28 Paıdeía
for preventing faction, attributed to the ancient city by James Madison, cen-
tered on giving “to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the
same interests.” As long as men felt the desire to increase their property and
to pass it on to their progeny, they would be at odds.
The social and economic arrangements at Sparta seem to have been aimed
at suppressing the private element in human life, at making the adult male
Spartiate an almost entirely public being by eliminating to the greatest degree
possible the last refuge of privacy—the family. Thomas Jefferson came close to
the truth when he borrowed the baron de Montesquieu’s metaphor and called
the Spartan government “the rule of military monks.”^68 Like a monastery, the
city herself attempted to fill most of the functions elsewhere conceded to the
household: she granted the citizen landed property and servants; she secured for
him both surrogate father and surrogate son; and she provided him with bed,
board, and lover, integrating him into the larger community by means of an
all-male social unit of a size perfect for engaging and keeping his loyalties and
for promoting small-unit cohesion on the battlefield.^69 He spent his entire life
in the public eye, being judged and praised or blamed by his fellows. For this
reason, it is true to say that Sparta exercised greater control over her citizens
than any regime that has existed anywhere else at any time. She exercised this
control not through terror, but rather through the power of public opinion in
a tiny, close-knit community that never included more than nine or ten thou-
sand male adults: a pólıs in which everyone knew virtually everything that
there was to know about everyone else. The force of public opinion—powerful
as it is in any small town—was magnified at Sparta by a set of institutional ar-
rangements designed to make it fully dominant. The Spartans foreswore gold
and silver coinage and encouraged homosexuality for the same reason. The
agōgē ́ and all that followed it were aimed at forming the completely public-
spirited man—the man who would never leave the formation and who would
depart from every battle in the posture demanded by his mother: with his
shield or on it.^70
No one understood this better than Herodotus. In The Inquiries, he rep-
resents the exiled Spartan king Demaratus as having been in attendance at
a review of Xerxes’ troops not long before the battle of Thermopylae. When
Xerxes asks whether the Greeks would dare to resist Persia, Demaratus replies
that the Spartans would fight to the end. He concludes by saying: “As for the
Spartans, fighting each alone, they are as good as any, but fighting as a unit,
they are the best of all men. They are free, but not completely free—for the law