Fear and Loathing in Sparta
I wanted to do a companion piece to my review of The Bronze Lie because the book gave me a lot to think about but I felt it distracted from discussing Cole’s work. Like I said in the review, part of Cole’s objective was to break down the myth of Sparta to cut down on how modern day fascist movements use them around the world. This is an interesting political question because to me it says a lot about how the fears that were the heart of Spartan society lay at the heart of our own.
We have to be careful writing about Sparta because, as Cole mentions, we have no first hand account of what the Spartans thought of themselves. There are no Spartan historians, philosophers, poets -the most acclaimed Spartan poet was probably an Athenian — playwrights, basically, every avenue humans have used to express themselves over the entirety of our existent, Sparta leaves us nothing. Everything we know about Sparta comes from other people telling us about them, which means we’re getting depictions from people who were contemporaries (Herodotus, Thuycidides, Xenophon) or people writing much, much later (Plutarch). All of these authors have their own agenda’s in their depictions of the Spartans, so we have to phase everything we know about them through a filter of “What does this author get from depicting them in this way” and apply it to what we know about human behavior.
What’s interesting is that this fuzziness makes the Spartans the most convenient historical analogue we have on hand. The lack of messy, contradictory details means we can project onto them whatever traits we find most desirable. Whatever we’re afraid our own culture doesn’t have, we can say the Spartans did, because who is around to argue otherwise? Cole rightly calls out the anxiety at the root of this behavior, ascribing to ancient civilizations what we are most of lacking in our own. Still, projections only work if there’s something solid behind them which, in my opinion, that something is the fear.
If you’re wondering what the Spartans were so afraid of, that’s easy enough to answer: it was their slaves. As I pointed out in my review, the helots — Sparta’s slave class — made up 90% of Sparta’s population. And if that number makes you question how such a small Spartan minority maintained control over such a massive slave population the answer is simple: murder. Lots and lots of state sanctioned murder. How it would work is that the ephors — a five-member executive council that partly governed Sparta — would declare war on the helots, allowing any Spartan citizen to kill helots at any time without fear of legal or religious sanction. Just to repeat that so there’s no misunderstanding, every year, the Spartan government declared war on its own slave class so its citizens could murder said slaves at will with no repercussions.
Another method of control the Spartans employed was the krypteia, the final part of the Spartan agoge where the boys would go out in the fields, hiding during the day, then fan out at night, killing whatever helots they found or ones they had spied on and thought could cause the most trouble.
Keep in mind, this is usually the fate of helot men. For the helot women, they got to live with the constant wondering if their family members would come home at night, and, of course, rape. We know the scale of this because the Spartans had an entire social class of the offspring of Spartan men and helot women. Called either the nothoi (it translates to ‘bastards’) or mothax, the men were sometimes sponsored into the agoge by wealthy Spartan families and fought with their masters in the hoplite phalanxes alongside their masters. But again, I feel the need to repeat this because the sheer scale of this problem almost boggles the mind so, one more, with feeling: Spartan men raped their women slaves so much they created a distinct social class as a result.
This then, is Spartan life. A life of leisure built on top of an unrelenting campaign of murder, rape, and terror. But like I said, these campaigns are built to make the helots more afraid of the Spartans than the Spartans were of their slaves. The Spartans lived in constant fear of their helots turning on them, to the point that the first thing the Spartan did after a devastating earthquake in 464 BC was to mobilize the army to quell a helot rebellion. This turned out to be a prescient move, because revolt the helots did.
We tend to limit our understanding of slavery to the concept of one human being owning another, then leave it at that. We don’t think about all the cultural justifications that get built up to justify the practice. This usually means our thinking tends to drift into thinking of slaves as accepting of their condition or at the very least attuned to their station. Things get much messier if you consider that slaves apparent complacency was bought by the constant threat (and practice) of murder they lived under.
I feel that I cannot emphasize enough that the Spartans engaged in these barbaric practices because they were utterly terrified of their slaves revolting against them. They would have been keen to avoid any sign of weakness lest they give their slaves the idea that they could be over thrown. This then serves as a good example as to why the brutality of slave societies exists, it reflects the terror the masters live in the shadow of two simple facts: 1. there are far more slaves around then there are masters, and 2. should the slaves recognize this, you can’t kill them all.
Slavery is the easy thing to beat the Spartans up about, though. We shouldn’t forget that the other thing we should scorn them for is that they, as a culture, seemed dedicated to learning nothing. The bulk of Spartan military history runs from the first Messenian War which started in 743 BC to the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, a period of just under 400 years. Throughout that time, which Cole documents repeatedly, the Spartans are beset by the same tactical and strategic errors, seemingly never implementing any of the lessons their defeats should have taught them. So think that through, almost 400 years of constant fighting and the Spartan army shows no signs of adaptation, improvement, or flexibility over the centuries. There are some individual moments, like one battle where the Spartan general does a valiant job trying to break into the fort his army is seizing. That he doesn’t succeed is because the defenders have more options to make their defense last than he has to attack, but, this is the one notable exception and we never see a repeat of this behavior.
What should we make then, of a society so committed to ignorance that it would rather lose the same battles in the same way over and over again than adapt to its circumstances? On a side note, this is yet another reason why we should discard the idea that the agoge was a military academy — if you don’t train your soldiers in the tactics of the battles they’re going to be fighting, your goal isn’t to train soldiers. If we wanted to emulate the Spartans than Cole’s project wouldn’t exist, mainly because it involved actual work but also because the bedrock on which the project rests is questioning what we’ve been taught and testing it against the evidence to see if the story holds up.
The last thing I want to touch on is that what Spartan society shows us is the danger of a society under elite capture. Practically every bit of work done in Sparta — the farming, weaving, smithing, weapon making, every bit of it was done to support the idle Spartiates who remember, literally did no work at all. This funneling of every possible resource into the minority concentration of Spartan hands left Spartan society hollowed out — it had no commerce, no trade, nothing to economically support itself. So when Sparta’s power over their slaves broke, there was nothing for them to fall back on save their own image. To be fair, they’ve successfully sold that image for over a thousand years to every Western culture that’s followed them. Still, I think that if all you have to trade in a society is a mirage of its heavily disputed glory, it’s safe to call that society a failure on multiple levels.
Cole has a lot of compassion for the Spartans, a feeling I do not share. The worst thing, in my opinion, about every slaver is that they have but one life to give in return for the thousands they destroy. No matter the personal struggles and triumphs of the individual Spartans, that their lives depended on the misery of literally hundreds of thousands of people makes those personal problems irrelevant in my eyes. On top of all that, the vampiric relationship the Spartiates had with the rest of society left the society powerless to adapt long-term to any of its problems which left Sparta as little more than antiquity’s version of Branson, Missouri.
Cole is right though that we should avoid casting the Spartans as monsters. History isn’t a morality play for later generations to sift through for heroes and villains to venerate or scorn as we see fit. Everything the Spartans struggled with are things we struggle with now, with much of the same dynamics at play. You can’t tell me there are so many industries going on strike because workers are getting fair treatment from their employers. Or that the shortages we’re experiencing because of the monopoly consolidation in the shipping industry has made our societies more resistant to systemic shocks.
The problems of oppression and exploitation aren’t unique to Sparta. These problems exist in every political, economic, and social system we’ve ever invented. We need to recognize that the Spartans are all too human, that their failures are our own, failures that we’ve repeated for thousands of years before and since. Most importantly, we need to recognize the Spartans as human because if nothing else, we need to recognize ourselves in their actions so that, if nothing else, we can resolve to do better than those assholes ever did.
