18 Paıdeía
vant by deliberately humiliating the helots—making them appear in public in
a costume suggesting their kinship with animals, whipping them at regular
intervals for no apparent reason, getting them disgustingly drunk, and even
requiring that they sing degrading songs. The presence of a servile class, the
derisive treatment to which its members were forced to submit, and the man-
ner in which they actually comported themselves—these contributed much
to the education of the Spartan young. As Tyrtaeus seems to have recognized
at the start, the helots were a permanent reminder to the Spartans of their
own exalted status and a warning of the fate that might be theirs if they failed
to justify their claim to superiority and dominion by victory on the field of
battle.^39
Young Spartans could hardly fail to appreciate the point. While undergo-
ing the agōgē ́, they occupied a liminal status intermediate between that of the
helots and that of the hómoıoı, and they sampled both worlds. Much was done
to remind them of the distance separating them from the Spartiates and to
suggest at least the possibility of their kinship with those already set perma-
nently apart as their fathers’ inferiors. The hair of these young Spartans was
short-cropped, not long. They slept under the stars rather than in the men’s
house or with the women at home. Like country bumpkins, they were filthy
and rarely bathed, and they wore no tunic, just a cloak, which was replaced but
once a year. Like calves and colts, by which names they were known, they were
gathered in herds [agélaı] called Boúaı at Lacedaemon under the direction of
herdsmen [Bouagoí]. But like foxes living on the margins of a village or town,
with whom they were also deemed comparable, they stole food from the men’s
mess, as we have seen. If these boys learned the martial dances for which
Lacedaemon was famous, this was apparently not all. For, adorned with masks,
they are thought to have performed a great variety of less dignified dances—
some terrifying, some comic, some obscene, some violent. And if we can trust
the scattered testimonia and the evidence provided by the surviving ex-voto
terracotta masks, they mimed not just men but animals, satyrs, and grotesque
members of the female sex. These Spartan youths were sometimes armed, but
only with sickles and weapons of the sort issued to helots on campaign: for the
hoplite panoply was reserved for citizen-men. Like the helots of Tyrtaeus,
these neophytes were distressed with toil; and like that subject race, they had
ample experience of the whip. They suffered flagellation if judged soft or fat.
They were flogged if caught stealing food. In one famous ritual, which was
solemnly reenacted as an ordeal each year, two groups of boys waged battle