By way of compensation for the lack of evidence about Sparta there are two items of cardinal importance: an extraordinary document about the early Spartan constitution and state, preserved by the Greek writer Plutarch (the “Great Rhetra”), and the poetry of the 7th-century Spartan poet Tyrtaeus. Tyrtaeus wrote poetry in elegiac couplets (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines) intended for symposia. Much of it is military in character and enshrines the hoplite ethic in a developed form at a time when Sparta and Argos were at each other’s throats (a fragment of Tyrtaeus’s poetry published in 1980 definitely disproved modern skepticism about whether Sparta and Argos could have confronted each other militarily as early as the 660s).
Sparta had two kings, or basileis. If it is right that this title merely denotes hereditary nobles with stated prerogatives, this was originally one of its less remarkable aspects. It is odd, however, that the number two should have been so permanently entrenched. In other respects the Sparta that emerged from the Dark Age had many standard features, such as a warrior assembly based on communal eating in “messes,” syssitia (a system analogous to the symposium system), and a council of elders. Magistrates called ephors were unique to Sparta and its offshoots, but there is nothing intrinsically odd about formal magistracies. The Rhetra
The Rhetra is an alleged response by the Delphic oracle to the lawgiver Lycurgus around the 9th or 8th century bce. The Rhetra purports to define the powers of the various Spartan groups and individuals just mentioned. It begins, however, by saying that the tribes must be “tribed” (or “retained”; the Greek is a kind of pun) and the obes (a word for a locality) must be “obed.” The meaning there is desperately obscure, but in an 8th-century context it ought to refer to some kind of political synoecism (Sparta, as stated, was never physically synoecized). The tribes and obes must be the units of civic organization. The Rhetra demands the setting up of a council with the kings and stipulates regular meetings for the Assembly (something not attested at Athens until far later). A crucial final clause seems to say firmly that the people, or damos, shall have the power. Yet a rider to the Rhetra, associated with the late 8th-century kings Theopompus and Polydorus, says that, if the people choose crookedly, the elders and kings shall be dissolvers. A poem of Tyrtaeus’s has traditionally been thought to echo both parts of that document, rider as well as Rhetra, but that relationship has recently been challenged. Certainly there is some circularity in the usual reconstructions of one crucial corrupt line of the relevant poem.
The Rhetra is a precocious constitutional document, if it really dates to the 9th or early 8th century, and for that and other reasons (Delphi was not active and writing was not common much before the middle of the 8th century) it is common practice to date the whole document or pair of documents a century or two later. On this view, which is not here followed, the Rhetra itself, with its stipulation of powers for the (hoplite) damos, is a 7th-century manifestation of hoplite assertiveness: in fact, it represents a kind of Spartan alternative to tyranny. The references to tribes and obes are then seen as part of a reform of the citizen body and of the army, comparable to and not much earlier than tribal changes elsewhere (see below The reforms of Cleisthenes). The rider then dates from an even later period, when Spartan military reverses called for a reactionary readjustment of the balance of power.
That view—which involves down-dating Theopompus and Polydorus to the 7th century from the 8th and still more arbitrarily attributing to them the activity presupposed by the Rhetra rather than the rider—does too much violence to the best chronological evidence (that of Thucydides and Herodotus), and a view in terms of 8th-century political synoecism should be preferred. As for the alleged army reform, nothing can be said about it in detail. The best reconstruction is hardly more than a creative fabrication from Hellenistic evidence that dealt with a Spartan religious festival but had nothing straightforwardly to do with the army at all. The helot factor
It was definitely in the 8th century that Sparta took the step which was to make it unique among Greek states. It had already, in the Dark Age, coerced into semisubject, or “perioikic,” status a number of its more immediate neighbours. Then, in the second half of the 8th century, it undertook the wholesale conquest of Messenia (c. 735–715). One consequence, already noted, was the export of an unwanted group, the Partheniai, to Taras. These were sons of Spartan mothers and non-Spartan fathers, procreated during the absence in Messenia of the Spartan warrior elite. A still more important consequence of the conquest of Messenia, “good to plow and good to hoe” as Tyrtaeus put it, was the acquisition of a large tract of fertile land and the creation of a permanently servile labour force, the “helots,” as the conquered Messenians were now called.
The helots were state slaves, held down by force and fear. A 7th-century revolt by the Messenians (the “Second Messenian War”) was put down only after decades of fighting and with the help (surely) of the new hoplite tactics. The relationship of hatred and exploitation (the helots handed over half of their produce to Sparta) was the determining feature in Spartan internal life. Spartan warrior peers (homoioi) were henceforth subjected to a rigorous military training, the agoge, to enable them to deal with the Messenian helots, whose agricultural labours provided the Spartans with the leisure for their military training and life-style—a notoriously vicious circle.
The agoge and the Sparta that it produced can best be understood comparatively by reference to the kind of male initiation ceremonies and rituals found in other warrior societies. Up to the Second Messenian War, Sparta’s political institutions and cultural life had been similar to those in other states. It had an artistic tradition of its own and produced or gave hospitality to such poets as Alcman, Terpander, and Tyrtaeus. But now Spartan institutions received a new, bleak, military orientation. Social sanctions like loss of citizen status were the consequence of cowardice in battle; a system of homosexual pair-bonding maintained the normal hoplite bonds at a level of ferocious intensity; and the economic surplus provided by the lots of land worked by the helots was used to finance the elite institution of the syssitia, with loss of full citizen status for men who could not meet their “mess bill.” The agoge, however, transformed Sparta and set it apart from other states. The difficulties of reconstructing the details of the agoge are acute: “invented tradition” has been unusually busy in that area. But a recent investigator goes too far in seeing the agoge as the work of the 3rd-century Stoic philosopher Sphaerus; the Greek historian Xenophon in the 4th century allows us to glimpse the essentials.