A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

It is appropriate that the scene of the realisation should have been above the plain of Sparta. For the
Spartans, like the Assyrians, are an example of the futility of sheer ruthlessness. In the eighth
century B.C., the Lacedemonians (Sparta is the capital of Lacedemon) found their own land too
small for the growing population, so they invaded the territory of their neighbours, the Messenians.
For sixteen years the Messenians fought like tigers, but the Spartans finally conquered. However
the Messenians detested the invaders, and a century later they made a desperate and tremendous
attempt to throw off the foreign yoke. This war was even bloodier, and it lasted twenty years. At
the end of it, both sides were exhausted; but the Spartans were the winners, and they took
murderous reprisals. And now they took the step that would eventually turn Sparta into a living
fossil. The sheer agony of that long battle made the Spartans determined never to allow it to happen
again. So they turned Lacedemon into one vast army camp. They thought and ate and drank nothing
but military discipline. Messenia had to be held in an iron grip, so they set out to transform
themselves into iron men.
The land of Messenia was divided into equal allotments, each of which was handed over to a
Spartan ‘peer’; the natives became slaves - helots - whose business was to support him. If any child
of a helot showed the least sign of talent or brilliance, he was promptly murdered; the Spartans
were determined to save themselves trouble in the next generation. All their own children - girls as
well as boys - were destined for military training from birth. (Weak children were condemned to
die of exposure.) At the age of seven, Spartan children left their homes and went into training
camps. Girls received the same military training as boys; in athletics, they competed with them on
equal terms, even wrestling naked with them in front of a male audience. The highest virtue in
Spartan life was sheer toughness, ability to endure pain and hardship. In due course, the males
entered the army. There was no family life for them; they lived in a barracks and ate in the mess.
On a girl’s wedding night, she surrendered her virginity, then her husband left her and went back to
barracks. To show she was a soldier’s wife she cut her hair short and wore male clothes. If her
husband seemed unable to produce healthy children, he was expected to find a better man to
occupy his bed; if he was unwilling, then his wife had to arrange it. A man who ate poorly at mess
was likely to be penalised; it was evidence that he had been indulging himself in the debilitating
pleasantness of family life.
It all sounds rather like Nineteen Eighty-Four - and even more like that giant in Wagner’s Ring who
killed his brother to get the Nibelung’s treasure, then turned himself into a dragon and spent the rest
of his life guarding it. The Spartans became the dragons of the Hellenic world. When their
neighbours, the Athenians, looked like becoming too powerful, the Spartans felt they had to
conquer Athens to maintain their own position. And after a war that dragged on for twenty-seven
years, they were again victorious. Yet the one thing they were not ready for was the leadership of
the Hellenic world. They had trained themselves for hardship and struggle; success demoralised
them. Some of the soldiers they sent abroad to govern colonies became notorious for debauchery.
And the Spartans who stayed at home remained rigid, completely fixed in their conservatism;
Toynbee compares them to soldiers standing permanently on parade with arms presented. And
while they stood there, the cobwebs grew all over them. The Spartans did not vanish in a
spectacular holocaust, like the Assyrians; they merely became the victims of a kind of spiritual
arthritis and quietly faded out of history.
Here we can see very clearly the importance of Jaynes’s insight. The Spartans were the ultimate
‘left brainers’. They fixed their minds on one thing and one thing only, and pretended that nothing
else existed. Before the Messenian war, Sparta was creating its own tradition of art and music; this