Greek Lands and Letters

In the Spartans’ theory of life adventures abroad or the welcome of strangers into their own territory had no place. Perhaps nothing more sharply differentiated them from the Athenians, whose love of roving was equalled only by their delight in seeing the rest of the world drawn to their city. The instinctive and reasoned reserve of the Spartans was reënforced by the physical conditions of their country. Laconia is bulwarked on three sides by mountains, through which, in antiquity, all entrances but one were difficult, and its southern boundary is the open and stormy sea. The Laconian Gulf splits the country into two peninsulas, ending in the famous promontories of Tænarum and Malea, in rounding which so many sailors, from the days of Menelaus and Agamemnon and Odysseus, have looked for violent winds.

Far inland, within the rifts of the northern hills, lies the plain of Sparta. By those to whom the sea is not an essential element in Greek landscape this city is held to be more beautifully situated than any other in Greece. The brilliant luxuriousness of a southern lowland is combined with the austere grandeur of mountain scenery. Some twenty miles in length, the plain is only five miles broad between the ranges of Taygetus and of Parnon, whose bases show extraordinary caverns and fissures. Taygetus stretches along the whole western side of Laconia, but rears the highest of its long line of summits just over Sparta. These magnificent summits, covered with snow for two thirds of the year, ennoble many a landscape outside of Laconia. Below them extend the wide tracts of forest where Artemis once took her pleasure, and Spartan hunters tracked the wild boar with dogs that shared their “bravery” and “love of toil” and won a guerdon of praise from Pindar and Sophocles. In front of these woodlands rise the five peaks which have given to the mountain the modern name of Pentedactylon.

It is characteristic of the Greek attitude toward nature that the mountain is not praised in poetry as much as is the beautiful plain, richly fertilized by the river Eurotas on its way from Arcadia to the sea. Telemachus, in spite of his greater affection for the rough goat-pastures of his native Ithaca, appreciated the wide courses and the meadowland of Sparta where “aboundeth the clover, the marsh grass, the wheat and the rye and the broad white ears of the barley.” Euripides knew that the reedy bed of the Eurotas, the trees and meadow flowers of its banks, its hungry foam in the season of heavy rain and the lovely gleam of its calmer waters would haunt the homesick hearts of Helen and the Spartan maidens who shared Iphigeneia’s exile among the Taurians.

Modern Sparta, founded after the War of Independence, lies in the southern district of the Sparta of antiquity. Mediæval Sparta, called Mistra, lay some distance west of the old site, very near the entrance to the Langada Pass. Homeric Sparta lay to the southeast, across the Eurotas, at Therapne, later a suburb of the Doric city. Here flourished that noble court which amazed the young Ithacan and the tale of which is still to us “a fountain of immortal drink.” Telemachus arrived just as Menelaus was marrying his son to a native princess, and his daughter, the inheritor of her mother’s loveliness, to Thessalian Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son. Never could the great vaulted hall of the palace have displayed a gayer splendour. The son of Odysseus has grown up in no mean castle, but this gleam of gold and silver, like sun and moon, this flashing bronze and shining ivory and glowing amber make him feel as if he were on Olympus at the court of Zeus. Tumblers perform wonderful tricks. A divine minstrel sings. Silver basins and golden ewers are passed around. Supper is served on a polished table in dishes of gold. Menelaus, noticing the boy’s charming admiration, tells him how he has gathered his wealth in Cyprus and Phœnicia and Egypt, but how it means little to him over against the loss of his old comrades and friends. And as they talk Helen comes in, like Artemis of the golden arrows, and her willing servants bring her a carved chair and cover it with a rug of soft wool. And sitting there, her white hands busied with the deep blue wool wound about her golden distaff and with the dressed yarn heaped in her silver basket that runs on little wheels and is rimmed with gold, she talks with them of what happened once in Troy and of Odysseus of the hardy heart and, quite easily, of how she had wanted to come home again to her own country and her child and to her lord “who was lacking in naught, nor wisdom, nor beauty of manhood.” And into their drinking cups she put a drug and “they drank of it, quenching all anger and pain and all of their sorrows forgetting.”

The memory of the royal pair never died in Sparta. Therapne contained a sanctuary called the “Menelaeion,” where prayers were offered for the physical beauty which was keenly desired by an athletic people. Helen sometimes walked abroad to bestow in turn the gift she had received from Aphrodite. At least, Herodotus tells a story of a nurse taking a very ugly girl baby to the temple and meeting a strange woman who insisted upon seeing the child and who then gently stroked its head and said, “One day this child shall be the fairest lady in Sparta.” And from that very day her looks began to change and the ugly baby became the beauty of the town and married the king.

It is not difficult to prolong the associations with Homeric Laconia by following Helen on her guilty flight southward; lingering to see Amyclæ, a rich city in Homeric times, and the beehive tomb of Vaphio, which in 1889 yielded up two incomparable vessels of gold now in the Museum at Athens; and going on to the busy seaport town of Gytheion, from whose docks Paris took his stolen bride to the little island of Cranaë, now Marathonisi, before spreading his defiant sails for the longer voyage. But sooner or later the fact of the Dorian invasion must be reckoned with, and the resultant birth at Sparta of a civilization totally at odds with that which it displaced.

In Laconia the invasion was one of conquest and subjection, and the victors prided themselves on keeping their blood pure, much as the Laconian Maniotes of modern times have clung fiercely to their Spartan descent. Sparta became the Dorian city par excellence, the protagonist of Dorian ideals, the natural leader of the forces which both in war and peace were in opposition to the Ionic elements in Greek life. The historical events in this development are so interwoven with the history of the other states of Greece, especially with that of Athens, that they will already have become familiar to travellers who visit Sparta last. The conquest of Messenia first increased her resources. By the middle of the sixth century she won signal victories over Tegea and Argos and became the head of the Peloponnesian Confederacy, which included every state in the Peloponnesus except Achæa and Argos. Before the end of the century she was the leading state of Greece, for Thessaly was losing ground and Athens had not yet risen. In the first part of the fifth century Sparta was the natural leader of the Greek allies against Persia, and in the autumn of 481 B. C. was the head of the congress at the Isthmus. To her generals was given the command of both the army and the navy. But her conduct of the wars at best did not increase her prestige, nor did she afterwards exhibit any skill in using new conditions. This was the opportunity of Ionic Athens to create the greatest period of Greek history. But Sparta was also strong and possessed in Brasidas a general unparalleled among the Laconians for eager enterprise, trustworthiness and personal popularity. A final struggle was inevitable. The Dorians won, and, at the end of the fifth century, once more for a generation held the balance of power in Greece. But Sparta’s despotism within the Peloponnesus and her desire for foreign aggrandizement created new hostilities. Early in the fourth century Persia undermined her maritime power, and Greek friendships as strange as the Æschylean truce between fire and water were formed to her detriment. Athens and Thebes, Corinth and Argos forgot old enmities in hatred of Sparta, but she maintained her supremacy and forced upon Greece the arbitration of the Persian king. For fifteen years Greek politics veered hither and thither, and then at Leuctra Epaminondas conquered Sparta and won the leadership of Greece for Thebes. His death gave one more opportunity to Athens, but before she could use it Macedon arose and at Chæronea united her with Sparta in a common humiliation. Never again did either Dorian or Ionian state have power to alarm the other.

Thucydides described Sparta as a straggling village like the ancient towns of Hellas. Polybius added that it was roughly circular in shape and level, although it inclosed certain uneven and hilly places. It had no real acropolis, but the highest of its several hills received this conventional name; and it was not fortified by walls until long after the greatest days of its history. Four districts or wards, Pitane, apparently the aristocratic quarter, Limnæ, Cynosura, and Mesoa, perhaps represented an early group of villages which later were united in one city.

This city was extraordinarily barren of artistic adornment. The citizens of no other leading state in the whole of Greece were so indifferent to the value of architecture and sculpture, nor is it likely that they were perturbed by the prophecy of Thucydides: “If the community of Lacedæmon should become a desert with only the temples and ground foundations remaining, I think that, after the lapse of much time, men of the future would be very slow to believe that the power of the Lacedæmonians was equal to their fame. And yet they possess two of the five divisions of the Peloponnesus and hold the hegemony of the whole and of many outside allies. But this community is not a city regularly built with costly temples and edifices and would seem rather insignificant.”

Temples and edifices of course there were for the business of life and of religion, but the need for them was not, as in Athens, or even in certain cities of rude Arcadia, identified with the larger need of inspiring or importing the genius of architect, sculptor, and painter. Sparta had an early school of sculpture, influenced by Cretan teachers, specimens of whose work may be seen in the Museum. But the impulse shrivelled and died in an uncongenial atmosphere. Nor do we find the Spartans in the great artistic centuries clamouring for the work of foreign artists as did the towns of “stupid” Bœotia. The British School of Archæology is successfully engaged in the exploration of Sparta, but we cannot anticipate the discovery of statues like the Hermes of Olympia or the restoration of buildings like the Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi.

With this chastening of his imagination the traveller may turn his attention to the few discoveries which up to this time have been made. By far the most significant of these are fragmentary remains of the temple of Athena Chalkiœkos and of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. Athena’s Brazen House, existing in some form from a very early epoch, was so associated with the public life of the city that it became known to foreigners as an object of peculiar national sentiment. Euripides makes the Trojan women attribute to Helen a desire to see it once more when, praying to die at sea before the consummation of their captivity, they seek to involve her in their own fate:—

The discovery of the Temple of Artemis is of great importance, not only because it was the pivot of the religious life of Sparta but because its eighth century foundations, excavated beneath the traces of a sixth century structure, may belong to the earliest temple in Greece. The image, called Orthia because it had been found “upright” in a thicket of willows, was believed by the Spartans to be the ancient wooden one brought by Orestes and Iphigeneia from the land of the Taurians, where Iphigeneia, rescued by Artemis from the sacrificial altar at Aulis, had been its priestess and guardian. Euripides naturally preserves the Athenian tradition that the image was brought to Brauron. But Pausanias presses the Spartan claim and explains the hoary custom of annually scourging the boys in front of the image by the “relish for blood” that it had acquired in the days when human sacrifices were offered to it in a barbarian land.

The brutality in the training of Spartan youth has bulked so large in tradition that local associations with it perhaps impress the traveller more sharply than any others. In the southwestern region of the town, near the large ruins of a Roman bath, lay, it is thought, the Dromos or race course, and the Platanistas or Plane-tree Grove, surrounded by a moat and entered by two bridges, where the boys, as a part of their education, fought very savage battles. This grove is an excellent illustration of the danger of claiming too much for the influence on the mind of external forms. Plato held that even the shapes of trees might influence the spirit of those who walked among them, and Walter Pater, in his study of Lacedæmon, compresses the idea into a definite application by describing the plane tree, the characteristic tree of Sparta, as “a very tranquil and tranquillizing object, regally spreading its level or gravely curved masses on the air.” Yet within a circle of these tranquillizing objects Cicero, and later Lucian and Pausanias, saw the Spartan boys fighting with incredible fury, kicking, scratching, biting, and dying rather than confess themselves beaten.

In literature as well as in the plastic arts the Spartans failed to express themselves. Only four poets of any widespread fame had their homes in Sparta, and no one of these was a native born. Significantly, too, they all lived at least as early as the seventh century, at the only period when Spartan life showed any pliability. Individual freedom was not wholly repressed, and an acknowledgment of the graces of life was at times permitted. Only under these conditions could art live at all, and poetry outran sculpture in permanent achievement. This was, perhaps, due to its immediate connection with music (including dancing), the only art which the later Spartans, although they did not give it a place in their educational curriculum, seem to have appreciated.

According to tradition, Sparta’s poets all came to her in response to a call for foreign aid in her domestic broils. Terpander of Lesbos and Thaletas of Crete successively founded two musical epochs in a city that was intent upon controlling its serfs and developing its soil. Terpander’s service was almost incalculable, for he modified the existing lyre into an instrument which was universally used until the fifth century and which gave the first great impulse to vocal music. But “the strings he fingered are all gone,” and of the verses that he wrote we have only a few fragments to recall his life in Sparta, his invocations at public festivals of Apollo, the chief god of the city, and of Castor and Polydeuces, the city’s heroes, and his praise of the city herself:—

Thaletas, coming from an island where the dance had been important from prehistoric times, and finding in Sparta the same friendly atmosphere of open Dorian life, introduced the festival of the Gymnopædia, in which boys displayed the perfected beauty of their naked bodies in athletic dances and, by means of formal songs in unison, began the “choral lyric.” This poetic form, passing far beyond its birthplace, became everywhere in Greece the chief expression of public worship of gods and heroes and stimulated the powers of such poets as Simonides and Pindar and Bacchylides. Thaletas was lost sight of in his greater successor Alcman, who not only was credited with the creation as well as with the cultivation of the choral lyric, but also was adjudged so successful in all his work that Alexandrian scholars included him in their canon of the melic poets, with Pindar and Sappho.

Terpander and Thaletas are little more than names, familiar only to those who study origins. Alcman and Tyrtæus, the poet of the Messenian War, are representatives of the vital poetry which Sparta cherished in her supple youth before her ideals had matured and her life had irreparably settled into its narrow grooves. Tyrtæus was probably an Athenian, even if it is mere legend that he was a lame schoolmaster sent by Athens in derision when Sparta appealed for help in the second Messenian War. Alcman was born in Sardis, though probably of Hellenic blood. If our traditional dates are correct, some years at least of their lives must have coincided. Their poetry in general represented different modes, Tyrtæus being the earliest master, outside of Ionia, of the flute-accompanied elegiac distich, the lusty heir of the Homeric hexameter, while Alcman established many of the more delicate measures permitted by the versatile lyre. Their poetic purposes, however, were influenced in common by the Dorian atmosphere in which they lived.

In Tyrtæus this showed itself in the creation of martial verse, which seems to have been powerfully influential in arousing into active service, at a time of need, the courage and the perseverance ingrained in the Doric character. But his own racial gift made it impossible that his poetry should be confined to one country. In all parts of Greece, through many centuries, it expressed the ideal of courage. One of his anapæstic songs, intended to be sung by Spartan soldiers as they marched to battle, has been called the Marseillaise of Greece. A fragment of it still stirs the blood:—

The Dorian element that appealed to Alcman was the publicity of the daily life. Men lived in common, ate at large public tables, trained their children in groups, and believed always in the sacrifice of the individual to the necessities of the state. Hence they took kindly to public festivals where choruses of men and women, boys and girls could sing hymns that gave expression to common and national sentiments. These hymns Alcman wrote in great numbers. Especially famous and never displaced by later poets were his partheneia, written for the choruses of Spartan maidens whose share in the athletic training of their brothers made them the most beautiful in Greece. Travellers in Sparta who look at the lifeless ruins of the Temple of Artemis will rejoice that among the broken fragments of Alcman’s poetry exist seven complete strophes of a partheneion which probably was sung before the temple at one of the festivals of the goddess. Helen as a child had danced at such a festival, and doubtless many a girl in Alcman’s chorus was pointed out by the surrounding crowd as her fit successor. In his vigour the poet must often himself have led the dances of these tall, straight maidens. In his old age, too stiff to keep pace with their lithe movements, he added to a song he wrote for them “des images aimables” of gallant regret:—

Verses like these betray an un-Dorian element in Alcman’s genius which came from his Æolian ancestry. It crept into his choral lyrics and claimed its own in his lighter verses. Love and feasting and Bacchic joy furnished him with subjects. No other set of lyric fragments contains so many traces of the consciousness of natural beauties. If all his poetry were preserved, it would not surprise us to find in it a complete and sensitive response to the extraordinary loveliness amid which he lived. We know already that by night in the valley of the Eurotas he watched sleep descend upon the crests and crags of Taygetus and the waiting earth,^[44] was aware of the dew of moonlit evenings and the songs of birds, and felt the charms of the alternating seasons, especially the invigorating bloom of spring.

After the seventh century Sparta entered the Greek world with an offering that excluded art and the consciousness of external beauty. This was her mode of life, dedicated to one austere end. The citizens of Sparta were a small body of men, of pure Dorian blood, freed from the cares of self-support by the serfs or helots who were descendants of the original possessors of the soil they tilled. The whole time of the masters could be devoted to the state, and the pivotal demand of the state was for strong, brave and skilful soldiers. All life was a vast system of education directed toward the end of military efficiency. This explains each one of their customs: the exposure of sickly infants on the slopes of Mount Taygetus; the savage training of their boys and the severe training of their girls, who were to be the mothers of soldiers; the repression of personal luxury, the equalizing of rich and poor, the detailed elimination of individual pursuits. Conservatism was the breath of their life. Their institutions were of very ancient origin, although Lycurgus is now regarded as merely a legendary designer, and, once in possession of their imaginations, could not be shaken off or essentially modified. At the crucial period following the Peloponnesian War their inability to use new conditions played havoc with their political opportunities. Exclusiveness and reserve were corollaries of their single purpose. Indifference to the arts of peace was inevitable in a nation consecrated to preparation for war.

The spectacle presented by the Spartans never failed to excite the lively interest of the other Greeks. Men as diverse as Xenophon and Aristotle wrote about their institutions, and popular judgments were always in evidence. An opinion which was probably held by many just before the Peloponnesian War is contained in Thucydides’s rehearsal of a speech made in Sparta by a Corinthian delegate to the conference which the allies had forced upon her. Impatiently he tells the Spartans that they do not know how utterly unlike them the Athenians are:—

“They are revolutionary and swift to plan and to execute whatever they conceive, but you are all for conserving the existing state of things, inventing no new policy and in action not even coming up to what necessity demands. Again, they are daring beyond their strength and run risks contrary to their judgment, and in the midst of terrors they are full of hope. Whereas your way is to act within your strength, to have confidence not even in your best secured plans and, when terrors threaten, to think that you will never be set free from them. Nay, they are energetic and you are laggards; they go abroad while you cling to home.”

The Spartan king, Archidamus, justified his nation in a speech made in a private session:—

“We have ever dwelt in a free and most illustrious state, and this policy of conservative self-control may well be equivalent to sound reason. We have become good warriors and wise in counsel by our careful discipline; good warriors, because self-control best quickens the sense of honour, and from this noble sense of shame springs courage; wise in counsel, because we are too unlettered to be superior to the laws, too severely self-controlled to disobey them.”

A generation earlier Herodotus had paid his tribute to the Spartan loyalty to law in his story of the conversation between Xerxes, meditating his attack on Greece, and Demaratus, the ruined Spartan king who had fled to the court of Darius. Want, the exile tells the monarch, had always been a fellow-dweller in his land, but courage was an ally they had gained by wisdom and laws. “The Lacedæmonians even when fighting man for man are inferior to none, but in a body they are the best of all. For although they are free they are not wholly free, for over them there is a master, Law, whom they fear far more than thine fear thee. At any rate, they always do his bidding.” And that the Athenians, with their reverence for law, were by no means unwilling to attribute to the law-abiding Spartans a love of liberty as passionate as their own is seen in another story of Herodotus. Two young nobles volunteered to go to Xerxes and offer their lives in atonement for the murder of his father’s heralds. On their way to Persia they were entertained by the governor Hydarnes, who, calling attention to his own prosperity, urged them to make their submission to the king. “Hydarnes,” they answered, “thy advice to us is one-sided. Thou hast tried the one side, but art inexperienced in the other. For thou knowest how to be a slave, but liberty thou hast not tried as yet, whether it be sweet or no. Shouldst thou taste it, thou wouldst urge us to fight for it not only with the spear but also with the battle-axe.”

One base alloy historians and poets alike found in the character of the Spartans. This was their corruptibility, their sordid greed of gain, as Aristophanes called it when angered by their rejection of peace. To the same political period belong savage attacks of Euripides on Spartan treachery and dishonesty. He also takes occasion to question the chastity of the daughters of Sparta:—

Probably this exactly expressed the sentiment of the average Athenian theatre-goer, accustomed to identify the virtue of women with their obedience to conventional restrictions, which men in the fifth century insisted upon as well as the husband in Menander’s play:—

Men possessed of these ideas could not appreciate that in Sparta, in the great periods, freedom and sobriety went hand in hand. Aristotle, in his arraignment of the license and luxury of the Spartan women as one of the defects of the Spartan system, may have been dealing with some special facts of his own day. In the fourth century Sparta had in certain ways deteriorated.

But this deterioration could not do more than blur the outlines of a system of life which for three centuries had stood before the world, a “whole serene creation.” Comic writers might show up the boorishness of the unlearned Spartans, and irritable tragic poets might vent their spleen on their country’s enemy, but in the end Spartan institutions had to be respected and admired. Indeed, many Athenians affected a special predilection for qualities unlike their own and “laconized” in dress, manner, and speech. Philosophy flourished in Sparta, Plato tells us, and with it a rare skill in conversation. The typical Spartan, after pretending that he could not talk, would throw into the discussion, “like a clever javelin-thrower,” a remark “worth listening to, brief, compressed.”

Thinkers as well as Laconomaniacs displayed enthusiasm for Spartan ideas. Aristotle, to be sure, while praising the love of education among the Lacedæmonians, deplored their absorption in one object and also complained that they preferred the good they gained to the virtue by means of which they gained it. But, true as this may be, the nobility of the effort, the flawless harmony of details, the perfect adjustment of the system to the use for which it was intended, resulted in a product as truly Greek as is a Doric temple or an Attic trilogy. It is not strange that its apotheosis is found in the ideal state of the great visionary of Athens. Plato’s “Republic” is Sparta idealized and interpreted by an Athenian.

A state combining the character of the Dorians and the genius of the Ionians history has failed to produce. Isocrates cherished a hope that Athens and Sparta might divide the headship of a gloriously united Greece. After Chæronea he was even far-sighted enough to plead for the willing union of Hellas under Philip of Macedon. Hopes like these proved either futile or too mean. But his pride in the spiritual achievements of his own city has been approved by Time, “the Inspector-General of men’s deeds.” The institutions of Sparta like every other product of the Greek mind went into the crucible of Athens. And this city, triumphing beyond the orator’s boast, “has caused the name of Hellene to seem to be matter no longer of birth but of intellect, and has made them bear it whose claim is that of culture rather than of origins.”