EJ's report on SPARTA for history class

SPARTA
By E.J Kornhauser

The ancient Greeks generally referred to Sparta as Lakedaimonia; these are the names commonly used in the works of Homer and the Athenian historians Herodotus and Thucydides.

During the Corinthian war Sparta faced a coalition of the leading Greek states: Thebes, Athens, Corinth and Argos. The alliance was initially backed by Persia, whose lands in Anatolia had been invaded by Sparta and which feared further Spartan expansion to Asia. The helots were originally free Greeks from the area of Messenia and Lakonia whom the Spartans had defeated in battle and enslaved. In other Greek city-states, free citizens were part-time soldiers who, when not at war, carried on other trades. Since Spartan men were full-time soldiers, they were not available to carry out manual labor. Helots were used as unskilled serfs, tilling Spartan land. Helot women were often used as wet nurses. Helots did not have any voting rights, although compared to non-Greek chattel slaves in other parts of Greece they were relatively privileged. Relations between helots and their Spartan masters were hostile. Each year when Euphors took office they routinely declared war on the helots, thereby allowing Spartans to kill them without the risk of ritual pollution. This seems to have been done by Kryptes, graduates of the Agoge who took part in the mysterious institution known as the Krypteria. Around 421 BC, the Spartans murdered 2,000 helots in a carefully staged event.
Spartan citizens were debarred by law from trade or manufacture, which consequently rested in the hands of the Perioki, and were forbidden to posses either gold or silver. Spartan currency consisted of iron bars, thus making thievery and foreign commerce very difficult and discouraging the accumulation of riches. Wealth was, in theory at least, derived entirely from landed property and ground allotted to the Spartan citizens. But this attempt to equalize property proved a failure. Full citizens, released from any economic activity, were given a piece of land that was cultivated and run by the helots. As time went on, greater portions of land were concentrated in the hands of large landholders, but the number of full citizens declined. Citizens had numbered by 10,000 at the beginning of the 5th century BC but had decreased by Aristotle’s day (384-322 BC) to less than 1,000 and had further decreased to 700 at the accession of Agis IV in 244 BC.

When male Spartans began military training at age seven, they would enter the Agoge system. The Agoge was designed to encourage discipline and physical toughness and to emphasize the importance of the Spartan state. Boys lived in communal messes and were deliberately underfed, to encourage them to master the skill of stealing food. Besides physical and weapons training, boys studied reading, writing, music and dating. Special punishments were imposed if boys failed to answer questions sufficiently. At the age of 12, the Agoge obliged Spartan boys to take on an older male mentor, usually an unmarried young man. The older man acted as a substitute father and role model to his junior partner; however, it is certain that they also had sexual relations. At the age of 18, Spartan boys became reserve members of the Spartan army. On leaving the Agoge they would be sorted into groups, where some were sent into the countryside with only a knife and forced to survive on their skills and cunning. This was called the Krypteria, and the immediate object of it was to seek out and kill any helots as part of their larger program of terrorizing and intimidating the helot population. Sparta is the only city-state in Greece to have given women any sort of formal education.
Many women played a significant role in the history of Sparta. Queen Gorgo, heiress to the throne and the wife of Leonidas I, was an influential and well-documented figure. Herodotus records as a small girl she advised her father Clemones to resist a bribe. She was later said to be responsible for decoding a warning that the Persian forces were about to invade Greece; after Spartan generals could not decode a wooden tablet covered in wax, she ordered them to clear the wax revealing the warning. Women, being more independent than in other Greek societies, were able to negotiate with their husbands and bring their lovers home. Men both allowed and encouraged their wives to bear the children of other men, because of the general communal ethos which made it more important to bear many progeny for the good of the city, than to be jealously concerned with one’s own family unit.