Children and war
Sparta
By the mid-6th century BC, the city state of Sparta in southern Greece had acquired an unrivalled reputation for the discipline and savagery of its fighting men. Known as hoplites, these shield-bearing, spear-carrying soldiers fought in the close-knit infantry formation – the phalanx – that characterised the land warfare of the period.
For nearly 200 years, until the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, the hoplites dominated the battlefields of Greece. One of the principal reasons for their military superiority was undoubtedly the cohesion that was the result of the extreme training endured by Spartan boys from an early age. This encouraged them to feats of self-sacrifice that seem almost incomprehensible now.
Herds of thieves
The Spartan man neither fished nor farmed and did not manufacture things – he was a fighting machine, pure and simple. He was the product of a programme that began at birth. If a newly born Spartan boy was judged by the city elders as unfit to live, he was cast into the Apothetae (‘Deposits’), a deep ravine also known as ‘the place of rejection’. The elders’ decision was final.
At the age of seven, Spartan boys were removed from their families and placed in a training system – the agoge – where they were treated no better than animals. They roamed in ‘herds’, slept rough throughout the year and were constantly famished. To avoid starvation, they were encouraged to steal. Anyone who was caught stealing was flogged, not for theft but for being a poor thief. Those who showed exceptional initiative, or ruthlessness, were earmarked for the Spartan secret service, or krypteia.
Ordeal of the altar
If they survived five years in the agoge, the adolescent Spartans would undergo an ordeal at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia.
On the altar were placed an array of tempting foods protected by a phalanx of ephebes – young men in their 20s armed with whips. Their juniors had to undergo a terrifying gauntlet, during which they came under the merciless lash of their elders as they repeatedly strove to reach the food. The weakest seldom survived; the strongest often suffered terrible injuries.
Dancing for war
From the age of 12 the budding hoplites drilled endlessly to ‘war music’, perfecting the rigid disciplines of hoplite warfare, in which the battlefield was described as ‘the dancing floor of war’. A phalanx that manoeuvred and fought with a totally co-ordinated and unflinching discipline was a Spartan general’s perfect dancing partner.
It was not until he was 20 that the young Spartan man’s initiation into the rigours of war was complete. Those who failed at the final hurdle – election to a warrior’s dining club, or mess – were condemned to a lifetime of exile from Spartan society.
