Hoplite Heresies: Accounting for the Spartans I/II

This may be the post that actually earns the title of "heresy".  I expect it to be somewhat controversial among the small handful of people who actually read any of this, so please feel free to leave feedback.  In some ways, Sparta is to ancient Greek history what WWII is to modern history - everyone who knows anything about it feels like a qualified expert.  So, I expect to ruffle some feathers merely by challenging the particular conception of the society that is familiar to many who know nothing else about the ancient Mediterannean.  The argument I will be making (briefly) is that the traditional view of Spartan society does not hold up to serious analysis from the standpoint of Historical Materialism.  Sparta was not subject to any different material or class forces than other Greek poleis.  It was not a unique historical entity that managed to stand apart from the core forces driving the rest of classical Greek slave society, while still taking a major role in shaping that world - such a conception cannot explain a thing about the role played by Sparta in the larger trajectory of the Hellenic world.  By relying on some recent scholarship, as well as the Marxist method of historical inquiry, we can demystify Sparta. 

If the average American can name two Greek city-states, they are most likely Athens and Sparta.  The two names have been etched onto the historical memory of the ages.  In popular culture, many know of Sparta and its soldiers from the recent movie "300" or even the many high school and college mascots that bear the name "Spartan".  But this is a rather strange phenomenon when one considers that Sparta has classically been considered an outlier among the Greek city-states; there was something different about the place and its mysterious regimented society.  I have written a few posts now on Greek warfare in which I have mentioned the state and its militant inhabitants many times, but despite their reputation for military excellence, the posts have not focused on them.  It is worthwhile to take a closer look at this city that still looms so large over history. 

In an attempt to keep my posts short, I will present this in two parts.  Anyone interested in my sources need only ask.

Land Ownership and the Land Owning Class

In order to understand anything about the Spartan military record, it is necessary to start with an examination of the social base.  I doubt there is anyone reading this who does not have at least some rudimentary knowledge of the Spartan agoge, or the strict military barracks system that served as both a system of public education and military training.  The tales of taking boys away from their homes, who received education (among other things) from older male lovers, and eating blood soup have remained in steady rotation in high school and college history courses.  So, there would be little point in dwelling on these facts themselves; if one is interested, they can find accounts of the agoge in numerous books and articles.  We are interested in the machinery that made the place what it was - the classes of Sparta and the social and productive relations that bound them.

Was Sparta an extreme outlier in history?  In order to attempt an answer, we will first look at the economic base of Sparta, which is supposed to be so radically different than other Greek poleis.  The productive property in Greece was primarily agricultural land, and the private ownership of this land, worked by slaves, made up the base upon which the large landowners - the ruling class of the Greek world - maintianed their social position of power.  This power extended over the class of small landowners (free peasants), who were engaged in class struggle with their superiors throughout antiquity.  The traditional view, which bases itself largely on the writings of the ancient Roman historians Plutarch and Polybius, holds that the land was equally distributed among Spartiates (full Spartan citizens) by the state.  Some who hold the traditional analysis also claim that the land was owned by the state, and the Spartiate acted as a steward.  This leaves us with an image of a radically egalitarian, even communistic, state with a strong bureaucratic government.  Yet, there are some major problems with this view.

The first issue is that the traditional view is based on evidence from historians writing centuries after the classical Greek period - they knew only what they heard or read in earlier writings.  Sparta traced many of its institutions back to the reforms of a king Lycurgus, who may or may not have been a real person.  Some of the institutions credited to his genius were the agoge, the oligarchic form of government, and the requirement of all Spartan males to eat in communal mess halls.  Most lauded among his reforms was a radical redistribution of land, said to have given each citizen an equal part.  The Spartans of the 5th and 4th centuries spoke of the reforms as a thing of the distant past, and it is likely that the Spartans of later centuries told the same tales about the 5th century.  For this phenomenon, there is some evidence from Athenian orators of the 4th century who spoke of how the "ancients" practiced the arts of war in a way more honorable and fitting of gentlemen - they were only speaking of the Athenians of the 5th century!

Furthermore, the evidence of equal or state owned land from classical Greek historians is slim.  Xenophon, an Athenian aristocrat most known for taking part in the expedition of the 10,000 Greek mercenaries into Persia in 401, was also a great admirer of Spartan society, and wrote a considerable amount about it.  It is noteworthy that in his work Polity of the Lakedaemonians, Xenophon does not mention land ownership a single time.  The work was meant, after all, to draw attention to the Lycurgan reforms that made Spartan social practices different than those of other Greek states.  His view was also that of an insider, not merely an Athenian visitor; he lived in Sparta for years and educated his sons along side those of the Spartiates.  One would assume that such an admirer would want to draw special attention to a system that effectively combats one of the great historical forces throughout the classical period: scarcity and concentration of arable land. 

There are other problems besides the trustworthiness of the historians.  One of these is that there is no evidence of the kind of state bureaucracy necessary for the level of control and record keeping necessary to doll out land and slaves (Hodkinson, 2000).  For instance, the Athens employed 700 magistrates throughout the Aegean and Asia Minor to administer its empire; when Sparta found itself at the head of a large land and overseas empire after the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, it left administration in the hands of a small number of regional governors who wielded a great deal of personal authority.  The empire quickly fell apart (see Xenophon's Hellenika).  This is hardly the picture of a well-oiled bureaucratic machine.

Secondly, and even more damning, is that the traditional model cannot account for the 5th century decline in the Spartiate population (Cartledge, 2009).  If land were doled out by the state and children were garaunteed economic security through such a program of land tenure, then what could explain such a demographic change?  Evidence from Thucydides and Xenophon shows great military reform during the 5th and 4th centuries (more on this in part II) in which non-citizens, mercenaries, and even enfranchized helots found their way into the phalanx alongside full Spartans - this is evidence of considerable social changes.  If there were enough trained citizens to fill the ranks, these reforms would hardly have been considered. 

It seems, rather, that freedom to buy and sell land, a right granted to citizens, resulted in a concentration of property (Hodkinson, 84).  The citizen had certain property requirements in order to retain his citizenship: he had to provide a certain amount of grain and produce to his communal dining mess.  If he were not able to provide his share, he could lose his rights to citizenship.  In fact, Xenophon famously wrote of a conspiracy by what  appears to be a group of former citizens or the children of former citizens to overthrow the Spartan state; of the Spartiates, the head conspirator said that they wished to "eat them raw".  Evidence of such vicious class conflict between large and small landowners is consistent with the class conflict that took place in other Greek poleis. 

Despite the image of the poor, austere Sparta, the Spartiate landowning class was likely very wealthy among the property owning classes of other Greek states.  Unlike Attica (the region dominated by Athens), with its poor and scarce farmland, Sparta ruled over a large dominion of very fertile land.  In fact, the soil likely allowed for two harvests a year.  In light of this, it is easy to understand how the Spartiates would gain great wealth at the expense of Helot labor, and how fierce struggle over land developed.  More on the social effects of this will be discussed in part II.

Another familiar aspect of Spartan society is the above-mentioned Helots, and they are worth considering in some detail.  The population known to us as helots would have called themselves (not too loudly) Messenians - and indeed they were; Sparta had conquered the region of Messenia, known for its fertile land in the late 8th century and subjugated the entire population.  They are commonly referred to as slaves in many history texts, but this label requires some qualification.  The institution of slavery existed in all Greek states, and their economies were largely driven by the employment of slave labor; some of the larger trading cities, such as Athens and Corinth, had slave populations that greatly outnumbered that of citizens. So, there is nothing out of the ordinary in slavery.  Slaves were the personal property of their owners, and productive property - "tools that speak".  There has been a great deal of disagreement regarding the nature of the Helots.  The famous "Marxist" historian de ste Croix considered them to be "state serfs", and others of a more traditional stripe have tended to see them as a type of mass of slaves owned by the state.

The ancient sources are not totally clear on the nature of the Helots.  A reason for the long-held belief that they were somehow property of the state lies, perhaps in Thucydides' and Xenophon's description of the state intervening in their lives and use during the Peloponnesian and Theban wars.  They were subject to use by the state without compensation to their masters, and numbers of them were granted freedom in exchange for military service during both conflicts (Hellenika and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War).  It should be noted that there was precedent for this in Athens, and no one would accuse the Athenian state of collective ownership over its slave population.

In light of the sale and concentration of landed property in Sparta, it would be better to assume that the Helots were the personal property of Spartiates, but subject to state intervention under the law (Hodkinson, 115).  Overall, in review of recent scholarship and ancient sources, and the system of property relations in Sparta is fairly unremarkable in relation to the economic bases of other Greek states.  My conclusions, as well as some further examination of the military and social relations, will be further examined in the next section!