A lesson most alarmingly brought home to a boy when, at the age of twelve, he became legal game for cruising. Pederasty was widely practised elsewhere in Greece, but only in Sparta was it institutionalised — even, it is said, with fines for boys who refused to take a lover. Girls too, it was rumoured, if not married, might expect to be sodomised 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 honoured 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 well-springs 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 honour 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. Travelling 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 manoeuvre 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 trammelled by restrictions that a citizen of any other Greek state would have found insufferable. A Spartan could not stand for office or even 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 honour, 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 of the Hippeis, an elite squad of three hundred, who operated distinct from the command structure which governed other military units, and served in the centre 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.
Hence the unsettling paradoxes that governed Spartan society: humiliation was pride; restriction opportunity; discipline freedom; subordination the truest mastery. Even when, at the age of thirty, a Spartan finally became a full citizen, a
'homoios',
or the 'peer' of his fellows, he continued to live in conditions that would have appeared to the elite of any other city akin to slavery. Every evening, he would be obliged to eat in a common mess; he would bring a set ration of raw ingredients which the cooks would mix into a black, bloody broth. So disgusting was this concoction that foreigners who were privileged to taste it would joke that at last they could understand why the Spartans had no fear of death. A shallow and uncomprehending jest. The Spartans themselves, who were not immune to a taste for witticisms, and indeed had raised a shrine to Laughter in their city, knew that some things were far too solemn to be joked about.
To a
homoios,
excess was always the enemy. In other states, the poor were skin and bones, and the rich might be nicknamed 'the stout' —
but not in Sparta. In other states, it was the elite who would indulge themselves with wine and drunken dancing — but not in Sparta. In Sparta, it was the slaves. Sometimes, as the
homoioi
ate in their mess, a helot might be dragged in, a stoop-shouldered, bestial thing, dressed in mangy animal-pelts, and with an ugly cap of flea-bitten dog-skin on his head. For the entertainment and edification of his watching masters, the wretch would be forced to drink neat wine, to gulp it down until the liquor was spilling from his lips onto the skins. Laughing, the Spartans would then order the slave to dance. His cheeks bright red, his chin wet with spittle, the helot would weave and stagger and totter until he passed out in the dirt. His masters would then amuse themselves by pelting him with bones.
With some justice, then, it could be said of Lacedaemon that 'the quintessence both of freedom and of slavery are to be found there'.'
12
One, after all, was the mirror-image of the other. LJpon the walls of the temple of Artemis, the masks of young warriors and wise old men were made to appear all the nobler for the ugliness of the masks that surrounded them, those of crones, imbeciles, savages and freaks. Similarly, to the sober
homoioi
at their mess-table, all the rigours and cruelties of their training were given purpose by the spectacle of the drooling helot collapsed at their feet. The Spartans, who were the masters of their own bodies and appetites as well as of a vast population of slaves, were the freest men of all precisely because they were the subjects of the harshest and most unyielding code. 'They have their liberty, yes — but their liberty is not an absolute. For even the Spartans have a master. And that master — the one who rules them — that master is their Law.'
43
Ancestral Voices
The evident perfection of their constitution, to say nothing of the xenophobia that it inevitably encouraged, led most Spartans to regard the world beyond their borders with a mixture of suspicion and disdain. A series of foreign-policy disasters had served only to encourage
them in their insularity. The humiliation of the snub by Cyrus had been followed, in 525
bc,
by an even worse debacle, when a sea-borne expedition against Samos, a powerful island just off Persian-occupied Ionia, had been comprehensively repulsed. From that moment on, rather than risk further entanglements in the Aegean, most Spartans were content to turn their backs on eastern adventures. Better by far to consolidate their supremacy closer to home. Dispatch too many of their peerless fighting men overseas and what was to stop the helots rising up in sudden revolt? Not to mention their supposed allies. Keep them all on a tight leash, and Lacedaemon would be secure. Let the frontiers of the Peloponnese, then, serve the Spartans as their walls.
And yet Pelops' island, despite its name, was not entirely 'girt in by the sea'.
44
Three days' march north from Sparta stood the great merchant city of Corinth, and beyond it, over a narrow strip of land no wider than six miles, lay the cities and mountains of mainland Greece. The Spartans, Peloponnesian though they were, could hardly afford to behave as though this isthmus did not exist. It was not merely that some of the cities which lay north of it, celebrated ones such as Athens and Thebes, were themselves major players in the power-games of Greece. Instincts of sentiment as well as of self-preservation were at stake. The Spartans, despite their attempts to present themselves as the heirs of Menelaus, were Dorians, after all. The mountainous country north of the Isthmus was their ancestral homeland. Once the isthmus road had passed first Athens and then Thebes, it was obliged by the peaks which hemmed in the lowlands to thread along the coastline, until, at its narrowest point, there was barely room for two wagons to travel side by side. This pass was named Thermopylae — a site with considerable resonance for the Spartans, for it was from the peak that loomed high above it to the west, Mount Oeta, that Heracles, having immolated himself upon a pyre, had ascended from the flames to join the gods in their home upon Mount Olympus. Just south of Oeta lay a region equally rich in significance, the plain of Doris, from which the Dorians traced their name. South in turn of Doris stood a further peak, Parnassus, ravine-gashed and precipitous;