Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

The usefulness of history and historians lies in the presentation and narration of events that can then reveal their meaning hundreds, even thousands of years after they happened. Burckhardt writes: “In Thucydides there may be facts of primary importance that will only be understood in a hundred years’ time.” He doesn’t offer any examples. But we can find one ourselves that Burckhardt couldn’t have found, because history hadn’t as yet revealed it, for Burckhardt hadn’t lived through the age of Stalin: “Likewise concerned about the ill-feeling among the helots and by their huge numbers [the Spartans’ relationship with the helots having always been based on the need to defend themselves], they went so far as to do as follows: they announced that if any of the helots considered that during past wars they had given the best possible service to Sparta, they should come forward with their evidence. Once this had been examined it could lead to their being set free. But really this was a test, for those who, out of pride, considered themselves most deserving, were also those who would be most likely to rebel. About two thousand were selected. Crowned with garlands they went around from temple to temple under the impression they had been freed. Not long afterward the Spartans did away with them and no one ever knew how they were all killed.”

“When the Spartans kill, they do so at night. They never kill anybody in daylight.” Thus writes Herodotus, dwelling on the fact for no apparent reason.

Initiation involves a physiological metamorphosis: the circulating blood and thought patterns of the mind absorb a new substance, the flavor of a secret wisdom. That flavor is the flavor of totality: but, in the Spartan version, it is the flavor of the society as totality. Thus we pass from the old to the new regime.

Equality only comes into being through initiation. It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn’t be able to conceive of the idea if it weren’t structured and articulated by initiation. Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it — and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite .

That moment is Sparta. The Spartans were above all hómoioi , “equals,” insofar as they had all been initiated into the same group. But that group was the entire society. Sparta: the only place in Greece, and in all European history since, where the whole citizenry constituted an initiatory sect.

Having drunk deep the liquor of power, though more the idea than the reality, they soon ignored and scorned all immortality’s other drinks: they had no time for the sciences of the heavens (“they can’t bear talk about the stars or the celestial motions,” observed the irritated Hippias) and cared nothing for poetry. Indeed, despite the fact that in years past Alcman had produced enchanting lyrics to sing the beauty of the Leucippides running like colts along the banks of the Eurotas, “the Spartans are, of all men, those who admire poetry and poetic glory least.” Their attitude to every form, every art, every desire can be summed up in their approach to music: they wished to make it “first innocuous, then useful.”

They were the first to train naked and grease their bodies, men and women alike. Their clothes became ever more simple and practical. They were the grim forebears of every utilitarianism. They kept their helots in a state of terror — yet were compelled to live in terror of their helots. They carried their spears with them everywhere, for death might be lurking at every turn. Not at the hands of their “equals” but at those of the endless mutes who served them, before being mocked and decimated.

Sparta is surrounded by the erotic aura of the boarding school, the garrison, the gymnasium, the jail. Everywhere there are Mädchen in Uniform , even if that uniform is a taut and glistening skin.

Sparta understood, with a clarity that set it apart from every other society of the ancient world, that the real enemy was the excess that is part of life. Lycurgus’s two ominous rules that forestall and frustrate any possible law merely dictate that no laws be written down and no luxury permitted. It is perhaps the most glaring demonstration of laconism the Spartans offer, always assuming we leave aside the grim moral precepts tradition has handed down to us. One can almost smell the malignant breath of the oracle in those dictates: forbidding writing and luxury was in itself enough to do away with everything that escaped the state’s control.

“When it came to reading and writing they learned only the bare minimum.” In every corner of their lives, like an ever-wakeful jailer, Lycurgus had hunted down the superfluous and strangled it before it could grow. There was only one moment when the Spartans had a sense of the overflowing abundance of life: when the flautists played Castor’s march, the paean sounded in reply, and the compact ranks advanced, their long hair hanging down.

“A majestic and terrifying sight,” war. That was the moment when god resided in both State and individual, the one moment when the rules allowed the young men “to comb out their hair and dress up in cloaks and weaponry” until they looked like “horses treading proudly and neighing to be in the race.” When the march stopped, the Spartan “stands with his legs apart, feet firmly planted on the ground, and bites his lip.”

“Just as Plato says that god rejoiced that the universe was born and had begun to move, so Lycurgus, pleased and contented with the beauty and loftiness of his now complete and already implemented legislation, wanted to make it immortal and immutable for the future, or at least so far as human foresight was capable.” The divine craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus composed the world and brought it into harmony; Lycurgus was the first to compose a world that excluded the world: Spartan society. He was the first person to conduct experiments on the body social, the true forefather all modern rulers, even if they don’t have the impact of a Lenin or a Hitler, try to imitate.

The Athenians knew there was a surplus of beauty in relation to power in their city. They could already see the ruins of Athens, whereas, to Thucydides’ eyes, “if the Spartans were to abandon their city, so that only the foundations of the buildings survived, with the passing of time posterity simply would not believe the town had ever been so powerful as it was said to be.”

What distinguishes Sparta from Athens is their different responses to the practice of exchange. In Sparta it provokes terror, in Athens it arouses fascination. Thus the wholeness of the sacred is split into two chemically pure halves. Gold is taken into Sparta but never comes out: “for generation after generation gold has been flowing into Sparta from every people in Greece, and often from barbarian countries too, and it never flows out.” Coins are so heavy and burdensome they can’t even be moved. In Athens, “friendly to speech,” words run spontaneously from the lips in a stream that sluices every culvert of the city. In Sparta the word is always kept tightly in rein.

Spartans’ morality was not based on the weighty precepts that made up the wisdom of the people but on the decision to treat the word as an enemy, foremost exponent of the superfluous. Sparta was an invention for freezing exchange and stabilizing power as far as is humanly possible, which explains the attraction Plato always felt toward Sparta, right up to the late Laws: that order of theirs seemed capable of putting a stop to the proliferation of images.