7

Chapter 1

Paıdeía

What gives rise to human misery is the contradiction found between our con-

dition and our desires, between our duties and our inclinations, between nature

and social institutions, between man and citizen; render a man one and you

shall render him as happy as he is able to be. Give him entirely over to the state

or leave him entirely to himself—but if you divide his heart, you shall tear it

asunder.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

C

lassical Lacedaemon was no ordinary pólıs. No one thought so in

antiquity; no one should think so today.^1 It is by no means fortuitous

that Herodotus of Halicarnassus—whose analysis of Spartan mores,

manners, and ways is the earliest such surviving account—treats Lacedaemon

and no other Greek pólıs alongside Scythia, Persia, and Egypt as an ethno-

graphic wonder. For that is precisely what she was.^2 The nómıma of the Lace-

daemonians—their customs, manners, and laws—really were incompatible

with those of their fellow Hellenes, as Thucydides’ Athenians bluntly inform

them; and Sparta really was opposed to the other Greek póleıs in her institu-

tions and practices, as Xenophon repeatedly insists.^3

The ground of this distinctiveness is clear enough. Of all the ancient Hel-

lenic communities, Sparta came the closest to giving absolute primacy to the

common good. She did this—as Plato, Isocrates, and Plutarch recognized—by

turning the city into a camp, the pólıs into an army, and the citizen into a sol-

dier. She did it by taking the institutions and practices embryonic in every

pólıs and developing them to an extreme only imagined elsewhere. Except

with the express permission of the magistrates, her citizens were prohibited

from traveling abroad and foreigners were forbidden to visit Lacedaemon. As

a consequence, she was able to exert an almost absolute control over the cir-

cumstances which shaped her citizens’ lives. Everything that she did in this vir-

tually self-contained world was aimed at a single end: at nurturing what Lord

Macaulay would later refer to as “that intense patriotism which is peculiar to

members of societies congregated in a narrow space.” This radical fidelity to