30 Paıdeía
to give a man entirely over to the community as it is to leave him entirely
to himself.
The chief effect of the attempt at a suppression of the private element in
human life was to make the pursuit of wealth dishonorable. But what the Spar-
tans disdained in public they often longed for when alone. Unlike the heav-
enly city of Plato’s Republic, the Spartan regime did not eliminate private prop-
erty and the family altogether. The Spartiate could distinguish between the
children and the estate which belonged to him and the children and the estate
which did not. He had a stake in protecting those children and in increasing
that estate which brought him into conflict with his peers. This was the very
conflict which the absence of coinage, the encouragement of pederasty, the
agōgē ́, and the sussıtía were designed to expunge. As Plato had occasion to
remark, the Lacedaemonian legislator sought to form a man who loved toil,
victory, and honor—toil for the common cause, victory in the struggles of his
people, and the honor which only his city and fellow citizens could confer
upon him.^77 The lawgiver sought to redirect, transform, and harness the spirit
of competition to serve the city. He tried to replace as much as possible the
love of one’s own property and progeny and the hatred of those outside the
family implicit in that attachment with the love of one’s own city and citizens
and the hatred of foreigners implicit in that commitment.
Xenophon rightly regarded this project as a partial failure. As he inti-
mated in his Polıteía of the Lacedaemonians, the punitive education given
young Spartans produced men equipped with a powerful sense of reverence
and shame [aıdō ́s] who prided themselves on possessing a moderation [so
phrosúnē ] that they, in fact, lacked. When under the gaze of their fellow Spar-
tans, these men could be relied on to conduct themselves with courage and
self-restraint in an admirable fashion. But, when alone or abroad, they fre-
quently succumbed to temptation—and the disgraceful desires that were by
and large contained, if not entirely suppressed, when their hegemony was
confined within the Peloponnesus were later unleashed and proved fatal to
their enterprise when, in the wake of the Peloponnesian War, they sought to
establish their dominion throughout Hellas.^78
Plato agreed wholeheartedly with his fellow Socratic. In his judgment, the
Spartan regimen produced men torn between their public duties and the pri-
vate wants engendered by the remnants within their pólıs of the distinction
between mine and thine. “Such men,” he observed, “will long for money just
as those in oligarchies do; and under the cover of darkness, like savages, they