Paıdeía 9
ness. Instinctively, the Greeks recognized that the differentiation of interests
inevitably fostered by trade and industry was a danger to the hard-won com-
munal solidarity that enabled them to survive.^6
With the danger of faction in mind, Sparta took great care to insulate the
polity from the influence of the marketplace. Fearful that competition for
wealth would set the citizens at odds, she coined no money, used flat iron in-
gots in its place, and, at least at one point, expressly outlawed the private pos-
session of silver and gold. Eager to prevent a differentiation of interests, she
barred her citizens from engaging in commerce and prohibited their practice
of the mechanical arts. Nowhere were the latter held in less esteem. Lacedae-
mon even banned visits to the commercial agorá by men under the age of
thirty. The Spartans were, as Plutarch remarks, “the servants of Ares,” not
Mammon. They were “the craftsmen of war,” not the makers of pots. They had
but one purpose in life: to gain a reputation for valor. From childhood on, they
trained to secure victory in battle by land.^7
To eliminate those unfit for this endeavor, the city practiced infanticide,
subjecting the newborn to a careful scrutiny and exposing to the elements
those who were deformed or otherwise lacking in vigor. Whether, over time,
Lacedaemon’s eugenic practices had an impact on the physical characteristics
typifying members of the Spartiate community, as such practices no doubt did
in the case of the horses and dogs the Spartans enthusiastically bred, we sim-
ply do not know. But it is clear enough that this was their aim and that the
Spartans thought of themselves quite literally as a breed apart.^8
To enable those who survived this initial test to pursue in due course the
chief goal set by the regime, the city authorized a grant to every citizen of a
klēˆros—an equal allotment of public land—and servants called helots to work
it.^9 The rent determined by the pólıs and paid in kind by these dependent
peasants was sufficient to support in comfort a small household,^10 and the
labor of this depressed class made it possible for the Spartans to devote their
time and efforts to mastering the martial arts and to gaining that confidence
which fortifies civil courage. When asked why they placed their fields in the
hands of the helots and did not cultivate the soil themselves, one Spartan is
said to have replied that “it was not by caring for the fields but by caring for
ourselves that we came to possess those fields.” Centuries after the city’s de-
cline, Josephus would look back and remark that “these men neither tilled the
soil nor toiled at the crafts—but freed from labor and sleek with the palaestra’s