Floggings were exceedingly common at Sparta. Any elder man might flog any boy. It was not etiquette for boys to complain to their parents in these cases; if they did so, they received a second thrashing. But the triumph of this system was the flogging of the “epheboi” yearly at the altar of Artemis Orthia, in substitute for human sacrifice. Entrance for the competition was quite voluntary, but competitors seem always to have been forthcoming even down to Plutarch’s days. They began by practice of some sort in the country.[57] The altar was covered with blood; if the floggers were too lenient to some “ephebos” owing to his beauty or reputation, the statue, according to the legend, performed a miracle in order to show its displeasure.[58] The competitors were often killed on the spot; but they never uttered a groan.[59] The winner was called the “altar-victor” (βωμονίκης) and an inscription still records such a victory.[60]
The girls at Sparta were also organised into agelai or “packs.”[61] They took their meals at home, but otherwise lived a thoroughly outdoor life. They had to train their bodies no less than the boys, in order that they might bear strong children, so they took part in contests of strength as well as of speed.[62] They shared in the gymnasia and in the musical training. Among their sports were wrestling, running, and swimming; they were exposed to sun and dust and toil.[63] They learned to throw the diskos and the javelin;[64] they wore only the short Doric “chiton” with split sides.[65] They went in procession at festivals like the boys; at certain festivals they danced and sang in the presence of the young men, praising the brave among them and jeering at the cowards. At the Huakinthia the maidens raced on horseback. Theokritos makes a band of 240 maidens, “all playmates together, anoint themselves like men and race beside the Eurotas.”[66] That passage also gives wool-work to Laconian maidens (which is probably untrue, being contradicted by Plato),[67] and lyre-playing, which is contradicted by a Laconian in Plutarch, who says that “such rubbish is not Laconian.” The result of all this outdoor training was great physical perfection: Lampito, the Spartan woman in Aristophanes’ Lusistrata, is greatly admired by the women from other cities for her beauty, her complexion, and her bodily condition: “she looks as though she could throttle a bull.” She ascribes it to her gymnastics and vigorous dancing.[68] The girls till they married wore no veil, and mixed freely with the young men; in fact, there was one dance where they met in modern fashion; first the youth danced some military steps, and then the maiden danced some of a suitable sort.[69] Consequently love-matches were far more possible at Sparta than elsewhere in Hellas. After marriage the women had to wear veils, and remained at home; gymnastics, dances, and races ceased.
The Spartans were intensely fond of dancing, but it must be remembered that they often called dancing what moderns would call drill. For war was almost a form of dance; they marched or charged into battle to the notes of the flute, crowned and wearing red cloaks. The march tunes were in frequent use in Sparta, no doubt at military exercises. Every day the epheboi were drawn up in ranks, one behind the other, and went through military evolutions and dancing figures alternately, while a flutist played to them and beat time with his foot.[70] This is simply musical drill. The great national festival of the Gumnopaidia was very similar. Three great battalions, consisting respectively of old men, young men, and boys, drawn up in rank and file, exhibited various movements, chiefly of a gymnastic sort, singing the songs of Thaletas and Alkman and Dionusodotos the while and indulging in impromptu jesting at one another’s expense, after the fashion of a rustic revel-chorus in Attica. Sometimes the battalions appeared one by one, and were “led out” like an army, by the Ephors.[71] On other occasions all three were drawn up in crescent formation side by side, with the boys in the middle. The festival must have closely resembled the public parades of the gymnastic clubs in Switzerland. There were posts of honour and dishonour, as in battle, cowards usually receiving the latter. But Agesilaos, the king, once received an inferior station after his victory at Corinth, and turned the insult by a jest, “Well thought of, chorus-leader: that’s the way to give honour to the post.”[72] Then there was the war-dance, imitating all the actions of battle, a sort of manual and bayonet exercise, but accompanied by much acting and by music. Every Spartan boy began to learn this as soon as he was five.[73] It was done in quick time, if we may judge by the “Pyrrhic” or war-dance foot ( ˘ ˘ ). There was also a wrestling-dance,[74] and most gymnastics were done to the accompaniment of the flute. In fact, chorus-dancing was a regular part of the education of Spartans and Cretans: the only experience of singing which most of them possessed was acquired in this way.[75] It is true that elegiacs were sung as solos before the king’s tent on campaigns, and at meals, when the victor got a particularly good slice of meat; but probably this accomplishment was confined to a few. Aristotle asserts that the Laconians did not learn songs, but claimed nevertheless to be able to distinguish good from bad.
* * * * *
Such was the Spartan system of education. To an Englishman their schools have a greater interest than those of any other ancient State. Sparta produced the only true boarding-schools of antiquity. The “packs” of the Spartan boys, like the English public schools, formed miniature States, to whose corporate interests and honour each boy learned to make his own wishes subservient. Spartan boys, too, like our own, had the smaller traits of individuality rubbed off them by the publicity and perpetual intercourse with others involved in the boarding-school system, in order that the racial characteristics might the more emerge in them. They, too, learnt endurance by hardship, and were early trained both to rule and to obey by means of the institution of prefects and fagging. But here the resemblance stops short. The Spartans, like most other nations, were not prepared to pay the price at which alone an education in responsibility can be obtained, the price which lies in the possible ruin of all the boys who are not strong enough to be a law to themselves. They very rarely left the boys to themselves without grown men to look after them. They were always interfering and supervising, instead of leaving the prefects to exercise their authority. And so, when Spartans were sent abroad to govern cities or command armies, having had no practice in responsibility, they failed shamefully and ignominiously. But this is equally true of the Athenians and of other Hellenes. The Spartans deserve all credit for their experiments with the boarding-school system.
But the system which they adopted had many faults, besides that which has already been noticed. There was no individual attention for the boys. The hardships were excessive and brutalising. While the boys’ bodies were developed and trained almost to perfection, their minds were almost entirely neglected: hence the stupidities of Spartan policy and the lack of imagination which their statesmen showed. It was impossible to over-eat or over-drink under the Spartan system, so the young Spartan had no experience in self-restraint.[76] The gymnasia and dining-clubs caused a great deal of quarrelling (which the Spartan authorities welcomed), and of immorality (which was very strictly forbidden); the Spartan gymnasia erred less, however, in this latter respect than the Athenian. In war the Spartans were only invincible so long as they were the only trained troops in Hellas; the rise of professional armies ruined them, for they could not adapt themselves to new circumstances. They produced no art and very little literature, if any. But their whole State was as much a work of art as a Doric temple, and of very much the same order, with its symmetry and regularity, its sacrifice of detail to the whole, its strength and restraint. It was also the inspiration of at least one great piece of literature, Plato’s Republic.
If courage was their sole object, as perhaps it was, they succeeded in obtaining it. The coward was a rare, and a most unhappy bird at Sparta. Mothers on several occasions killed sons who returned home from a campaign disgraced. “No one would mess with a coward, or consort with him. When rival teams were chosen for the game of ball, he was omitted. In dances he received the post of dishonour. He was avoided in the streets. No one would sit next to him. He could not find a husband for his daughters or a wife for himself,” and was punished for these offences. “He was beaten if he imitated his betters in any way.”[77] If the Hellenes were a nation of children, as the old Egyptian called them, the Spartans were at least a manly sort of schoolboy. They deified the schoolboy virtues, pluck and endurance. If we wish to see how far their education, in its best days, enabled them to prove true to their ideals, let us consider those 300 at Thermopylae waiting, with jests on their lips, for the onset of Oriental myriads, and remember that finest of all epitaphs, of which English can give no rendering, written upon their memorial in the pass in honour of their obedience unto death—
Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
* * * * *