It was in the midst of their celebrations, however, that news reached the Spartans of Croesus’ fall. Their failure to live up to the terms of their alliance with the King of Lydia was an evident humiliation. Worse was to follow. Still unwilling to commit troops beyond the Aegean, Sparta dispatched instead only a small embassy, which duly met with Cyrus and was subjected to his celebrated put-down: “Who are the Spartans?” The Persians, certainly, had little cause to care. The lesson was sobering. Although Sparta appeared a colossus to the Greeks, in Asia she barely registered as a name, still less a power. Why should she? Compared to the fantastical scale of Cyrus’ dominion, all the Peloponnese was but an insignificant dot.
But the time would come when the Spartans would fling the Persians’ mockery back in their teeth. “Who are the Spartans?” This question, asked in scorn, could just as well be asked in fear. Shielded behind their mountain frontiers, self-sufficient, xenophobic and suspicious, the Spartans took but never gave, spied but never revealed. Alone among the people of Greece, they made no attempt to distinguish between Greeks and non-Greeks, condemning all non-Spartans as “foreigners,” and periodically expelling any found in their city. To their neighbors, at any rate, the wolf-lords of Lacedaemon were a source of obsessive fascination and fear. The riddle they posed their neighbors, like Cyrus’ question, afforded no ready answers. The truth was veiled by fantasy, the reality by mirage. Ever conscious of the value of terror, the Spartans perfectly understood that it would diminish them to have the heart plucked out of their mystery. For in their mystery lay their dread.
Slaves of the Law
At the foot of the cliff on which the tomb of Helen stood flowed the swift and muddy currents of the Eurotas. Follow the gently winding course of the river northward, and a traveler would soon see, on the far bank, what looked like a huddle of straggling villages. There was little in the provincial appearance of Sparta to hint at the awe with which her citizens were regarded. “Suppose,” as the Athenian Thucydides would one day put it, “that the city were abandoned, so that only her temples and the layout of her buildings remained—surely, as time passed, future generations would find it increasingly hard to believe that the people who once lived there had ever been powerful at all.”25
This was of little concern to the Spartans themselves. A people steeled by the virtues of restraint and fortitude could have only contempt for grandiose architecture. Let the cowards of other states raise up walls around their cities. The Spartans had no need of masonry when they had their spears and burnished shields. Why build pompous monuments from wasteful marble when the truest mark of a man was that he lead his life as though in a military camp? Only temples—an intrusion of the unearthly and the eerie within the otherwise barracks-like spareness of the city—rose distinct above the common run of buildings. On these, at least, the Spartans could lavish their plundered riches. In the great shrine on the acropolis, a low-lying hillock which served as the citadel of the town, all the interior was faced with rectangular plaques of solid bronze. In another temple, just north of Sparta, a statue of Apollo, the archer-god of prophecy, stood sheathed in the purest gold.
Most haunting of all Lacedaemon’s temples, however, was the shrine dedicated to Apollo’s sister, the virgin huntress Artemis, “mistress of wild beasts.”26 Continuing north along the Eurotas past the center of the city, a traveler would soon pass beyond open exercise grounds into a marshy hollow, where stood a black and ancient idol of the goddess. The Spartans, in the first flush of their dominance over the rest of the Peloponnese, in around 560 BC, had built there a splendid temple all of stone; and yet, despite the gleam of its new masonry, the site retained an air of menace. It was not merely that frogs continued to croak from among the rushes that surrounded it, nor that a marsh haze might sometimes rise ghost-like from the river: the temple itself was a place to provoke goosebumps. Not all its fittings were recent. Hung upon the fresh stonework were adornments preserved from a much older shrine, faces of terracotta, some of them idealized portraits of beardless youths or grizzled soldiers, but others grotesque and twisted monstrosities, their stares cretinous, their mouths wide open in animal cries of savagery or pain.27 These were the stuff of Spartan nightmares: rare was the citizen whose imaginings they would not have haunted, for the temple of Artemis, from his childhood through to his old age, was where he came to mark the staging posts of his life. Always present, blank-eyed yet watching him, were the masks. The faces of heroes to inspire him; and the grimaces of idiots, of gorgons, of deformed and toothless hags to remind him of the ugliness of failure. To fail was to be an outcast: lost beyond the bounds of the city, where only the shameful, the twisted and the bestial were to be found. All Spartans had to live with the implications of this truth. All had to live by the stern code that it forged.
For everywhere, as citizens, they were tracked and supervised. Each generation, like a jailer, kept its watch upon the next. The Spartans, who knew what it was to admire “choirs of boys and girls, and dance, and festivity,”28 nevertheless mistrusted the exuberance of youth. Lycurgus, wolf-worker that he was, had dreaded where the energies of unchecked cubs might lead. Only with the whip, he had taught his countrymen, could young predators be adequately trained. As the Spartans well knew from the grim example of their own early history, the savagery of instincts and impulses slipped off the leash might all too easily tear a state apart. Having passed through one period of revolution, they had no wish to endure another. No leeway could be given to the natural restlessness and appetites of youth. Only discipline, unyielding discipline, could possibly serve to check them. If there had to be change in Sparta, whether of a failing custom or of a law that had had its day, then it was for the elderly to moot and pass the needed reform.29 Why should any measure be accepted otherwise? After all, the elders of Sparta were living proof of what tradition could achieve: that it was capable of forging a master race of heroes.
So it was that Sparta, for all her fearsome reputation, was also widely lauded as the home of perfect manners. Only there, of all the cities in Greece, would a young man habitually step aside to make way for his senior; for he was, with such a gesture of respect, simultaneously paying honor to the laws and customs of his people. To such an extreme was this notion carried that the Spartans, appalled by the idea of a stripling unable to rise in the presence of his elders, frowned upon public lavatories. “The spears of young men” may have flourished in the city, but there was no doubting that “it is the old who have the power there.”30 Even the titular heads of state—for the Spartans, peculiar in all things, had not one but two kings—were obliged to respect their authority. Push too hard against the limits of what was constitutional, and they would quickly find themselves arraigned by their city’s supreme court, a legislative body that, aside from the two kings themselves, consisted entirely of gerontocrats aged over sixty. The Spartans duly called this intimidating body the Gerousia—a name which, like the Romans’ Senate, had the literal meaning of a council of elders. Since, aside from its role as the guardian of the constitution, it also had the right to forestall all motions put before it, and to present the fruits of its own deliberations as effective faits accomplis, the Gerousia might easily exert a stranglehold over politics in Sparta. Election to it was not only the supreme honor that a citizen could attain, but was for life. “No wonder that this, of all human prizes, should be the most zealously contested.” Even non-Spartans might concede as much: “Yes, athletic competitions are honorable too, but they are merely tests of physical prowess. Election to the Gerousia is the ultimate proof of a noble spirit.”31