Spartan Thoughts

[kittiwake]

On Sunday, I watched the second part of the documentary about the Spartans on C4. I get the impression that it would have been fantastic to have been a Spartan woman, but no fun at all to have been a Spartan man. The girls were encouraged to be strong and sporty (so that they would produce strong babies) and women had lots of freedom compared to the women in other Greek cities who were mostly house-bound. The boys on the other hand were thrown over a cliff to die as babies if they weren't strong enough, were taken from their families when they were seven to be trained as soldiers and bought up living rough in the contryside with constant training and hardship, expected to steal to supplement their meagre rations. If a man passed all his training, he was given land and a house, but was expected to spend most of his spare time with his comrades in the mess-halls rather than at home with his family.

Coincidentally, my current lunchtime reading at work is "The Corn King and the Spring Queen" by Naomi Mitchison. It is partially set in Sparta at a time when they were trying to re-introduce this systems after it had fallen out of use and the Spartan nobility had reverted to the pursuit of luxury like the other Greek cities. In the book the king and his supporters are very idealistic about their plans for social engineering, and the new system starts with all debts being cancelled, and the land and wealth shared out equally among the men, so it is very popular with the poorer citizens. The harshness and cruelty of the system isn't apparent in this story.