Paıdeía 23
This was a communal poetry fit for the education of citizen-soldiers who
would be expected to spend their lives at home in Laconia and to risk them
abroad on the city’s behalf. The Spartans committed these and similar verses
to memory and recited them about the campfire and while on the march for
the same reason that they prepared for combat in ritual fashion by combing
out their long hair and donning cloaks of royal purple in such a manner as
to terrify and discomfit their foe. Like the wine which the Lacedaemonians
customarily imbibed before battle, like the strains of the flute played by men
occupying an hereditary office, which accompanied their steady march into
combat, and like the paean which they chanted as they closely approached the
enemy phalanx, the songs of Tyrtaeus were an intoxicant intended to reduce
tension, dull pain, and make men—at least momentarily—forget the specter
of death. With the city’s poets in mind, Plutarch suggests, the Spartan king
would sacrifice to the Muses at the onset of battle. His purpose was to remind
Lacedaemon’s warriors to accomplish feats worthy to be remembered by the
city in song.^50
The World of the Sussıtíon
In the late archaic and early classical periods, when Lacedaemon was pop-
ulous and may even have suffered for a time from overpopulation, the young
men who survived the agōgē ́ and became Spartiates are likely to have been a
highly select group.^51 On their long journey to manhood,^52 they had been sub-
jected to a formal magisterial scrutiny [dokımasía] at regular intervals: ini-
tially, at birth; then, almost certainly, as boys [hoı paîdes] at seven; as youths
[hoı paıdískoı] at twelve, thirteen, or fourteen; and finally, at twenty, when, as
eırénes, they joined the warriors variously called hoı hēbōˆntes and hoı néoı.^53
As a paîs neared adolescence and become a paıdískos and, again, as he ap-
proached hē ́bē—the threshold of manhood—his physical training became
more and more rigorous and the tests of his strength and courage more and
more severe. The final test, the period of concealment [krupteía], appears to
have taken place after he left the age-category of the paıdískoı, when he was
technically a young man [néos] but not yet an eırē ́n—in the very year in which
he was slated to reach his twentieth birthday. For a full twelve months, the
young man withdrew from the community and was thrown back entirely on
his own resources. Armed with a dagger, he hid in the wilds during the day,