Sparta: An exceptional domination of state over society? (2018) (original) (raw)

2018, In: A. Powell (ed.), A Companion to Sparta, Hoboken NJ (Wiley, ISBN: 978-1-405-18869-2)

In this chapter I have set out to examine one of the central aspects of the debate about whether Sparta was an exceptional polis: namely, whether the Spartan polis constituted an exceptional domination of state over society. I posed three key questions: first, whether the state determined the nature of Spartan society and the lives of its citizens to an unusual degree compared with other poleis; second, whether Spartiate citizens had significantly less scope than citizens elsewhere to exercise personal agency in their household affairs; and, finally, to what extent Spartiate citizens were able to exercise private influence over affairs of state. On the first question, we have seen some respects in which Sparta was unusual, especially the state’s imposition of a common citizen life‐course, including institutions such as the boys’ public upbringing and the daily evening syssitia. However, the degree of direct control exercised by the state over these institutions and, in general, over the daily lives of Spartiate citizens was more limited than usually portrayed in modern scholarship On the second question, we have seen that Spartiate families had considerable scope, often more than citizens in other poleis, to exercise private control over their household affairs. On the final question, we have seen that Sparta was not a totalitarian state. On the contrary, the private influence of wealthy citizens conditioned all levels of public activity, from the operation of the small‐group koinōniai in which Spartiates led their everyday lives through to the highest levels of official policy‐making. By the fourth and early third centuries the private activities of wealthy Spartiates had become so free from state restraints that they undermined the very economic basis of the common citizen way of life and, with it, the foundations of Spartan power. Was the classical Spartan polis, then, marked by an exceptionally close fusion of state and society, as some scholars have claimed? In the usual meaning of that phrase, the permeation of society by the state, the answer must be ‘no’. One might argue, indeed, that over the course of the classical period Sparta came increasingly close to exemplifying the phrase in the opposite sense, the permeation of the state by society. On a long‐term perspective, Sparta in the fourth and early third centuries had become a type of polis similar in key respects to archaic Sparta of the seventh century: a plutocratic society marked by severe inequalities of wealth and dominated by private interests and acquisitive behaviour of the rich. In between, for a couple of centuries or so following the sixth‐century revolution, a partially effective compromise was reached, in which the lifestyles and interests of rich and poor were brought together to some degree through Sparta’s distinctive state institutions and citizen way of life. Over time, however, both public institutions and affairs of state became thoroughly penetrated by societal influences stemming from the private resources and activities of wealthy Spartiates.