If
you drive down the modern road from Tripoli (or Tegea, as I prefer to
think of it) toward Sparti (Sparta), there is a moment when coming
around a bend you catch the first glimpse of Taygetos. I will
never forget the first time I encountered that view: it took my breath
away. I could hardly concentrate on the winding road for
straining to get another glimpse of those spectacular
mountains. And when the valley of the Eurotas was spread out
before me ,it was like revelation. My image of Sparta –
ancient Sparta and all that Sparta implied – was transformed
in a single instant.
Our images of Sparta, the city, are dominated to this day by what we
have been told about Sparta, the society. Even to the
individual who has never studied Sparta or read a single book about it,
images of Sparta have been transmitted through our language
alone. “Spartan” is an adjective used to
denote “severe,” “plain,” and
“austere.” Laconic speech is
“terse,” “concise,” and
“economical.” The most rudimentary and
fleeting brush with Sparta in literature will not be without reference
to rigid discipline, disdain for luxury, self-sacrifice, and endurance
of hardship.
The more a novice looks into Spartan society, the quicker he/she is
confronted by references to a childhood of deprivation in which one had
to steal to get enough to eat and was allowed only one garment per
year. The boys, we learn, had to cut down the river reeds
with their bare hands or the help of a tool which is dismissed as
practically worthless, and then sleep upon these instead of real
beds. Worse, they had to live practically in the wild,
exposed to the elements without shelter or proper clothes.
Books like Gates of Fire
describe horrendous beatings to which Spartan boys were apparently
subjected for any tiny infraction of the rigid rules of acceptable
behavior.
Nor are youths the only Spartans whom, we are led to believe, suffered
deprivation. This was a society, according to most sources,
where women were prohibited from wearing jewelry or even taking pride
in their weaving. Indeed, all gold and silver was banned, and
so could adorn nothing – not even the temples of the Gods.
The houses, we are told, were not painted (as elsewhere in the ancient
world), and if one believes the oft-quoted “sayings of
Spartan kings,” they did not even hew their house beams into
regular square posts, but left them raw and untreated – one
imagines crude timber as in a log cabin. Meanwhile, the young
men lived in barracks (notoriously grim places in any society!) and for
their entire lives ate their meals at men’s clubs where the
cuisine, we soon learn, was infamous throughout the ancient world for
its lack of sophistication and variety.
Such a society is most readily imagined in an austere, plain, indeed
barren, landscape. After all, a society characterized by
deprivation of food, clothes, decoration, and fine cuisine sounds like a
desperately poor society, a society barely surviving in a hostile
environment, a society that has made a virtue out of
necessity. Unconsciously, therefore, I had imagined Sparta
situated in a harsh environment, in an infertile valley that yielded
little, a place where everyone’s energy had to be devoted to
collective survival or face extinction. This seemed,
inherently and logically, to be the underlying – if unspoken
– root cause of Sparta’s obsession with
self-discipline and self-denial for the good of the community, the City.
Nor was I alone in this conclusion. In his best-selling novel
Gates of Fire,
Stephen Pressfield calls Sparta “a village,” adding:
“The whole stinking place would fit, with room to spare,
within His Majesty’s [Xerxes of Persia’s] strolling
garden at Persepolis. It is … a pile of
stones. It contains no temples or treasures of note, no gold;
it is a barnyard of leeks and onions, with soil so thin a man may kick
through it with one strike of the foot.”
But there is a problem here.
The valley of the Eurotas is anything but barren! It is quite
the reverse. It is green and fertile and stunningly beautiful
– like riches cupped in the hands of the gods. From the
blooming oleander to the wild iris, the valley is a garden. The orange
orchards stretch as far as the eye can see, brazenly advertising not
only the abundance of soil and sun but water as well. Most
spectacular of all, the Eurotas valley is one of those few places on
earth that offers the sensually stimulating sight of palm trees waving
against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains.
Has Laconia perhaps changed dramatically in the last 2,500
years? Was it poor when the harsh, economical,
self-disciplined Spartan society took root in its – then
– sparse and almost barren soil? Does it bloom now
artificially because of modern fertilizers and irrigation?
If we are to believe the ancient historians, no. Herodotus
speaks of Sparta’s “good soil” and
Thucydides describes the entire Peloponnese (with the exception of
Arcadia) as the “richest part of Hellas.”
It is when speaking of Athens, the city modern man most intensely
associates with ancient Greek civilization and vast wealth, that
Thucydides draws attention to “the poverty of her
soil.”
So the fertility and abundance of the valley has not changed since
ancient times any more than the shape of Taygetos beyond. But
if this rich valley was the seat of Sparta, then Spartan austerity and
deprivation did not come from necessity! Sparta’s
land was rich, fertile, and productive enough to enable the highest
standard of living available in the ancient world – at least
to the always modest number of elite Spartiates. In short, if
Sparta was as austere a society as it is depicted in modern times, then
that austerity was self-imposed.
But are we supposed to imagine that a people raised in the midst of
wealth and beauty had no appreciation for either? Or is the
very austerity of Spartan society as mythical as the thin soil of
Pressfield’s Sparta? After all, Pressfield calls Sparta a
village, while Nicolas Nicastro is only willing to concede that the dominant
superpower of Greece was “an agglomeration of sleepy
villages.” Even Jon Edward Martin, an author whose
research is on the whole very sound, insists “large buildings
were few here” and talks of “a small collection of
civic buildings clustered to the southeast of the
acropolis.” Yet Pausanias, who traveled to Greece
in the 2nd century AD – long after Sparta’s decline
from prominence and more than half a century after its
“golden era” in the 6th century BC –
needs 26 sections and more than 60 pages to describe the
city! Even then, he claims he has not described
everything, but rather has selected and discussed only “the
really memorable things.”
The contrast between popular assumptions about Sparta’s
physical appearance as a place of provincial insignificance, if not
downright crude ugliness, and Pausanias’ lengthy listing of
temples, palaces, sanctuaries, monuments, and public buildings suggests
that modern readers may have been as misled by their own preconceptions
about the city as they have been about the fundamental fertility of the
Sparta’s landscape.
Yes, Sparta had no walls, but this only means it could spread out
graciously upon its valley, as all major European cities did after their
confining medieval walls were torn down. No one today would
call Paris, Vienna, or Rome “a collection of
villages” simply because they are in fact many villages that
have grown into a single metropolis after the need for fortifications
disappeared and economic growth fueled urbanization. Why
should we assume, just because Sparta was made up of five distinct
villages in pre-archaic times, that it was not – in its years
of glory – a cohesive, dynamic city?
No, Sparta never had a hill inside the city to match the majesty of
Athen’s acropolis – but then, nor did Corinth or
Tegea or Olympia itself. Athens was the exception, not the
rule. In most ancient cities, as in Sparta, the acropolis was
an integral part of the lowland city.
No, nothing we can find in Sparta today can hold a candle to the
remnants of Athens still so magnificently scattered through the modern
city – but then Sparta was destroyed by earthquakes many
times over the centuries. It was flooded by the
Eurotas. It was abandoned. Nothing destroys
architectural monuments so completely as abandonment. Nor
should it be forgotten that Sparta has not been systematically
subjected to archaeological excavation in almost a century.
Can we honestly say we have any idea of what Sparta might have looked
like?
No Spartan has left a written description of their city that has
survived to our time. The depictions of Sparta that have shaped modern
perceptions come from “strangers” – such
as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Pausanias – not
to mention Plato and Aristotle. What might Sparta have looked
like through the eyes of someone born and raised there? Would
a Spartan have found the Acropolis in Athens
“magnificent,” or perhaps instead
“distant, intellectual, and arrogant”?
Would a Spartan necessarily have admired the altar at
Pergamon? Or found it perhaps “gaudy” and
“busy” – as many people see rococo
architecture today? Sparta was different from
other Greek cities. Does that necessarily mean it was less
attractive? Totally without its own unique charms?
Let me be heretical. We know that in ancient Greece most
statues and temples were painted vivid colors and the Gods dressed in
robes, ivory, gold, and jewels. What if Spartan austerity
indeed extended to temples, statues, and monuments, and these like
themselves, were adorned only with natural beauty – naked
stone sculptures and marble? Isn’t that what we
find strikingly beautiful in Greek architecture and sculpture
today? The perfection of proportion, symmetry, and
form? The lifelike poses, gestures, and expressions?
Would we rather see Venus de Milo painted in flesh tones with red lips
and blond hair? Would we admire the Parthenon in Athens as
much if it were dressed in gaudy paint?
What if Spartan homes were indeed devoid of elaborate interior
paintings because, unlike their Athenian counterparts, they were not
crammed into an overcrowded city and surrounded by high walls that
blocked out almost all light? Spartan houses could be built
on a generous plan, they could incorporate interior courtyards planted
with fruit trees and herbs, they could surround themselves with gardens
and orchards, they could sparkle not with gold and silver but the
glinting of sunlight on water in internal fountains. Spartan homes
could have windows that let in the light, and they might have decorated
their homes – as they did themselves – with things of nature:
cut flowers, bowls of fruit, running water. Such things are
transient; they rarely leave an archaeological record.
Nor should we forget that Spartan bronze works were coveted across the
ancient world, that Spartan sculptors found work at Olympia, that
Spartan pottery, while it never reached the artistic pinnacle of
Corinthian or Athenian, was neither plain nor crude. Spartans
clearly did not disdain all forms of art, nor refuse to surround
themselves with objects of beauty. When they could not
compete with products of their own, they imported them – just
as we do today.
So the next time you drive through that magnificent, fertile valley
that was once the home of Sparta, think again about what Sparta might
have looked like. Ask yourself if such a magnificent cradle
might not have produced a splendid city far more pleasing to modern
taste than what contemporary Athens or Corinth would have
offered. Picture upon the broad floor of the Eurotas valley a
city of wide avenues lined with trees. A city full of marble
monuments, pure Doric temples, sun-soaked theaters and imposing
stoas. A city with large villas set in blooming
gardens. A city where the barracks and civic buildings are
interspersed between sunny open spaces set aside for running and
horse racing. A city decorated with fountains and flowering
trees. In short, a city much as we would plan one today.
References Herodotus, The
Histories.
Martin, Jon Edward (2007), The
Headlong God of War: A Tale of Ancient Greece and the Battle of Marathon
(Baltimore: PublishAmerica).
Nicastro, Nicholas (2005), The
Isle of Stone (New York: New American Library).
Pausanias, Guide to Greece
Pressfield, Steven (1999), Gates
of Fire (New York: Doubleday).
Thucydides, History of
the Peloponnesian War.
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