involved in this glorification of the Spartan educational system against all the teaching of sound history? To invert one of Barrès’ phrases, can easily dismiss the eulogies that Spartan education has received by saying that they “smack of the subaltern’s outlook.” The Spartan ideal was the ideal of a barrack-room sergeant-major.

I believe I am as conscious of Sparta’s true greatness as most people, but I observe that she was great when she was beautiful and just, in those golden days when, in Terpander’s words,8 she nurtured “the valour of young men, the muse of harmony and that mistress of all that is great— justice with her generous ways”; when civic virtue and military might were perfectly balanced and there was a smile of humanity in the mischievous grace of its maidens and elegance in their ivory brooches. Sparta only began to grow hard when she began to decline.

Sparta’s tragedy was that she matured too soon. She tried to make the first blessed moment of an early eternal, and grew rigid, glorifying in the fact that she was no longer subject to change— as though life were not essentially a matter of change, and death alone immutable! Everything in classical Sparta began from a refusal of life. In the first place, as we have seen, there was the aristocracy’s egoistic reaction in refusing to extend civic rights to the combatants in the Messenian wars. As regards external affairs, Sparta was jealous of the growth of States or cultures more recent than her own.

Petrified in an attitude of refusal and defence, she was henceforth only capable of a sterile cult of her incommuni- cable difference from all others; hence her perverted desire— again repeated in modern Fascism— to set herself up against all the generally accepted customs and cut herself off from the rest of the world.

All the attempts to whitewash her have simply tried to camouflage a decadence that became more irremediable with each generation. Sparta conquered Athens in 404, but only at the cost of an inordinate effort that destroyed all her elasticity and exhausted her spiritual riches. The following centuries merely witnessed a gradual decline.

And, I repeat, it was as she declined that her education became increasingly and explicitly totalitarian. I do not regard ... as a sure way to greatness, I denounce it as a sign of the radical impotence of a conquered people reduced to living on illusions about itself. Its inhuman eugenics go hand in hand with the increasing oliganthropy of a city with a declining birth-rate and a self-engrossed ruling class. All the unnatural efforts to produce hardy women produced in fact high-class adulteresses like Timaia, Alcibiades’ mistress, or women of affairs like those who appeared in the third century, whose one interest was their own personal fortune and their property. (30) And the military training! It grew progressively harsher and more brutal— and all the time it was losing its efficiency and its real purpose.

Careful analysis of the sources shows that Spartan severity was not a legacy from the beginning; its severity was always on the increase. In the sixth century the Gymnopediae were accompanied by musical ceremonies; later, the nudity demanded of the children lost all its original ritual value and led to competitions to see who could best resist the terrible summer sun. In the beginning the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia had been the centre of harmless battles between two bands of children fighting for cheeses piled on the altar— no more than the sort of rag that takes place in French grandes écoles and English public schools. In Roman times— and not until Roman times— the same ceremony became the tragic ordeal of the ..., in which boys were submitted to a savage whipping, competing against each other sometimes to the death, before crowds of people who flocked sadistically to see them (31)— to such an extent that it became necessary to put a semicircular theatre up in front of the temple for all the “tourists” who came along. And when was this? It was in the Early Empire, when the Roman peace covered the civilized world, when a small professional army was all that was needed to keep the barbarians back beyond the strong Roman frontiers, when there flourished a civilization whose one ideal was a civilized, unified mankind, and when Sparta faded into oblivion, a peaceful little municipality in the disarmed province of Achaia!

A History of Education in Antiquity
Henri-Irénée Marrou