A Boy of the Agoge

by Helena P. Schrader

  To Leonidas’ astonishment, the “other woman” did not frown or snap her fingers at the errant child; she laughed. Then she raised her eyebrows and remarked to Leonidas, “You seem to have won her confidence instantly, but then she is excessively bold. Now, Gorgo,” she addressed herself to the little girl. “Let your uncle go and come with me. You need to go to bed.”

  “No!” The little girl stomped her foot, shook her head, and continued to cling to Leonidas. “I don’t want to go to bed!”

  The “other woman” still did not get angry. She seemed to think for a moment, and then she asked, “Would you like to sleep with me, in my bed?”

  Leonidas could feel the child clinging to his knee nod her head.

  “All right. Come to me, and I’ll take you up to my bed.” Chilonis held her hand out to the child, and this time the little girl let go of Leonidas and ran to her grandmother. The woman bent and swept the two-year-old into her arms. The child nestled her head in her grandmother’s neck and closed her eyes in obvious contentment. The “other woman” smiled and stroked her granddaughter’s cheek before turning to Leonidas. “It’s the sound of her brother’s whimpering that distresses her. He cries most of the night. Agis sleeps through it all, but Gorgo is more sensitive.” She looked down at the child in her arms with obvious affection. Leonidas wondered if his mother had ever looked at him like that, but he knew better. He doubted if she had ever held him in her arms at all.

  Leonidas felt he had to explain himself. “I didn’t mean to intrude, ma’am. Your son insisted that I join him for dinner at the request of his Athenian guests, and I wanted to slip out the back rather than attract attention at the main door.”

  “I never imagined you had just barged in here. After all, you never have before.” She considered him long and hard, and Leonidas squirmed inwardly, wondering what she saw. He would never know. “Good night, then,” she ended the encounter.

  “I hope the baby recovers,” Leonidas remembered to say.

  She paused already in the act of turning away. “Thank you. I hope so, too.... And, Leonidas, I want you to know that I did not want your mother expelled from here. I was perfectly happy where I was, but Cleomenes felt he had to do it to establish his—position.”

  “That’s all right, ma’am. He was probably right.”

  She seemed to consider him again, but then she nodded, thanked him, and was gone. Leonidas let himself out the stables exit into the street.

  Spartan law forbade her citizens from carrying torches and lighting the streets, so that they would always feel comfortable moving about in the darkness; but at a feast like this there were so many foreign guests who had their own lighting that the city seemed bright. Furthermore, the bonfires built to roast the sacrificial meat were still burning, giving a red glow to the sky in the east. In consequence, the city looked eerily unfamiliar to Leonidas as he hurried back to the river, hoping to find his friends there. It seemed very late, and he feared they would already have headed for home. He was startled when Alkander came out of nowhere.

  “Leonidas! Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you! I need your help! Leotychidas, son of Archidamas, has asked for Percalus’s hand.”

  “Who?”

  “Leotychidas! You must have seen the way he’s been hanging around her!”

  Leonidas hadn’t particularly noticed. “Well, will he take her without a dowry?”

  “Yes; that’s not the problem.”

  “Doesn’t Percalus like him?”

  “No, she likes him well enough. In fact, she seems rather keen about it.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “He’s a Eurypontid!” Alkander said this as if he thought Leonidas was being excessively dense.

  “He is?”

  “Yes, he’s great-grandson to King Hippokratides and heir to the Eurypontid throne until Demaratus marries and has heirs of his own.”

  “So what?”

  “Leonidas! I’m a mothake! I can’t marry my sister to royalty.”

  “Who says?”

  “People will get angry. You know what they’re like.”

  “How can you say ‘no’?”

  “I can’t. You’ve got to do it.”

  “Why me?”

  “Leonidas!”

  “All right, I’ll talk to him. It doesn’t have to be tonight, does it?”

  Leotychidas didn’t like what Leonidas told him, and he was not very pleasant about it. In fact, the interview was one of the most unpleasant of Leonidas’ short life. Leotychidas naturally insisted on the courtesy he could expect from a “mere” youth towards a full citizen; and Leonidas was kept standing with his hands at his sides, saying “yes, sir” and “no, sir” and swallowing insults. Leotychidas kept pressing Leonidas to tell him whom they were planning to give Percalus to, refusing to believe that Alkander simply didn’t want “trouble”. By the time Leotychidas finally let him go, he was sweating as if he’d just run a ten-mile course, and inwardly very resentful of Percalus and all the trouble she was causing him.

  Furthermore, she was soon making Alkander’s life miserable by insisting she was “in love” with Leotychidas and wouldn’t marry anyone else. In tear-laden scenes, she even threatened to sleep with him without the sanction of marriage and force Alkander’s hand.

  “She wouldn’t really do that, would she?” Leonidas asked in shock.

  Alkander shrugged his shoulders, but wouldn’t meet Leonidas’ eye. “I don’t think so. She ought to know that it would ruin her. But all this attention has gone to her head. She really thinks her beauty makes her more valuable than family ties or fortune.”

  It was hard to deny that, not at an age when they were themselves so fascinated by female charms. By now, watching the girls of the agoge at sports had become deathly boring. Just when the girls started to get really “interesting”, they were yanked out of the agoge and sent home to learn how to become good wives and mothers. The girls running, swimming, and wrestling were thus, at best, in the early stages of puberty; and by the time the boys were 18 going on 28, they looked down on these girls as “babies”—an attitude reinforced by the knowledge that the girls in the agoge were strictly “off limits”.

  Not so the girls who worked in the large basket factory near the dye works, or the girls who worked in the flax mill, or the helot serving girls working in houses all across the city. Helot girls seemed to mature young, and were often married and breeding before they reached their twentieth year. For them, there was nothing more thrilling than the attentions of a young Spartiate.

  Everyone knew the rules of the game. No helot girl expected a Spartiate lover to marry her or even keep her as a concubine. They knew perfectly well that the youths were only collecting experience and would soon turn their attention elsewhere. But these Spartiate youths were young and strong and beautiful in a way that helots never could be. And not only were they surrounded by an aura of future power and strength and status, they also paid well. A youth from the agoge would bring his helot girl the hares and pheasants he trapped or sometimes cured meat, oil, or wine from his kleros (if his mother turned a blind eye to such things). The richer boys might even give the helot girls real gifts—ivory combs, glass beads, pottery, or wooden utensils. The prettier and cleverer helot girls knew how to convert their success with the youth from the agoge into small dowries that made them more attractive to suitors from their own class.

  Alkander and Leonidas, as usual, played by the rules; Prokles did not. While Alkander more boldly and Leonidas with considerable hesitation and almost backwardness found helot girls to court, Prokles was not content to gather his youthful experience with helot girls. He set his sights on seducing a particular perioikoi maiden who had caught his fancy. Leonidas warned him against it. “If her dad finds out, he’ll make a stink! He’s one of the principal purveyors to the army. He’s well connected and he has important friends.”

  “No one is going to find out,” Prokles promised.

 
; And maybe no one would have found out if the girl herself had kept her mouth shut, but Prokles was too successful. The girl liked him so much, she wanted to keep him. Since it was obvious to her that he would not marry her of his own free will, she decided she would force his hand. Her reasoning was that if the scandal got out about their relationship, he would be forced by public opinion and pressure to marry her. She therefore went to her father and accused Prokles of rape.

  The accusation was extremely rare in Sparta. In fact, the city prided itself on the fact that women were perfectly safe to walk unescorted anywhere in Sparta at any time. In other cities, a woman’s safety was the duty of her male relatives, who generally dealt with the risks by keeping their women locked up in their homes. But a society that depended so heavily on women managing the estates and running all aspects of the domestic economy, as Sparta’s did, could not afford to have women confined to their homes or afraid to move about on their own. Whereas in other cities, a woman out alone was automatically presumed to be a woman of ill repute and hence fair game, a woman alone in Sparta bore no stigma of impropriety, and matrons and maidens of the very best families and repute moved freely about the city. Their safety was, however, the duty of every citizen and every youth. Unbelievable as it seemed to foreigners, the system worked so well that the Spartans had no statute punishment for rape; it was too rare to warrant such a statute.

  Precisely because it was so rare and because Sparta was so proud of it being rare, the fact that Prokles, the son of a good and respected father, was being accused of this outrage became an instant scandal. Prokles was arrested straight off the drill fields, without being given time to even bathe or change. He was clamped into the jail usually reserved for rebellious helots—not one of the polite cells for minor offences against sumptuary laws or breaches of military discipline. He was allowed no visitors except his father and the judges appointed to his case. His mother and grandmother publicly stated that “if the charges were true”, they would disown him.

  Privately, however, Prokles’ family pressed Leonidas and Alkander for assurances that it was not true. Leonidas and Alkander found themselves at Prokles’ kleros the night of his arrest, facing an inquisition from Prokles’ entire family. They were AWOL from the agoge and would get in trouble for it, but after all the hospitality and kindness they had enjoyed over the years, they couldn’t just leave. Leonidas, in particular, remembered that he would be a slave somewhere in Asia if Lysandridas had not persuaded the perioikoi fleet commander to send two triremes to rescue him. In the smoky darkness of the kitchen, Leonidas and Alkander tried to convince the distraught grandparents and mother of their friend that Prokles had never used force.

  “But her father says he saw the proof of force! He says she’s covered with horrible bruises and even cuts. He says any surgeon is welcome to examine her!” Prokles’ mother reminded them in evident despair. She was wringing the skirt of her peplos in her hands in distress.

  Leonidas and Alkander couldn’t explain that, of course, but they kept repeating that Prokles had been seeing the girl for months. “She’s crazy about him—more than my helot girl is about me!” Leonidas candidly admitted.

  “You know Prokles as well as we do,” Alkander reasoned. “You know he wouldn’t use force. He doesn’t need to. If she didn’t want him, he could easily find someone else.”

  “Then why was he pursuing this modest maiden of a good perioikoi house?” Prokles’ grandmother wanted to know. Leonidas and Alkander looked helplessly at one another.

  “I cannot understand you young men!” the old woman announced with obvious exasperation. “Why do you let your balls rule your brains! It makes no sense to me at all! Prokles’ whole future may be ruined, and for what? For a few moments of pleasure that he could have had with any number of other girls!”

  “What do you think the judges will decide?” Prokles’ mother asked anxiously. She was trying very hard not to sound alarmed, but she obviously was.

  “If he is found guilty of rape, the very least they will give him is exile,” Lysandridas suggested soberly. “They will not allow a convicted rapist to live in the city.”

  “Exile!” Prokles’ mother was horrified.

  “The least they will give him?” Lysandridas’ wife noted. “You’re saying they could sentence him to death?”

  Lysandridas drew a deep breath. “Only if they find him guilty. I don’t think we should assume that.”

  But even so, the thought was sobering.

  The next day, Leonidas and Alkander were questioned separately by the magistrates. Nobody appeared to question that Prokles and the girl had had an ongoing relationship, but the evidence of force was apparently overwhelming and convincing. The only issue was, therefore, who had applied the force; and if it had been someone other than Prokles, why did the girl lie about it? As no one could come up with an alternative candidate who might have raped the girl, the judges moved to condemn, and his father, Philippos, was warned what his son could expect: on account of his youth, the judges had agreed on exile rather than death, but if he set foot again in Lacedaemon, he would be killed. Stunned, Philippos returned to his kleros to break the news to his wife and parents.

  The same news also went to the father of the victim. While the news that Prokles was to be exiled permanently was greeted with satisfaction by the girl’s parents, she herself responded with hysterics. It soon became clear that she had expected Prokles would be ordered to marry her. It had never occurred to her that he might be exiled or killed. Her father, in astonishment, pointed out that no one dreamed of forcing her to marry the man who had so violently abused and degraded her. The Spartan judges had from the very first showed understanding for this position. In a flood of tears the girl now changed her story: Prokles had never used force. She had been attacked by a young neighbour, a perioikoi, who was jealous of Prokles. He had got wind of what was going on with Prokles, and knowing that she was no longer “pure”, had refused to take no for an answer. The rape had been real enough, but the rapist was not Prokles.

  Most of that night her father struggled with his conscience, ashamed to return to the Spartan court and admit that his daughter had lied to them all. He wanted to leave things as they were, but he could not. All the servants had heard his daughter’s screaming and wailing, and just next door the young man who had really raped his daughter was smugly waiting for Prokles to be exiled. So, weary and deeply saddened, he made his way to the court the next morning, and was waiting for the magistrates when they arrived. He told them what had transpired, and at once the case was remanded to a perioikoi court. Prokles was released from his prison—and sent to “the pits”. It was the opinion of the judges that a youth who had seduced an honest maiden of good family should be punished.

  When Prokles’ family and friends got the news, they were overjoyed. Prokles’ mother and grandmother rushed to bring offerings of thanks to the Gods, while Philippos and Lysandridas went to be at Prokles’ side when he endured the flogging. Leonidas and Alkander were given permission to be there, too. Drill wasn’t scheduled until the afternoon, and sports weren’t quite so compelling.

  By the time they reached the pits near the Temple of Artemis Orthia, a large crowd had already gathered. Prokles’ case had attained such notoriety, after all, that this sudden turn of events attracted excited attention throughout the city. For many, Prokles was a name only, and they were anxious to finally see the youth who had caused so much scandal in a city usually devoid of it. There was a particularly large crowd of women, curious about just what sort of youth this was who would seduce modest maidens before he was even out of the agoge.

  Prokles looked decidedly the worse for wear as they led him to the pits. For a start, he hadn’t seen the light of day for days, and his face was twisted up by squinting in the bright morning sun. Nor had he been allowed to wash; and he was dirty. His hair was starting to grow on his scalp, and that gave it a dirty shadowing as well. Leonidas heard women muttering that he didn’t look
“that irresistible” to them.

  Alkander and Leonidas wormed their way as far forward as they could, determined to let Prokles know that he was not alone in a hostile crowd. They did not know if he had been told he was facing exile, but they were certain the treatment he had received would have discouraged him. Only at the last minute, after Prokles had stripped down and turned to hand his things to one of the officials, did he cast a glance in the direction of his friends; but he didn’t seem to see them. “Here!” Leonidas shouted out. “We’re here!”

  Prokles smiled once and then stepped into the sand pit to take up his stance before the bar, his feet and arms well apart. The two officials of the court selected to administer the flogging had already cut the reeds to the appropriate length and tested them on the palms of their hands. One took up a position on either side of Prokles, ready to spell each other if their arms tired before Prokles did. The usual hush fell over the crowd and with a nod from Prokles, the flogging began.

  Although he had stood here often enough in the past and been in Prokles’ skin twice, Leonidas found himself thinking of his brother’s Athenian guests. Apparently everywhere else in the world, Spartan youth was looked down upon for enduring this humiliation, usually reserved only for slaves. No sooner had he thought this than he remembered that Prokles himself had complained about that fact before Artemis Orthia last year. And no sooner had he remembered that, than Leonidas knew in the pit of his stomach what was going to happen: Prokles was going to demonstrate his contempt for the whole ritual. Sure enough, the flogging had hardly started before Prokles raised his hand in surrender and dropped to his knees in the sand.