RE-AIR: Very Extravagant Rich People, Ancient Sparta & The Spartan Mirage (Part Two)
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It occurred to me one day that Sparta, though among the most thinly populated of states, was evidently the most powerful and most celebrated city in Greece, and I fell to wondering how this could have happened. But when I considered the institutions of the Spartans, I wondered no longer. I feel

Oh, hi, hello, and welcome once again to this special series on ancient Sparta. One of the most famous parts of ancient Greece, the most famous of ancient cultures and practices, the one we all think about when imagining ancient warfare, the one with so, so many misconceptions in the modern world. Oh, Sparta.

That quote at the top was from our man Xenophon, one of the best sources for ancient Sparta, even if he wasn't Spartan himself.

Sparta is one of those places that I personally didn't think too much about, mostly because I'm more concerned with mythology than anything else. And while there are a few very important mythological figures that were Spartan, the region itself doesn't come into play all that much, or at least as much as one might expect. Like, sure, Helen and Menelaus are from Sparta and the Diaspora, and we have their stories. But in those stories, we don't get much in the way of storylines.

It's Spartan mythology. It's just a place like any other. Meanwhile, when you're in the history, and particularly if you're a non-expert coming to the history and learning via, say, pop culture or popular history, then you're going to get this very different view of Sparta.

And one of the things that comes across most when you're coming across Sparta in the world today is this idea that they were all about their military. That Leonidas and the 300 at Thermopylae was an example of how their society functioned broadly. Like it's the perfect way of understanding most things about them. Add to that the things that people quote-unquote learn from Zack Snyder's or Frank Miller's, for that matter, their 300, and you've got even more of this...

oddness on your hands. And don't get me wrong, much of 300 does come from ancient sources, Herodotus and Plutarch, but that doesn't necessarily make it a great indication of actual ancient Sparta.

And while the primary thing you get from that movie or graphic novel or generally understandings that are kind of based in that, which is more widespread than you think, like I think a lot of people are going to be laughing like, oh, 300, you take your history from that. I don't. But it has become like this cultural emblem, at least in North America, of like what Sparta was.

This militaristic nature of Sparta ties in with the Agogi, their training process, and so much more. And so through all of this, you get this pretty obvious idea that Sparta was just all about military or all about training and fighting, all about honor, all about defending their homeland. And that just isn't particularly true.

We're going to talk so much more about the actual military practices of Sparta, particularly during the classical period and the archaic periods, i.e. the time during and around the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars and those 300 at Thermopylae.

But that's coming in a conversation episode because you all just know I could not do that topic justice myself. I simply do not care enough about ancient warfare. Or at least I didn't before I spoke with upcoming guest, Dr. Ruel Canonendijk, about this.

And honestly, like if I was ever going to be convinced to be interested in ancient warfare, it was through this conversation because it was so fun. I learned so much. I just can't wait for all to hear it. But that's for Friday. Today, we're going to talk about everything else Sparta had going for it. All those ways that made it weird. Yeah, I'm not letting that term go. It just fits them far too well. They were exactly that.

Weird in so many ways and how those things those ways contributed to what's known about Sparta today is fascinating. A reminder that the purpose of this series is not only to give you a generally good overview of Spartan history culture myth but also to break down certain ideas about the ancient city-state.

It is inherently bad to buy into the idea that they were all about war and honor and the like, but what it has done is become a kind of rallying cry for the alt-right, their messaging, and general white supremacy, so it's even worse than you think. Poor Sparta has become a kind of icon for that realm of humanity, and even words spoken, or rather written, by Leonidas are used today for those purposes.

And that's why I'm here. Because isn't it always why I'm here? To claw back ancient Greece from the darker parts of humanity through educating all of you wonderful nerds on the truth and history of these people and their world? Hey, because the ancient world is seriously fun, particularly when you know the truth of it and not the stuff that Western supremacists want you to know. This is episode 195. Very extravagant rich people.

Ancient Sparta and the Spartan Mirage. Before we get too deep into this episode on the culture of ancient Sparta, let's once again look at what exactly the so-called Spartan Mirage is. Because it's the basis for this series. So what on Gaia's earth was it? The Spartan Mirage is a both ancient and modern concept. Phenomena, even.

Broadly, it's the idea that so much of what we think we know about ancient Sparta is based in a number of misleading factors. Things like what the ancient Spartans wanted the other Greeks to believe about them, what they wanted outsiders to see, and then what those outsiders saw, and what we now understand to be broadly misleading.

Ancient writers who were either taken in by Sparta's intentional wiles or determined things on their own, things that weren't necessarily true about this ancient city. Like exaggerations and false ideas about what they were all about, what their priorities were. We can thank the Spartan mirage for this idea that Sparta was a militaristic society at all, that they were better than everyone else at warfare.

It also alludes to more modern notions of Sparta, some of the same ideas, particularly around the military and warfare, but from a modern standpoint. And it all comes back to the same basic problem. Most of what we know about Sparta didn't come from Sparta, but from its neighbors and even its enemies. And all of those things were influenced not only by what those people saw from the outside, but what Sparta wanted them to see.

And so what does that say about the information that we now have and how much can we or should we believe? And does that mean that today's episode is definitely 100% accurate when it comes to the very real ancient Sparta?

No, because again, we don't know everything. But since recognizing the existence of the Spartan Mirage, historians have become way better prepared to look at the evidence and sourcing that we do have and consider what may or may not be part of this mirage.

Regardless, it's all fucking fascinating because how cool is it to be an ancient city that's so intentionally mysterious that 2,500 years later, no one really has any idea what was going on. I mean, we have a good idea, but still, so much mystery.

Last week we were introduced to the long and storied history of our dear Spartan friends, those mysteriously weird people in the south of the Peloponnese, tucked away in that Eurotas Valley. We looked at the basics of their history, Bronze Age beginnings, the half-mythical, half-historical establishment of specific laws that would begin their ongoing quest to be the weirdest of all the Greeks...

We looked at the basic idea of helots, the population they enslaved so that the everyday Spartan not only didn't have to work, but legally couldn't in order to remain an official citizen. A Spartiet. I mentioned it briefly, but we're going to talk more about it. But you can imagine how that could go downhill fast. These like severe limitations on how to be an official Spartan. And it did go downhill.

The Spartans were always worried that their helot population would rise up in a rebellion. They never wanted to be away from Laconia for long because there were so many helots, like they could do some real damage. And so their own population was so specific, so limited, that it had a very, very tough time sustaining itself and remaining large enough to enforce those laws and to keep the helots in line among literally everything else it takes to run a successful civilization.

But what I hope stuck from last week is that learning about the Spartans is a really difficult task, and it comes back to that mirage. They were an enigma, even in the ancient world. The fascination that we feel for them today in modernity is very much present in antiquity as well. None of it is new. The Spartans were bizarre people, and I think that that is what makes them so intriguing.

They were the goth kids that no one fully understood and yet everyone was still endlessly intrigued by them. The usual themes we would expect to see from ancient Greek polis like Athens, Corinth, or Thebes are not as prevalent in Sparta. In fact, Sparta at first glance appears almost to be the opposite of what we would expect from a Greek polis. And one of the most striking differences is how they handled rulership.

Pretty sure I've drilled that into your heads quite a bit, like how the Greeks saw certain types of kings in their history. Like for the most part, they weren't big on kings. So much so that one of their words for kings, tyrannos, literally goes on to mean tyrant.

Of course, much of those ideas come from Athens, where they had had the most trouble with kings and where they'd attempted their own version of democracy for a time. But when other ancient Greek city-states were avoiding kings, Athens with its democracy and Thebes with its... I'm going to call it... I'm going to forget the political structure, but it came up in that fascinating conversation I had with Michael Furman at the end of the last year, where they... No, they weren't a republic.

Guys, we're not going to try. Regardless, when so many other major polis were looking at options for rulership that were not kings, Sparta just continued on as they always had. And for a very, very, very long time, Sparta actually had two kings. Plural. Multiple kings co-ruling based on this original mythology of their people. And they were happy with their kings.

And that isn't to say that they only had kings and were super different from the rest of the Greeks. Like they weren't. They had other similar political structures that I won't try to fully explain because I'm simply not a historian. But the interesting bit is the two kings that were at the top. That's where they were entirely unique.

But also, like I mentioned, it's hard to dig out truth about Sparta. The Spartan mirage has plagued us all, and we are reliant on outsiders' perspectives for what typical life looked like for an average Spartan. But that's okay. Because again, like I said, we are aware of this bias now, and that means that we are packed and ready to venture forth and dig through our sources to find the shiny, shiny gem of truth that we all want.

The piece of Spartan history that I most want to talk about and that today's episode is based around is their culture. What made up their culture? What made it unique amongst the other Greeks? And how is it actually very, very different from what those of us who learn about Sparta from primarily pop culture and popular history might think?

First, though, what are we talking about when we talk about culture? It's sort of a weird concept to define, kind of like, I mean, you just know it when you see it. But in this case, we're talking about what we know about daily life, practices, habits, beliefs, and particularly where those things differed from the rest of the ancient Greek people. Like, what is it about Spartans and their lived experiences that made them Spartan?

To put it the most simply, what were the things that made them Spartan with a capital S? Lacedaemonians, descendants of Tyndareus himself, children of Helen, Leonidas' brethren. You get the idea, I was just having fun there.

But of course, culture is not stereotypes, and often that's what we have for Sparta, because of that damn mirage. But actual culture isn't shown through another people's views or misconceptions or ideas about what makes one Spartan. Fear not, though. We will get into those misconceptions, because they are many and they are juicy. Hence why they remain the main ideas that we have about Sparta today.

Just like Canada isn't covered in snow year-round and we don't all speak French, love winter, and hang out with polar bears, Sparta wasn't obsessed with war and did not single-handedly save the Greek world from a Persian invasion. Those, my friends, are stereotypes. ♪

So as we've already talked about in detail, sourcing for Sparta is difficult because of this lack of written record by actual Spartan people. The people who are writing and talking about them from the outside are what we have left. It was an outsider's perspective on their life. But thankfully, not all sources are created equal and some are actually pretty great. Enter Xenophon, our main source for Spartan culture.

Yes, Xenophon was an Athenian, but he had some really interesting ties to Sparta and is generally considered to be the most reliable and unbiased source. Plus, with a name like Xenophon, you just know I'm going to talk about him as much as I can. I'll even tell you that technically it should be pronounced more like Xenophon, but I won't say that because it's weird on my English tongue as much as I do really like it.

During the early 4th century, Xenophon served with some Spartan armies in Anatolia, modern Turkey. And through this experience, he gained so much respect for the Spartans that he served under. And then later, he was exiled from Athens because that's what Athenians like to do. And he actually went on to live in the Peloponnese and continued to have Spartan connections for most of his life. And best of all, he wrote a lot of shit down. Thank you, Xenophon.

supposedly he actually even had his sons educated in sparta which really suggests how he felt about the spartans but we can't forget that he is still an athenian and an athenian who like other young aristocratic men in the late 5th century was connected with socrates which is interesting he has a bias folks and we will not forget that moving forward but he is still our absolute best bet because basically he liked the spartans and therefore was not judging everything that they did

Now, obviously, one of the big elephants in the room when it comes to Sparta is not just that during the city-state's height of importance, the Greeks did not know what elephants were. No. It's the big question of how did they treat their women? Was that a half-decent joke, by the way? No? Okay. I'm going to try to do better. I liked it. This is my podcast and I'm me. So I'm obviously seriously interested, though, in how Spartans treated women.

You might be tempted to say, or possibly have heard others say, that Spartan women had power and freedom, even maybe equality. It seems to me that that's a general idea that floats around. That the Spartan world possessed some kind of more modern feminist viewpoint towards women, and unfortunately I would like to just tap the brakes on that real fast. They have a reputation for being better for women, better than the rest of the Greek city-states, and certainly better than Athens. And that's, like, true?

It's definitely true, broadly. But I don't want you all to believe that this was some kind of feminist utopia or that women were equal or even close to that. That is not a thing now, let alone then. Gods, this is still the ancient Greek world. Like, women are not people in the way that men are people at this time.

Just because Sparta's viewpoint towards women is like slightly less restrictive than the other city states does not mean that they were a feminist utopia. It's like, oh, thank you for bestowing upon me the marginal humanity and not seeing me entirely and completely as property. You only see me mostly as property, mainly as a baby maker.

Like, no, they were slightly less shitty to women, but still shitty. I'm going on too long. I'm sorry. We're not going to sing too much praise for a group of people not being as shitty as another, though. All to say, yes, women were absolutely treated differently and marginally better in Spartan society. So let's talk about it. But also there will be an entire episode on the details of how women lived in Sparta. This is more for an introduction.

So what was expected or normal for women of Sparta compared to the other cities of the Greek world? What we know of women in the Greek world, again, though, is pretty centralized around Athens, where most of our sourcing on this issue comes from. And things certainly could have been better slash different elsewhere. So grain of salt, I'm mostly talking about Athens in this comparison. And in Athens, there was a hyper focus on their purity and their value in society being tied to such purity. And of course, they were property. They were property of their fathers and then of their husbands.

A woman in Athens could achieve purity by staying inside, by being invisible, getting married young, and quickly having as many babies as possible. Fun times. She would weave and do all her domestic tasks quietly in the hymenikon, the women's apartments of the home. But in Sparta, life was a little bit different. Now remember when we spoke about helots last week? You know, the entire population of enslaved people, thousands and thousands and thousands of enslaved people?

A lot of the freedoms that the Spartan women get comparatively are because of the enslavement of the helots. So again, not singing a lot of real praise here. Because the helots could do all the housework, all the weaving, all the domestic tasks that we generally see as being the responsibility of Greek women in other city-states. Once again, that part of Sparta that makes them so odd, so weird, comes into play. This horrible enslavement. I just, sometimes I can say it.

But this left women with so much time to just like exist and do what they wanted to do. And what did they do? Well, everything they did had to do with raising and ensuring that girls would become excellent mothers to little Spartan babies in the future and that they would have lots of Spartan boys. So one of the ways they did this was exercise. Yeah, that's right. Spartan women exercised. And what's more, they exercised outside where anyone could see them.

Horror. If you know anything about the standard of how the ancient Greeks exercised, you might know that they invented the Olympics, after all, and they loved to wrestle in many forms. But you might also be familiar with what they wore during their exercising, which was nothing at all. How freeing and non-restrictive and not supportive in the slightest. In Sparta, it seems like women could have exercised in the nude or at least with very little clothing, like maybe Cassandra style, A.C. Odyssey, you know.

They could have worn maybe a tunic even. They maybe revealed their thighs because they did have a nickname of thigh flashers. Because fun fact, in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Lampito is described as doing an exercise where one kicks their behind with their heel, throws their leg back.

And I mean, Lampito is very much an Athenian stereotype of a Spartan woman and like in a comedy, no less. But all the same, it gives us a bit of confirmation that like at least exercising was a thing that Spartan women were understood as doing. The Athenian Aristophanes might have at least he might have just leaned into the stereotype, but it was grounded in reality, which is interesting.

Now you might be wondering why this is something that happened only in Sparta. Like why did they treat their women differently? Why were they allowed to do a little bit more? So here again, I will remind you once again, all of the issues that Sparta faced constantly throughout their history, their problem of legitimate citizens, Sparta's official body, Spartiates being official citizens of Sparta versus there are also Perioikoi who were people who lived in the region, but were not official Spartiates and Spartan women,

Were Spartan only to the degree of passing that title down to their children? We see this in antiquity in other places as well. Like you can think of Pericles' citizenship law that the role women played in society directly responded to the status that their future children would hold and little else.

So we don't see women partaking in like civic life in the way that men do. They certainly aren't official citizens in that respect. But there is a distinction between Spartan women and non-Spartan women. It's, yeah, it's confusing. Their population of citizens was in constant decline, though. And their way of fighting this decline was to really emphasize the making of babies.

This was the job of Spartan women, making Spartan babies. And because they were always so threatened by their population, it was a supremely important job. So while it was the same job as Athenian women, they were considered more important in Sparta, I guess? Ugh.

This emphasis on physical exercise, too, has backing in the Lycurgus myth. Now, Lycurgus, as I mentioned last week, is this mythical lawmaker, kind of founder of what Sparta became. He's semi-historical, semi-mythical. Most of what we know about him was written by Plutarch, like, hundreds and hundreds of years later. But

Yet Xenophon does say that Lycurgus, quote,

So, yeah. I mean, personally, as a woman who has never even for a moment wanted to even imagine having children, the idea that Spartan women get a reputation for being so much better treated compared to other Greeks, but ultimately all it boils down to is, like, they make babies...

I really don't want to give them that much credit. Like, way to go, Sparta, for recognizing that people with uteruses are the ones you need to make babies, and maybe a good way of keeping that happening is to have them healthy? Like, well done on the absolute bare minimum for human rights. And fine, in their defense, having babies was dangerous business in antiquity. There was like a 1 in 5 chance of death during childbirth for mothers, and like 30% of babies died before the age of 1. Not good.

Needless to say, having babies was a risk. And the more prepared a woman was, like, the better. I'm using the word woman here because back then, obviously, that would have been their understanding. I do recognize that other people have uteruses. But this emphasis on physical exercise, on having a strong body, probably helped these women in childbirth more purely from, like, a health perspective. Their bodies were better prepared for the strenuousness of pregnancy and then childbirth.

Add on to that the higher age of marriage at Sparta, with women getting married around the age of 18 or 19 compared to Athens, where it was like 14. Good for them. And it meant that Spartan women were more prepared for childbirth than their contemporaries simply because their bodies were better prepared. Again, it's like, okay, it's great that things were marginally better. They weren't marrying off literal children, but

But it wasn't because they had any kind of empathy to the plight of women or they wanted them to be happier. It was just that they were going to be better prepared to make boy Spartan babies to keep that population going. I'm going to get so much deeper into marriage and women because honestly, it's fascinating. Like there's an entire book written about it. So there's going to be an entire episode dedicated to that now. But until then, let's talk about Spartan babies and what is generally assumed to

happened to some of those tiny bundles of Spartan joy? Do you know the reference I'm going to here? Because it's a really big old myth about Sparta, a really well-known and prolific myth, but very much a myth.

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Let's not mince words. I'm going to go into detail, but let's be clear up front. Sparta did not regularly throw babies off of mountains if they determined something was wrong with them.

This may be one of the biggest misconceptions about Sparta. Hell, about the ancient world. I know we are all familiar with this idea of exposure. I talk about it all the damn time because in myth, it's always used as a plot device to allow a character to come back when everyone thinks they're dead. Like Oedipus left out in the wilderness. Paris was left on Mount Ida. Atalanta was raised by bears. Because of this and some Spartan stereotypes by non-Spartan sources...

There developed this idea that there was a regular practice in Greek history and specifically in Sparta. Even more detailed myths around this idea arose.

See, people believe that the Spartans practiced a form of infanticide that is, it's just eugenics. So this is the myth. Myth as in something commonly believed that is not true and not the usual stories of mythology that we all love so much. It was thought that when a Spartan baby was born, they were brought in front of this council of elders, the Gerousia, to be inspected.

You're going to start picturing scenes from 300 here, and that's good because it has perpetuated this myth. And if you can picture it, then you're better prepared for me to tell you why it's all bullshit. So the story goes that all these old men would inspect this new little Spartan baby and make a decision. A decision of whether or not this baby was healthy enough to eventually become a big, strong Spartan citizen.

If the baby was deemed acceptable, like off home, they would go eventually to join the Agoge and, you know, become an adult, which we're going to talk about more about the Agoge more. Don't worry. And they'd learn how to become a proper Spartan. Or if this little Spartan baby was deemed unacceptable, like not fit to bear the title of a true Spartan, then they would be brought up to Mount Tigetos and thrown from a cliff. Just forgotten, abandoned, just like Cassandra and Alexios.

Well, more than abandoned. I mean, those two surviving was a bit of a video game fluke. Dead. The baby would be dead.

So as I said, this is a myth, one of the most prevalent little factoids that people carry around about Sparta. It is simply not true. And it comes down to where we get this information from, and thus where the movie 300 got its information from, and generations of people, including, well, Nazis. The sourcing of it all. This baby getting tossed from a mountain idea is found in Plutarch.

Remember him? Good old Plutarch. The biographer, not the historian. Not only was he a biographer concerned with paralleling notable men from Greek and Roman culture, but he was also writing during the first century CE. Somewhere between 500 and 700 years after this so-called practice was supposed to have been happening.

This is after Rome had come in and did some strange like Disney-ification work on Sparta. So we need to take it all with a grain of salt. Many grains, really. You know when you're shaking the salt shaker and the lid falls off? Like that much salt we should be putting into this situation. There is absolutely no archaeological evidence for it. None. Like there would be archaeological evidence, let alone other sources saying that this was ever a thing. Because we're talking a whole lot of dead babies here.

There's no evidence for it at all outside of Plutarch. Now, okay, like, is it possible that it was, like, a much older or even, like, an archaic practice? I mean...

Maybe, but no. It's notable that it just does not show up in any other source, like even Xenophon. For all his Spartan loving ways, he never mentions it. And hell, like other Athenians who definitely didn't love Sparta, they could have mentioned it or like a playwright would have mocked it or made Sparta look bad, made it into a joke, something. And this brings up another interesting thing, like this idea that ancient people were more ambivalent towards their children than we are today.

Certainly, the frequency of child death was way higher back then, but really, children making it to adulthood is pretty recent. It's not just back then. And just because this is something that happened doesn't mean that it wasn't, like, absolutely devastating to the parents of earlier times.

They were people just like us. They loved and cherished their children, like every one of them, just like we do today. The death of a child wasn't any less horrible than it would be today. I think it's often forgotten in the conversation of exposure to like that. That would it would take a lot for a parent to do this. And it is purely mythological. It's a plot point, right? Like it allows something else to happen later.

Archaeologist Debbie Sneed has written about how there is actually evidence that ancient Greek people took extra special care with disabled children. Like the opposite of this idea of them just being worthless. They took special care to care for these children. They mourned them when they died or if they died. Basically, they treated them exactly the same way as their other children, possibly much better due to their disabilities.

Not to mention, remember, like, translations of sources and motivations. All the people that have interpreted ancient texts in the few thousand years since they were written. Like, remember Atlantis? What could possibly be the motivation for a modern society spreading this idea that even the most ancient and revered culture could have deemed children unfit for life?

Could there possibly be some dubious motives? Yes, there could be. Because you see, some modern people, the Nazis and other eugenicists, for example, they could maybe choose to latch on to these ideas to give their own some historical backing. Yeah, that's where it gets dark. We're not going to dwell too far on this. We're going to talk more about the Nazification of Sparta later.

There's too much to say for right now. But basically, the Spartans did not practice this type of eugenics. They did not do all the creepy things that you imagine from popular history. They just didn't. They were shitty in a lot of ways, for sure, much like the rest of the ancient world. But they weren't shitty in this specific way. And the idea that they were is actually based in much more modern, equally dark views. Because again, there's a reason that I'm giving Sparta a similar treatment to Atlantis.

And speaking of fucking nonsense perpetuated by popular history accounts and things like 300, among whatever other pseudo-historical nonsense when it comes to Sparta, let's talk about the Agogi, shall we?

I will go into this in more detail in a conversation episode. It certainly comes up when I'm speaking about not only their military practices, but also just generally debunking a lot of the wild, dark shit that comes up about Sparta. But thankfully, those guests know more than I do. For now, we're going to talk about it just briefly, because while most of what you might imagine with just a cursory knowledge of Sparta is bullshit, the Agoge itself did exist in some form. Just like the idea of babies being thrown off mountains, though, it wasn't half as fucked up as we might think.

The Agogi was pretty much the name given to their general education system that was present in ancient Sparta. So in itself, it's a less foreign and fantastical thing that we might think. It's just school. Spartan boys would go through several years of education that culminated in them moving on and joining this thing called a Sistion that was happening when they'd enter adulthood. Sistion, meanwhile, these were these big banquets that took place every day and they were mandatory for Spartiates.

I imagine it bonded them all together pretty strongly. The standout quality of the Spartan education system, though, is that it removed the responsibility from the father and the household and instead put it into the hands of the state. Essentially, the Spartans had their very own public education system, which to a degree at least differentiated them from much of the rest of the ancient Greeks.

From birth to the age of seven, the children, boys, we'll talk about women later, but boys, would stay home under the close eye of their mother. And then at seven, they would go off to the wonders of the Agoge.

Throughout their education, the boys would be separated into different age groups that then helped differentiate them between different stages of development. The youngest, who were just entering school, were called the pedes. And then around the age of 14, they would be called the pedesque. And finally, around the age of 20, they would be the hebantes. At least, we think so. Xenophon mentions all these terms, and it's possible that these are the terms that Spartans themselves used, but we're not totally sure. Because as always, our sourcing comes from not Spartans.

But at least with Xenophon, we know that he spent a lot of time there. He befriended Spartans and he appreciated them as like a people and a culture. So his word is pretty well accepted in cases like these. But one of the biggest things that made Sparta different was that the girls actually did get formally educated too. So like score. So for once, we get to talk about women in a bit more of a substantial way. But this is still ancient Greek patriarchy. So we know a lot more about what the boys did. So we're starting with them.

Now, when it comes to understanding the agogae and what it was and was definitely not, we need to ask the question of what did these Spartan boys do at school? What did their curriculum look like?

Well, yeah, I mean, by now, you know, this point, we don't have the most clear picture of it, but we have some ideas. There's a general theme of athletics that never seems to leave the Spartan picture. It's kind of always there. They were active. It's probably that they learned how to write and like do arithmetic to some degree. There probably or possibly was a tradition around stealing, actually, where the children were encouraged to steal to subsidize their daily food. And then they were punished if they got caught. Right.

But not because they were stealing, but because they got caught. They weren't good enough thieves, and so they had to be punished. Fascinating. We learn this again from Xenophon, and he really stresses that this is like a good learning experience that has educational value. I think that's interesting in itself, but it also suggests that it's probably true because there's no judgment attached to this. He's kind of just stating it as if it was a good thing.

We also see this in context with this altar of Artemis Orthia, where the younger children had to sneak past the older ones who were armed with whips and they had to steal cheese off the altar. Just let all that sink in. Like, Sparta was wild. Regardless of the specifics of what happened at the Agogae, the purpose of Spartan education system was to create this unified Spartan identity.

By putting all the male children into the same program and surrounding them not only with their peers but those older than them in like these common eating areas, it served to teach them what it meant to be part of the male Spartan citizen body. To be a Spartiot. What the ideals were, like who they should aim to be, how they should carry themselves throughout life.

It also explicitly prepared them for this Sistion, where they would go do something similar like every day of their lives, all gathering together for big meals with the same men every single day. The end aim of the Spartan school system was to strengthen their ideal citizen body and this overarching concept of what we call eunomia, which means good order. And it's basically the official Spartan motto.

Now, given everything I've just said about what the Ogogi actually was, you might be wondering where in the actual fuck did something like 300, let alone our general modern notions, get the details. Like, of kids fighting wolves and basically being left to die in the wilderness. Well, we do know that they have some kind of wilderness training involved, but it wasn't fighting wolves. It wasn't being just, like, left to your own devices. It was pretty reasonable wilderness training.

At least it was during the archaic and classical periods, but it probably didn't change drastically. These details come from much later writers who were piecing together different bits and pieces and then sensationalizing the hell out of all of it, whether intentionally or otherwise. Generally, the agogae was just education. It wasn't military training and it wasn't fighting wolves. It was like

Somewhat wilderness-based, but more so just in the sense of a general ability to survive. To become an adult Spartan man and create more Spartans. It wasn't some wild test of strength against, I don't know, wolves.

But now, the ladies? Yes, women were educated too. Huzzah! Honestly, like, what a win. But why were they educated? Yeah, don't get too excited. Women were explicitly educated in Sparta so that they could, again, produce more Spartan boys. Yeah, basically everything about their quote-unquote education was to make them both good Spartan mothers, those who held and passed on their culture, and to prepare their physical bodies for pregnancy and birth. Good times.

So what we know about their education was, again, like I mentioned earlier about women, exercise.

But in the case of education, both boys and girls, one thing was also true of Sparta. And it isn't something that has made its way into this popular imagination. They had a huge respect for poetry and storytelling, like art generally. This was really high on the list of importance. And the Spartan poet that we do have surviving, Alckmin, makes that super clear. Like they didn't learn these things in the form of reading and writing necessarily.

Literacy was pretty sparse and confined to like the very fanciest of Spartans, but they did all learn to recite Alcman's poetry. And all of this poetry and art included comes back to this most important thing for ancient Sparta. Tradition. They were a very conservative, tradition-centered society.

So we've been using this amazing book by Sarah Pomeroy for this bit. It's in this episode's description and it's going to contribute to my whole episode on women. But here she is talking about this idea of tradition and how poetry ties in. She says, quote, By repeating poems like those of Alckmin at festivals, successive generations of Spartans learned both their content, including mythology, religion, courtship, and etiquette, and poetry.

Musicae, this repetition of material tended to create children who thought and behaved as their parents did. Thus, Spartan society remained conservative and conscious of its traditions. And one of the things that really solidly exemplified Spartan tradition and conservatism is this idea of eunomia that I just mentioned briefly. This very Spartan idea of good order.

There's a bit more we should cover there. So here I am to give you a quick TLDR of this very important and kind of all-encompassing concept found in Sparta because as if this episode isn't long enough. So, you know, Mia, good order is what Sparta was ostensibly striving for in all of their weird and strange policies. This concept flows through every decision that they made when it comes to how their polis operated and how they constantly strived for this ideal of perfection.

The end result of all their policies, like the Agogae and the Cysteia, was eunomia, and thus was connected to the ever-important Lycorgus.

Again, we're going to get into him a bit more. But needless to say, like, if you can tie a practice to Lycurgus, then you're tying that practice to Eunomia, good order, this Spartan ideal. Like, he was the person who they thought introduced it all to them. And so it all ties back together to this, like, just looking back on your history and tradition.

The goal was to essentially make their society function almost as like a well-oiled machine, which leaves no space for that wonderful thing that we come across time and time again, you know, human infallibility. This endeavor to create a perfect, a good order, good society was the reason that the Spartan city-state worked so well until it didn't.

Because we'll get into it in future episodes. But Sparta was really, really successful for a long time. And then finally, they just really, really weren't. And both of those events, not fully events, but both of those things from their history are completely tied to the same issue.

This tradition, this conservatism, worked really well for them until their population declined to such degree that they just could not still be around. They kind of just crumbled. Everything they'd built, the way they'd become, this absolute powerhouse in the whole of the Greek world, just fell apart. But, obviously, that is for another day.

Sparta was intricate and mind-blowing as a place, and there is still so much to say about them. Oh, nerds, nerds, nerds, can you believe I have so much to say about Sparta? Like, because I can't. These episodes, they're so long. This one was 7,000 words. What am I doing? We have so many of them. Like, actually writing this episode led me and Michaela to realize that we have to do an entire episode dedicated to women in Sparta. Yeah.

Which means, at least at this stage, there's going to be another episode of the series. Because women in Sparta. It's a really interesting group and one that's both special to the ancient Greek world, unique, but also, as with so many things in Sparta, totally misunderstood and misrepresented in the modern world. Like, just like I said earlier, women were treated differently in Sparta and maybe marginally better, but they weren't actually treated well. They didn't have any kind of real equality. A feminist or matriarchal state, Sparta was not.

And while this episode, again, is long enough, so I will just finish it up as usual by reminding you all that there will be also a special Spartan Q&A episode to answer any and all of your burning Sparta questions. So make sure to submit those questions at mythsbaby.com slash questions. And as always, here is a five-star review by one of you amazing listeners. Please consider leaving me a five-star rating or review. They mean the whole world to me and seriously, absolutely help to keep this podcast going. Without downloads and reviews, I am nothing. Nothing.

which is why I love them. Plus they're nice and they make me smile. Sometimes they pull me out of a bad mood. They mean a lot. This one is from Cara Mia D in the States. Love this podcast. I'm a big fan of mythology, especially Greek myths, and this podcast is simply amazing. I love the humorous way each episode is told. Straight into the point, Cara. I love you. Thank you.

Let's talk about Miss Babies written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians and handles so many podcast related things. But for this series, Michaela gets the biggest extra special shout out because again, she always helps me. But like this one, oh my God, we've been working on the scripts together. I would not have been able to handle all the history without her, let alone all of the research that she did and just had access to because she's going to university. Lifesaver. Stephanie Foley works to transcribe the podcast for YouTube captions and accessibility and

Help me continue bringing you the world of Greek mythology and the ancient Mediterranean by becoming a patron where you'll get bonus episodes and more. Visit patreon.com slash mythsbaby or click the link in this episode's description. I am Liv and I love this shit quite a bit if you couldn't tell.

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