Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

But here is Sparta in a nutshell, courtesy of a Plato at once laconic and vicious: “These men … will be greedy for wealth, fiercely devoted behind the scenes to gold and silver; they will possess storehouses and domestic treasuries where they can hide that wealth, and well-fenced villas, veritable nests of privacy, where they can spend money on women and whomever else they want and enjoy being thoroughly dissolute.… And they will be miserly with their wealth too, earning and honoring it in secret, prodigal only with other people’s, which they covet, and they will take their pleasures behind closed doors, snubbing the law the way a child snubs his father, and they will not respond to persuasion, but only to violence, because they will have ignored the real Muse of reasoning and philosophy and esteemed physical exercise more praiseworthy than music.” One can never be too sure where Plato’s sentiments lie.

It was to the Spartans’ credit that they were the first to appreciate the extent to which the social order is based on hatred — and can survive only so long as that base is maintained. They accepted the consequences of this discovery: equal and interchangeable among themselves, they formed a rock-solid front against the outside world. And in the outside world were the masses ( tò plêthos ), whom, unlike the Athenians, the Spartans had no illusions about winning over and manipulating. “The best Spartan thinkers do not believe it would be safe to live together with those they have so seriously wronged. Their way of doing things is quite different: among themselves they have established equality and that democracy necessary to guarantee a constant unity of intent. The common people, on the other hand, they keep out in the surrounding countryside, thus enslaving their own spirits no less than those of their slaves.”

The Spartans were perfectly aware of the atrocious suffering they were inflicting and never imagined their victims could forget it. The solution was to establish terror as a normal condition of life — and that was Sparta’s great invention: to create a situation in which terror was seen as something normal. The pure Athenian Isocrates was outraged: “But what would be the point of describing all the sufferings inflicted on the masses? If I just mention the worst enormity, leaving aside all the others, it will be quite enough. From among those who have constantly been subjected to horrible wrongs, and who are nevertheless still useful in present circumstances, the ephors are free to choose whomsoever they want and have them put to death without trial; while for all the other Greeks, even the killing of the most reprobate slave is a crime that must be paid for.” The ephors were powerful bureaucrats; they were not remarkable for their “bold thinking” ( méga phroneîn ), as were the eminent and feared men of Athens. To make up for that, they could at any moment, and without a word of justification, kill anybody they wanted to from the nameless mass of the helots.

Athens never achieved the full horror of Sparta, but then it was never far behind. The city had barely discovered liberty, that experience no one in Persia or Egypt had ever dreamed of, before it was also discovering new methods of persecution, methods more subtle than those practiced by the great kings and the pharaohs. An army of informers invaded city square and market. They were no longer the secret agents of a police force but a freely formed collective of citizens intent on the public good. Thus in the very same instant that it discovered the excellence of the individual, Athens also developed a fierce resentment against that excellence. None of the great men of the fifth century B.C. was able to live in Athens without the constant fear of being expelled from the city and condemned to death. Ostracism and the sycophants formed the two prongs of a pincer that held society tightly together. As Jacob Burckhardt was first to recognize, Jacobin pettiness became a powerful force in the pólis . The public good was able to claim its victims with the arrogant and peremptory authority that had once been the reserve of the gods. And where a god would speak through soothsayers or a Pythia, chanting in hexameters and using obscure images, the pólis could get by with a less solemn apparatus: public opinion, the voice of the people, mutable and murderous as it sped, day after day, through the agoré.

Athens left posterity not only the Propylaea, but political chatter too. The anecdote passed on to us by Plutarch is exemplary: an illiterate man went up to Aristides, who he had never seen before, and asked him to write the name Aristides on a potsherd. So he could vote for his ostracism. Aristides asked him: “What harm has Aristides done you?” The illiterate man answered: “None. And I don’t know him, but it bothers me hearing everybody call him Aristides the Just.” Without more ado, Aristides wrote his own name on the potsherd.

It is a grim irony of history that Sparta continues to be associated with the idea of virtue, in its most rigid and hateful form. It is as if the Equals had placed the hard rule of law above everything else and thus gained themselves a reputation for being tough and cold, yet at the same time noble.

But the truth is that the Spartans had come up with a very different and far more effective way of doing things. They created the image of a virtuous, law-abiding society as a powerful propaganda weapon for external consumption, while the reality inside Sparta was that they cared less for such things than anyone else. They left eloquence to the Athenians, and with a smirk on their faces too, because they knew that that eloquent, indeed talkative nation would be the first to feel nostalgic for the sober virtue of the Spartans, not appreciating that such virtue was nothing more than a useful ploy for confusing and unnerving their enemies. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Spartans refused to allow strangers to enter their city and were so secretive about what happened within its territories. An accurate report would have exposed their smug insensibility to the very idea of law, which had such a powerful hold over the minds of their neighbors. For the most disturbing examples of indifference toward injustice came not from those animals of passion, the tyrants, but from the cold ephors, supreme guardians of the secret of Sparta. The sad story of Skedasus reveals them to us in all their esoteric ruthlessness.

Skedasus was a poor man who lived in Leuctra. He had two daughters, Hippos and Miletia. He loved to have guests, even though he had little to offer in the way of hospitality. One day he put up two young Spartans. They were both taken by the beauty of the virgin daughters, but because the girls’ father was there they restrained themselves and proceeded with their journey to Delphi. On the way back they stopped at Skedasus’s house again. But this time he was away. The two daughters took the foreigners in. When the Spartans realized they were alone, they raped the girls. Then, seeing them disfigured by distress, they killed them and threw them down a well. When Skedasus got home all he found was the dog, yelping and running back and forth between his master and the well. Skedasus guessed the truth and pulled out the corpses. His neighbors told him the two Spartans had stopped at his house, and Skedasus realized what had happened, remembering that the two “had admired the girls and spoken warmly of the happiness of their future husbands.”

So Skedasus set off for Sparta. He wanted to report the crime to the ephors. One night he was in an inn. Next to him was an old man from Oreos who was complaining bitterly about the Spartans. Skedasus asked him what they had done to him. The old man explained that the Spartans had appointed a man called Aristodemus as governor of Oreos. He had fallen in love with the old man’s son and had immediately attempted to abduct the boy from the gymnasium, but the gym teacher had stopped him. The following day he managed to get the boy just the same. He put him on a ship and sailed over to the opposite shore. He tried to rape him. The boy put up a fight. So he cut his throat. That evening, he went back to Oreos and gave a banquet. The old father organized his son’s funeral and set off for Sparta. He asked for an audience with the ephors. The ephors didn’t even listen to him. Then Skedasus told his own story. When he had finished, the old man told him there was no point in going to Sparta. But Skedasus took no notice. He spoke to the ephors. They didn’t even listen to him. So he went to the king, he pleaded with people in the street. It did no good. Finally he killed himself. But history would one day set its seal on the story. Spartan power was broken once and for all at the battle of Leuctra. The fighting took place not far from the tombs of Skedasus’s daughters.