curious to later outsiders. Items like the Spartan use of iron weights had not been peculiar in the 640s, before coinage even existed, but they became very odd from
c.
520 BC onwards when coinage began to be used widely by other city-states in Greece. Despite the fantasies of later political theorists (whether Karl Marx or the Nazi publicists), Sparta never became a totally collectivist state. In fact, the vagaries of private ownership continued and before too long ‘all Spartiates were equal, but some were more equal than others’. From the mid-sixth century onwards, we can point to a rich Spartan minority who owned hugely expensive teams of chariot-horses. From the 450s onwards, during years of persistent war and crisis, superior members of the ‘peer group’ are recorded as winning glittering individual prizes with horses and chariots at Olympia and elsewhere. As a retort, King Agesilaus II is said to have encouraged his daughter to finance a winning entry at Olympia in order to teach the Spartiates that chariot-victories were an unmanly business.
The Spartans remained, nonetheless, free of tyrants and the disruptive bloodshed which would have broken their hold on conquered Messenia. The Spartans still enjoyed festivals for the gods, competitions (even in horse racing) and fine occasions for singing and choral dancing: their young girls sang and danced to a haunting Maidens’ Song (composed by the visiting poet Alcman,
c.
610 BC ), and, at their shrine of Artemis, finds of clay masks imply that males engaged in ritual dancing too, wearing ‘young’ masks or ‘old’ ugly masks in a performance the nature of which escapes us. To Aristotle, nonetheless, Spartan society appeared like an army camp, and indeed he was right. Back in
c.
700 BC , in my view, Spartan males had first acquired their right of political decision, but not because they were a newly empowered hoplite soldiery. Some fifty years later, however, they were exercising this right in a social structure which had become focused on military success before all else. The competitions, even the female dancing, were designed to promote fit and hyper-ambitiousparticipants: mockery was one of the great reinforcing social instruments in Sparta, including (we are told) the mocking of helots who were made to tramp around absurdly when drunk.
What endured was the novelty of the Spartans’ permanently trained, professional army of hoplites, far superior to the lightly trained occasional hoplites, the citizens of all other Greek states. For centuries, they marched in ranks, dressed in their purple cloaks, to the sound of pipers and the martial poems of Tyrtaeus. Their neighbour, Argos, had been so prominent in Homer and, as the seat of King Agamemnon, might have been expected to dominate southern Greece. But the Spartans hit back with their professionally trained army and a constitution which continued to adapt itself after their occasional grand blunders. The Argives had no such system. The kingdoms of the Near East also lacked a solid trained infantry of their own and in the 550s BC , when they cast around for trained and heavily armoured foot soldiers, it was to distant Sparta that they turned. Gifts to woo a Spartan military alliance were sent from rich King Croesus in Lydia, while the Pharaoh in Egypt sent a heavily woven linen breastplate, a real wonder, including gold thread and figured embroidery, each thread being made of 360 separate strands (a sister-piece was sent to Athena’s temple at Lindos on the island of Rhodes; it had the same density, as was verified by the studious Roman governor, Mucianus, in
c.
AD 69: he claimed to have counted 365 strands per thread in its fragments, perhaps miscounting one for each day of the year). 6 These gifts beckoned Sparta to an altogether less fettered and archaizing world, the settlements of Ionian Greeks on the islands of the Aegean and mainland Asia Minor.
7
The Eastern Greeks
My heart has become heavy, my legs
c.
520 BC onwards when coinage began to be used widely by other city-states in Greece. Despite the fantasies of later political theorists (whether Karl Marx or the Nazi publicists), Sparta never became a totally collectivist state. In fact, the vagaries of private ownership continued and before too long ‘all Spartiates were equal, but some were more equal than others’. From the mid-sixth century onwards, we can point to a rich Spartan minority who owned hugely expensive teams of chariot-horses. From the 450s onwards, during years of persistent war and crisis, superior members of the ‘peer group’ are recorded as winning glittering individual prizes with horses and chariots at Olympia and elsewhere. As a retort, King Agesilaus II is said to have encouraged his daughter to finance a winning entry at Olympia in order to teach the Spartiates that chariot-victories were an unmanly business.
The Spartans remained, nonetheless, free of tyrants and the disruptive bloodshed which would have broken their hold on conquered Messenia. The Spartans still enjoyed festivals for the gods, competitions (even in horse racing) and fine occasions for singing and choral dancing: their young girls sang and danced to a haunting Maidens’ Song (composed by the visiting poet Alcman,
c.
610 BC ), and, at their shrine of Artemis, finds of clay masks imply that males engaged in ritual dancing too, wearing ‘young’ masks or ‘old’ ugly masks in a performance the nature of which escapes us. To Aristotle, nonetheless, Spartan society appeared like an army camp, and indeed he was right. Back in
c.
700 BC , in my view, Spartan males had first acquired their right of political decision, but not because they were a newly empowered hoplite soldiery. Some fifty years later, however, they were exercising this right in a social structure which had become focused on military success before all else. The competitions, even the female dancing, were designed to promote fit and hyper-ambitiousparticipants: mockery was one of the great reinforcing social instruments in Sparta, including (we are told) the mocking of helots who were made to tramp around absurdly when drunk.
What endured was the novelty of the Spartans’ permanently trained, professional army of hoplites, far superior to the lightly trained occasional hoplites, the citizens of all other Greek states. For centuries, they marched in ranks, dressed in their purple cloaks, to the sound of pipers and the martial poems of Tyrtaeus. Their neighbour, Argos, had been so prominent in Homer and, as the seat of King Agamemnon, might have been expected to dominate southern Greece. But the Spartans hit back with their professionally trained army and a constitution which continued to adapt itself after their occasional grand blunders. The Argives had no such system. The kingdoms of the Near East also lacked a solid trained infantry of their own and in the 550s BC , when they cast around for trained and heavily armoured foot soldiers, it was to distant Sparta that they turned. Gifts to woo a Spartan military alliance were sent from rich King Croesus in Lydia, while the Pharaoh in Egypt sent a heavily woven linen breastplate, a real wonder, including gold thread and figured embroidery, each thread being made of 360 separate strands (a sister-piece was sent to Athena’s temple at Lindos on the island of Rhodes; it had the same density, as was verified by the studious Roman governor, Mucianus, in
c.
AD 69: he claimed to have counted 365 strands per thread in its fragments, perhaps miscounting one for each day of the year). 6 These gifts beckoned Sparta to an altogether less fettered and archaizing world, the settlements of Ionian Greeks on the islands of the Aegean and mainland Asia Minor.
7
The Eastern Greeks
My heart has become heavy, my legs
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