I was watching YouTube videos the other day and I stumbled across this one documentary about the history of Sparta, found here:
After about 10 minutes in, I realized very quickly that what I was seeing looked like a communist utopia. In spite of the narrator’s apparent infatuation with the Spartan culture, she points out some glaring and fatal flaws in their way of life. First is their treatment of children, particularly male children. Starting off in life the male babies were subjected to infanticide if they were deemed weak. If they survived that, at the age of 7, the boys were taken from their mothers and basically conscripted for military service training. Due to the segregation of living quarters between men and women, boys were often the object of sexual desire in these situations, and so child rape was commonplace for boys. Upon adulthood, the boys once again went through a screening process in which they wouldn’t be outright killed, but they would be excluded from society for simply not being strong enough. In ancient times, this was often a death sentence, so nearly as harsh as an outright killing.
As if all of this isn’t bad enough, they were now expected to pair bond with one of the elder males in their society during the period before they married, almost like a male concubine. When it was deemed necessary to procreate, the young man “married” a Spartan woman, who would simply visit him in his sleeping quarters on occasion. Due to the practice of compulsory homosexual behavior, and therefore the selection of homosexual men as the ideal warrior elite, Spartan men were often not interested in women at all, and it was commonplace for the wives to dress up as young boys to entice them. Also as a result of this practice, there was a problem with the birthrate of the Spartan society which ultimately contributed to its downfall.
The Spartans were a war-obsessed people, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has heard of them. They are indelibly imprinted in popular culture as the symbol of warrior strength. They were constantly at war or were preparing for it. It was considered a way of life for them.
My theory for why the above militarism happened is that the society was structured from the top-down as a dictatorship that resembled modern-day communism. They had a very rigid top down structure, and key to the ethos of the elite in Spartan society was an egalitarian equalization of every citizen in regards to material wealth. All material wealth was deemed as the property of the state and any surplus was directed towards military affairs. They even went so far as to ban the use of money, and they made a virtue out of poverty. Leaders in the society were known for wearing ragged old clothing in tatters, as an expression to their devotion to the ideal of frugality and rejection of material wealth. In spite of all of this, the society, as with all societies that attempt to eliminate spontaneously formed class structures, still became stratified into elite and commoner groups, and these structures were vehemently defended and called virtuous.
This extreme economic egalitarianism, in my opinion, was more the cause of the rest of the Spartan behavior, rather than an integral part of a coherent way of life. The war-making was a response to the economic hardship that the egalitarian dictum created. They made war not because it was ideal, but because it was necessary to maintain their state. Since they didn’t create, they looted. In order to build what little they did have, they had to capture and keep slaves. Their economic system was so backwards that they were incapable of building basic defenses around their territory, which necessitated all the more extreme militarism. They killed babies not because they wanted strong warriors necessarily, but because they didn’t have the wealth to support them.
The Spartans rarely built anything of the quality that their neighbors in Athens did. They didn’t have any technological advancement and they were simply a poor people. They weren’t frugal, because frugality is a quality of someone who has excess. The Spartans were incapable of producing excess, so they couldn’t rightly be called frugal. That would be giving them too much credit in my opinion.
Also as a result of their egalitarianism, literacy rates among them were low. There wasn’t any great emphasis put on their education, unless it was to turn their body and mind into a perfect killing machine. This is part of the reason there aren’t a lot of literary works or structures left by the Spartans to posterity. It’s not that we haven’t found it, it’s that they simply didn’t create it. In spite of their obsession with war, they never even built walls to defend their territory. This means that they either were incapable of doing so, or that they were so blood thirsty, that they welcomed attacks.
Being primarily focused on war-making, they weren’t particularly good at it as compared to the Athenians. Yes, Athens eventually did fall to Sparta, but only with financing provided by the Ottoman Empire, ironically the very empire that the Spartans suicidally fought to the death at Thermopylae just a few decades before (a battle made recently famous again in the movie 300). So once again, the Spartans required resources taken from outside areas even to do the very thing they were most good at, making war.
Not too long after the fall of Athens, Sparta fell as well because of their horrid birthrate and dire economic situation. No longer able to maintain a fighting force, they crumbled in an implosion just like the Soviet Union did.
I had never learned about Spartan culture in this much detail in my history classes, so it was surprising to me to see something so closely resembling that of the Soviet empire tried out in an ancient time. Their historical example should have been a lesson for future generations, including people alive today, that their system ultimately resulted in a miserable existence, even for elites, and war-making and poverty were the norm. They tried to characterize many of their practices as virtuous, but I think they were simply too prideful to admit the truth, which is that collectivism and extreme economic egalitarianism. The elimination of the individual in a societal structure is a sure way to extinguish it very quickly from the inside out.