A Boy of the Agoge

by Helena P. Schrader

  At the Feast of the Hyacinthia, the boys were very busy. This festival, although it included the usual sports competitions, was most famous for the musical performances and dancing, especially the women’s dances. In fact, increasingly almost as many tourists flooded into Sparta for this festival just to hear the singing and see the dancing as came for the more famous Gymnopaedia. Although Alkander was excused from the chorus altogether, both Leonidas and Prokles were required to perform.

  By the end of the first day of the festival, Leonidas and Prokles’ chorus was still in competition, and throughout the second day the excitement grew. This was quite different from athletic competition because no one was on his own; only the whole chorus could win or lose. That created an intense but highly intoxicating team spirit, with the boys encouraging one another and particularly their soloist, Ephorus. Furthermore, the results were far less clear-cut. Sports were objective, but choral singing was not, and the judges often seemed undecided or divided among themselves. When the soloist of their rival chorus lost his voice towards the very end of the second day, the victory went to Ephorus and his chorus.

  Now, for the first time in their lives, Leonidas and the others were allowed to perform in the theatre itself, along with the winning youth and men’s choruses. The boys were sent to change into fresh new chitons and himations specially kept for the occasion at the Temple to Apollo in Amyclae, while torches and lamps were lit along the aisles of the theatre.

  Finally, well after dark, with the crowds packed into the very last row of seats, the boys filed in for their grand performance. The tension was almost unbearable. Because the boys were placed in the middle, between the youths and men, Leonidas found himself standing almost directly in front of the two ruling kings. Ariston was looking rather ill, he noted with spiteful satisfaction; he sat bent over and the expression on his face was sour, as if he had stomach troubles. Cleomenes, by contrast, was looking very smug, with his beautiful bride beside him.

  More interesting in many ways, however, were the foreigners in the crowd. Leonidas was fascinated by the sight of men in very outlandish dress that could only have come from Asia somewhere, and there were Egyptians too in their stiff headdresses, and Ethiopians in leopard skins, and lots of other Greeks in bright-coloured himations and jewellery.

  After the choral performance, the boys were free to watch the last event of the day, the dancing. Dancing was not done in the theatre but directly in the agora, on what was known as the “dancing floor” between the main civic buildings.

  The women danced first, to the evident pleasure of particularly the foreign guests, who couldn’t seem to get a good enough glimpse of the performers and kept treading on everyone’s toes and shifting about trying to see better. The boys, however, were rather bored by the women, and waited impatiently for the last event: the sword dance.

  This was performed by torchlight, which glowed on the broad breastplates of the dancers and was reflected on their polished battle helmets like glimmering inner fire, or dramatically flashed on the honed blades of the swords and on the fast-moving bronze greaves. All the dancers wore their helmets down over their faces; so that as they moved in and out, weaving back and forth, it was impossible to tell them apart. They were equally anonymous, inhuman really, and ominous. Leonidas and his friends watched in awe and fascination as the dancers performed to the wail of the pipes alone. Leonidas was entranced. This dancing in full armour required a precision of movement as perfect as in a phalanx and as strenuous as running. Sometimes when the dance pattern brought the dancers closer to the audience, you could hear how heavily they were breathing, and yet their movements were so perfectly controlled that their swords never clashed or struck—except in unison and on cue. Leonidas hoped that one day he would be one of these dancers.

  It was getting close to midnight before, exhausted from the long, eventful day, the boys found their way back to their barracks and fell into bed. Their laurel wreaths were put carefully away in their baskets, souvenirs for life; but their new chitons and himations were folded up, collected, and returned to the temple.

  The next two days of the festival were taken up with sports competitions, and the boys were free to entertain themselves except when competing. Philippos, Prokles’ father, was driving a chariot in both the four- and the two-horse events, and the three twelve-year-old friends helped him when they could. Furthermore, Prokles and Leonidas were themselves riding in horse races; and Leonidas was competing in wrestling, Prokles in javelin, and Alkander in long-distance running, respectively. In all the excitement, it would have been easy to forget Hilaira—if Alkander hadn’t kept reminding them.

  “Don’t forget your sister, Prokles,” Alkander insisted, as the time approached for her event at the end of the second day.

  Prokles scowled. “Do we have to go? If we do, we’ll never be able to get good seats for the armoured race. They’ll all be taken.” The foot race in armour was the last event of the last day and very popular. Crowds were already streaming toward the main stadium where it was scheduled to be held, and staking out their places.

  “You promised,” Alkander reminded Prokles.

  “I could try to hold places for all of us,” Leonidas suggested.

  “No, we better stick together. We’d never be able to find you in that crowd.”

  So together they went to the smaller of the “race courses”, where the foot races of lesser importance were held. To the boy’s surprise, although it was only a “little girls’” event, there was an astonishingly large crowd here as well—and it was composed primarily of foreigners. “What are all the strangers doing here?” Leonidas asked generally.

  Prokles’ mother and grandmother caught sight of them and waved vigorously. The three boys hurried over to join them. The women had secured a good spot close to the finish line and at the very front. “I thought you had forgotten!” Prokles’ mother declared, clearly relieved, and looked rather admonishingly at her eldest son. “This means so much to your sister.”

  “Does Hilaira have any chance of winning?” Prokles asked sceptically.

  “She certainly does,” his mother told him firmly.

  “Why are there so many strangers here?” Leonidas asked again, because he noted that almost everyone around, although Greek, was speaking a different dialect—mostly Ionic.

  “Oh, that’s because they don’t have maiden races in other cities,” Prokles’ grandmother explained. “In fact, they don’t let their maidens out of their houses at all.” Leonis knew what she was talking about, because she had lived in Tegea for a time when Lysandridas was in exile there.

  “So how do they go to school?” Prokles wanted to know.

  “They don’t.”

  “They don’t go to school?” Leonidas was shocked. “Not at all?”

  “No—”

  “And that is the proper way of things!” one of the men standing near them insisted, butting into the conversation firmly. He addressed himself to the boys rather than the women. “Everything a girl needs to know in life, she can learn at her mother’s knee in the safety and seclusion of her own home. By letting girls run around in public view, you only encourage licentiousness and disobedience! The less a girl sees and hears, the better she is.”

  The three Spartan boys stared at the stranger in open bafflement. Because he looked at least 40 and by his rich clothes and carefully coifed hair appeared to be a man of wealth, they dared not contradict him.

  It was Prokles’ grandmother who answered him sharply. “If it is such a scandal, why are you here?”

  “See! That’s just what I mean!” the man declared, still addressing the boys. “Silence, SILENCE, is a woman’s greatest virtue.” Then, turning on Leonis, he sneered at her. “Flaunting your bodies is not half so bad as the way you chatter and interfere in men’s affairs!”

  “If you are afraid of a woman’s words, go back where you came from!” Leonis retored.

  “I intend to do just that!” the man said indignan
tly and would have turned away, but Leonidas stopped him.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  The other man looked back. “Yes?”

  “May I ask where you are from, sir?”

  “I am from the great city of Athens!” the man proclaimed, loudly enough to make others start to take notice.

  “Oh!”

  Leonidas looked so surprised that the man’s curiosity was aroused. “Does that surprise you?”

  “It does, sir.”

  “Why?” the man asked, perplexed. He evidently felt that his nationality should have been obvious from his clothes and accent.

  Leonidas hesitated. He glanced a little uncertainly at Prokles’ grandmother. She could not know what he was going to say, but she awaited it expectantly. “It’s only that I was taught that Athens was a great and powerful city, sir.”

  “As indeed it is, boy—nothing like this provincial pig-sty you call a city! Why, your whole acropolis wouldn’t qualify as more than a collection of third-rate district temples in Athens, and your agora could fit inside ours three times over!”

  “I accept your word for it, sir, but it surprises me nevertheless—although I knew you had walls....” Leonidas trailed off enticingly.

  “What surprises you, boy?” the man asked impatiently, frowning, sensing something behind Leonidas’ words that he could not identify yet.

  “It surprises me that you are so easily frightened.”

  “Frightened?!” the Athenian demanded, flabbergasted and uncomprehending.

  “I mean”—Leonidas still sounded baffled and respectful, because it was a guise he had long since honed to perfection in the syssitia—“if you fear even the words of women, how you must tremble before the spears of men.”

  The man’s jaw dropped in shocked outrage, and there was no knowing what he would have said if around him other spectators, both domestic and foreign, hadn’t hooted with laughter. Angrily the Athenian pushed away into the crowd, with a loud sneer of “Whores and their whelps!” tossed over his shoulder.

  Prokles leapt after him, apparently intent on making him retract this insult, but his mother caught him by the neck of his chiton. “Leave it! Leonidas won the round, and he knows it. Here’s your sister now.”

  The seven competitors were lining up on the chalked starting line. They were barefoot and wore knee-length chitons, which were pinned at their left shoulder but left their right shoulder bare. Since they were all children still, it was impossible to speak of “bare breasts”, although the foreigners around them whispered this word with obvious relish and were craning their necks for a better look. Leonidas, Alkander, and Prokles exchanged a look that dismissed these men as “dumb”.

  A high-pitched whistle called the competitors on to their marks. On their faces was the same grim determination that could have been found on the faces of their brothers—or on the pan-Hellenic athletes at Olympia. To these girls, this race was just as important. Another whistle set them loose. They bounded forward with the lightness of young deer, and in an instant all you could see was their backs. Prokles just had time to shout out after his sister: “Come on, Hilaira!” At the far end of the course they had to stop themselves and turn, and then work up to maximum speed to come tearing back. While the girls had seemed well matched on the outward run, bunched very close together, on the return they started to spread out. Two girls lagged quite far behind, apparently already giving up. Three more ran with waning strength, and the two leaders competed two-thirds of the distance, until Hilaira pulled out into the forefront with so much mastery that the race was won long before she crossed the finish line. By that time Prokles and his friends were jumping up and down and cheering wildly.

  As she slowed down after finish line, she was audibly gasping for breath and glistening with sweat over her entire body. Her hair around her hairline was soaked with it, and she doubled over, grabbing her knees to keep herself from falling over dizzy from the exertion.

  Now the commentary of the gawking foreigners was even harsher than before. “Poor thing!” was the kindest remark. Another remarked that it was “completely unnatural”, while a third found the spectacle “downright disgusting”. A fourth foreign spectator, however, actually grabbed Alkander by the arm and asked him pointedly, “Do you mean to tell me you’d actually want to marry a girl who’d run around like this with her breasts bared for all the world to see?”

  “Why not?” Alkander managed in reply, afraid to say more for fear of stuttering.

  He was rescued by Prokles’ mother, who turned on the boys and urged: “Go give Hilaira your congratulations. It means more to her than my praise.”

  The boys obeyed readily enough, and soon afterwards met up with Prokles’ father and grandfather. As a family they joined the crowd for the armoured race, but saw little of it because of their poor seats. Then they shared in the feast of the sacrificial beasts and, exhausted from yet a fourth day of excitement, went to bed.

  It was only then that it occurred to Leonidas that Alkander had a sister, too. He stopped abruptly as he folded up his chiton into a pillow. “Alkander?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t you have a sister?”

  No answer.

  “I thought your mother said—”

  “Shhh!”

  They were in the barracks, and Leonidas took the hint. He said no more, and just finished stripping and climbed into bed. But he didn’t forget about it. One day after the Hyacinthia was over and they were back to their routines, he asked Alkander about his sister when they were alone together. “Don’t you have a sister, Alkander?”

  “Yes.”

  “But where is she?”

  “You know my mother couldn’t afford the agoge fees!” Alkander hissed angrily.

  “I know. But where is she now?”

  You could see Alkander didn’t want to say. He struggled long with himself, trying to find ways of not answering, or maybe lying, or just telling Leonidas to mind his own business. But how could he do that when Leonidas was like an adopted brother to him? So at last he admitted, “She’s been p-p-put out t-t-to service.”

  “Service?”

  “My mother f-f-found a job for her with a f-f-family in K-K-Kardamyle.”

  “Job? What kind of job?”

  “What do you th-th-think?!” Alkander snapped. “It’s a large f-f-family. She looks after the ch-ch-children and waits on the l-l-lady of the house.”

  Leonidas was appalled. She was a servant. After a moment he said: “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Can’t we bring her back?”

  “Where? To my mother? She probably gets more to eat where she is!”

  “But, Alkander, she’s my sister now. How old is she?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Leonidas sighed. That complicated things. She was too young to marry. He was going to have to get some advice on this. So he let things rest for the moment, and they didn’t talk of it again.

  The most significant event of Leonidas’ twelfth year, however, occurred at the very end of it. Just before the snows came and the passes closed for the year, the twelve-year-olds were sent on a “test” hunting expedition, an important exercise intended to prepare them for that all-important test of their ability to survive entirely on their own at age 13. Before entering the ranks of the “youths” at age 14, all the “little boys” had to prove that they had learned enough self-sufficiency to keep themselves alive without the benefit of civilisation for a period of 40 days. This so-called Phouxir, or “fox time” (because they lived by their wits like foxes), marked the end of childhood and the graduation to the official status of “youth.”

  During the Phouxir, the boys were allowed the help of neither other humans nor domesticated animals such as hunting dogs. Thus, hunting (without dogs) was a vitally important aspect of their training in the years preceding the “fox time”. Without dogs, of course, tracking became particularly important; and Leonidas, very aware of his own inadequacies in this skill, was beginning to get nerv
ous about passing the Phouxir test. It had been one thing to rely on Prokles, as long as it had simply been a matter of enlivening the dull diet of the agoge; but if it was to determine whether he survived and passed the “fox time”, Leonidas decided he ought to try to improve his own skills.

  This preliminary test involved living off the wilderness for just ten days, one-fourth of the time they would have to endure a year later. Leonidas proclaimed his determination to do it all without Prokles’ help. What he hadn’t reckoned with was Alkander. Although the boys were not officially prohibited at this stage from banding together, it was frowned upon; and while Prokles happily went off on his own with a shrug, Alkander declared he would stay with Leonidas. Leonidas tried to talk his new protégé into attaching himself to Prokles, but Alkander declared simply, “Prokles doesn’t want me. Are you saying you don’t want me, either?”

  Trapped, Leonidas took Alkander along with him. They were not, however, a particularly effective team. After three days, they had still failed to kill anything edible and were getting very hungry. After five days of living on nuts, berries, mushrooms, and dried grass, they were famished. It was Alkander’s idea to try to steal a smoked ham from the kitchen of an outlying kleros. They were caught red-handed by the geese.

  Not only did the geese warn the helot residents of the intruders—the geese actually attacked them and made their escape impossible. Within minutes they were locked up in a windowless, slimy underground storeroom invested with vile creatures they did not see but could hear, feel, and smell in the dark. The next morning—hungrier, filthier and more discouraged than ever—they were turned over to the agoge authorities.

  The disgrace, of course, was having been caught. If they had got away with the theft, it would all have been viewed as a legitimate tactic for survival. After all, hoplites cut off from their units in enemy territory also stole what they could to stay alive—albeit at high risk. Thus, while theft at other times was a contemptible indignity that lowered a Spartiate to the level of helots and foreigners, theft during survival training was deemed legitimate. Punishment for getting caught, however, was a reminder of the consequences of getting caught in a real wartime situation. A Spartiate hoplite, caught stealing in enemy territory, would be killed or sold into slavery.