Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens in 404 BC, was another of Socrates’ circle. And so of course was Plato, a nobleman who had relatives among the Thirty and whose ideal state, as described in the Republic, has a constitution that resembles that of Sparta far more closely than the Athenian one. It has been argued that when the restored Athenian democracy accused Socrates of ‘corrupting the youth’, and put him to death for it, the charge had a precise political meaning. He was being accused of being a Spartan sympathizer. The heroic stand he made at his trial, which has earned him the admiration of generations of libertarians and defenders of free speech and free enquiry, was made, if this theory is correct, in assertion of his right to commend one of the most repressive and secretive regimes in recorded history.

      Sparta is the classical model for all subsequent totalitarian states, just as Athens is for democracies. It was a warrior society, dedicated with grim exclusivity to its own preservation and aggrandisement. The Spartans were a Dorian people who had invaded the Peloponnese from the north and had reduced the indigenous population, known as Helots, to a state of serfdom. The Helots had not submitted tamely. Their repeated uprisings were brutally suppressed. New ephors, on taking office, routinely declared war on them ‘in order that there might be no impiety in slaying them’. The state maintained a corps of Helot killers whose operations Plutarch describes: ‘They would be armed with daggers and supplied with basic rations, but nothing else … At night they came down onto the roads and, if they found a Helot, would cut his throat.’ Sparta’s much admired stability was guaranteed only by the omnipresence within it of violence and sudden death.

      The Helots were obliged to provide food for the master race. The Spartans, thus freed from the labour of providing for themselves, were able to devote themselves single-mindedly to the business of warfare. ‘The Spartans are, of all men, those who admire poetry and poetic glory least,’ noted Pausanias. ‘They did not understand how to be at leisure’, wrote Aristotle, ‘and never engaged in any kind of training higher than training for war.’

      It was forbidden for any Spartan to travel abroad except for purposes of conquest and foreigners were not made welcome, for Lycurgus, the Spartans’ mythical lawgiver, had wished the society he created should remain permanently intact and unchanged and ‘along with strange people strange doctrines must come in’. Trade was virtually non-existent, each citizen living off the produce of his own allotted plot of land. Lycurgus had forbidden luxury of all sorts. The staple Spartan food was a black broth famous throughout Greece for its nastiness. Spartan houses were all identical, and so crudely built that, according to a patronizing Athenian joke, a Spartan visiting Corinth was astonished to see wooden planks and asked whether the trees in that region had square trunks. Spartan dress was austerely simple. Even Spartan speech was limited and deliberately brusque. The people maintained a ‘general habit of silence’, a ‘laconicism’ (the word means simply ‘Spartan’), which combined the caution of those whose rigidly conservative, authoritarian state permitted them no political voice and the dumbness of those whose every personal response was suppressed or put to public use.

      The state was all-encompassing. Spartans, according to Plutarch, had ‘neither the time nor the ability to live for themselves; but like bees they were to make themselves integral parts of the whole community’. The city was like a military encampment, where each person had allotted duties. All personal relationships were subordinated to that between the individual and the state. Male babies were inspected by the elders at birth. If they were not perfectly healthy they were thrown into a ravine. Those who passed muster were cared for by their parents until the age of seven, when they entered the school, a vast boot camp whose curriculum consisted almost entirely of gymnastics, where they learnt obedience to discipline, indifference to pain and the rigid suppression of private emotion.

      The boys were systematically underfed and encouraged to steal to satisfy their perpetual hunger, but if they were caught in the act they were ruthlessly flogged. The young men lived in all-male dormitories but they were permitted to marry. A bride was abducted by force from her family home. Her hair was cropped back to her scalp by a ‘bridesmaid’, who then stripped her and left her lying alone on the floor of a darkened room to await her husband, who came late at night and stayed only long enough to perform his reproductive duty before returning to the men’s house. The couple’s subsequent encounters would be equally swift and furtive, and always nocturnal, so that a woman might give birth to several children before seeing her husband’s face. All men, of whatever age, took their meals in the communal mess (women ate separately, and were rationed to about one-sixth the quantity of food allowed to their menfolk). Men who refused to marry were punished and publicly shamed. Husbands who failed to impregnate their wives were pressured into inviting other men to do so. Jealousy was despised, along with all other manifestations of strong personal feeling. A mother who expressed contempt for a cowardly son was especially esteemed. Sparta was a place of throttled emotion, of willed dumbness and of furtive violence. ‘When the Spartans kill,’ wrote Herodotus, ‘they do so at night.’

      This place of darkness and suppression, however, was widely admired even by its enemies. Socrates joked about the fashionable Athenian Spartophiles who wore short tunics and leather bands around their legs and mutilated their ears in the Spartan style. Spartans were praised for their frugality and their physical fitness, for the fortitude with which they bore pain, for their indifference to all forms of pleasure and their readiness to sacrifice themselves for the common good. To many Athenians they seemed, not enviable of course, but admirable: models of ascetic virtue, time travellers from a simpler but more dignified age. The austerity of their lifestyle made an aesthetic appeal even to those who would not themselves have wished to drink black broth. The authoritarianism of their rulers was insidiously seductive to those weary of the endless argument and counter-argument of the democratic process. Pindar wrote in praise of Sparta, its venerable council of elders, its young men’s conquering spears. And Plato, while overtly rejecting the Spartan system of government as being debased, incorporated many Spartan institutions and Spartan values into his ideal Republic, thus ensuring that Lycurgus’ programme for converting an individual into a useful component of the state has become intrinsic to Western ideals of manliness, of good citizenship, and of heroic virtue.

      In Sparta Alcibiades was to describe Athenian democracy as ‘a system which is generally recognized as absurd’; and although he was undoubtedly attempting to curry favour with his anti-Athenian audience, it is also possible that he spoke from the heart. He had proved a brilliant manipulator of the democratic Athenian Assembly, with powers of persuasion equal to those of the demagogues he despised; but once the Assembly had turned against him he would have had strong personal reasons to reject, not only that particular gathering, but the political system of which it was the foremost example. As an aristocrat he may have found the oligarchic Spartan system congenial. As a young and famously beautiful military commander he must have responded to the Spartan cult of the warrior: ‘In time of war they relaxed the severity of the young men’s discipline and permitted them to beautify their hair and ornament their arms and clothing, rejoicing to see them, like horses, prance and neigh for the contest.’ He had felt in Athens what it was like to be at the mercy of people he considered his inferiors. He had been condemned by his own city for reasons that probably seemed to him pettifogging and stupid. Sparta may have seemed to him a home more fit for heroes.

      Certainly it suited him to give his hosts that impression. He arrived in Sparta a penniless fugitive whose life depended on his winning the protection of his former enemies. Never again would he dazzle and intimidate in his youthful role of spoilt, swaggering dandy. In Athens, he had made a mock of public opinion. In Sparta, he was tactful, accommodating, charming. In Athens, he glittered like Achilles: in Sparta he showed that he could bend and change like Odysseus, Homer’s ‘man of twists and turns’. Achilles is absolutely self-consistent, totally СКАЧАТЬ