Andrew Bayliss On Sparta | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘Pederasty is a common practice in the ancient Greek world. And it was clearly a practice, while being common that had controversy about it. So it's, it's something that's debated, and discussed in primary sources about Sparta but also about other parts of the Greek world. So it's, if you think about what's going on there, the primary sources report this relationship between an adolescent boy and an older man as a form of education, that's what's Xenophon, who wrote a constitution of Sparta, says straight up. He talks about it in the context, he uses the word education. But he's a bit vague about what actually happens in that education process. And that tells you already, there's something that people are uncomfortable about here. It clearly had a mentoring process.
One of our later sources Plutarch says that when a boy was fighting and cried out in an undignified fashion, the Spartan officials punished his older mentor, because he hadn't followed the rules properly. So clearly, it was about teaching them how to do things, but there was obviously a sense of some sort of sexual activity going on in Sparta and elsewhere in the ancient Greek world. Because Xenophon goes out of his way to tell you that it wasn't sexual in Sparta, and he says that it definitely wasn't sexual. And he stresses that so much that you start to doubt that he might be telling you the truth there. And the obvious counter argument is Plato, in, when discussing his ideal society says, when it comes to sex, Sparta is not our role model. And it's so obvious, that Plato, who was very uncomfortable with the idea of, of what we would see as pedophilia was, was not the right thing to do.
But it was actually comparatively normal in the ancient Greek world. Xenophon when discussing this says Spartans, not like Ilas [sp?], also in southern Greece or Thebes, in central Greece, where sex between men and boys was normal. So there was clearly some parts of Greece where it was more acceptable than in others, and that's why Xenophon’s trying to stress that it wasn't sexual there.’...
‘How typical or atypical was Sparta of the Greek societies at the time?’
‘So, if you read a book published in the 1980s, or earlier, it would say totally different. And in the last 30 years, modern scholarship is, is diminishing the gap between Sparta and the rest of the Greek world quite significantly. So many aspects of Spartan society can look very odd when you start off looking at them. But the more I sort of dig into there, the deeper you get into the primary sources, and the more carefully you ask the questions, the more you can see, Sparta is not as abnormal as it's often presented.
And it comes down to how you frame your questions in many ways, because so many of the sources for Ancient Greece come from Athens. That you get, it's really easy to compare a place like Sparta to Athens and say, oh, that's different to Athens. Oh, that's different to Athens, or that's different to Athens. Therefore, it's really different. But if you actually start comparing Sparta to other parts of the Peloponnese, central Greek cities, and other aspects of different city states, you then find, well, actually, so many aspects of Spartan society aren't near as different as you think they might be. And one of the obvious ones is politics. Athens is democracy. Sparta is an oligarchy with two kings. Clearly, it's very, very different. But there were loads of oligarchies in the ancient Greek world, Athens was not, was not the norm. When Athens developed into a democracy to begin with, it was the exception'...
‘What would you see as the end point of the Spartan heyday? And how did that come about?’...
‘370, or thereabouts... that's coincides with two great events. One of them is the Battle of Leuctra in 371, where the Spartans are defeated by the Thebans. And that's, that's the moment when any aura or mystique that the Spartan army had is gone. Because of the manner of that defeat, it's a disastrous defeat, they literally run away in battle. The next day, the Spartan King... has to suspend the laws about cowards because he would have basically had to make almost the entire Spartan citizen population cowards because they'd run away in battle. And the following summer, the Thebans swept into the Peloponnese, and they freed the Messenians from Spartan rule, and that basically, it halved the size of the Spartan state, and it took away a huge chunk of their slave population, and it basically ended Spartan power...
How that happened is not just military defeat, it’s steep decline in numbers of Spartan citizens, which commenced in the fifth century, and rapidly accelerated up until that point in time. So at the time of the Battle of the battle of Thermopylae, Herodotus says there were 8000 Spartan citizens, there might have been a bit fewer than that. But by the time you get to the Battle of Leuctra, there's only 1500… Aristotle says Sparta perished due to small numbers of men...
*Goes on on the appeal of Spartans to sports teams* Spartan eugenic practices was something that appealed to Hitler. And then you combine that with that military prowess, then it's working quite quite nicely as as a role model in that way... In the Soviet era, Sparta looked like a proto communist society where they had divided up the land allegedly into equal plots, and everyone was equal, yet they were all citizens who were prepared to defend Spartan territory, and that was a model that appealed to people within the Soviet Union as well.
And part of that came also from the identification of the West with the Athenians, a an imperialistic maritime power, you can see where, where people are scholars in America and Britain could identify with Athens as a democratic state with a massive fleet. Whereas Sparta was this sort of backward seeming land based economy, which could easily be be identified with the Soviet Union as well. So it depends on the perspective that people are coming from. I always have to warn my students eventually, that I don't admire the Spartans beyond the certain level because their society is a horrible one. And yes, they fight on the right side of Thermopylae, but too often they were prepared to trample on the rights of everyone else to get what they wanted...
It's not the best preserved ancient Greek city by any means, which is quite interesting when you think about the fact that Thucydides, writing about it towards the end of the fifth century, said that in future years, if only the foundations of the two cities survived, no one would ever believe that Sparta was as powerful as it was, and everyone would think that Athens was twice as powerful as it was, and he was right. Because when you go to Athens, you see the Parthenon, you see the Acropolis, you see all these temples everywhere, and you just think wow, this city state was amazing, you go to Sparta, and the remains are very meager and and the foundations of the temples are remarkably small compared to Athens. So Sparta, Sparta was not a dramatic urban landscape. Sparta was really a collection of villages that got lumped together to form an urban center. But it wasn't, architecture wasn't their thing. Art wasn't their thing.’"
