Thanks in part to the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, during which a small force of Spartan soldiers remained to fight to the death against a much larger Persian army, the warriors of Sparta have long been famous for their military prowess and tenacity. Even today, the word “Spartan” conjures up an image of an incredibly fit, skillful fighter, indifferent to pain and fear.
“Other [Greek] The city-states had great armies, ”says Kimberly D. Reiter, associate professor of ancient and medieval history at Stetson University. “Sparta was recognized by most as the best.”
How did the Spartans get so impressive? One factor was the agoge, the Greek city-state education and training system, which used harsh, extreme, and sometimes cruel methods to prepare boys to become Spartan citizens and soldiers.
“The agogue aimed to instill military virtues: strength, endurance, solidarity,” as the late Canadian historian Mark Golden wrote. But he accomplished all of this at a high price, turning the childhood of the Spartan boys into what today would be considered a traumatic experience.
Training began at an early age
A Spartan woman saying goodbye to her young son who is going to war.
Universal History Archive / Getty Images
According to the ancient Greek historian Plutarch, who wrote several centuries after the heyday of Sparta in the 400BCs, the Spartans began to develop soldiers soon after birth, when male infants were assessed. by Spartan elders. Children “well built and strong” were allowed to live, while those who were considered unhealthy or misshapen were left at the foot of a mountain to die.
At age seven, the Spartan boys were turned over by their parents to the state, where they were organized into businesses that lived, studied, and trained together.
“The boy who excelled in judgment and was the bravest in battle was appointed captain of the company,” Plutarch wrote. “The others kept all eyes on him, obeying his orders and submitting to his punishments, so their childhood training was a practice of obedience.
Plutarch portrayed the Spartan boys as having little education. But Stephen Hodkinson, professor emeritus of ancient history at the University of Nottingham, UK, says other sources suggest they received “standard Greek elementary education in reading, writing, figures, singing and dancing ”.
To harden them even more, the Spartan boys were forced to walk barefoot and rarely bathed or used ointments, so their skin became hard and dry, Plutarch wrote. To clothe themselves, they were given a single cloak to wear all year round, to teach them how to endure heat and cold, and they made their own beds from plants that they had to pull from the ground with their bare hands on them. river banks.
According to Plutarch, as young Spartans grew older, they had to exercise more and more to build their bodies. As Donald G. Kyle notes in his book Sport and entertainment in the ancient worldThe young Spartans had to show up for regular inspections naked, and the boys who did not seem fit enough were whipped.
Spartan boys endured brutal contests
In addition to running and wrestling, their sports included a particularly brutal contest in which two teams attempted to chase each other off an island by pushing, kicking, biting and ripping off opponents, according to the Kyle’s book.
To make life even more difficult, the Spartan boys were fed a lean diet. Xenophon, a philosopher and historian who lived from the late 400s to the mid-300s BC, noted that one of the goals was to keep them thin, which Lycurgus, the founder of the Spartan system, believed they did. grow. But the boys’ hunger was also meant to encourage them to steal food from gardens and other places “in order to make boys more resourceful and better fighters,” Xenophon wrote. But to make sure they learned the trick, the boys who were caught stealing were whipped.
Such harsh punishment was an important part of the Spartan training system. The Spartans even made it an annual ritual, in which boys tried to steal cheeses from a temple altar, forcing them to evade guards armed with whips.
“Whipping was a test of courage and stoicism,” Reiter says. “The boys looked forward to the public demonstration of their courage.”
the Agoge was a “trial by ordeal,” as Paul Cartledge, professor emeritus of Greek culture at Cambridge University, wrote in his 2003 book Spartan reflections. But it was a vital step to be selected for one of the messes, the communal catering groups, and to become a full citizen and Spartan soldier.
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Strictly speaking, the Agoge did not include military training, which only started in earnest until they became adult soldiers. Its real aim was to prepare Spartan men to become docile members of society, ready to sacrifice everything for Sparta. Unlike other Greek city-states, Sparta “was exceptional in its socio-political stability,” Hodkinson says. “Part of the reason for this was that the education of the boys had instilled behaviors that encouraged harmony and cooperation.”
But the Spartan school’s emphasis on physical fitness helped Spartan soldiers on the battlefield. “It made them stronger / stronger, more able to withstand the weight of a heavy mostly wooden shield in the summer sun, better at pushing and shoving, better at endurance,” says Cartledge.
The real secret of the Spartans was not physical fitness or indifference to pain and suffering, but rather superior organization. The Spartan troops trained relentlessly until they could execute tactics with perfection. “It was probably their training in tactical maneuvers that really gave the Spartan soldiers their advantage on the battlefield,” JF Lazenby writes in his book. The Spartan army.
“Xenophon said that a Spartan army could perform maneuvers that others could not, due to their training,” Cartledge says.
According to Plutarch, the Spartans continued to train regularly throughout their adult lives. “No man was allowed to live as he liked, but in their town, like in a military encampment, they always had a prescribed diet,” he wrote. As Cartledge writes in Spartan reflectionsIt wasn’t until they were 60 that the Spartans were finally allowed to retire from the military – provided they had lived that long.
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Sparta was not invincible
The stability that the agoge favored also “leads to a certain rigidity,” says Hodkinson. For all the effectiveness of the Spartans, they relied heavily on a limited set of maneuvers, and when these failed, they had no plan B.
Outside the battlefield, the rigid acceptance of the status quo imposed by the Spartan education system made it difficult for Spartans to cope with social issues in their society, such as inequality in land tenure and a declining population. .
“Ultimately, it produced a kind of conceptual lockdown when the Spartans couldn’t imagine any other kind of life,” Reiter explains. “It made it very difficult for the Spartans to accept innovation in war or politics.”
In this sense, the regime that helped make the Spartans so difficult also contributed to the ultimate downfall of Sparta. In 371 BC, Thebes, a rival city-state, defeated Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra using creative and unorthodox cavalry maneuvers that the Spartans were too adamant to counter. This ended Sparta’s military rule, although their formidable reputation has endured throughout history.
