Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

During exercises and games, the Spartan girls went nude beside the nude boys, brought together “out of erotic, not geometric necessity,” Plato remarks. If the women speak in public it is only to pontificate in the best civic spirit. Indeed it is to them that we owe the invention of that saddest of figures, the Positive Hero. “We alone generate men,” thunders the proud Gorgo, wife of Leonidas, speaking to a foreign woman. She thus does the spadework for Napoleon’s quip on his first meeting with Madame de Staël: “Who do you consider the best of all women?” she asks. And he: “The one who bears the most children, madame.” But what we would like to know is something quite different: what did these descendants of the Leucippides say to each other amid the clouds of dust they raised as they ran like colts along the banks of the Eurotas, “their hair tossing in the wind like Bacchants waving their thyrsuses.” But the Spartan Sirens keep their silence too.

That happiness is an early symptom of misfortune, that “inherent” within happiness is the power to bring on misfortune, above all through the agency of resentment ( phthónos ), whether of men or gods, is a vision that was to persist among the Greeks when almost all others had faded. Yet they did want to be happy. One can appreciate now why it was that the Spartans cut themselves off from the other Greeks, transformed themselves into an unapproachable island. Just as they had perceived the dangers of exchange, so they saw the dangers of happiness. When they weren’t sure they could handle something, they preferred to cut loose, to abolish rather than lose control. Thus they chose to put into practice what would later earn them Aristotle’s most damning criticism: “they have lost the happiness of living.”

Under Lycurgus, Sparta underwent a transformation that condensed into just a few years the whole of political history from sacred kingship right through to the regimes of the present day. Sovereignty passed from a pair of kings, an archaic and obscure institution, to five ephors, a highly innovative expression of absolute power disguised as a judiciary, which in turn was a cover for what was originally a priesthood. The long transition from sacred king to Politburo was thus achieved in one foul swoop. And the fact that this was done while pretending to leave the old institutions intact only added to the audacious modernity of the development. There was no need to cut off the two kings’ heads. They could stay where they were, but bereft of power. If they caused trouble, however, the ephors might decide to “kill them without trial.” Alternatively, the ephors could take their decision to kill the kings on a starry, moonless night, while silently watching the sky. If a shooting star crossed that sky, it meant that one of the kings had “offended against divinity.” Originally no more than observers who kept their eyes on the heavens, the ephors had become supreme supervisors and “guardians,” watchful eyes looking down from above. That was how they exploited their priestly past. It offered a sparkling cloak that protected the secret of politics.

On the one hand, a divine king who upholds through his body the attributes of cosmic sovereignty; on the other, a group of mostly faceless, nameless, all-seeing inquisitors: the whole of political history is contained between these two extremes. It is the story of how liturgical power was transformed into invisible power. And that transformation, which was to go on for centuries right down to the present day, was achieved in Sparta in almost no time at all, and with very little effort. The only difficult thing was making sure that nobody outside realized what had happened. Everybody had to go on believing in those innocuous anecdotes about the discipline, courage, and frugality of the Spartans. But there were one or two people who couldn’t so easily be hoodwinked. Thucydides was one. But most perceptive of all was Plato.

All Plato’s political thought is obsessed by one figure: the guardian, or guardians. Whether they are philosophers, as proposed in the Republic , or men concerned with the Good, as he likes to pretend in the Laws , ultimate power is concentrated in the hands of the guardians. But Plato did not think of them as hypothetical figures: on the contrary, the guardians already existed, in the wealthy Peloponnese. They were the great sophists Socrates had mentioned in Protagoras , those who used their sophistry not to show off their glory but to hide it. They were the ephors, first example of a wholly godless power. But they didn’t let people see that side of them either; on the contrary, not content with all the existing cults, they brought in a new one, to which they were deeply devoted. They built a temple to Fear, close to the communal dining hall. “They didn’t honor her as a dark demon to be kept at bay, but because they believed that the State was held together mainly thanks to fear.”

The great societies of ancient times were images of something that encompassed them, isomorphs of the cosmos. The Son of the Sky was the axis of the world before becoming the axis of the city. It was only with the hubris of the Greeks that society claimed to be self-sufficient. So the Great Animal, as Plato describes him, was born. From that hubris sprang all the other repudiations: it was the sign of man’s first move to cut loose from the rest, the human race closed in on itself, in an attacking formation.

It was Athens: the searing word, cruelty, a play of color. And it was Sparta: slow, circumspect, murderous, seeking to turn everything to its own account. The Spartans even produced a lawmaker, Lycurgus, who committed suicide because he felt it might be useful for Sparta. “So he starved himself to death, reasoning that even the deaths of politicians should be of some value to society, that the end of their lives should not be without its use, but ought to have something virtuous and efficacious about it.”

Perhaps Alcibiades penetrated deeper than anyone else into “the secret of the regime” that was Sparta. As an exile, he sought asylum in Sparta, being a descendant of the Eupatrids, who for generations had had links with the family of the ephor Endius. “He shaved his head, washed in cold water, and accustomed himself to eating dry bread and drinking black broth.” Although the king of Sparta at the time was not, for once, a puppet of the ephors but a great general, Agis, Alcibiades “seduced his wife Timea and got her pregnant.” Thanks to him, even the archaic and somewhat ridiculous regality that remained in Sparta was thus raised to illegitimacy in the person of the bastard child Leotychides, “whose mother, at home, speaking softly before servants and friends, would call Alcibiades, so great was the passion that obsessed her.”

Alcibiades left us none of his insights into Sparta, but he did talk to Thucydides. And reading Thucydides one has the impression that the mirage of a virtuous Sparta has entirely dissolved. Thucydides sees and judges the Spartans’ actions as though from within, as though the mechanism were there before his eyes, driven by two powerful levers: deceit and brute force. Before being wiped out by the Athenians down to the last man capable of bearing arms, the Melians had hoped for assistance from Sparta. The Athenian ambassadors tried in vain to convince them that such hopes were treacherous, because they depended on those who “more blatantly than any other nation we know of believe that what they like doing is honorable and that what suits their interests is just.”

Located on the Asiatic side of the Hellespont, at its narrowest point, Abydos was included in Athens’s list of depraved cities. It was here that Alcibiades chose to go for his grand tour. “As soon as you came of age and had got the approval of your tutors, you took your inheritance from them and set sail for Abydos, not in order to recover payment for anything, nor in any consular role, but because you wanted to learn from the Abydian women the sorts of habits congenial to your spirit of illegality and debauchery, so as then to be able to pursue those habits in later life.” So says Antiphon in oratorial rage.