KC
14th November 2005, 16:48
(this is from A History Of Ancient Greece, written by Claude Orrieux and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, published in 1999 by Blackwell Publishers)
Lycurgus and the 'Rhetra'
In his Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch describes the circumstances in which this legislator, of whose existence we cannot be certain, took action. Faced with the disturbances by which the city was affected following the Second Messenian War, Lycurgus consulted the Delphic oracle which, by way of reply, produced a rhetra, or constitutional law. Here is the text, as cited by Plutarch:
When thou hast built a temple to Zeus Syllanius and Athena Syllania, divide the people intio phylai [tribes] and into obai [residential quarters], and establish a senate of thirty members, including the archegetai [the two kings], then from time to time appellazein [assemblies of the people] between Babyca and Cnacion, and there introduce and rescind measures, but the people must have the deciding voice and the power
The second measure attributed to Lycurgus was the division of land. Plutarch writes as follows:
A second and very bold political measure of Lycurgus [was] his redistribution of the land. For there was a dreadful inequality in this regard, the city was heavily burdened with indigent and helpless people, and wealth was wholly concentrated in the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to banish insolence and envy and crime and luxury, and those yet more deep-seated and afflictive diseases of the State, poverty and wealth, he persuaded his fellow-citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew, and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality in the means of subsistence...Suiting the deed tothe word, he distributed the rest of the Laconian land among the perioeci or free provincials, in thirty thousand lots, and that which belonged to the city of Sparty, in nine thousand lots, to as many genuine Spartans.
The terms used in both these texts have been the subject of commentaries that it is not possible to reproduce in the present work but they do condition the importance of each of these institutions. Let us attempt a synthesis of the political institutions and social structures that were set in place.
Political Institutions
The Kings Royalty was double. The kings were chosen from two different families, the Agiadae and the Eurypontedae. The succession remained within these two families but was not invariably in a direct line of descent. The powers of the two kings were limited by the very facts that there were two of them and both submitted to the city constitution, which they swore to uphold. There were frequent conflicts, either between kings or with the elders and the ephors, the most frequent complaint being that the kings were abusing their power, in particular by acting with too much independence in their dealings with other cities. The powers of the kings were given the most freedom of expression in the military field. In times of war only one of the kings acted as commander of the armies and he exercised great authority over the troops. As members of the gerousia, the kings took part in political decisions. They enjoyed special honours: each owned an estate (temenos) taken from the land of the perioikoi; they were allowed double rations in the common meals and a greater share of war booty than the other warriors, all of which provided each of them with the means to run a 'household' far superior to those of other Spartan families. Finally, the royal function was of a markedly religious nature. The kings were responsible for most of the city rituals, and their funerals, the grandeur of which exceeded all Greek norms, underlined the exceptional nature of a royalty regarded as sacred.
The assembly, apella, regularly summoned on the occasion of the festivals of Apollo, was composed of all Spartans of ree birth and met once a month in the open air, in an unidentified spot. The extent of its authority has been the subject of much discussion. In general, historians do not credit it with much power. In particular, they maintain that it could not discuss the propositions put to it, but could only accept or reject them. However, the interpretation suggested by F. Ruze for the text of the Rhetra (the French translation of which is the basis of the above English rendering), on the contrary restores total sovereignty to the assembly. He claims that it was not simply a recording chamber but a place in which real debates took place. All the same, if it took decisions contrary to the constitution, the kings and other members of the gerousia could dissolve it. It decided on when to seek peace and when to go to war, and elected magistrates and members of the gerousia.
The council of elders or gerousia comprised twenty-eight members, elected for life by the assembly, plus the two kings. To become a member, a man had to be 60 or over. The gerousia drafted laws which were then put to the vote in the assembly. This was the function known as 'proboulematic'. It also acted as a high court of justice in criminal cases. Both its prestige and its powers were considerable. Its method of election elicited a few smiles from the Athenians of the classical period: candidates for the gerousia presented themselves, one by one, before the assembly. The level of applause that greeted them decided whether or not they were elected.
The ephors constituted a college of five magistrates elected for one year. Eligibility was subject to no census or birth conditions: the ephors were recruited from the citizen body. Whatever the date of their creation, their role definitely seems to have been to thwart any tyrannical evolution of the royal power. Their powers were wide. The president of the college of ephors was an eponymous magistrate (the Spartan year of his office was named after him) and he presided over the apella. The ephors decided which political questions should be submitted to the assembly. In times of war, they organized mobilization, and two of them accompanied the king on the campaign, acting as generals. On a day-to-day basis, they supervised the social life of the city, in particular education, and the administration. They also held judicial authority, even over the kings. Their very considerable power was, however, tempered by the short duration of their responsibilities.
Spartan Society
The citizens These were known as the Equals: homoioi. To be a citizen, you had to have been born a boy, from a citizen father, and to have been through all the stages in the collective education, the agoge. You had to be 30 years of age and capable of making the required contribution to the daily common meal, the syssition.
In accordance with the legislation attributed to Lycurgus, every citizen was allotted a parcel of land known as a kleros, put at his disposal by the city, along with a number of dependent peasants responsible for cultivating it: helots. Both the kleros and the helots were the city's property, not the citizen's, and would normally revert to the city at the citizen's death, to be subsequently redistributed. The plots were carved out of the fertile land of Laconia and Messnia. According to Plutarch's text cited above, initially there were 9,000 of these parcels of land, which gives some idea of the cize of the citizen body. Although in principle fair and egalitarian, the system soon became open to abuse (when a son succeeded his father, for instance, the parcel of land would be kept in the family instead of reverting to common property). By the fourth century, real estate inequality was rife among the citizens.
The homoioi worked neither on the land nor as craftsmen; they were primarily warriors for, as we have seen, their political role was a limited one.
The perioikoi, literally 'those who live round about', were the free inhabitants of Laconia who did not have citizenship. They lived in small towns and villages in an autonomous fashion, except with regard to any relations with other cities. They were peasants, craftsmen, traders. They served in the Spartan army in separate contingents.
The helots were rural dependents, hence non-free. They belonged to the civic community and worked on the estates of the citizens, to whome they handed over a predetermined portion of the harvests. They lived in the countryside, on the land that they cultivated, or in villages. The helots of Messenia were the former people of Messenia, who had been deprived of their liberty when the Spartans conquered Messenia between 730 and 710. They were the descendants of local populations who had also been reduced to slavery, but the exact process of their enslavement is not known. They may have included both autochthonous peoples who had been living in Laconia before the arrival of the Dorians and also people who had lost their freedom as a result of extreme poverty. But whether their enslavement was a consequence of conquest or of economic inequalities, the helots formed a homogeneous group of enslaved Greeks, speaking the same language, employed at the same tasks, and - in the case of the helots of Messenia, at any rate - with the same aspirations.
Sparty was exceptional not only with regard to its constitution and its social structure, but also from the point of view of its institutionalization of education and its collective aristocratic practices, such as its banquets.
The agoge As we have seen, no one could become a citizen without having passed through the various stages of the agoge, an education organized by the city. This was altogether exceptional in the Greek cities, where families were normally responsible for the education of their own children. Plutarch tells us that Lycurgus considered 'the paideia to be the most important and finest work of the legislator'. And, as the paideia involved far more than simply instruction, the legislator first concerned himself with the girls, the future mothers of citizens, with a view to giving them robust bodies, well suited to procreation; and next, with love between boys and girls, and marriage for, according to Lycurgus, the oblications of marriage 'united husbands and wives when their bodies were full of creative energy and their affections new and fresh' and preserved 'in their hearts...mutual longing and delight'. All this with but a single aim in mind: the birth of children, upon whose survival or suppression the community as a whole immediately decided. The infants whom the 'elders' did not condemn to die by being hurled from the Apothetai precipice were left in the care of their mothers until the age of 7, then taken in charge by the city, under the responsibility of a pedonome, one of the magistrates, and divided into age groups (agelai) in which they lived together. Physical games and training of an increasingly stringent kind, hunting practice, training in the use of arms, music and choral singing, under the supervision of older boys, filled their days until adolescence. In the course of the last stage in this education a small number of hand-picked young Spartans underwent the trial of the krypteia: each of these youths had to leave the town, live in the mountains, always on his guard, even when sleeping, remaining unseen by anyone for a whole year. A number of historians compare the krypteia to the episode of living alone in the wilderness that is a feature of other cultures, and regard it as a period of initiation before a boy's definitive entry into the life of a citizen. Even setting aside the krypteia, which seems to have been a trial reserved for a limited number of future Spartan citizens, the agoge's function certainly was to educate a boy in the values of endurance, courage, sobriety and unselfishness - all requisites for citizenship - and at the same time to teach him his real profession, that of a hoplite. It is not hard to see why it was one of the conditions of citizenship. But Sparta's uniqueness lay in its prolongation of the paideia so that its collective values continued to be accepted by all citizens throughout their lives. One of the occasions on which the civic community expressed itself was the famous syssition, the daily meal that assembled all adult citizens and to which each had to bring his own contribution in order to preserve his citizenship.
The syssition, the meal, was not simply a peacetime transposition of a warriors' feast. It was institution whose three main aspects summed up the qualities needed to be a Spartan: the economic aspect, since to bring one's own contribution to the common table showed that one possessed a kleros worked by helots; the political aspect, since daily participation, that is, putting oneself at the service of the city, was synonymous with citizenship; and the ideological aspect, since the syssition was a place of education through example, through the recollection of the high deeds of citizens that took place in the course of the banquets, and a place where the community of the homoioi was daily cemented. The syssition was at the same time a tangible mark of the segregation of the other groups in the population, who were excluded from the banquet, not admitted to the practice that each day reminded the citizens of their membership of the group. The syssition symbolized the exclusiveness of a civic community on the defensive, which had irrevocably decided to rserve equality for just a small number of the population.
The agoge and the syssition are practices of great interest when it comes to trying to understand how citizenship was defined at the time in question. Sparta was, of course, unique in that it carried the institutionalization of these practices to an extreme, but the fact that it did so suggests that similar practices were also important in other cities.
Spartan equilibrium, eunomia, was thus achieved in both the domain of political institutions and that of social structures. And even if this city subsequently refused to evolve to such a point that by the fifth century it had already become an object of curiosity to the Athenians, in the archaic period it was certainly one of the foremost laboratories experimenting with the application of the notion of equality to a number of sectors of city life. If Plutarch is to be believed, it was a city 'where there was neither wealth nor poverty, where the resources were equal for all and life was made easy by the simplicity of the customs. Throughout the land there were to be seen nothing but dancing, festivals, banquets, hunting parties, physical exercises, and conversation in places where people met together, at least, that is, during the times that the Spartans did not devote to military expeditions.'
Lycurgus and the 'Rhetra'
In his Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch describes the circumstances in which this legislator, of whose existence we cannot be certain, took action. Faced with the disturbances by which the city was affected following the Second Messenian War, Lycurgus consulted the Delphic oracle which, by way of reply, produced a rhetra, or constitutional law. Here is the text, as cited by Plutarch:
When thou hast built a temple to Zeus Syllanius and Athena Syllania, divide the people intio phylai [tribes] and into obai [residential quarters], and establish a senate of thirty members, including the archegetai [the two kings], then from time to time appellazein [assemblies of the people] between Babyca and Cnacion, and there introduce and rescind measures, but the people must have the deciding voice and the power
The second measure attributed to Lycurgus was the division of land. Plutarch writes as follows:
A second and very bold political measure of Lycurgus [was] his redistribution of the land. For there was a dreadful inequality in this regard, the city was heavily burdened with indigent and helpless people, and wealth was wholly concentrated in the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to banish insolence and envy and crime and luxury, and those yet more deep-seated and afflictive diseases of the State, poverty and wealth, he persuaded his fellow-citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew, and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality in the means of subsistence...Suiting the deed tothe word, he distributed the rest of the Laconian land among the perioeci or free provincials, in thirty thousand lots, and that which belonged to the city of Sparty, in nine thousand lots, to as many genuine Spartans.
The terms used in both these texts have been the subject of commentaries that it is not possible to reproduce in the present work but they do condition the importance of each of these institutions. Let us attempt a synthesis of the political institutions and social structures that were set in place.
Political Institutions
The Kings Royalty was double. The kings were chosen from two different families, the Agiadae and the Eurypontedae. The succession remained within these two families but was not invariably in a direct line of descent. The powers of the two kings were limited by the very facts that there were two of them and both submitted to the city constitution, which they swore to uphold. There were frequent conflicts, either between kings or with the elders and the ephors, the most frequent complaint being that the kings were abusing their power, in particular by acting with too much independence in their dealings with other cities. The powers of the kings were given the most freedom of expression in the military field. In times of war only one of the kings acted as commander of the armies and he exercised great authority over the troops. As members of the gerousia, the kings took part in political decisions. They enjoyed special honours: each owned an estate (temenos) taken from the land of the perioikoi; they were allowed double rations in the common meals and a greater share of war booty than the other warriors, all of which provided each of them with the means to run a 'household' far superior to those of other Spartan families. Finally, the royal function was of a markedly religious nature. The kings were responsible for most of the city rituals, and their funerals, the grandeur of which exceeded all Greek norms, underlined the exceptional nature of a royalty regarded as sacred.
The assembly, apella, regularly summoned on the occasion of the festivals of Apollo, was composed of all Spartans of ree birth and met once a month in the open air, in an unidentified spot. The extent of its authority has been the subject of much discussion. In general, historians do not credit it with much power. In particular, they maintain that it could not discuss the propositions put to it, but could only accept or reject them. However, the interpretation suggested by F. Ruze for the text of the Rhetra (the French translation of which is the basis of the above English rendering), on the contrary restores total sovereignty to the assembly. He claims that it was not simply a recording chamber but a place in which real debates took place. All the same, if it took decisions contrary to the constitution, the kings and other members of the gerousia could dissolve it. It decided on when to seek peace and when to go to war, and elected magistrates and members of the gerousia.
The council of elders or gerousia comprised twenty-eight members, elected for life by the assembly, plus the two kings. To become a member, a man had to be 60 or over. The gerousia drafted laws which were then put to the vote in the assembly. This was the function known as 'proboulematic'. It also acted as a high court of justice in criminal cases. Both its prestige and its powers were considerable. Its method of election elicited a few smiles from the Athenians of the classical period: candidates for the gerousia presented themselves, one by one, before the assembly. The level of applause that greeted them decided whether or not they were elected.
The ephors constituted a college of five magistrates elected for one year. Eligibility was subject to no census or birth conditions: the ephors were recruited from the citizen body. Whatever the date of their creation, their role definitely seems to have been to thwart any tyrannical evolution of the royal power. Their powers were wide. The president of the college of ephors was an eponymous magistrate (the Spartan year of his office was named after him) and he presided over the apella. The ephors decided which political questions should be submitted to the assembly. In times of war, they organized mobilization, and two of them accompanied the king on the campaign, acting as generals. On a day-to-day basis, they supervised the social life of the city, in particular education, and the administration. They also held judicial authority, even over the kings. Their very considerable power was, however, tempered by the short duration of their responsibilities.
Spartan Society
The citizens These were known as the Equals: homoioi. To be a citizen, you had to have been born a boy, from a citizen father, and to have been through all the stages in the collective education, the agoge. You had to be 30 years of age and capable of making the required contribution to the daily common meal, the syssition.
In accordance with the legislation attributed to Lycurgus, every citizen was allotted a parcel of land known as a kleros, put at his disposal by the city, along with a number of dependent peasants responsible for cultivating it: helots. Both the kleros and the helots were the city's property, not the citizen's, and would normally revert to the city at the citizen's death, to be subsequently redistributed. The plots were carved out of the fertile land of Laconia and Messnia. According to Plutarch's text cited above, initially there were 9,000 of these parcels of land, which gives some idea of the cize of the citizen body. Although in principle fair and egalitarian, the system soon became open to abuse (when a son succeeded his father, for instance, the parcel of land would be kept in the family instead of reverting to common property). By the fourth century, real estate inequality was rife among the citizens.
The homoioi worked neither on the land nor as craftsmen; they were primarily warriors for, as we have seen, their political role was a limited one.
The perioikoi, literally 'those who live round about', were the free inhabitants of Laconia who did not have citizenship. They lived in small towns and villages in an autonomous fashion, except with regard to any relations with other cities. They were peasants, craftsmen, traders. They served in the Spartan army in separate contingents.
The helots were rural dependents, hence non-free. They belonged to the civic community and worked on the estates of the citizens, to whome they handed over a predetermined portion of the harvests. They lived in the countryside, on the land that they cultivated, or in villages. The helots of Messenia were the former people of Messenia, who had been deprived of their liberty when the Spartans conquered Messenia between 730 and 710. They were the descendants of local populations who had also been reduced to slavery, but the exact process of their enslavement is not known. They may have included both autochthonous peoples who had been living in Laconia before the arrival of the Dorians and also people who had lost their freedom as a result of extreme poverty. But whether their enslavement was a consequence of conquest or of economic inequalities, the helots formed a homogeneous group of enslaved Greeks, speaking the same language, employed at the same tasks, and - in the case of the helots of Messenia, at any rate - with the same aspirations.
Sparty was exceptional not only with regard to its constitution and its social structure, but also from the point of view of its institutionalization of education and its collective aristocratic practices, such as its banquets.
The agoge As we have seen, no one could become a citizen without having passed through the various stages of the agoge, an education organized by the city. This was altogether exceptional in the Greek cities, where families were normally responsible for the education of their own children. Plutarch tells us that Lycurgus considered 'the paideia to be the most important and finest work of the legislator'. And, as the paideia involved far more than simply instruction, the legislator first concerned himself with the girls, the future mothers of citizens, with a view to giving them robust bodies, well suited to procreation; and next, with love between boys and girls, and marriage for, according to Lycurgus, the oblications of marriage 'united husbands and wives when their bodies were full of creative energy and their affections new and fresh' and preserved 'in their hearts...mutual longing and delight'. All this with but a single aim in mind: the birth of children, upon whose survival or suppression the community as a whole immediately decided. The infants whom the 'elders' did not condemn to die by being hurled from the Apothetai precipice were left in the care of their mothers until the age of 7, then taken in charge by the city, under the responsibility of a pedonome, one of the magistrates, and divided into age groups (agelai) in which they lived together. Physical games and training of an increasingly stringent kind, hunting practice, training in the use of arms, music and choral singing, under the supervision of older boys, filled their days until adolescence. In the course of the last stage in this education a small number of hand-picked young Spartans underwent the trial of the krypteia: each of these youths had to leave the town, live in the mountains, always on his guard, even when sleeping, remaining unseen by anyone for a whole year. A number of historians compare the krypteia to the episode of living alone in the wilderness that is a feature of other cultures, and regard it as a period of initiation before a boy's definitive entry into the life of a citizen. Even setting aside the krypteia, which seems to have been a trial reserved for a limited number of future Spartan citizens, the agoge's function certainly was to educate a boy in the values of endurance, courage, sobriety and unselfishness - all requisites for citizenship - and at the same time to teach him his real profession, that of a hoplite. It is not hard to see why it was one of the conditions of citizenship. But Sparta's uniqueness lay in its prolongation of the paideia so that its collective values continued to be accepted by all citizens throughout their lives. One of the occasions on which the civic community expressed itself was the famous syssition, the daily meal that assembled all adult citizens and to which each had to bring his own contribution in order to preserve his citizenship.
The syssition, the meal, was not simply a peacetime transposition of a warriors' feast. It was institution whose three main aspects summed up the qualities needed to be a Spartan: the economic aspect, since to bring one's own contribution to the common table showed that one possessed a kleros worked by helots; the political aspect, since daily participation, that is, putting oneself at the service of the city, was synonymous with citizenship; and the ideological aspect, since the syssition was a place of education through example, through the recollection of the high deeds of citizens that took place in the course of the banquets, and a place where the community of the homoioi was daily cemented. The syssition was at the same time a tangible mark of the segregation of the other groups in the population, who were excluded from the banquet, not admitted to the practice that each day reminded the citizens of their membership of the group. The syssition symbolized the exclusiveness of a civic community on the defensive, which had irrevocably decided to rserve equality for just a small number of the population.
The agoge and the syssition are practices of great interest when it comes to trying to understand how citizenship was defined at the time in question. Sparta was, of course, unique in that it carried the institutionalization of these practices to an extreme, but the fact that it did so suggests that similar practices were also important in other cities.
Spartan equilibrium, eunomia, was thus achieved in both the domain of political institutions and that of social structures. And even if this city subsequently refused to evolve to such a point that by the fifth century it had already become an object of curiosity to the Athenians, in the archaic period it was certainly one of the foremost laboratories experimenting with the application of the notion of equality to a number of sectors of city life. If Plutarch is to be believed, it was a city 'where there was neither wealth nor poverty, where the resources were equal for all and life was made easy by the simplicity of the customs. Throughout the land there were to be seen nothing but dancing, festivals, banquets, hunting parties, physical exercises, and conversation in places where people met together, at least, that is, during the times that the Spartans did not devote to military expeditions.'