Fascinating Facts about Ancient Sparta

Most people today are familiar with the idea of the ancient Spartans as a warrior people who spurned luxury and devoted themselves to military training. The Spartans have a substantial presence in modern popular culture, partly due to the 2006 fantasy action film 300, which, as I discuss in this article I published in November 2019, greatly distorts the true history of Sparta in order to convey a deeply racist, misogynistic, ableist, and fascist message.

In this article, though, I don’t want to talk about 300. Instead, I want to talk about some aspects of ancient Spartan history, society, and culture that are, for the most part, fairly obscure that I think should be more widely known. For instance, did you know that there are surviving works of ancient Spartan poetry? Or did you know that Spartiate men were known in antiquity for wearing their hair in long braids that came all the way down to their mid-backs? Or did you know that other Greek people in antiquity stereotyped the Spartans as anal fetishists? Read on to learn more!

Ancient Spartan poets and writers

Ancient Sparta is not generally known for its literature—largely as a result of the fact that it produced very little. Nonetheless, many people will be surprised to learn that there were actually a few famous ancient Spartan writers.

One of the earliest poets said to have lived in Sparta is Terpandros, who is said to have flourished in around the early seventh century BCE. He is said to have been born in the city of Antissa on the island of Lesbos and to have later immigrated to Sparta. He is known for his codification of Greek musical styles. A few poetic fragments attributed to him have survived, but these are probably later forgeries.

Around the same time as Terpandros or maybe a bit later, another poet flourished in Sparta named Alkman, who was a native Spartan. Most of Alkman’s poetry has been lost, but fragments of his work survive. His most famous surviving work is the “Louvre Partheneion,” a poem that was meant to be sung by a chorus of young women. Some of his poems are comedic, which suggests that Sparta in the seventh century BCE was not exactly the grim warrior society that we imagine it as today. For instance, here’s a poem Alkman wrote about an old man cavorting with young women, as translated by M. L. West:

“My legs can support me no longer, young ladies
with voices of honey and song divine!
Ah, would that I could be a kingfisher, flying
sea-blue, fearless, amid you halcyons
down to rest on the foaming brine!”

About a generation after Alkman, there lived another famous Spartan poet named Tyrtaios, who mostly wrote poems about warfare, exalting military courage as the highest of all virtues. Tyrtaios composed his poems in the Ionic dialect, rather than the native Doric dialect that was normally spoken in Sparta. This led some later authors to believe that Tyrtaios was an immigrant and not a native Spartan. It is far more likely, however, that Tyrtaios actually was a native Spartan and that he simply chose to compose his works in the Ionic dialect because of the dialect’s literary prestige.

In addition to Terpandros, Alkman, and Tyrtaios, we also know the names at least two other famous poets who lived in Sparta and whose poems were widely performed there. The poet Spendon seems to have been a native Spartan, but we don’t know exactly when he lived and none of his poems survive. The poet Thaletas is said to have been born on the island of Krete and to have immigrated to Sparta. Unfortunately, though, once again, we don’t know exactly when he lived and none of his poems survive.

Interestingly, there was also at least one Spartan historian. His name was Sosibios and he lived in around the middle of the third century BCE. He seems to have been born in Sparta, but eventually left his native city and went to the Ptolemaic court in Egypt, where he wrote works about Spartan history and customs. Unfortunately, nothing he ever wrote has survived and his existence is only known from references by later authors.

ABOVE: Third-century CE Roman mosaic depicting the famous Spartan poet Alkman

The helots

Most people who talk about the Spartans’ reputation as “great warriors” are not aware of the fact that the vast majority of people who lived in ancient Sparta were actually members of an underclass of enslaved serfs known as helots, who were, according to all the surviving ancient sources, quite brutally oppressed and mistreated by their Spartiate overlords.

Tyrtaios wrote a poem describing the oppression of the helots. Here is what survives of his description, as translated by M. L. West:

“…like donkeys suffering under heavy loads,
by painful force compelled to bring their masters half
of all the produce that the soil brought forth.”

The helots certainly outnumbered the Spartiates by a vast margin. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his Histories 9.10 that, at the Battle of Plataia in 479 BCE, there were seven helots for every Spartiate. As a result of this, Spartiates resorted to cruel and even murderous measures to keep the helot population under control.

The later Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) summarizes in his Life of Lykourgos 28.2–3 how young Spartiate men often served in a kind of secret police force known as the κρυπτεία (krupteía) and members of this force would sneak out into the countryside and murder helots. He says that they would especially target helots who looked too strong and who they were afraid might try to rebel against the Spartan state. Ploutarchos writes, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin:

“The magistrates from time to time sent out into the country at large the most discreet of the young warriors, equipped only with daggers and such supplies as were necessary. In the day time, they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, where they hid themselves and lay quiet; but in the night they came down into the highways and killed every helot whom they caught. Oftentimes, too, they actually traversed the fields where helots were working and slew the sturdiest and best of them.”

Ploutarchos was an avid Lakonophile and probably a slave owner himself, but even he was willing to admit that the way the Spartiates treated the helots was truly horrifying.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic black-figure neck amphora by the Antimenes Painter dating to between c. 530 and c. 510 BCE depicting people (probably slaves) gathering olives.

Sparta’s insane death cult

The ancient Spartans were obsessed with death in battle from the very beginning of their history. Tyrtaios wrote poems glorifying death in battle as the ideal that all young men should strive for. He contrasts death in battle with ignominious survival, portraying these who flee from battle to save their own lives as cowards who will be reviled by all people for the remaining portions of their lives. Here is an excerpt from one such poem, as translated by M. L. West:

“For it is fine to die in the front line,
a brave man fighting for his fatherland,
and the most painful fate’s to leave one’s own town
and fertile farmlands for a beggar’s life,
roaming with mother dear and aged father,
with little children and with wedded wife.
He’ll not be welcome anywhere he goes,
bowing to need and horrid poverty,
his line disgraced, his handsome face belied;
every humiliation dogs his steps.
This is the truth: the vagrant is ignored
and slighted, and his children after him.
So let us fight with spirit for our land,
die for our sons, and spare our lives no more.”

Other Greek city-states similarly glorified death in battle, but the Spartans took it further than anyone else. The sheer toxicity of the Spartan death cult is perhaps best illustrated by the account of what happened to the small handful of Spartiates who survived the Battle of Thermopylai in 480 BCE.

Herodotos records in his Histories 7.232 that Leonidas ordered a Spartiate named Pantites to act as a messenger to the Thessalians. As a result of his duties, Pantites was not present at the final stand of Thermopylai and survived the battle. He returned to Sparta and, when he found out that the other Spartiates had all died, he was so ashamed that he had not died with them that he hanged himself.

Herodotos similarly records in his Histories 7.229-231 that there were two Spartiates named Aristodemos and Eurytos who had eye infections and could not see, meaning they could not fight. Leonidas therefore ordered them to return to Sparta. When Eurytos heard that the Greek forces at Thermopylai were being flanked, he turned back and flung himself into the battle with reckless abandon so that he was immediately killed.

Aristodemos, on the other hand, obeyed Leonidas’s orders and returned to Sparta. The other Spartiates detested him and mocked him as a coward, since he had not committed pointless suicide like Eurytos. They refused to speak to him. They refused to give him kindling for his fires. They called him “Aristodemos the Trembler.” Eventually, Aristodemos died in the Battle of Plataia in August 479 BCE, leading the Spartiates to remove the black mark from his name.

Just think about what this says about Spartan society; the Spartans were so obsessed with death in battle that they literally mocked people as cowards just for obeying orders and not killing themselves for no reason. That’s pretty messed up.

Long-haired Spartans

Most people today imagine Spartiate men as unkempt warriors who give little thought to their physical appearance. In reality, the exact opposite is the case; Spartiate men were notoriously concerned with their physical appearance, particularly their hair. While Greek men from other city-states often wore their hair relatively short, Spartiate men were known for wearing their hair long.

Herodotos records in his Histories 7.208-209 that, before the Battle of Thermopylai in 480 BCE, the Persian shah Xerxes I sent a scout to spy on the Greeks in their camp and see what they were doing. Supposedly, the scout witnessed large numbers of Spartiate men obsessively combing and grooming their long hair in preparation for battle. He writes, as translated by A. D. Godley:

“Riding up to the camp, the horseman watched and spied out the place. He could, however, not see the whole camp, for it was impossible to see those posted inside the wall which they had rebuilt and were guarding. He did take note of those outside, whose arms lay in front of the wall, and it chanced that at that time the Lakedaimonians [i.e., Spartans] were posted there. He saw some of the men exercising naked and others combing their hair. He marvelled at the sight and took note of their numbers. When he had observed it all carefully, he rode back in leisure, since no one pursued him or paid him any attention at all. So he returned and told Xerxes all that he had seen.”

Herodotos isn’t the only Greek writer to mention the Spartans’ long hair. The later Greek historian Xenophon (lived c. 430 – 354 BCE) writes in his treatise On Spartan Society 11.3, as translated by E. C. Marchant:

“He [i.e., the legendary Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos] also permitted men who were past their first youth to wear long hair, believing that it would make them look taller, more dignified and more terrifying.”

Ploutarchos of Chaironeia not only emphasizes that Spartiate men were known for wearing their hair long, but also emphasizes the care and attention that they devoted to it in order to make sure it looked good before they went into battle. He writes in his Life of Lykourgos 22.1, as translated by Richard J. A. Talbert:

“It was in wartime that they relaxed the harshest elements of the young men’s training: they did not stop them grooming their hair and decorating their clothes and weapons, but were pleased at the sight of them like horses prancing and neighing before a contest. So they wore their hair long as soon as they had passed the age of ephebes; they took particular care over it in the face of danger, making it look sleek and combing it. They bore in mind one of Lykourgos’s statements about long hair, that it renders handsome men better looking, and ugly ones more frightening.”

Similarly, Ploutarchos records an anecdote in his collection Sayings of the Spartans, section 68, that someone once asked the Spartan king Charillos why it was customary for the Spartans to wear their hair long. Supposedly, king Charillos replied:

“τῶν κόσμων ὁ φυσικὸς καὶ ἀδάπανος οὗτός ἐστι.”

This means:

“Because this is the most natural and least expensive of adornments.”

We can probably make an informed guess as to how Spartiate men wore their hair based on surviving ancient Greek artistic representations of male warriors with long hair, which often show them with what appear to be long, intricate braids that come midway down their backs.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of a depiction of a hoplite on the Vix Krater, dating to around 500 BCE. Notice the long braids coming out from under his helmet.

ABOVE: Photograph of an ancient Greek statue of a warrior wearing his hair in long, intricate braids that come midway down his back. This is undoubtedly how many Spartiate men wore their hair.

The alleged Spartan anal fetish

In ancient times, people from other Greek city-states stereotyped the Spartans as supposedly having an ingrained proclivity for anal sex. The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) alludes to this stereotype in his comedy Lysistrata, which was first performed in Athens in 411 BCE.

Near the very end of the play, an Athenian delegate and a Spartan delegate are dividing up territories on a map, which they are describing as a woman’s body. The Spartan insists on claiming the city of Pylos, which he describes as the woman’s anus. The Athenian agrees to let him have it as long as he gets to take the woman’s vagina. Here is the passage from lines 1162–1170 of the play in the original Greek:

Λάκων: ἁμές γε λῶμες, αἴ τις ἁμὶν τὤγκυκλον
λῇ τοῦτ᾽ ἀποδόμεν.

Λυσιστράτη: ποῖον ὦ τᾶν;

Λάκων: τὰν Πύλον,

ἇσπερ πάλαι δεόμεθα καὶ βλιμάττομες.

Ἀθηναῖος: μὰ τὸν Ποσειδῶ τοῦτο μέν γ᾽ οὐ δράσετε.

Λυσιστράτη: ἄφετ᾽ ὦγάθ᾽ αὐτοῖς.

Ἀθηναῖος: κᾆτα τίνα κινήσομεν;

Λυσιστράτη: ἕτερόν γ᾽ ἀπαιτεῖτ᾽ ἀντὶ τούτου χωρίον.

Ἀθηναῖος: τὸ δεῖνα τοίνυν παράδοθ᾽ ἡμῖν τουτονὶ
πρώτιστα τὸν Ἐχινοῦντα καὶ τὸν Μηλιᾶ
κόλπον τὸν ὄπισθεν καὶ τὰ Μεγαρικὰ σκέλη.

Here is my own translation of the passage:

Spartan: “For our part, we’ll hold, as long as you cede to us this little hole you hold here.”

Lysistrata: “Which one, sir?”

Spartan: “Pylos, which we’ve been desperately wanting and feeling for so long.”

Athenian: “By Poseidon, no! You won’t be claiming that one!”

Lysistrata: “Give it to them, good man!”

Athenian: “But then what will we play with?”

Lysistrata: “At least demand a different place instead of this.”

Athenian: “Hmm… well then, first, hand over the vulva Echinous, and the buttocks Melia, and the Megarian thighs.”

The Spartans’ alleged proclivity for anal sex, however, went beyond just scenes in Athenian comedy. The Greeks even invented the obscene word κυσολάκων (kysolákōn), which literally means “ass-Spartan” and is a pejorative term for a man who engages in anal intercourse—either with another man or with a woman. In the Middle Ages, the scholar Photios (lived c. 810 – 893 CE), who served as Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, produced a lexicon of the Greek language, which includes an entry for the word κυσολάκων (p. 192.12) that reads as follows:

“Κυσολάκων· ὁ Κλεινίας ὁ τῷ κυσῷ λακωνίζων· τὸ δὲ τοῖς παιδικοῖς χρῆσθαι λακωνίζειν λέγουσιν· Ἑλένῃ γὰρ Θησεὺς οὕτως ἐχρήσατο, ὡς Ἀριστοτέλης.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Kysolakon: the Kleinias who had Spartan-style sex in the ass. They say that to have sex with boys is to act like a Spartan. Indeed, Theseus had sex with Helene [of Sparta] in this manner, according to Aristotle.”

The Greeks stereotyped people from other poleis as having various other sexual proclivities as well; they didn’t just do it to the Spartans. For instance, ironically, the ancient Greeks stereotyped people from the island of Lesbos as supposedly having a proclivity for fellatio and the Greek word λεσβιάζω (lesbiázō), which literally means “to act like a Lesbian,” actually meant “to perform fellatio.”

ABOVE: Side A from an Attic red-figure bell-krater dating to between c. 440 and c. 430 BCE, depicting Theseus pursuing Helene of Sparta—apparently in order to have anal sex with her, if Photios’s account is to be believed

The bizarre tourist trap that Sparta became during the Roman Era

Possibly the strangest thing about ancient Sparta is what it eventually became. As I discuss in this article I published in March 2020, Sparta was annexed by the Roman Empire in 146 BCE and, after that point, it seems to have become something of a tourist trap. By this point, Sparta was a small village with some relatively unimpressive ruins. The local people therefore seem to have tried to cash in on their city’s ancient reputation in the most shocking possible way.

From around the first century BCE onwards, the local Spartans held an annual festival in which they would brutally whip local teenaged boys (presumably volunteers) on the altars on Artemis Orthia. The boys would try to show as little pain as possible in order to impress the onlookers with how tough and manly they were.

This festival attracted tourists from all over the Roman Empire. The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BCE) visited Sparta and saw this horrifying flagellation ritual for himself. He writes in his Tusculan Disputations 5.14, as translated by C. D. Yonge:

“The boys at Sparta are scourged so at the altars that blood follows the lash in abundance; nay, sometimes, as I used to hear when I was there, they are whipped even to death; and yet not one of them was ever heard to cry out, or so much as groan.”

Later, Cicero notes in his Tusculan Disputations 5.27, in Yonge’s translation:

“Spartan boys will bear to have their bodies torn by rods without uttering a groan. I myself have seen at Lacedaemon troops of young men, with incredible earnestness contending together with their hands and feet, with their teeth and nails, nay, even ready to expire, rather than own themselves conquered.”

Over a century later, Ploutarchos of Chaironeia seems to have visited the Spartan flagellation festival also and seen the spectacle for himself. He writes in his Life of Lykourgos 18, as translated by Richard J. A. Talbert:

“This tale is certainly not incredible, judging from Spartan ephebes today. I have witnessed many of them dying under the lashes they received at the altar of Artemis Orthia.”

Fortunately, this custom seems to have died out in late antiquity. The population of Sparta drastically declined during the Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century, its total population was probably only in the few thousands. It was an irrelevant backwater village for most of the Early Modern Period, but, after the Greek Revolution (lasted 1821 – 1829), there was a movement to rebuild and repopulate the town. Today, Sparta is the administrative capital of the Greek administrative region of Lakonia.

ABOVE: Illustration of the infamous Spartan whipping ritual from the 1911 novel The Coward of Thermopylae by Caroline Dale Snedeker