Paıdeía 29
is placed over them as a master [despótēs], and they fear that law far more than
your subjects fear you. And they do whatever it orders—and it orders the same
thing always: never to flee in battle, however many the enemy may be, but to
remain in the ranks and to conquer or die.”^71 The Spartan was to be brave and
steadfast even in the face of certain death. That was the goal which the insti-
tutions of the Lacedaemonians attempted to achieve.
Privacy’s Revenge
There was, of course, a gap between ideal and performance. There always
is. It is striking just how many of the Spartan anecdotes collected by Plutarch
presuppose close ties between mother and son, and fathers clearly took an
interest in the progress of their sons and evidenced pride in their accomplish-
ments.^72 It is, moreover, very revealing that the Spartans were notorious both
for their corruption when abroad and for being open to bribery when freed
from the purview of their fellows.^73 This gap should not come as a surprise; it
is what we would normally expect. Spartan institutions ran against the grain.
As even Rousseau was forced to acknowledge, the attempt to suppress alto-
gether the private element in human life requires doing violence to human
nature.^74 This is reportedly why the late archaic lyric poet Simonides gave
Lacedaemon the epithet “man-subduing [damasímbrotos] .”^75 It is impossible
entirely to expunge the normal preference for one’s own flesh and blood and
to eliminate the universal desire of human beings to amass wealth as a hedge
against hardship and as a legacy for their offspring.
To these propensities, the Spartans were themselves forced to give a
grudging recognition. In describing the shortcomings of the Spartan regimen,
Dionysius of Halicarnassus acknowledges that “the Lacedaemonians allowed
those who were the oldest to strike with their canes citizens who were behav-
ing in a disorderly fashion in any public place.” But then he immediately adds
that, in one critical respect, they were much more like the Athenians than the
Romans: “They made no provision for and took no precaution against what
might take place in the home; instead, they regarded the door to each man’s
house as a boundary stone marking out the sphere where he could conduct his
life freely and as he wished.”^76 The contradiction between desire and duty,
between unaccommodated human nature and the needs of the pólıs, and be-
tween a man’s character as an individual and his status as a citizen—ultimately,
this contradiction cannot be resolved. Try as one may, it remains as impossible