The Spartans by Paul Cartledge

Author:Paul Cartledge [Cartledge, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330475587
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

What he seems to have been claiming is that, at any rate in the early fourth century, Spartan women did not only control their men within the confines of the household, but also somehow exercised a decisive influence over affairs of state. Yet the only actual instance of female intervention in the public sphere during the period that he chooses to give, seems to tell in the exact opposite direction. When in 370/69 the Spartan women saw a mighty Thebes-led army of invasion actually on Spartan home territory and devastating land within sight of Sparta itself, the women allegedly caused more consternation and uproar even than the enemy, through their manically panicky reaction. Again, that looks uncomfortably like sheer male prejudice, since courage in war was deemed to be a peculiarly masculine quality and virtue. Also, the women’s panic would in any case have been wholly understandable, since seeing Spartan land, including land that they themselves owned, destroyed in front of their very eyes was hardly something they had been schooled for by the national curriculum.

In short, what Aristotle and other conventionally minded non-Spartan men feared subconsciously and perhaps sometimes consciously was feminine power. One expression of that Greek male fear was the invention of the mythical race of Amazons, but at least the Amazons had the decency to live apart from men, whereas the Spartan viragos apparently exercised their power from within the heart of the community. In the grip of such fear, the male sources often distorted the facts they had access to, usually only at second-hand at best, about Spartan women. Let us instead try to redress the balance and paint a picture of what life, or rather a lifecycle, might have been like for the average Spartan girl and woman, from the womb to the tomb.

Spartan laws as well as social mores privileged reproduction, ‘children-making’ (teknopoiia). Apart from the standard desire of individual Spartans to have a son and heir to continue the family line, there was an overwhelming pressure for the state to maintain the strength of the adult male Spartan citizen community, a community of warriors for defence against the enemy within, the Helots, as much as attack on enemies without. Hence a number of features of Spartan society that would have struck other Greeks as distinctly odd, such as public penalties, including ritual humiliation by women at a religious festival, imposed upon adult men for late marriage, and, conversely, public benefits for fathers of three or more sons, the exemption of women who died in childbirth from the general prohibition against tombstones bearing the names of men or women, and, as we have seen, the absence of laws against adultery.

However, although adultery was not punished or even legally recognized, marriage was nevertheless considered a prerequisite for legitimacy of offspring, and only marriage between two Spartans was legally acceptable. Courting happened in the usual Greek way; that is, fathers of nubile girls were approached by interested potential husbands or their representatives. Heiresses whose fathers

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