{"id":69233,"date":"2022-01-28T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2022-01-28T06:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69233"},"modified":"2022-02-06T22:11:00","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T03:11:00","slug":"qotd-the-myth-of-spartan-equality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/01\/28\/qotd-the-myth-of-spartan-equality\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Myth of Spartan Equality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This idea \u2013 the degree of equality and cohesion \u2013 is what I prefer to call the Myth of Spartan Equality, and it’s going to be our target today.<\/p>\n

Where does this idea come from? Well, it comes from the same pro-Spartan sources we discussed last time. Plutarch claims that Lycurgus<\/a>‘ decision to banish money from Sparta essentially removed greed by making all of the Spartans equal (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 9.1-4) \u2013 or equally poor \u2013 though we should note that Plutarch is writing 900 years<\/em> after Lycurgus (again, probably not a real person) was supposed to have lived. Xenophon notes approvingly that Lycurgus forbade the Spartans from engaging in productive business of any kind, making them thus unable to accumulate wealth (Xen. Lac<\/em>. 7.1-6). Land was supposed to be distributed equally to each full Spartan citizen \u2013 the spartiates<\/em><\/a> or homoioi<\/em><\/a> (we’ll define these terms in a second) in equal plots called kleroi<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

This idea \u2013 the Myth of Spartan Equality \u2013 is perhaps the single “biggest idea” in the conception of the Spartan state, rivaled only by the myth of Spartan military excellence (don’t worry, we’ll get there!). There is something deeply appealing, at a bedrock emotional level, to the idea of a perfectly equal society like that. And that myth of equality has prompted all sorts of thinkers from all sorts of eras (Rousseau, most famously) \u2013 including our own \u2013 to be willing to look past Sparta’s many, many<\/em> failings.<\/p>\n

And on the face of it, it does sound like a very equal society \u2013 practically a collectivist utopia. It is a pleasant vision. Unfortunately, it is also a lie<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

[…] every Greek polis<\/em><\/a> had a three-level layer-cake of status: the citizen body, free non-citizens (like foreigners), and non-free persons (slaves). You could \u2013 and the Greeks did \u2013 divide that top group by wealth and birth and so on, but we’ll get to that a bit later in this post and the next. For now, let’s stick with the three-level layer cake. Sparta follows this scheme neatly.<\/p>\n

At the top were the Spartiates<\/em>, the full-citizen male Spartans. According to Herodotus there were once 8,000 of these (Hdt. 7.234.2); supposedly 9,000 based on the initial number of equal land plots (kleroi<\/em>) handed out (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 8.3 \u2013 or rather than saying “handed out” we might say “seized”). Of course these are tallies of Spartiate<\/em> males, but women could be of citizen stock (but not citizens themselves) and we ought to imagine an equal number of spartiate<\/em> women at any given time. For a child to be born into the citizen class (and thus eligible for the agoge<\/em><\/a> and future full citizenship), he had to have a citizen father and<\/strong> a citizen mother. We’ll deal with the bastards a bit further down. Also, the spartiates were often also called the homoioi<\/em>, sometimes translated as “peers” but literally meaning something like “the equals”. As we’ll see, that equality is notional at best, but this ideal of citizen equality was something Sparta advertised about itself.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

But the final word on if we should consider the helots<\/em><\/a> fully non-free is in their sanctity of person: they had none, at all, whatsoever<\/strong>. Every year, in autumn by ritual, the five Spartan magistrates known as the ephors<\/em><\/a> declared war between Sparta and the helots<\/em> \u2013 Sparta essentially declares war on part of itself<\/em> \u2013 so that any spartiate<\/em> might kill any helot<\/em> without legal or religious repercussions<\/strong> (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 28.4; note also Hdt. 4.146.2). Isocrates \u2013 admittedly a decidedly anti-Spartan voice \u2013 notes that it was a religious, if not legal, infraction to kill slaves everywhere in Greece except<\/em> Sparta<\/strong> (Isoc. 12.181). As a matter of Athenian law, killing a slave was still murder<\/em> (the same is true in Roman law). One assumes these rules were often ignored by slave-holders of course \u2013 we know that many such laws in the American South were routinely flouted. Slavery is, after all, a brutal and inhuman institution by its very nature. The absence of any taboo \u2013 legal or religious \u2013 against the killing<\/em> of helots<\/em> marks the institution as uncommonly brutal not merely by Greek standards, but by world-historical standards.<\/p>\n

We may safely conclude that the helots<\/em> were not only enslaved persons, but that of all slaves, they had some of the fewest protections<\/strong> \u2013 effectively none, not even protections in-name-only.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-08-23.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This idea \u2013 the degree of equality and cohesion \u2013 is what I prefer to call the Myth of Spartan Equality, and it’s going to be our target today. Where does this idea come from? Well, it comes from the same pro-Spartan sources we discussed last time. Plutarch claims that Lycurgus‘ decision to banish money […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1526,7,9,41],"tags":[1457,347,198,605,1151],"class_list":["post-69233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-law","category-quotations","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-debunking","tag-equalrights","tag-slavery","tag-sparta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i0F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69233"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71437,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69233\/revisions\/71437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}