The Problem in Sparta Sparta has a problem. In a frenzy of ambition, it has conquered and enslaved its neighbors in Messenia and Lakonia. These slaves, called helots, outnumber the Spartans at least ten to one. To keep this massive slave population under control, every Spartan must be a warrior. In Greece, that meant a Spartan must be a hoplite and fight in a phalanx. As we saw in our presentation on the phalanx, this extremely organized style of warfare was as demanding as it was effective. To maintain this formation required rigorous discipline. To hold one's position in this crushing scrum of bronze took nerves of steel. The entire phalanx system flies in the face of fight-or-flight instincts of self-preservation.
The Problem in Sparta It was the most terrifying form of warfare discovered thus far. While citizens of every Greek city-state were expected to go through this nightmare, for most, it was a nightmare from which they would soon wake and return to their normal lives. They were farmers, merchants, potters and masons, who donned their armor maybe once or twice a year to teach those darn Corinthians whose pasture that was. For the Spartans, the nightmare of phalanx warfare was never-ending. With enemies abroad and a massive population of enslaved helots at home, a Spartan man lived a life of near-constant warfare. This was the Spartans' problem: how to turn their entire population into fearless cogs in a synchronized killing machine.
The Agoge The solution to this problem came from a fellow name Lycurgus. Lycurgus came up with the agoge. The agoge was many things. It was a series of trials that would cull the weak and cowardly from the Spartan stock. It was a system of education that would take the strong and make them stronger, and take the brave and make them braver. Finally, the agoge was a society that would forge these powerful individuals into a single deadly unit. Through eugenics, education and training, Lycurgus sought to make Spartans the ultimate warriors. Let us follow the journey of a Spartan boy through this agoge.
The Agoge Meet Brasidas. At his birth, Brasidas' mother bathed him in wine. For the skin of a newborn, this is essentially the same as pouring rubbing alcohol on an open wound. At his first breath, Brasidas knew that the world he was entering was hard and cruel. Many babies did not survive this first shock and were discarded. After this bath, the Spartan Council of Elders examined Brasidas closely. If he seemed sickly, deformed, weak, or slow, he would be cast off a cliff and forgotten.
The Agoge Past this first hurdle, Brasidas enjoyed a semi-normal childhood until age seven, when he was torn from his mother's arms and thrown into an agela, or herd of boys around his age. This broke down the bonds of family and got young Brasidas to consider his comrades his family. These boys were barely fed. This got them used to hunger and encouraged them to hunt, forage or steal to feed themselves. Stealing was not forbidden, but getting caught was severely punished. Around age 12, Brasidas faced a strange rite of passage. He and the other boys of his agela had to steal honey cakes from an altar of Artemis.
The Agoge Protecting the altar were older boys with whips. To meet his goal, Brasidas would have to overcome his fear and face the flails. Centuries later, Romans would travel hundreds of miles just to witness this strange event. After this rite of passage, Brasidas was given the only article of clothing he'd have for one whole year, a blood red cape called a phoinikos. At around the same time, Brasidas was expected to choose one of the older boys who'd just whipped him to complete his education. This older boy introduced Brasidas to his warrior society, with whom he would eat, sleep, practice and fight.
The Agoge Life of a Spartan Warrior At age 18, Brasidas graduated to a paidiskos. He served as a mentor, a teacher, a comrade and a lover, binding Brasidas ever more tightly to his phalanx cohort. As a paidiskos, he would serve as a military reserve force. To keep his blood thirst keen, the Spartans made him a member of the Krypteia, or secret police. These young men would spy on the helots, occasionally murdering them to keep them cowed. At age 20, Brasidas was considered a man and entered full military service. He was encouraged to find a wife and start making babies, but he was still required to live in the barracks among his cohort.
The activities of the kings and Council were subject to Ephors, a panel of men elected annually by the Assembly to oversee the government. Life of a Spartan Warrior Only at age 30 was Brasidas released from active military service, though he would still serve as a reserve fighter in time of need. He was allowed to leave the barracks and live with his wife and children. He was also given a vote on the Spartan Assembly. This assembly had the final say on all matters of state. If he lived to 60, Brasidas could be elected to a seat among the Council of Elders, a panel of 28 judges who served for life. This council decided on the measures that the Assembly voted on, and thus held the most power in Sparta, though there were also two kings who served as military and religious leaders of the land. This was not a monarchy or even an oligarchy.
Life of a Spartan Warrior Like Brasidas, every Spartan spent the first half of his life training and fighting, and spent the second half ruling. With the entire population doing nothing but training, fighting and ruling, we must wonder how the Spartans managed to feed themselves. Structure of Spartan Society To support this warrior society, Lycurgus created a caste system. At the top of this system were the Spartiates: the warrior class, and the only class with rights of citizenship and political power. At the bottom of the system were the helots: the labor class. The helots were spread about the countryside, and were not so much slaves as serfs, bound to their land and trade in service of the Spartans.
Structure of Spartan Society This freed the Spartiates from the need to feed, clothe and shelter themselves, allowing them to focus on war. Yet even helots had some rights. They could earn money and could even buy their freedom, but they could not serve in the military and, therefore, held no political power, despite comprising the majority of the population. Between slave labor and ruling there's still a lot of business to be done. A slave cannot be a merchant, because merchants need to travel. A slave would never return. At the same time, Lycurgus did not want his noble Spartiate warriors engaging in the piddly stuff of trade and commerce, as he thought the pursuit of wealth and comfort would soften them. Thus, Lycurgus created a third class, the perioikoi: the merchant class.
The Spartans needed to hold the helots in, because without their slave-labor class, the Spartiates could not dedicate their lives to military and civic service. Structure of Spartan Society Though the perioikoi were free men and served as reserve forces, they were not considered citizens of Sparta and could not marry a Spartan. Besides acting as merchants, the perioikoi served as a buffer. Located in semi-autonomous cities around the perimeter of the Spartan state, the free perioikoi kept the enslaved helots in. More importantly, they kept new or foreign ideas out. The perioikoi were the only members of Spartan society allowed to visit other city-states or conduct business with foreigners. Even the Spartiates required special permission to leave Sparta. This dual function of the perioikoi, to keep the helots in, and to keep dangerous ideas out, highlights the fragility of the Spartan system.
Structure of Spartan Society The Spartans also needed to keep foreign ideas out, because the Spartan way of life and ethos was as artificial as it was brutal. A new idea could undermine and destroy the Spartan way of life more effectively than any enemy. Thus, the Spartans, the fiercest warriors of the time, who feared neither wound nor death, were terrified of new ideas. The Greek Paradox: Freedom and Slavery History remembers the Greeks as fiercely independent freedom fighters, the fathers of philosophy and the inventors of democracy. All too often, we overlook the fact that the Greeks, like pretty much everyone else at the time, had slaves.
The Greek Paradox: Freedom and Slavery Though the Greeks heroically fought against Persian enslavement, though each Greek city ruled itself, though Greek philosophers explored the implications of freedom as an ideal, though the Athenians invented a system of government based on the intrinsic equality of all men, these champions of freedom also regularly enslaved their fellow man. Varieties of Greek Slavery Slavery in Greece was ubiquitous. Everyone had slaves; they were so easy to acquire! You could always take the classical approach: go to war and take slaves as booty, like Achilles in The Iliad. Or, you could buy a slave at any of a number of slave markets. If you couldn't afford a slave, you could always kidnap one. Coastal cities engaged in piracy and human trafficking, just like any other trade, and bandits haunted the mountain passes of Greece.
Varieties of Greek Slavery And, if someone owed you a lot of money, you could demand them or their family members to act as your slaves until the debt was paid off. (However, this practice was forbidden in Athens by Solon in the 6th century B.C.) Yet, like all other aspects of Greek culture, Greek slavery also varied from city to city. The agrarian Spartans practiced a sort of serfdom, in which their serfs, or helots, as they were called, were bound to the land in which they worked. The more urban Athenians practiced good old-fashioned chattel slavery, in which slaves were bought, sold and leased like livestock. It is hard to determine which of the two groups had it worse, the slaves or the helots.
Varieties of Greek Slavery Duties of Athenian Slaves On the one hand, a helot lived relatively independently, only paying tribute to his master; while an Athenian slave's entire livelihood lay in the hands of his master. On the other hand, to the Spartans, the helots were just a group of people to be harried and beaten into submission, and they regularly murdered the helots to keep their population (and their rebellion) under control - whereas, to the Athenians, each slave was an investment; they must be fed, clothed and cared for in order to make their master a profit. The chattel slavery approach used by the Athenians seems to have been the more popular option across Greece. In fact, there is evidence that even the Spartans supplemented their helot workforce of serfs with chattel slaves.
Duties of Athenian Slaves Given its prevalence, and the many records provided by the Athenians, let us take a look at the duties and rights of Athenian slaves, so that we might get a hint of what slavery looked like in Greece as a whole. Athenian slaves engaged in a wide variety of trades. Some of these trades were quite harsh. Slaves working in mines, quarries and mills had a startlingly short life expectancy. However, many slaves worked in less dangerous trades. Slaves worked in their master's businesses: making pottery, manufacturing weapons, building ships, spinning wool, working looms, baking bread. Slaves also worked the fields, orchards and vineyards of Greece, though never on the level of the plantations of the Roman Republic or Antebellum America.
Duties of Athenian Slaves Rights of Athenian Slaves A few privileged slaves found their way into their master's household, becoming household servants, and generally enjoying a far softer life than their counterparts outdoors. Yet, perhaps most shocking are the slaves who engaged in fields normally reserved for free men. Athenian slaves sculpted marble for the Parthenon, and Athenian slaves rowed triremes in wartime. This last is truly remarkable, since participation in warfare has historically been a path to political power. The dizzying array of trades followed by Athenian slaves becomes easier to understand when we recognize the unique rights and privileges they enjoyed. Slaves were permitted to engage in many aspects of civil and religious life, including festivals and rituals.
You could not rape a slave. Rights of Athenian Slaves Domestic slaves were often treated as members of the family and dined with their masters. Though Athenian slaves belonged to their master, they still had the right to accumulate their own private property. The only difference was that a large portion of their wages went to their masters. Nevertheless, Athenian slaves could save a portion of their wages to start a business, purchase a home, or even buy their freedom. Manumission, or the freeing of a slave, was a regular occurrence across Greece, and although freed slaves were still treated as secondclass citizens in Athens, they still could become quite rich. Slaves also enjoyed many protections under Athenian law. You could not murder a slave.
And, though some slaves were allowed to marry, and even raise children, their marriage was not recognized by the state, and their master was free to split up or sell off his slave's family as he saw fit. Rights of Athenian Slaves You could not even beat a slave without reason. However, lest I give you the impression that Athens was a sort of slave's paradise, it is important to remember the rights that Athenian slaves did not have. When it came to court cases, Athenian slaves weren't really considered people. They could not bring a case to court, and their testimony was only admissible under torture. Moreover, slaves suffered harsher punishments under the law than their free counterparts. Many slaves were restricted from sexual activity, except, of course, those who worked in brothels.
Rights of Athenian Slaves And, of course, all the rights in the world mean nothing when one can be bought and sold like an animal. So, we've gotten a glimpse at the many forms slavery took in ancient Greece. We've seen how Greek slaves were acquired, through trade, raid or conquest. We've seen how Greek slaves were used in a wide variety of trades. We've seen the rights the slaves of Athens enjoyed, including the right to personal property, the right to protection under the law and even the right to buy their freedom. Yet, we've also seen how these rights were but pale reflections of those enjoyed by the Athenians themselves. Though Athenian slaves enjoyed many privileges and protections, they still lacked the greatest of all treasures: freedom.
The Spartans, refusing to send their army abroad because the slaves might revolt in their absence refused to send assistance, but the Athenians and the polis of Eretria on Euboea did. They sent a fleet and soldiers that captured the Persian administrative city of Sardis, and burned it to the ground. They then sailed home leaving the Milesians and the other Ionians to the mercy of the Persians. Five years later, they were overwhelmed by the might of Persia. * The Archaic Age of Greece (800-480 B.C.) The Persian Wars The main source of our information on the Persian Wars is the Father of History Herodotus. He attributed the cause of the war to an age old hatred between Europe and Asia. However, his investigations into the matter clearly demonstrate that the main cause of the war was a political conflict in Miletus. By 501 B.C. Aristagoras, the Persian s puppet tyrant in Miletus, realized that he was losing favor with Darius the Great, the ruler of Persia. Rather than wait for him to remove Aristagoras, Aristagoras decided to stage an uprising in Miletus against the Persians, and asked for help from the Greek mainland.
The Persian Wars Darius realized that as long as his Greek subjects in Asia Minor could turn towards their cousins across the Aegean, then they would long for freedom. So, Darius set forth on a punitive expedition against the Athenians to punish them for their part in the Milesian Revolt. Darius sent 20,000 men and two of his finest generals on an island hopping campaign across the Aegean. Landing in Eurobea in 490 B.C., Persian forces sacked and burned Eretria and sent its population into captivity and slavery in Persia. Then they crossed the narrow strait to Attica and landed on the plain of Marathon. Athens knew it was in trouble, and sought help from Sparta. The Spartans, however, were in the middle of a religious festival and could not come to help. The Athenian phalanx would have to engage the Persians on their own. Heavily outnumbered, and without cavalry, the Athenians took a position between two hills blocking the main road to the asty. After a standoff of several days, the Athenian general Militades received word that the Persians were watering their horses, and their infantry, while numerically superior, was left without support.
The Persian Wars Militades led a charge that smashed the Persian force and resulted in catastrophic Persian losses. Herodotus recorded that 6,400 Persians fell, while only 192 Athenians lost their lives. The Persians withdrew, but the Athenians were not sure where they were going. If they turned towards Athens the polis was in imminent danger. So they sent a runner to Athens to warn them. This runner, Pheidippides, ran 26 miles to Athens to deliver the warning. He died from exhaustion after delivering his message. An Athenian general named Themistocles realized that the Persian threat was not over, and when the Athenians discovered a large ore of silver, where normally they would distribute the wealth amongst themselves, he instead urged them to spend the newly acquired wealth on building a fleet of 200 triremes. Athens thereby transformed itself into the preeminent naval power of the Greek world just in time to confront a new Persian onslaught.
The Persian Wars Darius died in 486 B.C. leaving his son Xerxes as ruler. Xerxes decided to smash the Greeks with a massive overland invasion of Greece designed to conquer the entire country. Supported by a fleet of 600 ships, Xerxes grand army numbering between roughly 150 and 300,000 men set forth from Sardis in 480 B.C. crossing the Bosporus Straits (the narrow strait separating Europe from Asia) on pontoon bridges. Unlike his father, who had relied on talented generals, Xerxes led this campaign himself. Many Greek cities capitulated immediately, but Athens, Sparta, Corinth and some thirty other poleises refused to bow down and formed the Hellenic League to defeat Persia. Under the leadership of Sparta, and their King Leonidas, the outnumbered Greeks confronted Xerxes at the pass of Thermopylae in August of 480. For three days the Greeks held off the Persian multitude, while their fleet engaged the Persian navy at nearby Artemisium.
The Persian Wars Only 300 Spartans and 400 Corinthians held the pass at Thermopylae, against the multitude of Xerxes Persian host. This host included 5,000 men known as The Immortals, who had never been defeated in battle. The Spartans held the pass for three days, when the Persians discovered a pass around the Spartans and attacked them from the rear, killing them all. They had held the Persians long enough though to allow Themistocles fleet to inflict heavy damage on the Persians, and then retire safely to the south. Themistocles convinced his fellow Athenians to abandon Athens for the island of Salamis as Xerxes got closer, and eventually captured and burned Athens. Time was on Themistocles side, however, and the Persians depended on their naval fleet for supplies. As fall came on however, a season in which the Aegean becomes very rough seas, the Persians were desperate for a battle before the weather changed. Xerxes took his numerically superior fleet into Salamis and confronted the Greek fleet. The Greeks smashed his fleet, and later at the battle of Plataea smashed his army as well, vanquishing the Persians from Europe. Against all odds, the small, fractious, outnumbered Greeks had defeated the mightiest empire of the Mediterranean world.