STARRTTTAAAA

This is part 1 of 2 for week 5

week 5 overview

• The life of Spartan boys and girls

• Small comparisons and differences to Boy Scouts and modern military training

• I’m also going to start doing a “song of the week” from now on since I have a lot of music I like to share, and I think it’ll be fun!

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If you were thrown into Sparta during its peak (4th century BC), do you think you’d have what it takes to survive? I don’t think most people in America, or the world would. Even modern military training doesn’t come close to the extreme challenges Spartans faced every day.

—Spartan Men

Imagine you teleport into the past and are reborn as a baby boy in Sparta. Before you even understand the world, the Gerusia (Spartan council) would come to your home to inspect you. If you showed even the slightest weakness, you’d be taken away and left in the wilderness to die. Right from the start, that would disqualify a lot of Americans today, since many children aren’t born very healthy.

Next, you’d spend your first seven years at home before being taken into a state-run military school with every other boy in the city. There, you’d learn physical training, sports, athletics, gymnastics, and weapon skills. Sounds tough, but manageable, right? The hard part wasn’t the lessons, it was the living conditions.

The school was brutal and extremely competitive. The boys were constantly pushed in both physical and mental challenges. The hardest parts were the sleeping arrangements and food situations. At the start of each year, the boys had to gather reeds by the river and build their own beds, and whatever they made was what they slept on for the entire year. They were given one cloak, no shoes, and that was their clothing.

Food was intentionally limited, barely enough to survive. This forced the boys to sneak out at night, hunt for food, and sneak it back in. If caught, they were beaten. Spartans believed this taught crucial skills like stealth, tracking, hunting, and evasion, all useful in war. This alone is why I don’t think people today would survive the training today. We’re too soft, not used to hardship, and many would simply break under the pressure.

In the last five years of the program, boys were expected to form homosexual relationships with each other. It wasn’t meant to be sexual, but more of a mentor-bond meant to build loyalty and discourage running away in battle because why would you abandon someone you deeply care about.

For their final test, in the last year, the boys took part in the yearly conflict against the Helots of Messenia. They were expected to kill at least one Helot considered a threat. To do this, they had to rely on every skill they’d learned, live on their own, craft their own weapons, and complete the mission. If they succeeded, they finally earned the status of Spartan citizen.

—Spartan Women

Now imagine you were born a girl in Sparta. The Gerusia would still inspect you, and if you were healthy, you’d stay with your family until age seven. After that, you were also sent to a state school focused mainly on physical fitness. Spartans believed strong women produced strong children, especially strong sons.

Girls trained until around age 20, when they would then be married off—often not to one husband, but several. Because Spartan society heavily prioritized male lives, there was a gender imbalance, so women commonly lived with groups of 3–5 men. Even with this system, Sparta still eventually died out due to low population growth.

Also on the topic of Sparta’s decline, I don’t think pairing one woman with several men ever solved the real problem. The issue wasn’t how many men could impregnate one woman but rather it was that so many baby girls weren’t allowed to live in the first place. On top of that, women in the ancient world often died during childbirth or caught diseases from one of the men they were forced to live with, which made the population problem even worse.

We see a similar issue to Sparta’s downfall in parts of the world today, for example, China. When China introduced the One Child Policy, many families preferred having boys and ended up abandoning or aborting baby girls. Today, China has around 110 men for every 100 women. To make things worse, China is also losing young people, both men and women, because many are leaving the country to move to places like America or other western countries.

—Comparisons & Final Thoughts

A lot of Spartan-style training still exists in modern militaries, just toned down to be survivable. Soldiers today are fed properly, given clothing, allowed personal time, and obviously not forced into any kind of relationship. They also don’t have to live permanently on base.

In Boy Scouts, boys learn things that prepare them for survival like tying knots, building shelters, finding food, and more. These skills are similar to what Spartans learned, except Boy Scouts don’t lashed for failing in their activities. Some boy scouts do go into the military after the complete Scouting, but unlike Sparta it isn’t mandatory to do so, and even if you don’t finish Boy Scouts, they don’t get shunned or punished for not taking part in war.

Lastly, Spartans were pushed into forming sexual relationships with other men. While that part of their culture was unique, modern soldiers in long deployments, especially men in the Marines, often form homosexual relationships with each other due to long isolation on boats and submarines.

There are many parallels between Sparta and the world today. Between the skills boys and men learn in Boy Scouts and Military training all the way to economic issues that lead to downfalls of civilizations. The 2nd and last post for week 5 will be on Athens and what led to their creation of Democracy.

— Song of the week