Ancient Spartan Education of Boys

This small bronze figure comes from 5th-century BCE Sparta, when the Ancient Greek polis was at the height of its power. Contemporaries and later Ancients had much to report on the education of Spartan boys at this time, which was infamously brutal and unique. Starting at age 7, boys were grouped into “herds” — the Greek word is the same verb associated with how cattle were arranged, and the youths were treated like such, being deliberately subjected to the harshest sorts of treatment.

In order to teach obedience, the Spartan boys were flogged (probably by a bullwhip type of instrument) at the slightest infraction. Plato wrote that they were taught “not by persuasion but by violence.” The contemporary author Xenophon wrote that the boys were not allowed to wear shoes so that, toughened, they could run and jump faster than others. These children were deliberately kept hungry, eating mainly barley burgers during their collective mealtimes. Too much food was thought to have made them sluggish, and their bodies were supposed to be tall and slim — one Ancient source claims that each young man was inspected naked every ten days to check up on whether he was trim enough.

Violence and the ability to tolerate pain were values that the Spartan education system promoted. For instance, the Goddess Artemis Ortha — highly valued by Spartans — had a cheese-stealing festival dedicated to her in which Spartan boys would try to snatch as many cheeses as they could while enduring whippings as they ran to and from her altar. By the Roman period, Cicero recorded that he saw two boys dying from such lashings, and noted that they did so in silence, maintaining their stoic demeanor throughout.

The schools produced skilled and toughened warriors, ones who were able to ignore feelings of fear and pride, as well as their basic appetites for hunger and thirst. Moreover, they would be obedient, which is what the battlefield leaders wanted.