Classical Sparta: A Militaristic Society? By Stephen Hodkinson

Vignettes of Spartan daily life in Xenophon’s Hellenika reveal large amounts of time spent pursuing private activities: doing business in the agora, socializing with patrons and comrades, or supervising labour on their estates. This last activity undermines the idea that Helot labour freed Spartiates from agricultural concerns. As one’s citizen rights depended on making contributions to one’s common mess, Spartiates devoted significant time to estate management and to social interactions that enhanced a family’s wealth, especially through advantageous marriages. Their lifestyle was similar to that of the Athenian landowner Ischomachos described in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos (7. 29–21.12, esp. 9.2–10, 11.14–18). He too resides in town, where he socializes and does business; but he frequently visits his country estates and personally superintends his slaves.

The Spartiates’ focus on socio-economic activities dovetailed with the unspecialized nature of military training. There is no evidence for weapons-handling practice (the Greeks generally believed that hand-to-hand fighting skills came naturally) or mock combat training. Like other Greeks, the Spartiates regarded physical fitness as the primary military pre-requisite. According to Xenophon’s Polity of the Lakedaimonians, citizens over age 30 regularly hunted on foot, “so that they could stand the fatigues of soldiering as well as the young men” (4.7). Exercise in the gymnasium and choral dancing were other central aspects of Spartiate life. These activities kept citizens physically fit, but they were standard Greek leisure pursuits which had equally important social and religious functions unconnected with war.

The one specialized military skill practised was elementary drill. Xenophon tells us that the Lakedaimonians could perform manoeuvres which drillmasters elsewhere thought difficult, but that the drills were easily learned because each man simply followed the man in front (Polity of the Lakedaimonians 11.5–10). His account matches the army’s composition. The so-called ‘Spartan’ army was actually a ‘Lakedaimonian’ army, some 50–70 per cent of whose hoplites were perioikoi, free inhabitants of subordinate communities scattered around Lakonia and Messenia. Most perioikoi were working farmers with limited opportunities for collective peacetime training; their effectiveness depended on the whole army utilizing a basic skillset requiring minimal training.  

This attention to drill and command structure shows that Sparta’s military ethos was one of soldierly discipline, not a ‘warrior-hero’ mentality. At Mantinea, the Lakedaimonians’ controlled advance to the rhythm of pipes (auloi) contrasted with their enemies’ disorganized rush into battle. At the battle’s end, they pursued their fleeing enemies in a similar controlled manner, neither very long nor far. Daring but foolhardy behaviour was discouraged. After Plataea, in 479 BC, an award for bravery (aristeia) was denied to Aristodemos, the disgraced survivor from Thermopylai, because to redeem himself he rushed out from the line like a madman (Herodotos, 9.71).

Warrior-heroes?

The Thermopylai myth, developed to transform a catastrophic defeat into a glorious act of self-sacrifice, created the idealistic belief that Spartiates always fought to the death. In reality, their exaltation of an honourable death over a life of disgrace was more pragmatic. Both Tyrtaios (fr. 11) and Xenophon (Polity of the Lakedaimonians 9.1) stress that wholehearted commitment in battle resulted in fewer casualties. Spartiates sought victory more than a warrior’s glorious death.

Apart from the 300 at Thermopylai, whose deaths were commemorated annually, honours for fallen soldiers were low-key. They had the privilege, denied to other Spartiates, of inscribed memorial stelai in Sparta. These stelai, however, were minuscule (average height 36 cm) and austere in decoration, inscribed with the deceased’s name followed by EN POLEMOI (‘in war’). The stelai, moreover, did not mark their graves. War-dead were always buried abroad in collective tombs on or near the battlefield. The only excavated tomb, in the Kerameikos cemetery at Athens from King Pausanias’ expedition in 403 BC, is an impressive public monument some 24 x 3.77 m in ground plan. However, the soldiers themselves received merely a listing of their names and a hasty burial on pillows set on rubble stone headrests, with the killing weapons left in several bodies. The burial of war-dead near the battlefield undermines one prominent female image regarding Sparta’s alleged warrior ethos: the supposed saying of an anonymous Spartan mother urging her son to return home “either with this [shield] or on this” (Plutarch, Moralia 241F). The saying is either late invention or applied only after 370 BC, when Sparta first began to experience invasions and battles were fought nearby.