Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West - 'Magisterial' Books of the Year, Independent

by Tom Holland

Helos, a town in Lacedaemon,

The Messenians, labouring ‘like asses suffering under heavy loads’,20 found themselves having to shoulder the full weight of Spartan greatness.

Argos,

his elder brother Agamemnon,

The Argives,

his grandfather, the hero Pelops,

‘Pelop’s island’ – ‘Peloponnesos’

Tegea, a city with the misfortune to lie midway between Argos and Sparta.

This delivered such a blow to the Spartans’ self-confidence that it forced an abrupt and decisive shift in their foreign policy.

Tegea

Other cities soon followed. Like Tegea, they were wooed and reassured into submission. Spartan bone-hunters toured the remotest reaches of the Peloponnese, prospecting for the remains of further heroes, and having, in a landscape studded with the fossils of Pleistocene mammoths, considerable success.

And the Spartans themselves, masters of psychological as well as every other form of warfare, knew precisely how to turn their enemies’ blood to ice. From far off, the advance of their phalanx would be heralded by the shrilling of high-pitched pipes, and the earth would shake with the rhythm of their slow and metronomic approach. Then, as they emerged through the dust of battle, a dazzling ‘wall of bronze and scarlet’

By the early 540s BC,

Croesus, the King of Lydia,

Croesus’ fall.

Eurotas.

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.’

Most haunting of all Lacedaemon’s temples, however, was the shrine dedicated to Apollo’s sister, the virgin huntress Artemis, ‘mistress of wild beasts’.

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’,28 nevertheless mistrusted the exuberance of youth.

So it was that Sparta, for all her fearsome reputation, was also widely lauded as the home of perfect manners.

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.

Gerousia

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...

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 proddings 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.

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.’

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.

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’,

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.

The sense of frantic competition that made women wish to outshine their peers in beauty gnawed at everyone in the 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.’

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.

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.

Not only was it acceptable for a lover to serve his young boyfriend as a patron; it was positively expected. The more honoured a citizen, and the better connected, the more effectively he could further his beloved’s career. Elite would advance elite: so it was that a boy, yielding to the nocturnal thrustings of a battle-scarred older man, might well find the secret well-springs of Spartan power opened up to him.

Crypteia

There, advancing soundlessly by night, as every graduate of the agoge had been trained to do, they would be expected to prove themselves as killers. Of all men, it was said, only the Spartans denied that homicide was necessarily a crime; for it was, in their opinion, perfectly legitimate to cull their slaves. Nervous lest the gods be provoked against them, however, the Spartans would proclaim each year a state of war against the helots, a manoeuvre of typically murderous circumspection, calculated to spare the Crypteia any risk of blood pollution.

Messenians,

Crypteia,

The elders who gave the Crypteia its commissions were simultaneously putting its members to the test. Only once he had smelled for himself the hatred of a hunted Messenian, and seen it in his eyes, could a Spartan truly appreciate the full extent of his city’s peril.

Crypteia,

agoge

‘hippagretes’

hippagretai

‘homoios’,

Every evening, he would be obliged to eat in a common mess; he would bring a set ration of raw ingredients which the cooks would mix into a black, bloody broth. So disgusting was this concoction that foreigners who were privileged to taste it would joke that at last they could understand why the Spartans had no fear of death. A shallow and uncomprehending jest.

homoios,

homoioi

in 525 BC,

Samos,

city of Corinth,

Dorians,

Athens