by Walter Pater
A great wave, successive waves, of invasion, sufficiently remote to have lost already all historic truth of detail, had left them — these Helots, and the Perioeci, in the country round about — thus to serve among their own kinsmen, though so close to them in lineage, so much on a level with their masters in essential physical qualities that to the last they could never be entirely subdued in spirit. Patient modern research, following the track of a deep-rooted national tradition veiled in the mythological figments which centre in what is called “The Return of the Heraclidae,” reveals those northern immigrants or invaders, at various points on their way, dominant all along it, from a certain deep vale in the heart of the mountains of Epirus southwards, gradually through zone after zone of more temperate lowland, to reach their perfection, highlanders from first to last, in this mountain “hollow” of Lacedaemon. They claim supremacy, not as Dorian invaders, but as kinsmen of the old Achaean princes of the land; yet it was to the fact of conquest, to the necessity of maintaining a position so strained, like that, as Aristotle expressly pointed out, of a beleaguered encampment in an enemy’s territory, that the singular institutions of Lacedaemon, the half-military, half-monastic spirit, which prevailed in this so gravely beautiful place, had been originally due. But observe! — Its moral and political system, in which that slavery was so significant a factor, its discipline, its aesthetic and other scruples, its peculiar moral ęthos,+ having long before our Platonic student comes thither attained its original and proper ends, survived, — there is the point! survived as an end in itself, as a matter of sentiment, of public and perhaps still more of personal pride, though of the finer, the very finest sort, in one word as an ideal. Pericles, as you remember, in his famous vindication of the Athenian system, makes his hearers understand that the ends of the Lacedaemonian people might have been attained with less self-sacrifice than theirs. But still, there it remained, hę diaita Dôrikę+ — the genuine Laconism of the Lacedaemonians themselves, their traditional conception of life, with its earnestness, its precision and strength, its loyalty to its own type, its impassioned completeness; a spectacle, aesthetically, at least, very interesting, like some perfect instrument shaping to what they visibly were, the most beautiful of all people, in Greece, in the world.
Gymnastic, “bodily exercise,” of course, does not always and necessarily effect the like of that. A certain perfectly preserved old Roman mosaic pavement in the Lateran Museum, presents a terribly fresh picture of the results of another sort of “training,” the monstrous development by a cruel art, by exercise, of this or that muscle, changing boy or man into a merely mechanic instrument with which his breeders might make money by amusing the Roman people. Victor Hugo’s odious dream of L’homme qui rit, must have had something of a prototype among those old Roman gladiators. The Lacedaemonians, says Xenophon on the other hand, homoiôs apo te tôn skelôn kai apo cheirôn kai apo trachęlou gymnazontai.+ Here too, that is to say, they aimed at, they found, proportion, Pythagorean symmetry or music, and bold as they could be in their exercises (it was a Lacedaemonian who, at Olympia, for the first time threw aside the heavy girdle and ran naked to the goal) forbade all that was likely to disfigure the body. Though we must not suppose all ties of nature rent asunder, nor all connexion between parents and children in those genial, retired houses at an end in very early life, it was yet a strictly public education which began with them betimes, and with a very clearly defined programme, conservative of ancient traditional and unwritten rules, an aristocratic education for the few, the liberales— “liberals,” as we may say, in that the proper sense of the word. It made them, in very deed, the lords, the masters, of those they were meant by-and-by to rule; masters, of their very souls, of their imagination, enforcing on them an ideal, by a sort of spiritual authority, thus backing, or backed by, a very effective organisation of “the power of the sword.” In speaking of Lacedaemon, you see, it comes naturally to speak out of proportion, it might seem, of its youth, and of the education of its youth. But in fact if you enter into the spirit of Lacedaemonian youth, you may conceive Lacedaemonian manhood for yourselves. You divine already what the boy, the youth, so late in obtaining his majority, in becoming a man, came to be in the action of life, and on the battle-field. “In a Doric state,” says Müller, “education was, on the whole, a matter of more importance than government.”
A young Lacedaemonian, then, of the privileged class left his home, his tender nurses in those large, quiet old suburban houses early, for a public school, a schooling all the stricter as years went on, to be followed, even so, by a peculiar kind of barrack-life, the temper of which, a sort of military monasticism (it must be repeated) would beset him to the end. Though in the gymnasia of Lacedaemon no idle by- standers, no — well! Platonic loungers after truth or what not — were permitted, yet we are told, neither there nor in Sparta generally, neither there nor anywhere else, were the boys permitted to be alone. If a certain love of reserve, of seclusion, characterised the Spartan citizen as such, it was perhaps the cicatrice of that wrench from a soft home into the imperative, inevitable gaze of his fellows, broad, searching, minute, his regret for, his desire to regain, moral and mental even more than physical ease. And his education continued late; he could seldom think of marriage till the age of thirty. Ethically it aimed at the reality, aesthetically at the expression, of reserved power, and from the first set its subject on the thought of his personal dignity, of self-command, in the artistic way of a good musician, a good soldier. It is noted that “the general accent of the Doric dialect has itself the character not of question or entreaty, but of command or dictation.” The place of deference, of obedience, was large in the education of Lacedaemonian youth; and they never complained. It involved however for the most part, as with ourselves, the government of youth by itself; an implicit subordination of the younger to the older, in many degrees. Quite early in life, at school, they found that superiors and inferiors, homoioi and hypomeiones,+ there really were; and their education proceeded with systematic boldness on that fact. Eiręn, melleiręn, sideunęs,+ and the like — words, titles, which indicate an unflinching elaboration of the attitudes of youthful subordination and command with responsibility — remain as a part of what we might call their “public-school slang.” They ate together “in their divisions” (agelai)+ on much the same fare every day at a sort of messes; not reclined, like Ionians or Asiatics, but like heroes, the princely males, in Homer, sitting upright on their wooden benches; were “inspected” frequently, and by free use of vivâ voce examination “became adepts in presence of mind,” in mental readiness and vigour, in the brief mode of speech Plato commends, which took and has kept its name from them; with no warm baths allowed; a daily plunge in their river required. Yes! The beauty of these most beautiful of all people was a male beauty, far remote from feminine tenderness; had the expression of a certain ascęsis in it; was like un-sweetened wine. In comparison with it, beauty of another type might seem to be wanting in edge or accent.
And they could be silent. Of the positive uses of the negation of speech, like genuine scholars of Pythagoras, the Lacedaemonians were well aware, gaining strength and intensity by repression. Long spaces of enforced silence had doubtless something to do with that expressive brevity of utterance, which could be also, when they cared, so inexpressive of what their intentions really were — something to do with the habit of mind to which such speaking would come naturally. In contrast with the ceaseless prattle of Athens, Lacedaemonian assemblies lasted as short a time as possible, all standing. A Lacedaemonian ambassador being asked in whose name he was come, replies: “In the name of the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my own.” What they lost in extension they gained in depth.
Had our traveller been tempted to ask a young Lacedaemonian to return his visit at Athens, permission would have been refused him. He belonged to a community bent above all things on keeping indelibly its own proper colour. Its more strictly mental education centered, in fact, upon a faithful trai
ning of the memory, again in the spirit of Pythagoras, in regard to what seemed best worth remembering. Hard and practical as Lacedaemonians might seem, they lived nevertheless very much by imagination; and to train the memory, to preoccupy their minds with the past, as in our own classic or historic culture of youth, was in reality to develope a vigorous imagination. In music (mousikę)+ as they conceived it, there would be no strictly selfish reading, writing or listening; and if there was little a Lacedaemonian lad had to read or write at all, he had much to learn, like a true conservative, by heart: those unwritten laws of which the Council of Elders was the authorised depositary, and on which the whole public procedure of the state depended; the archaic forms of religious worship; the names of their kings, of victors in their games or in battle; the brief record of great events; the oracles they had received; the rhetrai, from Lycurgus downwards, composed in metrical Lacedaemonian Greek; their history and law, in short, actually set to music, by Terpander and others, as was said. What the Lacedaemonian learned by heart he was for the most part to sing, and we catch a glimpse, an echo, of their boys in school chanting; one of the things in old Greece one would have liked best to see and hear — youthful beauty and strength in perfect service — a manifestation of the true and genuine Hellenism, though it may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own old English schools, nay, of the young Lacedaemonian’s cousins at Sion, singing there the law and its praises.
The Platonic student of the ways of the Lacedaemonians observes then, is interested in observing, that their education, which indeed makes no sharp distinction between mental and bodily exercise, results as it had begun in “music” — ends with body, mind, memory above all, at their finest, on great show-days, in the dance. Austere, self-denying Lacedaemon had in fact one of the largest theatres in Greece, in part scooped out boldly on the hill-side, built partly of enormous blocks of stone, the foundations of which may still be seen. We read what Plato says in The Republic of “imitations,” of the imitative arts, imitation reaching of course its largest development on the stage, and are perhaps surprised at the importance he assigns, in every department of human culture, to a matter of that kind. But here as elsewhere to see was to understand. We should have understood Plato’s drift in his long criticism and defence of imitative art, his careful system of rules concerning it, could we have seen the famous dramatic Lacedaemonian dancing. They danced a theme, a subject. A complex and elaborate art this must necessarily have been, but, as we may gather, as concise, direct, economically expressive, in all its varied sound and motion, as those swift, lightly girt, impromptu Lacedaemonian sayings. With no movement of voice or hand or foot, paraleipomenon,+ unconsidered, as Plato forbids, it was the perfect flower of their correction, of that minute patience and care which ends in a perfect expressiveness; not a note, a glance, a touch, but told obediently in the promotion of a firmly grasped mental conception, as in that perfect poetry or sculpture or painting, in which “the finger of the master is on every part of his work.” We have nothing really like it, and to comprehend it must remember that, though it took place in part at least on the stage of a theatre — was in fact a ballet-dance, it had also the character both of a liturgical service and of a military inspection; and yet, in spite of its severity of rule, was a natural expression of the delight of all who took part in it.
So perfect a spectacle the gods themselves might be thought pleased to witness; were in consequence presented with it as an important element in the religious worship of the Lacedaemonians, in whose life religion had even a larger part than with the other Greeks, conspicuously religious, deisidaimones,+ involved in religion or superstition, as the Greeks generally were. More closely even than their so scrupulous neighbours they associated the state, its acts and officers, with a religious sanction, religious usages, theories, traditions. While the responsibilities of secular government lay upon the Ephors, those mysteriously dual, at first sight useless, and yet so sanctimoniously observed kings, “of the house of Heracles,” with something of the splendour of the old Achaean or Homeric kings, in life as also in death, the splendid funerals, the passionate archaic laments which then followed them, were in fact of spiritual or priestly rank, the living and active centre of a poetic religious system, binding them “in a beneficent connexion” to the past, and in the present with special closeness to the oracle of Delphi.
Of that catholic or general centre of Greek religion the Lacedaemonians were the hereditary and privileged guardians, as also the peculiar people of Apollo, the god of Delphi; but, observe! of Apollo in a peculiar development of his deity. In the dramatic business of Lacedaemon, centering in these almost liturgical dances, there was little comic acting. The fondness of the slaves for buffoonery and loud laughter, was to their master, who had no taste for the like, a reassuring note of his superiority. He therefore indulged them in it on occasion, and you might fancy that the religion of a people so strenuous, ever so full of their dignity, must have been a religion of gloom. It was otherwise. The Lacedaemonians, like those monastic persons of whom they so often remind one, as a matter of fact however surprising, were a very cheerful people; and the religion of which they had so much, deeply imbued everywhere with an optimism as of hopeful youth, encouraged that disposition, was above all a religion of sanity. The observant Platonic visitor might have taken note that something of that purgation of religious thought and sentiment, of its expression in literature, recommended in Plato’s Republic, had been already quietly effected here, towards the establishment of a kind of cheerful daylight in men’s tempers.
In furtherance then of such a religion of sanity, of that harmony of functions, which is the Aristotelian definition of health, Apollo, sanest of the national gods, became also the tribal or home god of Lacedaemon. That common Greek worship of Apollo they made especially their own, but (just here is the noticeable point) with a marked preference for the human element in him, for the mental powers of his being over those elemental or physical forces of production, which he also mystically represents, and which resulted sometimes in an orgiastic, an unintellectual, or even an immoral service. He remains youthful and unmarried. In congruity with this, it is observed that, in a quasi-Roman worship, abstract qualities and relationships, ideals, become subsidiary objects of religious consideration around him, such as sleep, death, fear, fortune, laughter even. Nay, other gods also are, so to speak, Apollinised, adapted to the Apolline presence; Aphrodite armed, Enyalius in fetters, perhaps that he may never depart thence. Amateurs everywhere of the virile element in life, the Lacedaemonians, in truth, impart to all things an intellectual character. Adding a vigorous logic to seemingly animal instincts, for them courage itself becomes, as for the strictly philosophic mind at Athens, with Plato and Aristotle, an intellectual condition, a form of right knowledge.
Such assertion of the consciously human interest in a religion based originally on a preoccupation with the unconscious forces of nature, was exemplified in the great religious festival of Lacedaemon. As a spectator of the Hyacinthia, our Platonic student would have found himself one of a large body of strangers, gathered together from Lacedaemon and its dependent towns and villages, within the ancient precincts of Amyclae, at the season between spring and summer when under the first fierce heat of the year the abundant hyacinths fade from the fields. Blue flowers, you remember, are the rarest, to many eyes the loveliest; and the Lacedaemonians with their guests were met together to celebrate the death of the hapless lad who had lent his name to them, Hyacinthus, son of Apollo, or son of an ancient mortal king who had reigned in this very place; in either case, greatly beloved of the god, who had slain him by sad accident as they played at quoits together delightfully, to his immense sorrow. That Boreas (the north-wind) had maliciously miscarried the discus, is a circumstance we hardly need to remind us that we have here, of course, only one of many transparent, unmistakable, parables or symbols of the great solar change, so sudden in the south, like the story of Proserpine, Ado
nis, and the like. But here, more completely perhaps than in any other of those stories, the primary elemental sense had obscured itself behind its really tragic analogue in human life, behind the figure of the dying youth. We know little of the details of the feast; incidentally, that Apollo was vested on the occasion in a purple robe, brought in ceremony from Lacedaemon, woven there, Pausanias tells us, in a certain house called from that circumstance Chiton.+ You may remember how sparing these Lacedaemonians were of such dyed raiment, of any but the natural and virgin colouring of the fleece; that purple or red, however, was the colour of their royal funerals, as indeed Amyclae itself was famous for purple stuffs — Amyclaeae vestes. As the general order of the feast, we discern clearly a single day of somewhat shrill gaiety, between two days of significant mourning after the manner of All Souls’ Day, directed from mimic grief for a mythic object, to a really sorrowful commemoration by the whole Lacedaemonian people — each separate family for its own deceased members.
