Xenophon’s Self-Fashioning Spartans

If we wish to assess the change in historical attitudes after Herodotus, we might consider Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans. Many forces contributed to a new paradigm for the analysis of international affairs, but Thucydides’ particular influence on Xenophon is explicit and pervasive. Xenophon’s Hellenika literally picks up where Thucydides’ unfinished narrative breaks off—it is perhaps the only major history that begins with the words “After these things” (meta de tauta). This peculiar mannerism not only offers a seamless connection to Thucydides’ broken text but is a gesture of profound respect for Thucydides’ achievement and an endorsement for his (rather than Herodotus’s) program of history. Xenophon is our most detailed classical source for Spartan customs and society, but we must be cautious in using Xenophon to analyze Thucydides, for Xenophon accepts many of the intellectual assumptions that seem first to take written form in Thucydides and that polemically oppose ideas present in Herodotus.

The concluding sections of the Hellenika, however, allow us to gauge even more closely the degree to which Xenophon follows Thucydides rather than Herodotus. For all his overt conservatism, Xenophon takes as assumptions ideas that, if expressed in clear language, would have called the Greeks of his grandfather’s generation to arms. Xenophon, for example, gives up his history in apparent despair after the battle of Mantinea in 362, a half-century after its opening in 411:

When these things had taken place, the opposite of what all believed would happen was brought to pass. For since nearly all the people of Greece had come together and formed themselves in opposing lines, there was no one who did not suppose that if a battle were fought, those who proved victorious would exercise rule (archê) and those who were defeated would be their subjects (hupêkooi); but the deity (theos) so ordered it that both parties set up a trophy as though victorious and neither tried to hinder those who set them up, that both gave back the dead under a truce as though victorious, and both received back their dead under a truce as though defeated, and that while each party claimed to be victorious, [27] neither was found to be any better off, as regards either additional territory or city or rule (archê), than before the battle took place; but there was even more confusion (akrisia) and disorder (tarachê) in Greece after the battle than before.

Thus far be it written by me; the events after these will perhaps be the concern of another.

When Xenophon expresses gloom at the indecisive nature of the battle, he inscribes in his narrative an assumption that would have shocked the Greeks of the early fifth century. Before the Persian Wars, the hundreds of petty Greek city-states maintained, wherever at all possible, the claim that they were free and autonomous. The subjection of the Greek states in the east to Kroisos and then to Persia was unprecedented (Hdt. 1.6.3)—an aberration and, in the eyes of the other Greeks, a disgrace. Even those states that were in some measure subordinate to others sought to frame the hierarchical relationship in some less opprobrious form: they were apoikoi and thus owed their mother-city filial respect, or they were friends who owed their benefactors a debt of honor. Open and unambiguous domination was degrading—a relationship dangerous for both sides, since the disgrace would exert constant pressure on the subordinates to revolt, as the Ionians did against Persia, with disastrous consequences.

Xenophon, however, comes to his analysis of Mantinea with an entirely different assumption. More than a century had elapsed since Plataia, and, in that time, one Greek polis or another had exercised domination over a group of weaker states. Even the Peloponnesian War had begun because many Greek states objected to Athenian rule and wished to restore the ancient freedoms that all Greeks had enjoyed. It was ironic that Sparta would, after the Athenian empire was crushed, simply take Athens’s place, and Sparta’s rule was correspondingly short-lived. Before the battle of Mantinea, the Greeks had—if we are to believe Xenophon—assumed that one state or another would become the dominant power. The battle was not fought over freedom versus slavery (as speakers in Herodotus or Thucydides so often claim was the issue in their wars), but over which power would predominate. The matter-of-fact way in which Xenophon describes the universal malaise after the battle of Mantinea is a gauge of the degree to which the situation has changed. The situation that Xenophon describes after Mantinea, from Xenophon’s point of view, violates the expectations and even the hopes of all who participated. Xenophon implies that the Greeks had not only expected but had desired some preeminent power to emerge. Thus indecisiveness and the lack of a dominant power bring nothing but “confusion” (akrisia) and “disorder” (tarachê). The production of freedom (eleutheria) and independence (autonomia) does not even warrant mention in Xenophon’s account. It is almost as if Xenophon had retold the Greek victories at Salamis and Plataia as a tragedy because they prevented Xerxes from bringing order to Hellas.

Thus even as Xenophon, with his aside to the theos, points backward to Herodotus (rather than to Thucydides, for whom things divine were of little interest),^[14] he shows that the logic of Thucydides had shaped his own view of history. Already in the Archaeology, Thucydides showed that he had no use for the system of quarrelsome city-states—predominant archê needed to contain these small and selfish entities.

This complex mixture of the traditional and the modern subtly shapes Xenophon’s other works and colors his account of Spartan customs. Even as Xenophon seeks in his idealizing text to recuperate Sparta’s pristine glory, he cannot even frame his project in terms that would have made sense to the earlier generation in which he situates his vanished Sparta. He has lost touch with the earlier Greek world in which Spartan preeminence was able to flourish.

An Athenian aristocrat and longtime admirer of Sparta, Xenophon began his fourth-century description of Sparta with a self-consciously casual remark: “It occurred to me one day that Sparta, though among the most thinly populated of states, was evidently the most powerful (dunatôtatê) and most celebrated (onomastotatê) city in Greece; and I fell to wondering how this could have happened. But when I considered the institutions of the Spartans (ta epitêdeumata tôn Spartiatôn), I wondered no longer” (Lak. Pol. 1.1). He goes on to provide us with the most detailed picture of Spartan society that has come down to us from antiquity. He tells us how children are begotten (chap. 2) and how children, once born, are raised (3–4). He praises the common messes at which the elite homoioi, “peers,” the small group of full Spartan citizens, took their meals (5). He approvingly claims that Spartans share children, servants, and goods (6), reject moneymaking (7), obey the laws more rigorously than any other Greeks (8), impose terrible social sanctions upon cowardice (9), and provide an environment in which even the old must aggressively pursue virtue (10). But his analysis of Spartan success is, at least when compared with what we see in Herodotus, as untraditional and distinct as the assumptions about the battle of Mantinea are from hopes of the Corinthians, Mytileneans, and Melians in Thucydides.

For all of Xenophon’s interest in and admiration for the personal habits of the Spartans, the practice of warfare constitutes a single, almost Aristotelian goal that unifies and gives meaning to everything in the Spartan state. Women go through vigorous physical training (Lak. Pol. 1.4), and sex between husband and wife is restricted so that sexual encounters should be more passionate and produce stronger offspring (1.5). Thus Sparta, we hear, succeeded in producing children that exceeded all others in size and strength (1.10). The growing Spartans toughen themselves throughout their upbringing. They go barefoot because Lykourgos thought that this would allow them to climb hills and steep inclines more easily (2.3). Spartan children wear a single garment, winter and summer, so that they may learn to endure extremes of temperature (2.4), and, for all their exertions, they must get by on a limited ration that leaves them always hungry (2.5) and renders them lean (2.6). The state fosters constant rivalry and competition between young men (4.3–5), and they engage in casual fistfights with whomever they meet (4.6). Older men must continue their physical training so that they may serve in the army as effectively as the young, and, to ward off physical decline, Lykourgos’s middle-aged Spartans scampered through the hills and dales of Lakonia hunting (4.7). Lykourgos felt that, left to themselves, many would take their ease, and so imposed physical activity upon all and established a system that produced the healthiest and most physically accomplished men in all Greece (5.8–9). Above all, where other Greeks jealously proclaim their independence from any authority, civil or otherwise, the Spartans revere and take pride in obedience and submission, and even the most important men run, rather than walk, to answer any call (8.1–2). Cowardice leads to systematic and permanent social death (9.3–6).

All of these customs serve conscious purposes, and Xenophon’s Sparta is a functionalist’s paradise. Courage is not only admirable but practical—courageous fighters suffer fewer casualties than cowards (Lak. Pol. 9.2). Physical conditioning and habits of obedience make the Spartan army an instrument that can maneuver quickly and strike hard (chaps. 11–12). All practices within the Spartan state converge: birth, education, and daily life all strengthen the arms and shoulders that will support the heavy shields, spears, and swords of the frontline Spartan hoplites. In the end, Sparta has the greatest reputation (onoma; cf. onomastotatê at 1.1) because it has the greatest material force (dunamis; cf. dunatôtatê at 1.1). Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between the moral leadership of “hegemony” and the physical power of “domination” applies well to Xenophon’s analysis. The extraordinarily methodical pursuit of masculine virtue and the unparalleled subordination of self and family to the state carry to a unique degree tendencies that drew wide admiration in the Greek world, and thus gave the traditional Sparta a claim to moral leadership.

But Xenophon’s description of Spartan authority is so teleological and pragmatic that, for him, Spartan moral leadership derives from and is secondary to Sparta’s ability to project power. Xenophon is, in fact, not really interested in ta epitêdeumata of the Spartans for their own sake, as embodying some set of moral values, but because they are an efficient tool for some further purpose. When provoked, the Spartans can march out and crush any roughly equivalent force of Greeks. Physical toughness makes better soldiers. Obedience allows the Spartans as a group to master group tactics. Courage reduces casualties. Xenophon’s analysis renders Spartan prestige conditional on the pragmatic deeds of warfare. The excellences of Spartan life are not praised for their own sakes, but because they allow Spartans to strike faster, harder, longer. Sparta exercises both hegemony and domination, but the two qualities are not equal. Domination produces hegemony. The force of Spartan arms sanctions the Spartan way of life. “The central fact about Sparta,” as one historian has recently put it, “was indeed, as Xenophon saw, her way of life, her epitêdeumata ”;^[15] yet although Spartan moral excellence may reflect the claims with which Xenophon opens his history, it does not reflect the assumptions that actually shaped his text. Sparta’s deeds gave this way of life its meaning.

Xenophon’s analysis of Spartan power follows Thucydides. Toward the end of the Archaeology, for example, Thucydides offers a simple explanation for Spartan leadership against the Persians: “When tremendous danger loomed near, the Spartans, because they were preeminent with respect to power (dunamis), served as leaders of the Greeks who had jointly undertaken war” (Thuc. 1.18.1). Typically for Thucydides, strength is the dominant factor. As elsewhere in Thucydides, a calculus of force designates that the strong lead and the weaker follow in pursuit of their own advantage.^[16] Spartan power, by an almost mechanical process, leads to Spartan leadership. In this judgment, Thucydides reveals a fundamental and pervasive interpretive habit that shapes his view of history and that informs such later work as Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans. In classic Marxist terminology, we might say that for Thucydides the base inevitably dominates the superstructure.

The problem for Thucydides—and for Xenophon—is that Spartan preeminence was possible precisely because power alone did not ensure leadership (otherwise, for example, Gelon of Syracuse might well have led Greece against Xerxes). “Such authority as derived from the Spartan preeminence was ultimately extralegal, however much it was validated and objectified by the Spartans’ leadership of the Peloponnesian league,” ^[17] but Thucydides seems never to have been comfortable with such a deliberately vague and unquantifiable position. According to Thucydides’ view of history, Athens should have defeated Sparta, and Thucydides never provided a definitive explanation for why things turned out as they did.

Xenophon, too, is sensitive to the problems of his account and openly recognizes the gulf between Spartan power of his day and its previous prestige. But he is less sensitive to symbolic power than Herodotus. He deals with this problem by mythologizing the Spartans of an earlier generation. He concedes that his picture of Sparta is idealized—toward the end of his account (Lak. Pol. 14), he hearkens back to an earlier (and, conveniently, extinct) Spartan purity. The Spartans of the mid-fourth century had fallen from the virtue of their forefathers and thus occupied a less commanding position. But Spartan decadence was not less problematic than the inadequate assumptions that shaped Xenophon’s analysis. For all his emphasis on Spartan customs, Xenophon remains too utilitarian in outlook. Sparta had “the most power and greatest reputation in Hellas” (1.1) because the Spartan way of life produced better soldiers. The Spartan way of life is like a steam engine—valuable because of the power it could generate, a tool whose value flows from its effects. If Xenophon was uneasy, he may have sensed that his account was inadequate, but not suspected that the problem lay with the questions that he thought to put.

In the sixth and fifth centuries, Sparta enjoyed its position because it was simultaneously powerful and not too powerful. Kyros became preeminent because he conquered the great nations of the Near East. Sparta, as we saw, became preeminent because it could not even conquer Tegea. Spartan power was important not because it set off a chain of conquests, but because it legitimated the moral claims of the Spartan lifestyle. The Spartans occupied a position midway between the Great King—who had a good chance of slaughtering anyone who stood in his way—and Panhellenic athletic stars—admired for outstanding success in contests that conferred great prestige (and a platform for political advancement to a string of men from Kylon to Alkibiades) but no legal power. Writing in the fourth century, Xenophon simply could not imagine the position that the Spartans occupied a hundred years before. Herodotus, by contrast, provides nothing like the detail that we find in Xenophon, but the brief description in Herodotus of Sparta’s rise to power gives us a better picture of Sparta’s status in the late archaic period than Xenophon’s idealizing “Once upon a time.” For Herodotus, hegemony far outweighed domination, and all the aspects of his narrative—its content, its emphases, and its omissions—combined to provide an account of Spartan power that is, like that of Xenophon, prescriptive. But where Xenophon reconstructs an idealized previous Sparta, to which his contemporary Spartans might aspire, Herodotus frames present Spartan preeminence in terms that, in fact, set conditions for Spartan authority. Herodotus’s Sparta is the leading city in Hellas not because it crushes its enemies, but because its power is limited and because it does not seek to take full advantage of such power as it does have.

Thucydides had little use for such socially conditioned leadership. The middle-sized states that come to grief—Corcyra, Corinth, Mytilene, Plataia, and Melos, to name only the most prominent—all assume that reputation or social values can exert a decisive influence on the great powers. In this, Thucydides’ narrative does not contradict Herodotus but presents a world in which the conditions have changed. The Athenian empire, and its concomitant power, had no real Greek precedent, and the rise of Athens allowed Sparta to command from its frightened allies a new degree of obedience and submission.

But if Thucydides rejected many of the fictions by which poleis of the archaic period tended to shape their affairs, he nevertheless understood them thoroughly. His critique was so powerful that, from Xenophon onward, readers have accepted most tendentious assumptions as if they reflected a set of transcendent laws governing international affairs. We cannot, however, blame Thucydides for this. He carefully sketches the traditional values of the Greek elite. It is the glare of his own idiosyncratic analyses that has generally pushed the other elements into obscurity. In the next chapters we will explore the complex relationship that Thucydides establishes between his own assumptions and those prominent in the late archaic period.