citizen body--the Spartiates, as they called themselves--were always a
minority of nobles, living armed and watchful amid a great subject
population of serfs. These Helots were of the same blood as the
neighbouring peoples of Messenia and Arcadia--that is to say, they are
the aboriginal stratum of Greece--and if they had a chance would no
doubt prove as intelligent and artistic as their ancestors. But no
chance was given them; they were ruthlessly oppressed, cruelly
exploited, and there was an organised secret service to remove any men
of mark that might arise from their ranks. On the battlefield of Platæa
every Spartan soldier was followed by seven Helots. Thus every Spartan
is to be ranked with the mediæval knight, though he fought on foot.
Between these two classes of knights and serfs there was also an
intermediate rank--the Neighbours, or Perioikoi. If the theory of racial
stratification is to be applied to them they must represent a pre-Dorian
wave of conquest, Achæan presumably, which in its turn had to yield,
but, being not entirely alien, was treated on a superior footing. Though
they had no political or social standing, the Perioikoi were not
oppressed. They lived mostly in the country and on the sea-coast. They
provided the sailors, the farmers, and, so far as Laconia had any trade,
the traders. They seem to have been contented with their lot, but we
know singularly little about them.
The city of Sparta itself--the only unwalled city in Greece, planted on
the banks of the Eurotas, under Mount Taygetus[27]--consisted, then, of
a circle of knights and their slaves. The Spartiates formed a very
exclusive and haughty clique of military men, extremely narrow and
oppressive to those about and beneath them, ever vigilant against
rebellion, and conscious that their spears and shields had to take the
place of a wall for Lacedæmon. Among themselves they lived an absolutely
equal communistic life. Their meals were provided at common mess-tables,
each a little club with power to elect and reject its members. As this
institution also prevailed among the Dorians of Crete, it is to be
regarded as something very ancient and characteristically Dorian. It
meant, of course, the complete absence of home and family life. It was
by such habits that the Spartans remained a conquering race, victorious
first over their Messenian neighbours in two long wars, the details of
which are legendary, and then gradually extending their control over the
whole Peloponnesus, including their Dorian kinsmen of Argos and
Epidaurus.
It is possible that the remarkable discipline and asceticism of Sparta
which is proverbially linked with her name had gradually increased.
Recent excavations have shown that seventh-century Sparta was not
destitute of art. From the lyric poets of the seventh century we get
glimpses of a Sparta not entirely ascetic or contemptuous of culture. On
the contrary, she is a patroness of foreign poets like Tyrtæus. But
already she appreciates most the martial song and dance. It must be
remembered that in Greece poetry, music, and the dance were far more
closely allied than with us. Not only did Greek dramatists originally
train their own choruses in the dance and compose their own music, but
even Hesiod in that Eubœan competition had to chant his verses aloud. So
at Sparta Terpander and Alcman were first musicians and secondly lyric
poets, and Tyrtæus, the Athenian bard, was there to conduct martial
dances and to train the boys of Sparta in their musical drill. Thus
there was no contradiction in early times between strict military
discipline and a love of lyric poetry. Afterwards, when music grew
softer and poetry less martial, the Spartans banished all musicians and
poets from their midst, though they retained the old marching tunes of
antiquity. One of these poets, Alcman, seems to have come to Sparta as a
captive from luxurious Lydia, and he does sing of cakes and kisses, but
the small fragments of Tyrtæus are all military:
“Come, ye sons of dauntless Sparta,
Warrior sons of Spartan citizens,
With the left advance the buckler,
Stoutly brandish spears in right hands,
Sparing not your lives for Sparta:
Such is not the Spartan custom.”
Terpander praises Sparta for three things, the courage of her youths,
her love of music, and her justice. A Spartan proverb, apparently
ancient, runs: “Sparta will fall by love of wealth, naught else.” They
were, and always remained, a covetous people; but for that very reason
when coined money began to be used in Greece about the seventh century
Sparta forbade its introduction lest commerce should taint the warrior
spirit of her citizens, so that Sparta had no coinage until the second
century, but continued to use, where money was necessary, the ancient
clumsy ingots of iron. Change for five pounds at Sparta needed a cart to
bring it home in. But money is not the only form of wealth, and it is
probably an Athenian lampoon which represents the Spartan as living on
nothing but the celebrated black soup. As every Spartan had his land
(the equality and inalienability of the lots is probably a later
fiction), with any number of Helots to till it, while the young men
spent their leisure in the chase, there was plenty to supply the Spartan
larder, and to provide wine and sweetmeats for Lydian poets as well.
It was in education that the discipline is most characteristically
“Spartan.” From birth to death the Spartan was in the grip of an iron
system. Indeed, it began before birth, for the Spartans are the only
people in history who have dared to carry out the principles of modern
eugenics. They trained the bodies of their girls with running[28] and
wrestling and throwing of quoits and javelins, that when the time came
they might bear stalwart sons, and bear them bravely. “The Law-giver,”
says Plutarch, “put away all coquettishness and hysteria and effeminacy
by making the girls strip for processions, dances, and choruses at the
temples, with the youths present as spectators. This stripping of the
maidens involved no shame, for modesty was there and lewdness was
absent, but it produced unaffected manners and a desire for physical
fitness, and it gave the female sex some taste of a not ignoble pride,
in that they too had their share of manly worth and ambition to excel.
Whence came to them that thought which is expressed in the traditional
repartee of Leonidas’ wife Gorgo. A foreign woman remarking to her, ‘You
Laconians are the only women who rule the men,’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we are
the only women who are the mothers of _men_.’”
The strongest moral suasion compelled Spartan men to marry. The marriage
customs of Sparta were peculiar and carry us back to the remotest
antiquity. The bridegroom carried off his bride by a pretence of
violence, and the bride cut her hair short and dressed like a man. There
was no marriage feast; the young husband dined at his mess-table,
visited his young wife by stealth, and returned to barracks. Sometimes a
wife bore children to a man whose face she had never seen. The child was
not considered to belong to his father, but to the city. “The Law-giver
thought it absurd to take trouble about the breed of horses and dogs,
and then let the imbecile, the elderly, and the diseased bear and beget
children.” There was another celebrated Spartan repartee about adultery:
“We have no adulterers in Sparta.”
“Suppose you had, what is the penalty?”
“The fine is a big bull that jumps over Taygetus and drinks from the
Eurotas.”
“My dear sir, how could there be such a monstrous animal?”
[Illustration: Plate PLATE 23.--Running Girl.
_Anderson._]
“My dear sir, how could there be adultery at Sparta?”
At birth the babe was taken away from its parent to a hall where the
elders of the tribe sat to examine it. If it was plump and strong they
said, “Rear it.” If not it was exposed to die in a cleft of the
mountain. “For they thought better, both for it and the city, that it
should die than that it should live if it was not naturally healthy and
strong. That was why the women washed it with wine instead of water as a
test of its strength.” They had scientific methods of rearing babies, no
swaddling-clothes, no fear of the dark or solitude. Foreigners used to
hire Laconian women for their nurses.
As soon as they were seven years old the children were drafted off into
“herds.” The most “sensible and combative” of each herd was made
prefect, whose orders the others had to obey implicitly and suffer his
punishments without wincing. The older men watched them at their play,
and set them to fight one another. They learnt letters, but nothing else
except music and drill. They walked without sandals, and generally
played naked.
At the age of twelve they were allowed one mantle a year, no tunic.
“They had no experience of baths and unguents; only for a few days each
year they were allowed such luxuries.” They slept in their herds on
rushes, which they had to cut from the river-banks. “In winter they used
to mix thistles with their bedding, from the idea that there was some
warmth in them.” At this age they began to associate with older youths
on those curious terms of male love peculiar to the Greeks. Their elders
would take a fatherly interest in the achievements of their beloved,
chastise and encourage them.
Also, there was a public tutor appointed from among the grown-up nobles
for each “herd,” as well as prefects from the wisest and most warlike of
the youths of twenty. The latter had his “fags” entirely under his
orders. Stealing of food was encouraged as a martial virtue likely to
lead to sharpening the wits for warlike purposes. In a state which
practised communism there was, of course, no dishonesty involved. If
they were caught they were thrashed for their bad stealing. To encourage
theft, their public rations were kept short. They were also thrashed for
the good of their souls, to encourage endurance. “We have seen many of
the youths die under the blows at the altar of Artemis the Upright,”
says Plutarch, or rather the authority he is quoting. But modern
students consider that this flagellation at the altar was probably a
religious ritual, of which there are many other examples. If the beater
spared his victim the goddess manifested her displeasure.
After mess, at which he was waited on by his fags, the prefect would
address himself to their intellectual education. Some had to sing, to
others he would put questions in ethical casuistry. “Who is the best of
the men?” “What do you think of this or that action?” The answer had to
be brief and pointed--“Laconic,” in fact. The boy had to give reasons
for his answer. A bad answer was punished by a bite on the back of the
hand, but if older men were present the prefect had to justify his
punishments. If a boy cried out ignobly in fighting, his lover was
punished also. But the real source of their education was in music,
marching songs, and hymns in praise of the heroes of Spartan history.
One such song is preserved:
“OLD MEN. We were warriors of old.
“MEN. As we are. Who doubts? Behold.
“BOYS. Some day we shall be more bold.”
Laconic, but Spartan!
The Spartan youths did not neglect their personal appearance, especially
in the matter of fine armour. They prided themselves on their long and
well-groomed hair. In the pass of Thermopylæ the Persian monarch was
astonished to see the three hundred Spartans, who ought to have been
trembling and saying their prayers, carefully combing their long hair.
In war-time discipline was relaxed. When the line of battle was drawn up
in the face of the enemy, first the king sacrificed a goat, and the
warriors crowned themselves with garlands of flowers, while the
flute-players played the song of Kastor. Then they stepped forward
gravely to the sound of the marching pæan, all in step, without disorder
or confusion, but “led gently and cheerfully by the music into danger.”
There was no fear, for the hymn “made them feel that the god was with
them.” When they had routed their enemy they only pursued so far as to
assure defeat, “considering it neither gentlemanly nor Hellenic to cut
and slay those who yielded and retired.” This was the spirit of all
their warfare; they never destroyed a beaten city.
As soon as they were of military age the army and the secret police took
most of their time and thought. Arts, crafts, and business they
considered the work of slaves. Dancing, singing, modest banquets, and
hunting were their relaxations. It was not until the age of thirty that
a Spartan could go into the agora and enjoy his rights as a citizen.
Even then lounging in the market-place was not encouraged; most of the
day was spent in the gymnasiums and clubs. There was, of course, no
private family life whatever. King Agis, coming back victorious from a
campaign, asked permission to dine with his wife. It was refused by the
Ephors, whose power, no doubt, was derived from their position as
overseers of this singular disciplinary system. The old men were highly
honoured, and the supreme object of an old Spartan’s ambition was a seat
on the Senate.
And what sort of character did this strange system produce? Well, it
produced the three hundred warriors who died to a man round their king
Leonidas at the pass of Thermopylæ. It produced the Spartan king who
refused the request of his allies to destroy Athens. It produced the
women who mourned after the great defeat of Mantinea because no sons or
husbands of _theirs_ had died for Sparta. It produced the only good
infantry of Greece, and the only stable form of government. It produced
good men like Brasidas and Gylippus. Sparta was the state that swept
tyranny out of Greece, and bore the brunt of the land-fighting against
the Persians. But, on the other hand, the system encouraged that stupid
and bigoted conservatism which ruined Sparta, partly through refusing to
learn anything new in the art of warfare, and partly through declining
to supplement the dwindling warrior caste by extending the franchise to
the other inhabitants of Sparta. No doubt, also, the strict discipline
of life in the city led to the moral breakdown of her victorious
generals Pausanias and Lysander when they came in contact with the
fascinations of Eastern luxury. It made the Spartans oppressive and
unjust when they had to govern an empire. The typical Spartan is
narrow-minded, superstitious, and covetous, but he is always brave,
patriotic, and often chivalrous. Sparta has left us no art or
literature, but she has left us an extraordinary experiment (for a
warning) of aristocratic communism combined with unfettered militarism.
PALLAS ATHENE
Sparta and Athens are the counterparts and complements of one another:
Sparta drilled, orderly, efficient, and dull; Athens free, noisy,
fickle, and brilliant. Sparta’s watchword in history is Eunomia (order);
the motto of Athens is Eleutheria (liberty) and Parrhesia (free speech
and free thought). But Sparta was orderly and powerful over all the
Peloponnese long before Athens was free or cultured.
Both Apollo and Athena were deities specially concerned with cities and
good government. If Apollo was the god of prophecy, music, poetry, and
athletics, Athena’s arts were those of the craftsman, the potter, and
the weaver. Athena, though a fair, grey-eyed goddess, was nevertheless
an enemy to love, wise in counsel and fond of battle. So strictly
maidenly was she that they gave her a virgin birth. No female had a hand
in her making, for she sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus at a
blow from the hammer of Hephæstus. That was the scene depicted on the
front gable of the Parthenon. The worship of Athena is singularly pure
and civilised; it is almost
[Illustration: PLATE XXIV. ATHENA PROMACHOS. FROM A PANATHENAIC
AMPHORA]
entirely free from magic and mystery, for Athena is emphatically a civic
goddess, having hardly any connection with the powers of Nature. She is
pure intellect. True, she has a pugnacious aspect, she is armed with
spear and shield, and with a breastplate, or ægis, bearing the Gorgon’s
head and snaky coils of hair.[29] It has been ingeniously suggested that
the ægis had been evolved by art from the skin of a beast worn over the
shoulders, with the fierce head hanging over the breast of the wearer,
and the legend of Medusa the Gorgon invented to explain it. Anyhow,
Athena is a hoplite goddess. Whatever connection she may have with water
elsewhere, at Athens she is armed for land warfare.
All these signs convince us that the Athena worshipped on the Acropolis
of Athens is not a primitive goddess. Her character, her weapons, and
her cult all point to a Northern origin, like that of Zeus and Apollo.
Moreover, we have, in the legend of her successful strife with Poseidon
for the patronage of the city, a clear account of her importation, and
she shared a temple with the old earth-born hero of Athens, Erechtheus.
How then did she come to give her name to the city? Is it true that
Athens had been called Cecropia in times past? It is hard to believe
that the goddess was called after the city, for there were strong local
cults of Athena elsewhere, so markedly individual in character that the
name cannot have been due to a mere identification of local heroines
with the famous goddess of a famous city. It is not in the least likely
that the Spartans, of all people, would call the goddess who played a
very important part in the life of their State by the name of an
essentially Athenian deity. Nor, again, can we believe that a goddess
could completely change her character and become civilised without
leaving distinct traces of her past. The only conclusion is that Pallas
Athene was an Achæan goddess who came rather late upon the Acropolis of
Athens. It is true that the Athenians boasted themselves to be an
aboriginal people of the old stock, and it is very probable that the
main bodies of Northern invaders did, as Thucydides alleges, pass by
that stony promontory of Attica as beneath notice. But they can hardly
have left a strong citadel unconquered, and though Athens and her king
Menestheus play a rather humble part in the Iliad, yet there was an
Athenian contingent in the Achæan host. It is probable that Athens
received an Achæan king and that the Acropolis itself passed into Achæan
hands. But the population of Attica received little Northern
intermixture. Herodotus tells us that the Athenian maidens going down
from the citadel to draw water were liable to constant attacks from the
Pelasgians who lived on Mount Hymettus.
In all the elaborate rebuilding of Periclean days the rock of Acropolis
was pretty thoroughly scoured of ancient remains. But we still see
traces of Cyclopean masonry, as at Tiryns and Mycenæ, forming what the
Athenians called “the Pelasgic Wall.” To that period belong such
traditional royalties as Cecrops, Erechtheus, and Pandion, possibly real
names of prehistoric kings who ruled over the rock and part of the plain
below, but by no means over the whole of Attica. In artistic
representation these ancient worthies are rather apt to develop
serpents’ tails in place of their lower limbs. As they worshipped
Poseidon, we may be sure that these Cecropians or Pelasgians were a
trading, seafaring people, having intercourse with Crete and their
kinsmen of Caria and Ionia. Poseidon was always the common deity of the
Ionian people, who looked to Athens as their head, probably because she
had suffered so little infusion of Northern blood. It is not likely that
Athens was ever a citadel of equal importance with Mycenæ or Cnossos in
pre-Achæan days. Attica has yielded but few important relics of the
Bronze Age, but, on the other hand, the Attic sites contain an unbroken
series of artistic design from the earliest to the latest times.
The great legendary King of Athens was Theseus, a figure much
embroidered by later mythologists because he had been made the patron
hero of the Athenian democracy and the synœcist of Athens--that is, the
man who made Attica into a city-state instead of a congeries of village
demes. Of course that is not history. All the legends seem to admit that
Theseus was originally an alien. His descendants were said to have been
driven out by the Homeric King of Athens Menestheus. After the Persian
wars the bones of a giant were discovered in the island of Scyros; they
were at once recognised as those of Theseus, and brought with great
ceremony to be reinterred at Athens.
During this Achæan period the Athenians seem to have largely deserted
the sea for agriculture and olive-culture. It will be remembered that
Athena’s gift to the city by which she outbid the sea-god was the
olive-tree. Of course there were still fishermen on the coast, but when
history begins dimly in the seventh century Athens is mainly
agricultural and by no means yet a city-state. She was not yet a fully
developed city-state when Sparta had long been settled in government and
had already extended her hegemony over the whole Peloponnesus. By this
time the Athenian kingship had dissolved into aristocracy, and the
aristocrats, or Eupatridæ, were a clique of oppressive landowners whose
farms were largely worked for them, as at Sparta, on the _métayer_
system, by which the tenant pays a certain proportion of the produce to
the proprietor. The troubles which Solon had to face were agrarian
troubles connected with boundary-stones. He reckons property in bushels
of corn and oil. His enactments, or the ancient laws which pass under
his name, are largely concerned with dogs and wolves and olive-culture.
The only export permitted is that of olive oil. Even after Solon the
local parties that divide the state are not divisions of city-dwellers,
but of country folk--the shepherds of the hills, the farmers of the
plain, and the fishermen of the coast. These facts emerge in despite of
subsequent Athenian historians, who, to please the _amour propre_ of a
democratic city, tried to make out that democracy had existed long
before the tyranny of Peisistratus--in fact, as far back as Theseus, and
certainly Solon. But it is fairly clear to any one discounting this
tendency and reading their early traditions impartially that until the
time of the tyrants Attica was by no means a true city-state, much less
a democracy. Until city life was developed democracy was impossible.
Strange relics of this agricultural life survive in the religious
customs of Athens--as, for example, in the sacrifice called Diipolia or
Ox-murder. “They choose,” says Porphyry, “some girls as water-carriers,
and they bring water for sharpening the axe and the knife. When the axe
has been sharpened one person hands it and another hits the ox, another
slaughters him, others flay him, and they all partake of him. After this
they sew up the hide of the ox and stuff it with hay and set it up, just
like life, and yoke it to the plough as if it were going to draw it. A
trial is held about the murder, and each passes on the blame for the
deed to another. The water-carriers accuse those who sharpened the
knife, the sharpeners blame the man who handed it, he passes the guilt
on to the man who struck, the striker to the slaughterer, the
slaughterer blames the knife itself; and the knife, as it cannot speak,
is found guilty and thrown into the sea.” All these offices are held in
certain families by hereditary right. The whole ceremony clearly points
back to days when the ploughing ox was held sacred. The older worship of
Attica is all agricultural. The Eleusinian mysteries are in honour of
Demeter (the Earth-Mother), Koré, her daughter, also called Persephone,
and Triptolemus, who brought corn from Egypt.[30] There are the Athenian
mysteries called Thesmophoria, in which the women cast mysterious
objects, really pieces of decayed pig and dough in the shape of snakes
and men, into clefts in the earth. They were intended to produce
fertility in fields and women. There was the Hersephoria also, in which
maidens carried baskets containing objects whose nature they must not
know to the precinct of the goddess of
[Illustration: PLATE XXV. DEMETER, PERSEPHONE AND TRIPTOLEMUS
_English Photo Co., Athens_
[ELEUSINIAN RELIEF]]