Prompted by Levy’s observations and questions, our brief review of symbolic space in ancient Greece suggests that some features of Greek culture that at first sight seem rationalist and modernizing, signs of the transformation of the archaic city, were deeply rooted in the culture of the city-states from as early as we can study them.11 It may be that they are factors that contributed to the intellectual process referred to as the breakthrough or enlightenment which is not easily attributed entirely (...) to economic and social changes in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE. The largely secular political tradition is sometimes, and plausibly, invoked as a cause (cf. Humphreys 1986). It should probably be seen as part of the overall ordering of the sacred vis-à-vis the profane. By the later fourth century BCE, contact with a larger, multiethnic world and the growth of impersonal market relationships produced or hastened secondary urbanization and with it the fracturing of a social coherence. In the intervening classical period, in some areas, such as drama, festival, and the visual arts, the first stirrings of the enlightenment may actually have fostered a more intense deployment of traditional resources. The symbolic use of space in the Greek cities probably never matched, despite important similarities, the more complex traditional systems of their South Asian counterparts. Greece’s traditional culture only reached its acme when new winds were blowing (and even because of them), but before they had swept away the delicate links that held the culture together. (shrink)

According to several fourth-century Athenian sources, the Spartans were a boorish and uneducated people, who were either hostile toward the written word or simply illiterate. Building upon such Athenian claims of Spartan illiteracy, modern scholars have repeatedly portrayed Sparta as a backward state whose supposedly secretive and reactionary oligarchic political system led to an extremely low level of literacy on the part of the common Spartiate. This article reassesses both ancient and modern constructions of Spartan illiteracy and examines the ideological (...) underpinnings of Athenian attacks on the ostensibly unlettered Lacedaemonians. Beginning with a close analysis of the available archaeological and literary evidence on Spartan public applications of literacy, it argues that the written word played a central role in the operation of the Spartan state, which utilized a variety of documents and required routine acts of literacy on the part of Spartiate commanders and ocials. Both the broad eligibility for the ephorate and the Lacedaemonians' chronic oliganthropia demonstrate that not all of the important public functionaries whose duties customarily involved reading and writing were members of the Spartan elite. The fact that Spartan office-holders acquired their literacy skills from a compulsory and comprehensive system of public education, which promoted the creation of a collective identity, further argues in favor of a literacy that was more broadly based than previous scholars have concluded. The article then accounts for these representations of Spartan illiteracy by locating them in the context of the changing relationship between orality and literacy in fifth- and fourth-century Athens. It argues that as the written word played an increasingly important role in Athenian democratic practice and ideology, it began to performtwo interconnected functions: as a signicant component in Athenian self-denition and as a key indicator of cultural and political dierence between Athens and its Peloponnesian enemies. (shrink)

Summary Over the course of about two centuries, the population of Ancient Spartan full citizens – homoioi – declined precipitously. Historians typically ascribe structural, social and economic causes to this decline. In what follows, I use sample statistics to argue that despite scant evidence, the attrition rate suffered by Spartan armies on the battlefield was enough to intensify or cause the enormous population decline.