Intellectually, America and the West owe much of their patrimony to the Greeks, primarily the Athenians. The birthplace of democracy and philosophy, Athens fostered Plato and Aristotle, the famous midwives of rationalism, gave us the great historian Thucydides—his famous military subjects, Pericles and Alcibiades—and Hippocrates, founder of modern medicine. Sprinkle in the tragedians and Aristophanes, and the totality of human thought finds some antecedent in this small Greek city-state.
Today, however, Athens is largely forgotten outside of the classroom, replaced by a new Greek-archetype: the Spartan. Why Americans incline toward Sparta is not hard to understand; we tend to value, at least in speech, what they valued: discipline, efficiency, spiritedness, love of country, equality, manliness, valor in battle. The way Sparta became “Spartan” we are told by ancient sources, was on account of the vision of its founder, Lycurgus.
The primary source through which we learn of Lycurgus and the founding of Sparta is Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Plutarch, famous for his biographies on ancient luminaries, is a little bit like the People Magazine of the ancient world; that is, if People concerned itself with intellectual matters and the profiled celebrities had actually done something worth chronicling. Unlike People, however, Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus begins with a startling admission: “Concerning Lycurgus the lawgiver, in general, nothing can be said which is not disputed.” Plutarch’s work-around is to “follow those authors who are least contradicted, or who have the most notable witnesses for what they have written about the man.” Like Thucydides, who begins his account of the Peloponnesian war with a similar warning, what follows is not the truth but the effectual truth of Sparta’s origins.
What interests us, at all events, is the way in which Sparta’s laws came into being. The first thing to note is Lycurgus’ insight that to promulgate new laws, the lawgiver must prepare his people to receive innovations. Put another way, they need to want it. Lycurgus managed this by traveling abroad during a time of particular infighting within the royal family. After a while, the Spartans “missed Lycurgus sorely,” so returning “to a people thus disposed, he at once undertook to revolutionize the civil polity.” But what he learned while in Crete, and this from the philosopher Thales, was of decisive importance to the regime he set about creating.
What Thales imparted was the centrality of musicality—odes, poetry, etc.—to the health of the regime. Everything from children’s songs to military chants, he taught Lycurgus, should be crafted with an aim to harmonizing civic relationships and mobilizing the “common pursuit of what was high and noble.” Good mores—not written laws (he forbid his laws be put down in writing)—Lycurgus realized, most strongly bound a people together, an altogether different approach to the modern valuation of statecraft over soulcraft.
Lycurgus also, in an effort to ameliorate avarice in Sparta, apportioned the land into equal plots and mandated the citizenry dine in common mess halls. Over time, Spartans grew less and less concerned with material wealth and more interested in distinguishing themselves through martial valor. Children were reared in common—sent away from home at an early age—essentially through training schools run by the regime. More attached to their friends fostered through these experiences, young Spartiates’ identities were bound up together with the state. While this will doubtless strike readers as totalitarian—and it was—never, I suspect, was the collapse of the public and private so successfully complete as it existed in Sparta under Lycurgus.
When Lycurgus beheld his laws and the mores of the Spartans were in good order, he announced “something of the greatest weight and importance remained,” but that it required consultation with the god at Delphi. During his absence, Lycurgus forbade, under oath, the Spartans from altering or obviating any the laws until he returned. At Delphi he asked Apollo if the laws he made for Sparta were good. Apollo answered they were and that Sparta would continue to flourish so long as “it kept to the polity of Lycurgus.” He sent the note back to his countrymen and, after taking leave of close friends in family, ended his life before returning home, using his death as an insurance plan against any change to his institutions. As Plutarch remarks:
And he was not deceived in his expectations, so long did his city have the first rank in Hellas for good government and reputation, observing as she did for five hundred years the laws of Lycurgus, in which no one of the fourteen kings who followed him made any change, down to Agis the son of Archidamus.
A five hundred year run is not bad. America is almost half that old. Let’s see if we can make it.
Author: David Bahr