10 Crazy Facts About Spartan Society

[Beebs]

10 Crazy Facts About Spartan Society - Hoffstrizz.

1. Eugenics



If you want to produce the most elite soldiers on earth you've got to start weeding out the weak ones right from the get go. As soon as a baby was born the mother would bathe it in wine, which would send the weak, epileptic, or otherwise deficient babies into convulsions. If the baby seemed healthy then the father would take it to be examined by the Gerousia, the council of elders, to determine whether it was worth raising. If the baby showed any signs of disability or weakness, then he was tossed into a chasm in the mountains which was euphemistically called "the deposits."

Yes, outside of Sparta there was a huge pit filled with dead babies.



No, I don't really see the big deal with this is. The world wasn't even catastrophically overcrowded back then. If only there were more people practicing eugenics.

Sparta's gotten a lot of flack about this one but it is plainly sexism. Every other society in the world also killed off unneeded babies presumed to be defective and only extra mouths to feed. It was the only way to survive in a harsh and cruel world full of famine. Except to the rest of the world defective meant female, whereas in Sparta, the emphasis was simply on eliminating those men who wouldn't be capable of soldiering. Sparta was the most unabashedly pro-female society in the ancient world...

Not that they didn't also toss girl babies into the dead baby pit...

2. Spartan Women Had More Rights Than Any Other Women in the Ancient World




It's ironic, but the most famous warrior society in human history, is actually more notable for its women, whom the rest of the Greek world simultaneously found extraordinarily titillating and extraordinarily threatening, going all the way back to Helen of Troy, the broad who started the Trojan War.

Although in fact, Helen was only Spartan through her mother, her father was Zeus in the form of a swan...

Seriously...




Because Spartan women had slaves to do all the menial chores, they were given a thorough education, similar to the boys' but minus the killing. The idea being that, stronger, smarter, more courageous women, would produce stronger, smarter, more courageous sons.

Spartan women were well educated, taught to read and write, and also trained in gymnastics, athletics, and horseback riding. One Spartan woman, Cynisca, even competed and won in the Olympic Games in chariot racing. No other Greek women received any formal education. Spartan women on the other hand were intended to be as strong-willed as the men, and likewise, as physically fit.

Spartan women could also own property and land. In fact, with sons and husbands often dying in war, or absent on campaigns, or if not at war, then preparing for war, Spartan women pretty much were the property owners. There were a lot of wealthy widows in Sparta.

It's not as though Sparta was a feminist paradise. But whereas the rest of humanity was commanding its women to be meek, subservient, and fragile, Sparta was cultivating its women to be strong, independent, and aggressive. In fact, the classic explanation of Sparta's decline, promulgated by Aristotle, was that Spartan men had allowed their women to become too powerful.

Of course, you can imagine how threatening these women were to men like Aristotle when you consider that Spartan women were

1) All physically perfect as a result of generations of eugenics and emphasis on physical education, universally considered the most beautiful in Greece.

2) Literate independent property owners.

3) Pathologically fond of nude dancing and wrestling.

4) Encouraged to be sexually aggressive and free so as to produce as many potential soldiers as possible.

5) Encouraged to be lesbians by the absence of those soldiers when they all went off to war.



And worst of all, they didn't know how to keep their damn mouths shut. Plutarch even included a collection of "Sayings of the Spartan Women," in his Moralia. I assure you there are no collections of the sayings of Athenian women.


3. They Received the Most Intense "Education" Ever, also Their Whole Society is Based Around Who Sits At Your Lunch Table


Spartan boys were raised at home until the age of seven after which they left for good and entered the agoge, or upbringing. All the boys were organized into packs under the leadership of adult Spartans, and each was taught to break all ties to his own family, beginning the first step towards becoming a Spartan Warrior, and marking his entrance into a program of training which would not be finished until the age of 30 when he emerged a full Spartan citizen. The entire educational philosophy can be summarized as "toughen up or die".

Young Spartans were put through ridiculous physical ordeals, abandoned in the elements, things like that and given minimal food rations. This intentional borderline starvation had two goals beyond keeping everyone fit: a) to accustom every boy to starvation so that he would be able to endure during times of war, and b) to starve them until they were forced to learn how to steal. The Spartans, of course, punished thievery with extreme brutality, thus providing the necessary impetus for rapid progress in the young learners. You see, while the Spartans valued martial valor above all, they trained assiduously in thieving and trickery. Boys in each pack were also encouraged to continually fight each another so that the strongest would begin to emerge. These packs formed the barracks to which the young boys would belong until the reached the age of 18, which is when they became members of the army.

At this point the Spartans started to be separated, with the strongest and most cunning selected from the rest to be destined for elite positions. Everyone at this point had to pledge a fraternity be invited to join a mess table by other warriors, who would then form his social and military life, and a single 'no' vote was enough for rejection. In the Spartans' barracks society, your lunch table was everything; while technically they were all warrior brothers who had passed through the same process, not everyone got to sit at the king's table. And if no lunch table would let you sit with them then...well, you had better hope there would be a battle soon to kill off some warriors and open the ranks...

So yes, Spartan society consists of one big Frat Rush with the politics of the Middle School cafeteria...the Fraternity life is the Greek life after all.



The weak are slowly ostracized, isolated, and eliminated...

4. Part of that Education is Getting Molested by an Older Man




At the age of 12 aspiring Spartan warriors were supposed to choose an older warrior to be their lover/mentor. Technically the older partner was known as the 'inspirer', and the younger as the 'hearer', and the older warrior was supposed to teach the younger one how to be a man. Plutarch, Xenon, and others, all claim that the the relationship was non-sexual and that consumation of the relationship could lead to severe punishments, but when you get down to it the Spartans spent most of their lives exercising in the nude, and when your whole society consists of exceptional physical specimens...

In any case this was institutionalized and the older warrior was legally responsible for the honorable conduct of his lil buddy. A senior warrior could be punished or beaten for a cowardly act committed by the younger partner.

However it must be made very clear that relative to the rest of the Greeks, who were all a bunch of flaming homosexuals with inclinations towards pederasty (including their Gods), the Spartans hardly register. Thebes had an elite force called the Sacred Band of Thebes consisting solely of couples, based on the idea that you'll fight better if the person fighting next you is your lover. And the Athenian nobility consisted almost uniformly of child-rapists.

Despite institutionalized molestation, frequent nude wrestling and the like, and plenty of sexual encounters with men, the Spartans are basically not gay by the ridiculously gay standards of ancient Greece.



Seriously.

Presumably this is because their women are all so vivacious.


5. They Were Insanely Superstitious




Sometimes when reading Greek history, one becomes so struck by the political sophistication of the ancient Greeks, that one forgets these are not rational people in any sense whatsoever. Now the Greeks were absolutely fucking retarded when it came to superstitions, omens, the favor of the God's, etc, you can read here how the fall of Athens came about because of a lunar eclipse...But among these people, the Spartans were regarded as the most superstitious.

They didn't bother showing up for the Battle of Marathon because the phase of the moon was decided to be unfavorable, and they didn't send a full contingent of men to Thermopylae because the festival of Carneia was going on. And when they were actually on campaign, all military action had to be preceded by favorable omens, often animal sacrifices. The Spartans would arrive at a battle and then refuse to enter it if the animal's intestines didn't appear precisely as they were supposed to. Again, everybody in the ancient world did these sort of things, looked for omens in the stars or in a sacrifice before crossing a river or entering a battle say, the Spartans just took it to extremes.

Then again, they were Spartans, they were probably just bullshitting everybody else, since waiting for the sacrifice to come out right covers just about any excuse.





6. They Loved Dancing

Yep. These guys.



Part of the reason why the Spartans were so persnickety about observing festivals and religious rites, is because they freaking loved to dance. Yep, in addition to being the most famous warriors in ancient Greece, the Spartans were its most famous dancers. The women had competitive dance teams and the men were famous for a war-dance known as the Pyrrhic Dance. They positively fucking loved to dance, even more than they liked getting naked and covering themselves with oil. And they really liked to get naked and cover themselves with oil. Their biggest festival of the year was the Gymnopaedia, literally the Festival of Naked Youths.



Again, you've all seen the movie 300. The Spartans only sent 300 and not a full compliment because they were too busy celebrating the festival of Carneia.

That is...they were too busy dancing.




7. They Practiced Being Stealthy Every Minute of the Day


If there was anything the Spartans cultivated even more than martial valor and cold detachment, it was the skill of being sneaky. Another thing that the Spartans were famous for across all Greece was their uncanny and unique ability to move their soldiers at night, due to the fact they practiced this skill all their lives. As mentioned, in order to survive the agoge, Spartans were forced to learn how to be competent thieves, but Spartan stealth training was a life-long pursuit.

The day's evening dinner in the mess hall, so crucially important to the structure of Spartan society, was absolutely mandatory. Nonetheless, no torches were allowed to be carried to or from the mess, so that everyone could practice slipping through darkness. Yes, the Spartans literally competed to see who could walk to dinner without being seen.

Also, until the age of 30 when he became a full citizen, a Spartan warrior was required to live in the barracks under strict military discipline. But, in militaristic Sparta, the most important thing in the world was the steady production of babies, and people who weren't making babies were often publicly shamed as a way to encourage them to get on with it. Thus we have another peculiarly Spartan paradox. If you were a Spartan under 30 and you wanted to fuck your wife, you had to sneak out of your barracks, get across town, do the deed and get back without anyone knowing. Seriously, they turned everything into this sort of competition.

Meaning they were real fucking good at sneaking around in the dark.

8. They Combed Their Hair and Played the Flute to Intimidate Their Enemies




Spartans prided themselves on their stoicism, on their detachment and indifference towards pain. From that first bath in the wine through decades of excruciating trials, everything in Spartan society was designed to cultivate in the young warrior a cold equanimity towards battle, a phenomenon something similar to Japanese samurai being Zen officianados. Part of this has to do with the nature of Greek hoplite warfare. With two armies, shields locked, crashing into each other, the outcome depends on two things, 1) morale and 2) the cohesion of the unit, on "holding the line." The Spartans were the best at this type of warfare because they engineered their society to produce the type of soldier ideal for fighting it. All aspects of a Spartan's training taught him unflappable confidence and resolve in the face of pain, fear, or death, and to trust absolutely in his comrades fighting beside him, which of course he did because he had been with them since the age of 7.

But sometimes the mere appearance of the Spartans on the battlefield was enough to send the enemy into a rout.

Seriously?



Imagine that you are some ancient Greek schmuck from some insignificant little village. In fact this is the first time you've ever left that village, and here you are standing in line with your father's old shield and a crappy spear, standing with a bunch of other dudes who have never been in a battle. Everyone around you is scared to death, literally pissing themselves in terror, because Braveheart is about to happen. And then across the way you see these motherfuckers in red capes come walking in out of nowhere in perfect formation, and then sit down and start disembowling a chicken, oblivious to the fact that the battle is supposed to be starting. You wait for them to disembowl several chickens before everything is done right. Then these assholes start combing their hair as though nothing is going on. Yes, the Spartans' pre-battle ritual was to comb their exceedingly long hair.

You see these dudes acting as though this is no different than any other day, just sitting there calmly combing their motherfucking hair, and then you remember, yes, these are the Spartans, this is just any other day for them...all they do is fight.

And then when they finally decide to move, they do so in perfect, synchronized, formation, in step to some eerie motherfucking flute that is calling out your death (it's actually called an aulos). And that's the most terrifying thing about them. While everyone else is running around the battlefield like chickens with their heads cut off, screaming and praying, and simply losing it, the Spartans are always in formation. They never run. They just walk ominously around the battlefield in perfect time to this goddamn song.

And then as they come towards you, and you see everyone else on the battlefield shrink away from them, and they just keep marching towards you, slowly, steadily, without the faintest hint of fear on their faces...

You turn and get the motherfuck outta there...

9. They Did Not Recognize Adultery and Swapped Wives


As a Spartan man, your single objective beyond dying nobly in battle, was to produce some worthwhile warrior sons. If you weren't accomplishing this than the law said you were to be publicly shamed by all the women until you started spilling your seed in one of them.

But what if, for whatever reason, you didn't have a proper Spartan wife to impregnate? Well, one of your buddies could lend you theirs to impregnate, and then in nine months you (and the Spartan Army) have some legitimate offspring. The Spartans cared about paternity in the sense that the parents needed to be legitimate Spartan citizens, but given that at the age of seven, the boys would be heading off to the barracks to be raised communally, it didn't much matter to the authorities which particular Spartan citizens were procreating, so long as they were pumping out new warriors for the agoge.

This is another aspect of Spartan society which seems to favor the women. If you are a young woman and wondering why would I want to let myself be lent out as a womb, it's because in this way, you might conceivably become the matriarch of several households. As we stated, Sparta's military nature dictated that there were a lot of wealthy widows in town. An astute Spartan noblewoman who produced healthy children could accumulate a significant amount of property and influence.

In any case, unlike in the rest of Greece, not only was adultery not a crime in Sparta, it wasn't even recognized by law or society as existing. Marriage, paternity, and legitimacy, were important in a society like Sparta, which needed to ensure that only the best were granted citizenship, but the production of a healthy, potential, warrior always trumped concerns about legitimacy.

Unsurprisingly the rest of the Greeks teased the Spartans mercilessly about being ruled by their wives, but again, the rest of the Greeks were pedophiles who treated their animals better than their women.




10. The Crypteia
















Remember how back when we were talking about how around 18 the warriors began to be separated according to skill, strength, and cunning, and had to choose a Frat to pledge? Well, the very best warriors destined for the elite positions in the army or society, were selected at this time to join the very best Frat, the Crypteia, which is basically the secret police.

You see we have yet little discussed the Helots, the Spartans' slaves who free the men to devote every minute of their day to military training and the women to devote every minute of their day to naked oiled wrestling. Each Spartan citizen could only be so awesome, because there were dozens of Helots doing all the manual labor needed to support him and his family. According to Herodotus, at the time of the Battle of Plataea in 479 B.C. there were seven helots for every Spartan citizen. This is an awful lot of slaves to have in your society even if you are the most fearsome society that has ever existed. As a result it was important that the Helots be kept suitably terrified of Spartan citizens.

Thus, every autumn, the Spartan elders would declare war upon the Helot population and Spartan citizens were allowed to kill Helots freely without legal consequences. The Crypteia, the warriors hand-picked for their potential, were sent into the countryside to murder as many Helots as they could find. This served two purposes, it gave the young recruits some valuable experience killing people and through the experience of murder and torture bound these comrades together, and it also served the political purpose of terrifying the Helots and eliminating potential troublemakers among them.

Yep, before joining the army proper, Spartan youths honed their skills by waging guerrilla warfare against their own country, sneaking around in the night murdering any slaves they happened to find.

Also, the Spartans encouraged forced the Helots to practice eugenics with their babies, to keep the weakest ones out of the population.

Then, during the autumn, the Crypteia would target all the biggest and strongest Helots to kill, both as a test of manhood for themselves, and to eliminate the most capable and potentially subversive Helots.

And in this way the Spartans methodically bred their slaves to be thoroughly average.

[Mr. Blonde]

first

[Repugnant Abomination]

I am a descendant of Spartans on my father's side.

[ninjaface]

This thread rules.

[Mr. Blonde]