The Case for Sparta

Sparta was a communal society where the boys were taken away from their parents at the age of seven for military training, never to return. Obedience was the highest virtue. It had conquered the fertile neighbouring territories, Sparta’s breadbasket, and subjugated the population, the Helots, to be used as slaves or semi-slaves largely as agricultural labourers. There were ten Helots to every Spartan. They spoke the same language and celebrated the same religious festivals and were very much alike. That is why the Spartans went to formidable lengths to remind them at every point that they were slaves. (Pictured: Leonidas, King of Sparta)

The Spartan conduct shocked even contemporary historians. In the third century B.C., the historian Myron of Priene wrote that the Helots received a stipulated number of beatings every year regardless of any wrongdoing. If they “exceeded the vigour proper to a slave’s condition” – meaning if they offended the Spartans – death was the penalty. Keeping their numbers down was state policy anyway.

Is there anything good to be said about Sparta?

Adulterers would say yes, because adultery was not outlawed in Sparta, as it was in Athens. If the adulterer met the prevailing eugenic requirements, he was permitted to proceed.

Some feminists might also say yes, because Spartan women, in contrast to Athenian women, were allowed to speak directly to men in public.

Militarists who believe in long-term planning might definitely say yes. The (perhaps mythic) three hundred men, who were chosen to form the elite unit at the head of the Greek armies fighting the Persians at the Battle of Thermopolae (480 B.C.), had to have sons. If they did not come back their sons would take their place.

Some old people might approve of Sparta’s gerontocracy. Government policy was made by the gerousia, a council of twenty-eight elders over the age of sixty, elected for life. The damos, the collective body of citizens, could vote on alternative motions put before them. Aristotle thought the Spartans gave far too much power to old men.

Readers of Jean Jacques Rousseau would have some understanding for the reasons why he was impressed by Sparta. He admired its communal spirit, le moi commun, the communal “I”.

But it was not until the rise of Prussia that an entire society modeled itself on Sparta. The self-discipline, the austerity, and all the military virtues, struck the Prussians as exemplary. Hitler went further and saw in Sparta the model racist state.

Turning away from these cases it must be said that the Spartan model had some beneficial influence on educators. Anyone who has attended a traditional English boarding school can bear witness to that. A case in point is Gordonstoun, in Scotland, an import from Germany. Its creator and headmaster was Kurt Hahn who had fled the Nazis in the nineteen thirties with the entire student body. While admiring Spartan Prussia, he had found his concept of the true Prussia incompatible with Hitlerism. Hahn also had a partly Jewish background.

Ask Prince Charles, who went to Gordonstoun, and had to endure Gordonstoun’s Spartan regime of open windows in the winter, cold showers every morning, and bad food.