The Olympic Games lasted for five days. There were various foot races, including one in armor. Other sports featured were throwing the discus and the javelin, the long jump, wrestling, and boxing. The most extreme event was the pancration. This was a combination of boxing and wrestling, with almost no rules except that gouging and biting were banned (although in practice contestants sometimes tried to get away with both). It was not unknown for competitors to lose their lives. The pentathlon challenged all-around athletes with five tests—discus, jumping, javelin, running, and wrestling. Only those with the deepest pockets, such as Cynisca, could afford to enter teams for the chariot races.
To win at the Games was to be favored by the gods. The prizes at Olympia were only crowns of olives, but a victor was a celebrity for life. His polis showered him with honors, among them free board and lodging at the city hall and best seats at the theater. A poet such as Pindar wrote odes in his honor and sometimes he was commemorated by a life-size statue of him in bronze or marble.
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In sum, then, a Spartan’s life was spartan. It was much admired by contemporaries for its purity, its elective poverty, its military efficiency, and, in a wider culture where personal willfulness had a certain allure (remember Theseus), its self-control. It was not for nothing that a leading Greek poet called Sparta “man-taming,” for it broke its boys in as if they were colts.
Citizens lived austere lives and were formidable on the battlefield. Like bees in a hive everyone worked obediently and efficiently for the common good; there were no drones.
But it is hard not to detect a sense of strain. From today’s perspective the Spartan system is extremely odd—even, perhaps, a little deranged. Moral standardization and the suppression of ordinary, more generous, patterns of human behavior required a fierce act of will. This could only be achieved by isolating Spartans from other Greek city-states. Would their right little, tight little world survive exposure to other, more relaxed and individualistic communities?
To understand their mindset we need to find out why the Spartans decided to create their enclosed, eccentric, militaristic society in the first place.
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In the 700s many Greek communities felt the need to acquire more fertile land, probably because of a rise in their populations. There were too many wildernesses and too few productive acres. Most of them exported surplus citizens by sending them out to found “colonies” here and there on the coast of the Mediterranean. There they sat, wrote the famous Athenian philosopher Plato, “like frogs around a pond” (for more on this diaspora see this page).
Sparta in those days was (so far as we know) a city-state like any other, but it decided on a different solution to the challenge. It would expand its borders locally in the Peloponnese. It began a process of conquest and assimilation of its neighbors. First, it created up to thirty dependent settlements in the Laconian plain, whose inhabitants were called perioeci, “people who live round about.” They were responsible for all the manufacturing and other services that Sparta needed. They were also liable to be called up into the army, but they did not have the prestige of the full Spartan citizen-in-arms.
The next step was to move south along the river Eurotas, through marshes and down to the sea. Here a second group of dependents was formed, the helots (probably so-called after the village of Helos, or “Marsh”). These were members of a vanquished population and as such the property of the Spartan state. They were instructed where to live and given specific duties. However, they were not owned by individual Spartans. Helots worked in the fields and could be conscripted (although their loyalty was suspect and they were deployed with caution).
The great prize lay over the mountains to the west, the wide and productive plain of Messenia. If only that could be annexed, Sparta’s economic problems would be over; there would be sufficient food for hungry mouths, and a rise in the standard of living. In fact, on the restricted Greek stage it would gain the stature of a great power.
Few details have survived, but between about 730 and 710 Sparta fought and won a long, hard war against the Messenians. Tyrtaeus crowed:
…we captured Messene of the broad plain
Messene good to plow, good to plant.
They fought for it for nineteen full years
Relentlessly unceasing and always stout of heart.
In the twentieth year, the story was told, the enemy abandoned its last redoubt, a near-impregnable stronghold on Mount Ithome, the highest of twin peaks that rise from the plain to about eight hundred meters. Many Messenians fled their homeland for good to the safety of Arcadia in the northern Peloponnese.
It was a decisive victory, but the Spartans realized that they had consumed more than they could easily digest. How could they keep their prize in the face of bitter opposition from the remaining Messenians? The question was given a sharp relevance when fifty years or so later the Messenians took advantage of a Spartan defeat at the hands of Argos, a north Peloponnesian power, and domestic discontent in Laconia. They rose in revolt, but once again they were defeated.
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The Spartans decided that they would have to transform themselves into a fully militarized society if they were to have a chance of keeping their subject peoples under their permanent control. A series of radical reforms were introduced. The credit is traditionally given to a leader called Lycurgus, but he is probably a legendary figure.
We are told that the reforms were based on a consultation with the famous oracle at Delphi in central Greece. “The Lord of the Silver Bow, Far-shooting Apollo, the Golden-haired spoke from his rich shrine,” wrote Tyrtaeus. On this occasion, the god did not initiate a plague as he had among the Greeks in front of Troy. He gave helpful advice and a proclamation, the Great Rhetra, which reflected his ideas, was issued.
The basic proposition was to give full citizenship to several thousand (perhaps nine thousand at the outset) Spartan males and, as we have seen, to free them from the business of earning a living from farming or manufacturing. They would be trained to be the best soldiers in Greece. The Messenians were all “helotized,” or turned into public serfs. Their task was to farm the allotments allocated to Spartan male citizens. According to Tyrtaeus, they were
Just like donkeys weighed down with heavy burdens
Bringing to their masters from cruel necessity
Half of all the produce their land bears.
The state’s political institutions were reorganized. At its base was a citizen assembly, or ecclesia, which passed laws, elected officials, and decided policy. But in practice its powers were limited; it could not initiate or amend legislation. Votes at elections were measured in a most peculiar way (presumably it was designed to counter vote rigging). Some specially selected judges were shut up in a nearby building; candidates for office were silently presented to the assembly, which shouted its endorsements. The judges assessed the volume of the shouts, without knowing which candidates they were for. Those who attracted the loudest applause were declared elected.
The assembly was guided by a council of elders or gerousia and Sparta’s two kings. These elders were all more than sixty years old and were members for life. They were “ballast for the ship of state,” as Plutarch put it, and a force for conservatism, although they could fall under the influence from time to time of a particularly able king. The gerousia’s main power was to prepare the agenda for the assembly and it was empowered to set aside any popular decision of which it disapproved.