“Θάλασσα και πυρ και γυνή”
– Menander, 300 B.C.
Proto Feminism
Sparta was a dominant city-state in ancient Greece, in 650 B.C., before declining around 190 B.C. Its laws aimed to maximise military might above everything.
Spartan women famously had more freedom than other women in Greece. Most of the men were at war, or training for war, so this left the women to run the state.
Women owned two-fifths of the land in Sparta, and because their economy was entirely agricultural, women controlled the means of production. Women were wealthy, and they advertised their wealth flamboyantly by winning horseraces at Olympia. Cynisca, the first woman to win an Olympic victory, also had a cult in Sparta, the “only woman on record” to be thus commemorated.
Spartan women were reputedly promiscuous and controlling of their husbands. Unlike their Athenian counterparts, Spartan women could legally own and inherit property and were well educated. Slave labour performed domestic tasks, allowing the women to manage the governance, agriculture and logistics.
Spartans aimed to live in accordance with nature. Happiness was attained through ascetic “condemnation of pleasure. This is itself the greatest pleasure” according to Diogenes of Sinope (the Cynic). The recipe was άσκησις (training), and πόνος (pain/sacrifice).
As well as reading and writing, women studied music, dance and poetry. Spartan girls practiced running, wrestling, javelin, discus, boxing and horse-riding. The women could use these skills in hunting and farming. The nearby Taygetus mountains were rich in wild game.
Domestic battles
While Athenian women tended to marry for the first time around the age of fourteen to much older men, Spartan women normally married at twenty to men closer in age. Spartan men under the age of thirty were not permitted to live with their wives, and instead lived communally with their regiment. Due to the husband’s absence, women ran the household alone.
The primary role of Spartan women in marriage was to bear and raise healthy children to improve the military. This focus on childbearing emphasised physical fitness, as it was believed that physically stronger women had healthier children. Before marriage, there was a trial period for the potential couple to ensure that they could have children; if they could not, divorce and remarriage was the custom.
Spartan nurses were famously talented, and wealthy families across Greece had their children nursed by Spartans.
Although there is evidence that Spartans practiced polyandry, it is polygyny that was more common in the early 4th century BC, when the number of Spartan citizen men sharply decreased. Along with plural marriage, the historian Xenophon states that older men with younger wives were encouraged to allow younger, more fit men to impregnate their wives, in order to produce stronger children. Further, the historian Polybius claims that when a man had enough children, it was a Spartan custom for him to give his wife to another man so that he too might have children.
Fall
The philosopher Aristotle criticised the Spartan state for the power that their women had, their property ownership and their hold over men. He attributed the state’s decline from being the master of Greece to a second-rate power, to the fact that Sparta became a gynocracy, whose wealthy women were “decadent, drunk, unfaithful and loved luxury.”
Sparta’s reputation for minimal talk was legendary. One delegation from Athens went to Sparta to ask for corn and began explaining that their crops had failed that year. They were sent away. To the Spartans, just saying the word “corn” would have been sufficient.
The Athenians babbled too much.
James Neophytou