Persian Fire (17 page)
At the foot of the cliff on which the tomb of Helen stood flowed the swift and muddy currents of the Eurotas. Follow the gently winding course of the river northwards, and a traveller would soon see, on the far bank, what looked like a huddle of straggling villages. There was little in the provincial appearance of Sparta to hint at the awe with which her citizens were regarded. 'Suppose', as the Athenian Thucydides would one day put it, 'that the city were abandoned, so that only her temples and the layout of her buildings remained — surely, as time passed, future generations would find it increasingly hard to believe that the people who once lived there had ever been powerful at all.'
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This was of little concern to the Spartans themselves. A people steeled by the virtues of restraint and fortitude could have only contempt for grandiose architecture. Let the cowards of other states raise up walls around their cities. The Spartans had no need of masonry when they had their spears and burnished shields. Why build pompous monuments from wasteful marble when the truest mark of a man was that he lead his life as though in a military camp? Only temples — an intrusion of the unearthly and the eerie within the otherwise barracks-like spareness of the city — rose distinct above the common run of buildings. On these, at least, the Spartans could lavish their plundered riches. In the great shrine on the acropolis, a low-lying hillock which served as the citadel of the town, all the interior was faced with rectangular plaques of solid bronze. In another temple, just north of Sparta, a statue of Apollo, the archer-god of prophecy, stood sheathed in the purest gold.
Most haunting of all Lacedaemon's temples, however, was the shrine dedicated to Apollo's sister, the virgin huntress Artemis, 'mistress of wild beasts'.
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Continuing north along the Eurotas past the centre of the city, a traveller would soon pass beyond open exercise grounds into a marshy hollow, where stood a black and ancient idol of the goddess. The Spartans, in the first flush of their dominance over the rest of the Peloponnese, in around 560
bc
, had built there a splendid temple all of stone; and yet, despite the gleam of its new masonry, the site retained an air of menace. It was not merely that frogs continued to croak from among the rushes that surrounded it, nor that a marsh-haze might sometimes rise ghost-like from the river: the temple itself was a place to provoke goosebumps. Not all its fittings were recent. Hung upon the fresh stonework were adornments preserved from a much older shrine, faces of terracotta, some of them idealised portraits of beardless youths or grizzled soldiers, but others grotesque and twisted monstrosities, their stares cretinous, their mouths wide open in animal cries of savagery or pain.
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These were the stuff of Spartan nightmares: rare was the citizen whose imaginings they would not have haunted, for the temple of Artemis, from his childhood through to his old age, was where he came to mark the staging-posts of his life. Always present, blank-eyed yet watching him, were the masks. The faces of heroes to inspire him; and the grimaces of idiots, of gorgons, of deformed and toothless hags to remind him of the ugliness of failure. To fail was to be an outcast: lost beyond the bounds of the city, where only the shameful, the twisted and the bestial were to be found. All Spartans had to live with the implications of this truth. All had to live by the stern code that it forged.
For everywhere, as citizens, they were tracked and supervised. Each generation, like a gaoler, kept its watch upon the next. The Spartans, who knew what it was to admire 'choirs of boys and girls, and dance, and festivity',
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nevertheless mistrusted the exuberance of youth. Lycurgus, wolf-worker that he was, had dreaded where the energies of unchecked cubs might lead. Only with the whip, he had taught his countrymen, could young predators be adequately trained. As the Spartans well knew from the grim example of their own early history, the savagery of instincts and impulses slipped off the leash might all too easily tear a state apart. Having passed through one period of revolution, they had no wish to endure another. No leeway could be given to the natural restlessness and appetites of youth. Only discipline, unyielding discipline, could possibly serve to check them. If there had to be change in Sparta, whether of a failing custom or of a law that had had its day, then it was for the elderly to moot and pass the needed reform.
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Why should any measure be accepted otherwise? After all, the elders of Sparta were living proof of what tradition could achieve: that it was capable of forging a master-race of heroes.
So it was that Sparta, for all her fearsome reputation, was also widely lauded as the home of perfect manners. Only there, of all the cities in Greece, would a young man habitually step aside to make way for his senior; for he was, with such a gesture of respect, simultaneously paying honour to the laws and customs of his people. To such an extreme was this notion carried that the Spartans, appalled by the idea of a stripling unable to rise in the presence of his elders, frowned upon public lavatories. 'The spears of young men' may have flourished in the city, but there was no doubting that 'it is the old who have the power there'.
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Even the titular heads of state — for the Spartans, peculiar in all things, had not one but two kings — were obliged to respect their authority. Push too hard against the limits of what was constitutional, and they would quickly find themselves arraigned by their city's supreme court, a legislative body that, aside from the two kings themselves, consisted entirely of gerontocrats aged over sixty. The Spartans duly called this intimidating body the Gerousia — a name which, like the Romans' Senate, had the literal meaning of a council of elders. Since, aside from its role as the guardian of the constitution, it also had the right to forestall all motions put before it, and to present the fruits of its own deliberations as effective
faits accomplis
, the Gerousia might easily exert a stranglehold over politics in Sparta. Election to it was not only the supreme honour that a citizen could attain, but was for life. 'No wonder that this, of all human prizes, should be the most zealously contested.' Even non-Spartans might concede as much: 'Yes, athletic competitions are honourable too, but they are merely tests of physical prowess. Election to the Gerousia is the ultimate proof of a noble spirit.'
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This was not a nook in Sparta, not a cranny, but bony fingers would intrude there. Even the newest-born baby was subjected to the prod-dings of old men. Should an infant be judged too sickly or deformed to make a future contribution to the city, then the elders would order its immediate termination. Since the investment required from the state to raise a citizen was considerable, this was regarded by most Spartans as only proper. Indeed, a mother might well play the eugeni-cist herself, washing her baby in wine, which, as everyone knew, was the surest test for epilepsy. What true Spartan parent, after all, would wish to raise a son who might suddenly collapse in a fit? Better an early bereavement than the risk of such disgrace. A cleft beside the road which wound over the mountains to Messenia, the
Apothetae
, or 'Dumping Ground', provided the setting for the infanticide. There, where they might no longer shame the city that had bred them, the weak and deformed would be slung into the depths of the chasm, condemned eternally to its tenebrous oblivion. This was no abandonment, as was conventionally practised by other peoples, but a grim and formal rite of execution. There was no hope of deliverance — such as was said to have spared the infant Cyrus - for the unwanted Spartan child. He had to die, and be seen to die,
pour encourager les autres.
And no doubt, for those permitted to live, the tracery of tiny bones which littered the depths of the
Apothetae
must have served to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Spartan children could not help but grow up proudly conscious of themselves as an elite, chosen as such at birth; and yet the state, in return for its patronage, imposed stern and fearsome obligations. Lycurgus, it was said, rather than commit his reform programme to writing, had preferred to inscribe it upon the characters and bodies of those who were to live by it, so that they might serve one another as walking constitutions. Such a process of social engineering was only practicable, of course, if begun in the cradle. Babies, soft and helpless, had to be toughened and fashioned into Spartans. No swaddling for them. No cosseting of toddlers, either, no indulging of their whims. 'When they were given food, they were to eat it, and not be picky; night-fears and clinginess were to be firmly stamped on; tantrums and whining too.'
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Unsurprisingly, Spartan nannies were widely admired for their brisk, no-nonsense approach. Yet, strict as they were, even they were put in the shade by the city's faculty of instructors. This had a role quite without precedent elsewhere in Greece, or indeed beyond. For the Spartans, in their concern to mould the perfect citizen, had developed a truly bizarre and radical notion: the world's first universal, state-run education system.
Why — it even provided for girls! If, as seems probable, baby boys were likelier to be condemned to the
Apothetae
than their sisters, then this implied no lack of concern among the Spartans for the vigour of their female stock. Healthy mothers made for a healthy warrior-race. Just as boys were trained for warfare, so girls had to be reared for their future as breeders. The result — to foreign eyes, at any rate — was an inversion of just about every accepted norm. In Sparta, girls were fed at the expense of their brothers. To the bemusement of other Greeks, they were also taught to read, and to express themselves not modestly, as was becoming for women, but in an aggressively sententious manner, so that they might better instruct their own children in what it meant to be a Spartan. They exercised in public: running, throwing the javelin, even wrestling. When they danced, they would do so with such abandon that they might slap their heels against the bare skin of their buttocks. For, yes — and here the disbelief of foreigners would conventionally reach boiling point -it was the habit of Spartan girls, as they trained, to sport only the skimpiest of tunics, slit revealingly up the thighs. Sometimes — horror of horrors! — they might even disport themselves in the nude.
Visions of female flesh, oiled and tanned, glistened in the imaginings of many a Sparta-watcher. The Spartans themselves, sensitive to the mockery that labelled their daughters 'thigh-flashers',
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would retort sternly 'that there was nothing shameful about female nudity, nothing immoral in the slightest'. In fact, 'since it encouraged a sense of sobriety, and a passion for physical fitness,'
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precisely the opposite. Yet, paramount though the requirements of Sparta's eugenic programme undoubtedly were, an aura of the erotic still clung to the training grounds nevertheless. The fertility of a future mother was best gauged, a Spartan might argue, by the glowing of her skin and the perfection of her breasts. Physical beauty — the long blond hair and elegant ankles for which Spartan girls were celebrated — provided the readiest measure by which moral beauty too could be judged. An ugly daughter, inevitably, would cause her parents alarm and distress. Desperate measures might have to be taken. So shockingly plain had one baby been, it was said, that her nurse, clutching at straws, had finally taken her to Helen's tomb. There, outside the sanctuary, a mysterious woman had appeared and stroked the young girl's hair. The baby, this apparition had prophesied, 'would grow up the loveliest woman in Lacedaemon'. And so it had come to pass: the girl had become a celebrated beauty and ended up the wife of a Spartan king. Evidently, the spirit of Helen still sometimes walked her native land.
Such a story revealed an important truth about the Spartan cast of mind. Egalitarian though the Lycurgan ideal was, it did not foster any notions of equality. The sense of frantic competition that made women wish to outshine their peers in beauty gnawed at everyone inthe city. "What is the best kind of government?' a Spartan king was once asked. Back came his answer, unhesitatingly: 'The one in which the largest number of citizens are able to strive with each other in virtue, without threatening the state with anarchy.'
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This was why the education system, in a seeming paradox, worked both to stamp a single mould on those who passed through it, and yet to identify and fast-track an elite. Evident in the upbringing of girls, it was even more so in the training of their brothers. The Spartan who best submitted to it was the Spartan who most excelled.
For it was the goal of instructors not merely to crush a boy's individuality, but to push him to startling extremes of endurance, discipline and impassivity, so that he might prove himself, supremely, as a being reforged of iron. When, at the age of seven, a young Spartan left his home to live communally with other boys, it was more than his sense of family that was being fractured and reset: the very notion that he possessed a private identity was, from that moment on, to be placed under continuous assault. Spartans termed his training the
'agoge,
a word more conventionally applied to the raising of cattle. His supervisor was a
'paidonomos —
literally, a 'herder of boys'. Denied adequate rations, the young Spartan would be encouraged to forage from the farms of neighbouring Lacedaemonians, stalking and stealing like a fox, refining his talent for stealth. Whether in the heat of summer or in the cold of winter, he would wear one style of tunic, identical to that worn by his fellows, and nothing else, not even shoes. Strict limits on his conversation would be set, to foster the terse style of speech known all over Greece as 'Laconic'. Yet, even as a young Spartan submitted to these ferocious and uniform disciplines, he was continuously being studied, compared and ranked: 'As the boys exercised, they would always be spurred on to wrestle and contend with one another, so that the elders could then better judge their characters, their courage, and how well they were likely to perform when the time came for them, finally, to take their place in the line of battle.'
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Even girls might get in on the act: the boys would routinely be ordered to strip before them, to be subjected to either praise or mocking giggles. A true Spartan never had anything to hide.