A lesson most alarmingly brought home to a boy when, at the age of twelve, he became legal game for cruising. Pederasty was widely practiced elsewhere in Greece, but only in Sparta was it institutionalized— even, it is said, with fines for boys who refused to take a lover. Girls too, it was rumored, if not married, might expect to be sodomized repeatedly during their adolescence.38 In both cases, the justification was surely the same: nowhere was so private, so intimate, but the state had the right to intrude there. Yet, traumatic though the experience of submitting must have been for most young Spartans, there were, for boys at least, some significant compensations. Not only was it acceptable for a lover to serve his young boyfriend as a patron; it was positively expected. The more honored a citizen, and the better connected, the more effectively he could further his beloved’s career. Elite would advance elite: so it was that a boy, yielding to the nocturnal thrustings of a battle-scarred older man, might well find the secret wellsprings of Spartan power opened up to him.
Certainly, by the time he finished the agoge, a young man would know for sure whether he had been marked out for future greatness. To the most promising graduates was granted the honor of one final, bloody challenge. Enrolled into a crack squad known as the Crypteia, they would be sent into the mountains, armed only with a single dagger each, and ordered to live off the land. This period of exile from their city, however, was much more than a mere endurance test. Traveling alone, each member of the Crypteia would inevitably cross the Taygetos range and slip into Messenia. There, advancing soundlessly by night, as every graduate of the agoge had been trained to do, they would be expected to prove themselves as killers. Of all men, it was said, only the Spartans denied that homicide was necessarily a crime; for it was, in their opinion, perfectly legitimate to cull their slaves. Nervous lest the gods be provoked against them, however, the Spartans would proclaim each year a state of war against the helots, a maneuver of typically murderous circumspection, calculated to spare the Crypteia any risk of blood pollution.39 How else, after all, save by careful pruning of the most able Messenians, could the Spartans hope to breed natural serfs? Just as they condemned to the Apothetae the dregs of their own city, so they aimed to extinguish any spark of talent or rebellion in their slaves. Only the truly servile could be permitted to reproduce. Individual masters who failed to stunt the growth and aptitudes of their helots would be fined. The matter would be brought to the attention of the elders. The Crypteia, tipped off, would then glide in and set about its business.
Hitman though he was, the young Spartan who brought his dagger to the throat of a condemned Messenian was performing something more than an execution: it was almost an initiation rite, a deed of magic. As he felt his blade slice deep, he was privileged to know himself an acolyte of the profoundest mysteries of his state. No Spartan could lead his people who had shrunk from killing in cold blood. The elders who gave the Crypteia its commissions were simultaneously putting its members to the test. Only once he had smelled for himself the hatred of a hunted Messenian, and seen it in his eyes, could a Spartan truly appreciate the full extent of his city’s peril. Only once he had murdered could he truly appreciate what was required to keep it at bay.
Such, for the agent of the Crypteia, was the particular knowledge which he put on with his power. Not that ignorance could be permitted any Spartan, of course—whether male or female. Helen, it was said, while still a little girl, had been surprised as she danced before the sanctuary of Artemis, and raped. Messenian raiders, prior to the enslavement of their country, had similarly violated a whole chorus of dancers. And they might do so again, given half a chance. Every Spartan girl knew what her fate would be should her city’s whip hand fail. It was left to her brothers, however, to test this certainty to the limits of their endurance. Every citizen, as part of his boyhood training, had learned what it was to suffer the lash. With their rough tunics slashed to ribbons, and their shoulders scarred and bleeding, the children of Lacedaemon’s master race might sometimes, after rituals that demanded a whipping, look little better than the meanest, lowest-born slaves. And yet they had proved themselves the very opposite of servile. The whip which degraded the helot served to ennoble the Spartan boy. “Brief suffering leads to the joy of lasting fame,”40 Lycurgus had instructed his people. It was those who endured the lash with the sternest fortitude who went on, no doubt, to be enrolled in the Crypteia. The master was most the master who could best endure the toils of a slave.
An insight which governed the Spartan throughout his adult life. Although a graduate of the agoge would never again have to endure the humiliation of a whipping, his life continued to be trammeled by restrictions that a citizen of any other Greek state would have found insufferable. A Spartan was not even permitted to control his own finances until he was thirty. Rather than live with his wife, he would be obliged instead to sneak from his barracks for hurried, animal couplings. He might bear the scars of battle, but a young man who came to blows with another could expect to be treated by his elders like a naughty child—or, indeed, a slave. Symbolic of his ambiguous status was the fact that a Spartan warrior in his twenties would wear his hair short, just like a helot. So too, even more shockingly, would a Spartan bride.41
In Greece, the only women generally seen with shaven heads were slave girls shorn of their tresses for wigs, but it was typical of the many peculiarities of the Spartans that they should have regarded what was elsewhere a mark of humiliation as an emblem of matronly pride. Having been raised to breed, the newly married Spartan woman—a fit, healthy and already anally proficient virgin—could at last embrace her destiny. Society encouraged her all the way. The more prolific she proved herself, the greater her prestige. If she produced three sons, her husband would be excused garrison duty; if she died in childbirth, she would at least have the consolation of having her name recorded for eternity upon a tombstone. In such a way did the state aim to make even motherhood a matter of the most intense competition.
Not, of course, that anything could compare with the status obsession of young men. The ruthlessness with which this was fostered became, in a Spartan’s twenties, something truly carnivorous. The supreme honor, awarded to only three graduates at a time, was to be named by the elders a “hippagretes”—a “commander of horse.” This title gave a young Spartan the right to nominate a further one hundred of his peers for membership in the Hippeis, an elite squad of three hundred, who operated distinct from the command structure which governed other military units, and served in the center of the battle line as the bodyguard of the commanding king. The jealousy of those overlooked by the hippagretai was naturally fearsome. Rejects were encouraged to keep an envious and watchful eye on the Hippeis, reporting any infractions, always looking to have its members dismissed in disgrace, angling to replace them. No wonder that brawls between young Spartans were so common. No wonder, either, that they had to be framed, even into their early manhood, by such ferocious rules of conduct.