This Is Sparta (II): Crazy, Feminist Warriors

A History of Mankind (59)

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Whatever the importance of his experience in Crete, Lycurgus made a decisive break with the rising influence of trade and traders in places like Messenia and, particularly, the Isthmus, Attica and the Aegean islands. One of the ways he did this was the apparently nonsensical mandate that only iron bars would be accepted as currency in the city.

That made it difficult to accumulate money, since not-so-valuable iron bars had to be carted around, making Lycurgus' law a practical teaching on the necessity of frugality and an acceptance of equality among citizens. He also came up with the idea of dinner at common tables, to disincentivize luxurious habits and to make it hard for men to drink too much – otherwise they’d have trouble finding their way home in the dark. Seeking to protect a degree of free speech in the midst of a community of hard men accustomed to fight and kill, a rule was enforced that those who wouldn’t take a “scomma” or “gibe” weren’t allowed to make jokes at the expense of others[1].  

A long series of legends has become attached to Spartan history, but some apparently incredible stories appear to have been true, and connected to Lycurgus' institution of the Agoge, or mandatory military training for all full citizens: for example, the Spartan Assembly formally declared civil war every year on the city's helot population, made up of descendants of Achaeans, migrants and slaves without full-citizenship rights, in order to remind everyone of the real state of affairs in Spartan territory.

Individual Helots were ritually humiliated, for example, by forcing them to drink massive quantities of alcohol as object lessons for young Spartans in the virtues of moderation.[2] Worse, they were subjected to the Krypteia, "The Secret Matter," targeted assassination by the secret groups of young Spartan citizens who, as part of their training as elite warriors, were supposed to eliminate the most promising and thus dangerous elements of the helot population before the subjugated class started to have ideas above its station.[3]