This thin volume (just 232 pages in the hardcover edition, only
around 125 of which are the main text and appendices—the
rest being extensive source citations, notes, and indices of
subjects and people and place names) is intended as the
introduction to an envisioned three volume work on Sparta
covering its history from the archaic period through the
second
battle of Mantinea in 362 b.c.
where defeat of a Sparta-led alliance at the hands of the
Thebans paved the way for the Macedonian conquest of Sparta.
In this work, the author adopts the approach to political
science used in antiquity by writers such as Thucydides,
Xenophon, and Aristotle: that the principal factor in
determining the character of a political community is
its constitution, or form of government, the rules
which define membership in the community and which
its members were expected to obey, their
character being largely determined by the system of
education and moral formation which shape the citizens
of the community.
Discerning these characteristics in any ancient society is
difficult, but especially so in the case of Sparta, which
was a society of warriors, not philosophers and historians.
Almost all of the contemporary information we have about
Sparta comes from outsiders who either visited the city at
various times in its history or based their work upon the
accounts of others who had. Further, the Spartans were
famously secretive about the details of their society, so
when ancient accounts differ, it is difficult to determine
which, if any, is correct. One gets the sense that all of
the direct documentary information we have about Sparta would
fit on one floppy disc: everything else is interpretations
based upon that meagre foundation. In recent centuries,
scholars studying Sparta have seen it as everything from
the prototype of constitutional liberty to a precursor of
modern day militaristic totalitarianism.
Another challenge facing the modern reader and, one suspects,
many ancients, in understanding Sparta was how profoundly
weird it was. On several occasions whilst reading
the book, I was struck that rarely in science fiction does one
encounter a description of a society so thoroughly
alien to those with which we are accustomed from our own
experience or a study of history. First of all,
Sparta was tiny: there were never as many as ten
thousand full-fledged citizens. These citizens
were descended from Dorians who had invaded the
Peloponnese in the archaic period and subjugated the original
inhabitants, who became
helots: essentially
serfs who worked the estates of the Spartan aristocracy in
return for half of the crops they produced (about the same
fraction of the fruit of their labour the helots of our modern
enlightened self-governing societies are allowed to retain
for their own use). Every full citizen, or Spartiate,
was a warrior, trained from boyhood to that end. Spartiates
not only did not engage in trade or work as craftsmen: they were
forbidden to do so—such work was performed by non-citizens.
With the helots outnumbering Spartiates by a factor of from
four to seven (and even more as the Spartan population shrunk
toward the end), the fear of an uprising was ever-present, and
required maintenance of martial prowess among the Spartiates
and subjugation of the helots.
How were these warriors formed? Boys were taken from their
families at the age of seven and placed in a barracks with others
of their age. Henceforth, they would return to their families only
as visitors. They were subjected to a regime of physical and
mental training, including exercise, weapons training, athletics,
mock warfare, plus music and dancing. They learned the poetry,
legends, and history of the city. All learned to read and
write. After intense scrutiny and regular tests, the young
man would face a rite of passage,
krupteίa,
in which, for a full year, armed only with a dagger, he had to
survive on his own in the wild, stealing what he needed, and
instilling fear among the helots, who he was authorised to
kill if found in violation of curfew. Only after surviving this
ordeal would the young Spartan be admitted as a member of a
sussιtίon,
a combination of a men's club, a military mess, and the basic unit
in the Spartan army. A Spartan would remain a member of this
same group all his life and, even after marriage and fatherhood,
would live and dine with them every day until the age of
forty-five.
From the age of twelve, boys in training would usually have
a patron, or surrogate father, who was expected to initiate
him into the world of the warrior and instruct him in the
duties of citizenship. It was expected that there would be
a homosexual relationship between the two, and that this would
further cement the bond of loyalty to his brothers in arms. Upon
becoming a full citizen and warrior, the young man was
expected to take on a boy and continue the tradition. As
to many modern utopian social engineers, the family was seen
as an obstacle to the citizen's identification with the
community (or, in modern terminology, the state), and the
entire process of raising citizens seems to have been designed
to transfer this inherent biological solidarity with kin to
peers in the army and the community as a whole.
The political structure which sustained and, in turn, was
sustained by these cultural institutions was similarly
alien and intricate—so much so that I found myself
wishing that Professor Rahe had included a diagram to help
readers understand all of the moving parts and how
they interacted. After finishing the book, I found this one
on Wikipedia.
Image by Wikipedia user
Putinovac
licensed under the
Creative Commons
Attribution
3.0 Unported license.
The actual relationships are even more complicated and subtle
than expressed in this diagram, and given the extent to which
scholars dispute the details of the Spartan political institutions
(which occupy many pages in the end notes), it is likely
the author may find fault with some aspects of this illustration.
I present it purely because it provides a glimpse of the
complexity and helped me organise my thoughts about the
description in the text.
Start with the kings. That's right, “kings”—there
were two of them—both traditionally descended from
Hercules, but through different lineages. The kings shared power and
acted as a check on each other. They were commanders of the army
in time of war, and high priests in peace. The kingship was hereditary
and for life.
Five overseers, or ephors were elected annually by the citizens
as a whole. Scholars dispute whether ephors could serve more than
one term, but the author notes that no ephor is known to have done
so, and it is thus likely they were term limited to a single year.
During their year in office, the board of five ephors (one from each
of the villages of Sparta) exercised almost unlimited power in both
domestic and foreign affairs. Even the kings were not immune to their
power: the ephors could arrest a king and bring him to trial on a
capital charge just like any other citizen, and this happened. On
the other hand, at the end of their one year term, ephors were
subject to a judicial examination of their acts in office and
liable for misconduct. (Wouldn't be great if present-day “public
servants” received the same kind of scrutiny at the end of
their terms in office? It would be interesting to see what a
prosecutor could discover about how so many of these solons manage
to amass great personal fortunes incommensurate with their salaries.)
And then there was the “fickle meteor of doom” rule.
Every ninth year, the five [ephors] chose a clear and moonless
night and remained awake to watch the sky. If they saw a
shooting star, they judged that one or both kings had acted
against the law and suspended the man or men from office. Only
the intervention of Delphi or Olympia could effect a
restoration.
I can imagine the kings hoping they didn't
pick a night in mid-August
for their vigil!
The ephors could also summon the council of elders, or
gerousίa,
into session. This body was made up of thirty men: the two kings, plus
twenty-eight others, all sixty years or older, who were elected for
life by the citizens. They tended to be wealthy aristocrats from
the oldest families, and were seen as protectors of the stability
of the city from the passions of youth and the ambition of kings.
They proposed legislation to the general assembly of all citizens,
and could veto its actions. They also acted as a supreme court in
capital cases. The general assembly of all citizens, which could
also be summoned by the ephors, was restricted to an up or down
vote on legislation proposed by the elders, and, perhaps, on
sentences of death passed by the ephors and elders.
All of this may seem confusing, if not downright baroque,
especially for a community which, in the modern world, would be
considered a medium-sized town. Once again, it's something which,
if you encountered it in a science fiction novel, you might expect
the result of a
Golden
Age author, paid by the word, making ends meet by
inventing fairy castles of politics. But this is how Sparta seems
to have worked (again, within the limits of that single floppy disc
we have to work with, and with almost every detail a matter of dispute
among those who have spent their careers studying Sparta over the
millennia). Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which was the product of
a group of people toiling over a hot summer in Philadelphia, the
Spartan constitution, like that of Britain, evolved
organically over centuries, incorporating tradition, the consequences
of events, experience, and cultural evolution. And, like the
British constitution, it was unwritten. But it incorporated, among all
its complexity and ambiguity, something very important, which can be
seen as a milestone in humankind's millennia-long struggle against
arbitrary authority and quest for individual liberty: the separation
of powers. Unlike almost all other political systems in antiquity
and all too many today, there was no pyramid with a king, priest,
dictator, judge, or even popular assembly at the top. Instead,
there was a complicated network of responsibility, in which any
individual player or institution could be called to account by
others. The regimentation, destruction of the family, obligatory
homosexuality, indoctrination of the youth into identification with
the collective, foundation of the society's economics on serfdom,
suppression of individual initiative and innovation were, indeed,
almost a model for the most dystopian of modern tyrannies, yet darned
if they didn't get the separation of powers right! We owe much of
what remains of our liberties to that heritage.
Although this is a short book and this is a lengthy review, there is
much more here to merit your attention and consideration. It's a
chore getting through the end notes, as much of them are source
citations in the dense jargon of classical scholars, but embedded
therein are interesting discussions and asides which expand upon
the text.
In the Kindle edition, all of the citations and
index references are properly linked to the text. Some Greek
letters with double diacritical marks are rendered as images
and look odd embedded in text; I don't know if they appear correctly
in print editions.
August 2017 
