Despite what Gerard Butler’s glistening six-pack and billowing cape might indicate in the movie
“300”, it turns out life as a Spartan warrior was actually kind of terrible.
Though life was undoubtedly worse in ancient times on almost all levels - health, longevity,
hygiene - warriors in the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta might have had it worst of all.
Why? We sent our reluctant researchers back to ancient times to find out.
You might think that hell for Spartan warriors started during their intense
military training when they were young men, or even perhaps teenagers. And…you’d be wrong.
First of all, boys in Sparta were destined to become warriors from the start.
No one was asking them about their hopes and dreams or aspirations of starring
in Euripides’ new play when they were growing up. There was only one permissible occupation:
soldier, otherwise known as a hoplite in ancient Sparta.
This meant that Spartan babies had to prove their fitness right out of the womb.
Both girls and boys were inspected for signs of good strength, health,
and any physical defects as soon as they were born.
A myth persisted for centuries that babies who didn’t pass this inspection were tossed
into a gorge at the foot of Mount Taygetus. Most historians now believe this to be untrue. Instead,
the infants were abandoned on a hillside to die of exposure. So that’s…not much better.
Occasionally someone would come by and rescue a baby, but at the end of the day,
the point is that the jaundice that kept you in NICU a bit longer
would have been a death sentence in ancient Sparta.
The babies that were lucky enough to make it through - and we use the term “lucky” lightly
as there’s a whole lot of insanity waiting for them - were bathed in wine to prove they were,
in fact, strong. That’s a lot of strength tests so far for children who cannot walk yet.
When they cried out for attention or to get their needs met, Spartan
parents would often ignore their children or purposely put them in dark, isolated spaces
so they could learn to handle them. We assume there was no ancient Spartan version of CPS.
After infants had gotten all that pesky teething and learning to walk out of the way,
the boys were placed in a strict military educational program at the ripe old age of seven.
The program would last a whopping 13 years, and was known as “agoge”.
Boys were taken from their families and housed in communal barracks. They were instructed in
warfare, hunting, athletics, and more scholastic education such as reading, writing, and poetry.
At age 12, when most of us were battling with braces or acne for the first time,
Spartan boys had all their clothing taken from them and were forced to sleep outside.
They were handed only a red cloak; so it turns out “300” was accurate in many ways,
except that Spartans almost never moved in slow motion.
The boys then had to make their beds out of reeds and whatever other materials they found in nature.
In order to further prepare them for the horrors and scarcities of the battlefield,
their elders would encourage them to scavenge for food and steal it if necessary. However,
if they were caught stealing food, they would be mercilessly flogged or beaten. Which is kind
of the exact thing the phrase “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” was invented for.
The point of this - theoretically, as we are making the generous assumption here
that the Spartan elders weren’t just abusive sociopaths - was to toughen
up the boys to withstand the cold, pain, and hunger of the battlefield.
However, it wasn’t enough to just make them endure such situations.
The elders who taught them decided they needed to instigate further problems as well.
Spartan boys in the barracks were often encouraged to fight
each other and participate in hazing of their fellow soldiers-in-training.
Apparently, encouraging a spirit of camaraderie wasn’t high on the Spartan priority list.
Anyone who showed signs of fear or nervousness was especially targeted for ridicule. In fact,
occasionally the girls in town - who were undergoing their own rigorous training programs at
home - would sing in choruses at formal ceremonies in front of Spartan elders and dignitaries,
and in their songs they would single out boys underperforming in the program
to make fun of them.
Yeah… imagine the girl you had a crush on in elementary school coming up with a song
she performs in front of the principal and the rest of your classmates, about that time you
had an accident in first grade and how much of a wuss you are. Oh, and also, you’re not
in elementary school so much as your life is “The Hunger Games”. Pretty terrifying, huh?
Last of all before the teens became men was the “diamastigosis”. This was also known as
a “contest of endurance”, in which teen boys were taken to the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia,
placed in front of the altar, and flogged…sometimes to death.
Though the practice originated as a religious ritual and a test of the boys’ pain tolerance,
it eventually became a grisly sport and a kind of tourist attraction.
By the 3rd century AD, the town had constructed an amphitheater around
the sanctuary so visitors could observe the boys being flogged.
So, the boys went through their teen years learning that their
elders would use pretty much any excuse in the book to abuse them.
What happened once they reached the age of 20 and their primary education finished?
Though the toughest part of the training was done, the hardships for a Spartan
soldier were far from over once he reached adulthood. When men reached the age of 20,
they started attending a type of mess hall known as “syssitia”. The men were purposely
given bland, flavorless, and small rations so they could learn to cope with hunger.
Soldiers were expected to be fully devoted to their physical fitness via training and diet.
In fact, any Spartan citizens who were overweight were not only publicly ridiculed,
but could even be banished from Sparta for their weight.
Basically, imagine if body shaming became a state-sponsored pastime.
While the philosophers and artists of Athens would drink wine, eat heartily, and talk about life and
culture, Spartan men kept their wine intake to a minimum. They would shame and punish teens
for becoming drunk. To show the ill effects of intoxication, they would frequently make members
of the enslaved class - the Helots - drink to excess and then parade them around the mess halls.
This would be a good time to mention the people who were making Spartan society run
while the local Spartan men participated in military training and child abuse. After all,
both the Spartan army and Spartan farms required skilled laborers and craftsmen to be productive.
These jobs fell to the “Perioeci”, free non-citizens from the surrounding area of Laconia.
The more labor-intensive jobs were assigned to the Helots, a class of enslaved fellow Greeks who
made up most of Sparta’s population. The Helots vastly outnumbered the Spartans who could become
equal citizens, or “homoioi”. Though exact numbers vary over time, according to Herodotus in 479 BC,
Helots outnumbered Spartan men by seven to one.
In fact, part of the reason Spartans kept such a well-trained army is to
fend off constant threats of revolts from the Helots.
Not having an enslaved class in the first place and then not having to abuse your
children either might have been the better solution to all this, but what’s done is done.
The Helots unfortunately factor into one of the last components of a Spartan warrior’s training
as well. After the soldiers entered their 20s, the most skilled among them were organized
into “Krypteia”. Their mentors would give them daggers and a few essential supplies, and they
were ordered to roam the roads and countryside day and night to find and murder Helots at will.
This served the double purpose of preparing the
Spartan soldiers to kill others on the battlefield,
while also thinning out the Helot population so too many of them wouldn’t band together to revolt.
Though some Athenians and other Greeks criticized the practice as unimaginably cruel,
which we would have thought would be self-evident, many Spartans saw it as a noble tradition.
Plato described what a Spartan man named Megillus thought of the Krypteia:
“Krypteia, as it is called, affords a wonderfully severe training in hardihood,
as the men go barefoot in winter and sleep without coverlets and have no attendants,
but wait on themselves and rove through the whole countryside both by night and by day.”
Megillus’ description makes it sound like a coming-of-age outdoor adventure,
rather than the brutal killing spree that it was,
which perhaps gives us an idea of how much Spartans accepted violence against the Helots..
Now that we’ve seen how Spartan warriors were punished, underfed, abused, left out in the cold,
and then asked to become serial killers, let’s turn to a subject that might have
been a source of happiness for them: love! Hey, life might have sucked in all other respects for
a Spartan warrior, but they must have found some solace in their relationships, right?
Well…for those in the audience who haven’t caught on by now, pretty much
every aspect of Spartan warriors’ lives was a catch-22 for which they could be punished.
See, Spartan men were encouraged to marry in their 20s, so much so that men who hadn’t found a wife
by their late 20s were ridiculed. After all, the primary goal of the Spartan state was to create
more healthy, young soldiers. How could that happen if men and women waited too long to marry?
Yet, even though marriage was encouraged, communal living in military barracks didn’t
end until age 30, when Spartan soldiers were considered full citizens. This means
that though they were usually married for several years before turning 30,
they would have to sneak out at night to visit their wives and be intimate with them.
Even on their wedding night, Spartan men were expected to be back at the barracks before dawn.
This was to further emphasize the point that a Spartan soldiers’ primary loyalty
should be to his city-state, even more so than to his own family.
The wedding night itself was incredibly bizarre through our modern lens.
Or, really, any lens of any person living in any time.
The night of their weddings, wives would shave their heads and dress in
a man’s cloak and sandals. Not exactly the sexy honeymoon outfits one might think of.
They would then be left in either a dark room in their homes, or the husband’s
barracks - sources mention both - and wait for their new husband to pretend to kidnap them.
The marriage would then presumably be consummated, once everyone was
clearly in the mood from all the incredible head-shaving and kidnapping the night provided.
Why dress like men and shave their hair, you may wonder? Here is where
we get to a somewhat controversial part of the history of ancient Sparta.
While teenage boys were in the “agoge” program, they almost always had an older
mentor in his 20s training them, educating them, and guiding them into adulthood.
There is plenty of evidence that some of these relationships were sexual in nature,
though the extent to which this happened is highly debated.
Either way, any physical relationship was supposed to stop when a boy became an adult;
so, the exact opposite of our consent laws today. Some historians have posited that newlywed wives
dressed as men in order to help Spartans make the transition from sleeping with men to women.
This is contested by others who argue that, while Spartan boys did shave their hair in
their early teen years, Spartan men took pride in wearing their hair long after that,
so the wives shaving their hair for this reason wouldn’t make much sense.
In any case, throw possible sexual assault into the mix as one of the
many things Spartan warriors might have had to deal with.
Now let’s say this military training is finally done.
A Spartan boy has miraculously made it through the multiple tests and abuses
he has had to suffer through from birth to age 30, and is now a full citizen of Sparta
with his own home, wife, and land. Surely things must get better from here on out!
Well…sorta. Though Spartan soldiers got farmland that was helpfully maintained by the poor Helots,
they were on reserve duty as soldiers until age 60. They were still expected
to eat meals with their fellow soldiers and spent a lot of time in the barracks,
even after they were no longer required to live there.
Each Spartan soldier had a bronze helmet, breastplate, round shield made of bronze and wood,
a sword, and a long spear. The shield is important,
as it features in perhaps one of the most well-known phrases to come out of Sparta:
“return with your shield or on it”. Supposedly this was what mothers said
to their sons before sending them off to war - as usual, Sparta was all about the tough love.
In essence, this meant that a Spartan soldier was expected to return victorious, and if not,
at least dead or gravely injured. Surrendering during a battle was considered an abject disgrace,
and most of the Spartan men who did this either ended up killing
themselves or fighting to the death in a later battle to redeem themselves.
So even in adulthood, a Spartan soldier was expected to focus most of his life on fighting,
and then expected to either win or die in each battle. Considering how war-prone the
Spartans were, this didn’t bode well for the average soldier’s life expectancy.
If, and we want to highly emphasize if, a Spartan soldier made it to age 60, he was officially
considered retired and would be able to honorably withdraw from the army and any future battles. At
this age, he had a chance of joining the Council of Elders, known as the “Gerousia”, meaning that,
after a lifetime of abuse, he might spend a couple of years as a politician before dying.
That is, assuming he made it to 60 in the first place - between war,
hunger, and disease, this was an unlikely proposition at best.
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