1

Prologue

The Spartan Enigma

Patriotism is conducive to good morals, and good morals contribute to patrio-

tism. The less we are able to satisfy our private passions, the more we abandon

ourselves to those of a more general nature. Why are monks so fond of their

order? Precisely because of those things which make it insupportable. Their rule

deprives them of all the things on which the ordinary passions rest: there re-

mains, then, only that passion for the rule which torments them. The more

austere the rule, that is, the more it curbs their inclinations, the more force it

gives to the one inclination which it leaves them.

—Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

T

o understand ancient Sparta, the part she played in Greek history, and

the role that her image played in the history of the West, one must

come to understand the Spartan regime and way of life—which is no

mean task.^1 Lacedaemon is now and always has been a great puzzle. She trou-

bled even the ancients. In antiquity, some thought her a democracy; others, an

oligarchy. In one passage of Plato’s Laws, the Athenian stranger describes her

constitution as a mixture of monarchy and democracy; a few pages later, the

Spartan Megillus admits that even he is at a loss for a name to give the polity:

when considering the ephorate as a magistracy, he is tempted to call it a tyr-

anny; when looking at the regime as a whole, he is led to think Sparta the most

democratic of all the cities; and it would be altogether strange to deny that she

is an aristocracy. But, he adds, there is a kingship in the place, for her two

basıleîs rule for life, and theirs is the oldest of kingships. Aristotle suffered a

fate similar to that of Plato’s Megillus. When reflecting on the strife between

rich and poor that racked most Greek cities, he could describe the Lacedae-

monian regime as a mixture of democracy and oligarchy; when thinking of

the Spartan way of life, he found it necessary to term the city an aristocracy

somehow both democratic and oriented toward the pursuit of virtue.^2

The confusion persists. In the age stretching from Niccolò Machiavelli to

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sparta was often considered a model for the constitu-