Role of women in the Spartan military state. By the sixth century b.c. the Greek state of Sparta had developed a unique military organization. Men of the elite Spartiate class engaged in no profession but war, and their whole lives were devoted to training and battle. This system, attributed to the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus, had profound implications for Spartan women. They were the state’s military support staff par excellence, running estates and homes in their husbands’ absence, producing future warriors of the highest possible quality, and reinforcing an ethic that preferred death to cowardice.
Unlike women in other Greek states, Spartiate females were rigorously educated from a young age. Their training included study of the classics, poetry, and philosophy but also intensive physical exercise because the Spartans believed that a strong, healthy woman was more likely to produce strong sons. Spartan girls learned to race, wrestle, throw the discus and javelin, and, in short, perform all the feats of their male counterparts except arms training. They married later than other Greek women, in their late teens, so they were prepared to take control of their households immediately (Spartan men lived in barracks until age forty, only occasionally visiting their wives). Both men and women seem to have been taught from a young age that their bodies were at the service of the state. Thus, it was apparently not uncommon for a husband to invite a stronger man to impregnate his wife, thereby producing a stronger future warrior of Sparta.
The Spartiate matron raised her daughters until their marriage and her sons until they moved to the barracks at age seven; therefore, she provided essential early ethical training. Most prominent in the ancient Greek sources concerning Sparta are mothers’ exhortations to sons, encouraging them never to show cowardice. A Spartan mother is credited with handing her son his shield before he set out to battle with the laconic statement "With it or on it." The shield was the first thing a man dropped when running from the battlefield, but, conversely, the Greek round hoplon could be used to carry the bodies of the slain after the battle. Mothers were expected to show pride in sons who died for the state. There are accounts of Spartan women killing sons who had disgraced themselves and their family by showing cowardice in battle.
Spartan women were not trained to bear arms themselves. This is obvious from the panic when Thebans invaded Spartan territory in 369 b.c. at a time when the Spartan army was away. In times of crisis women could, however, play an important role in resistance. When Pyrrhus attacked in the mid-third century b.c., Archidamia, the grandmother of one of the two kings who simultaneously ruled Sparta, rallied the women and prevented the men from sending them to Crete for safety. (Sparta always had two kings, who descended from two families—the Agiads and the Eury-pontids.) Women helped the soldiers dig a long trench as protection against Pyrrhus’s war-elephants, and the next day they cheered the army on to victory.
