Pitiless patriots
THOMAS BRAUN
if History of Sparta 950-192 W. G. Forrest (Hutchinson paper 1 Is 6d, cloth 25s) States that deny political freedom to their citizens normally let them keep their families and private lives. Even the Great Leap Forward failed to destroy the Chinese family. Ancient Sparta is an exception. The lives of the Spar- tiates, the ruling warrior caste, were entirely devoted to the state. If not exposed at birth, the Spartiate boy was taken from his mother at six. From then on he was under brutalising military discipline. He learned reading and writ- ing 'only because they were necessary.' Endur- ance tests, such as the ritual flogging of boys at the altar of Artemis, survived into Roman times as a tourist curiosity; boys had been known to die rather than show weakness. At thirty, a Spartiate concluded his training and could marry. But even then, he always dined with his regimental comrades. Not all the in- habitants of Laconia lived this kind of life. The Spartiates were a dwindling minority. They had many subjects. Any one of them, it was claimed, would gladly have eaten a Spartiate raw.
Of these, the perioikoi lived in numerous small communities, served in Sparta's wars, and were subject to her direction. 'Their life, if with- out political aspirations, could resemble that of other Greeks. But the Helots or state serfs, the descendants of conquered peoples, were in the words of a Spartan poet 'like asses crushed under their burdens.' Fear of their rising was a national obsession. On one occasion, Thucy- dides tells us, 'the Spartan authorities offered freedom to those who claimed to have served Them best in war, thinking that those who came forward would be the likeliest to revolt. Some 2,000 were selected, paraded around the temples in garlands as if set free, and then wiped out. No one ever knew bow each was killed.'
Spartan austerity and discipline must partly derive from the remote times when the Dorian tribes first entered Laconia. There are parallels among primitive warrior peoples such as the Zulus and the Masai. But it was fear of revolt by the subject peoples that kept Sparta (in Toyn- bee's phrase) an 'arrested civilisation.' Jar_for-
tot, himself an usient demos • tie aymjaatAL.L)1- SsarialLagthods. n this respect be is thoroughly in the Eiiiina tradition. For Gilbert Murray, England was a second Athens; Sparta, the reactionary land-power, was 'fan- tastically similar' to Germany. But Germany has produced not only pro-Spartan apologists, but devastating critics as well. Nietzsche called Sparta 'a curb on civilisation . . . a barbaric society in constant peril.' Schiller's lucid com- parison of Athens and Sparta, written in 1790, shows up Spartan patriotism as sterile. It denied spiritual progress, the true objective of human society. Sparta 'preached the dangerous maxim of regarding human beings as means, not as ends. In this way the foundations of moral and natural law were officially torn down. True Morality was abandoned to preserve the State.
But the State's only value is as a means of realis- ing morality.'
There were similar reactions at Athens. Pericles, the nobleman who led Athens into war against Sparta, is quoted as drawing a lofty comparison between his country's open society and the closed Spartan system. 'We Athenians are free and tolerant in our private lives; we keep the public law because we respect it. We are easy-going rather than subject to arduous discipline, but we meet danger voluntarily, with natural rather than state-imposed courage.'
Aristotle incisively deals with Spartan courage. 'Those like the Spartans who concentrate on the standards of beasts, and ignore those of civil- ised men in their education, turn men into machines. In devoting themselves to one single aspect of a city's life, they end up by making them inferior even in that.'
But, remarkably enough, most Athenians and other Greeks were impressed by Sparta. Many Athenian writers were upper-class men with- little sympathy for their own democracy. `Acknowledged folly' was what one exiled poli- tician called it. Xenophon, another Athenian exile, idealised the Spartan commanders under whom he fought. Plato, free at Athens to teach as he liked, saw the Spartan way of life as a model for Utopia. But praise of Sparta was not just due to upper-class prejudice. To Greek states, where civil war was usually endemic, Sparta's political stability seemed miraculous. And something about her institutions touched
a chord in every Greek. For Greek morality was-inward-looking. It was concerned not min- cmksonanassionai i but with self-dissiplue.
In Sparta, whatever her shortcomings in prac- tice, the Greeks saw self-discipline on a national scale.
In his- narrative history, Mr Forrest has tackled a desperately difficult subject. Sparta's
early period is as fragmentary as that of any Greek state. In classical times, her political system obscures the evidence. There is no mass of official documents on stone, as published by the Athenian democracy. Outsiders were period- ically expelled. Thucydides could give no ade- quate army statistics 'because of the State's secretiveness.' Crucial decisions were often taken behind the scenes. 'The authorities' are frequently mentioned, but it is rarely clear who they were. In view of these difficulties, the author's success in producing a clear and con- secutive narrative is commendable. His em- phasis is on the earlier centuries. A valuable feature here is his excursus on the date and origin of the political system. He argues a - point in Sparta's favour: that the Spartiate 'equals' obtained some real equality of rights among themselves long before the Greek de- mocracies evolved.
But the earlier period requires more frank guesswork than any other, some of which is bound to be controversial. One instance may be worth citing. In the sixth century, the Spar- tans, Dorians themselves, gave up the idea of making Helots of their as yet unconquered non-Dorian neighbours to the north. To con- ciliate them, they made much of the traditions of Spartan mythical history which went back to before the Dorian invasion. The bones of the pre-Dorian Orestes were brought back to Sparta, like those of some mediaeval saint. But one Spartan king named his son Dorieus, 'the Dorian.' This name, says Mr Forrest, 'shouts out hostility' to the conciliatory policy. I wonder. If you look at the genealogy of the Spartan kings, artificial enough but crystallised by this time, you find them non-Dorian by race —unlike the people they led—but Dorian by adoption. They no doubt stressed one or other aspect of their ancestry according to the com- pany they were in. But the one did not preclude the other. They must have been proud of both.
For the last two centuries described in this book, Sparta was no longer a great power. The nightmare had come true. In 371 BC, the Spartan army had been smashed. Despite invasions, Sparta retained her homeland. But in the west the Helots of Messenia freed themselveS, and combined for safety with the non-Dorians to the north. The Spartans withdrew into surly isola- tion. But before finally going under, Sparta was the scene of a singular revolution. It had the usual revolutionary programme: extension of citizenship, cancellation of debts, redistribution of land. But exceptionally it was led by two Spartan kings. Everywhere in the ancient world, the propertied spoke of such measures as 'inno- vation'—a dreadful word. For the kings, it was no innovation but a return to the earliest tradi- tions of the nation. The propertied won. One king was executed; another committed suicide abroad. A generation later, the Romans entered Greece, and Sparta's long independence came to an abrupt end.
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