ABSTRACT
What went on inside Sparta was a question which intrigued many Greeks of other cities and is the subject of much recent study. In the fourth century, during or soon after the period of Sparta’s empire, several studies of the subject were published.1 Xenophon, the author of one of them, began his work by observing that the Spartans had the greatest power of any Greek community but also one of the smallest populations.2 This paradox was no doubt widely felt; Sparta’s extraordinary dominance called for an explanation. For this, Thucydides,3 Xenophon and others looked to the political and social arrangements within Sparta. Yet Sparta was secretive, as we have seen,4 and has left us no literary record of her own from the classical period. Reconstructing the internal arrangements of Sparta is more difficult than tracing her external military ventures, which happened before a crowd of witnesses. Non-Spartans admitted into Spartan territory were subject to periodic expulsion, the xenēlasia (“driving out of foreigners”), which some contemporaries believed to be a device for preserving Spartan secrets.5 Those who visited Sparta, or disseminated information about her, were often (though not always) Lakonisers, Sparta’s partisans. Such were the Athenians Kritias and Xenophon. Our problem with Sparta’s internal history is rather similar to that faced in the twentieth century by Western students of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, where the movements of foreigners were restricted, communication with outsiders was guarded, while much that was reported derived from the uncheckable accounts of enthusiasts. Caution is made still more important by a fact which shrewd contemporary observers of Sparta came to understand very well: the Spartans were masters of deception. Modern works have tended to overlook this. Thus the author of one valuable recent book refers to the devious commander Derkylidas as “ostentatiously un-Spartan in
his Sisyphos-like cunning”.6 The idea that the Spartans were honest and decent may have its roots in the record of Thucydides, that Greeks at the start of the Peloponnesian War favoured the Spartans as potential liberators and that the general Brasidas behaved with encouraging rectitude.7 Faith in Spartan honour may even have come on occasion from the assimilation of Sparta to the English boarding school, with its professed virtues of “owning up” to the truth and “playing the game”.8 To have left this image of virtue may be one of the greatest attainments of deceptive Spartan propaganda. From contemporary Greek sources we hear of deception worked by Spartan officials on their own citizen soldiers, on Sparta’s subject population, the helots, and on enemy states. Xenophon records two cases in which a Spartan general, on learning of a defeat for Spartan forces elsewhere, announced it to his troops as a victory, to sustain morale.9 Thucydides writes of the helots’ being deceived with attractive promises by the Spartan authorities, as a preliminary to massacre.10 The seditious Kinadon was removed from Sparta by means of a lie, according to Xenophon.11 In these cases we are not dealing with some untruth uttered briefly by a cornered politician, such as might be found in any society. Rather, each deception was supported by careful arrangements and appears to have been successfully maintained for as long as necessary. Life at Sparta in several ways resembled that of a military camp – a point familiar in antiquity, though how far Spartan culture was militaristic has been intelligently debated in the twenty-first century.12 Spartan deceit may be best understood in this light. To mislead an enemy was widely regarded as quite proper, if not commendable.13 (The attitude is common today; if we wish to refer without disapproval to a deceptive arrangement, as of household furniture or shop goods, we may talk of things being “strategically placed”.) Xenophon writes of the Spartan king, Agesilaos:
In a further respect he appeared to have achieved something characteristic of a proper general (stratēgikon): when war was declared and deception as a result became religiously permissible and just, he completely outclassed Tissaphernes [his Persian enemy] in deceit.14
