Alex
Binz

Spartan and Platonic Utopias:
Realism and Idealism

Copyright 2007 © Alex Binz
Do not reprint or quote without permission by the author.

 

Athens had fallen; only Sparta remained. In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek intelligentsia grew increasingly discontented with democratic forms, and the philosopher Plato was a leading advocate for a more authoritarian structure based on the Spartan oligarchy. Sparta avoided Athens’ costly mistakes by forbidding dissent and disobedience; it concentrated political authority among the rational few, rather than diffused it among the uneducated many. Thus, the Spartan polis conformed closely to Plato’s rationalist vision for city administration, by preserving a hierarchical structure in which a monarchical “head” might rule over the “body” of common people. But Plato also recognized the imperfection of the Spartan system. Such exquisitely rational means—the system of central planning—were directed towards this irrational end—the military subjugation of neighboring poleis. Conquest did not befit the Platonic state, which was instead engaged in realizing the cardinal virtues of justice and reason. While retaining the administrative means, Plato rejected the militaristic end. He reframed Spartan organization in light of his own ideals. The Republic is a vision of a contemplative Sparta—if reason is indeed the ultimate end of man, as Plato argued, then surely it ought to be the end of society as well.

The Peloponnesian War had brought the city of Athens to its knees, and heralded the end of its Empire and Golden Age. War raged on until 404 BC, until the Spartans overran the Long Walls connecting Athens to the harbor at Piraeus. Cut off from the sea and thus from its allies, the beleaguered Athens were forced to surrender on humiliating terms. To quash unrest, the Spartans erected an iron-fisted military junta known as the “Thirty Tyrants.” Modeled on Sparta’s executive body, the Gerousia, the Athenian oligarchy was led by one of Plato’s relatives, Critias (also a student of Socrates). After a year, however, the “Thirty Tyrants” were deposed, and a wave of returning Athenian exiles reestablished the democracy. While the leaders offered amnesty to many supporters of the oligarchy, not even this democratic gesture could reinvigorate the Athenian spirit, as the polis splintered into numerous factions vying for political authority.

In the wake of these events, it is hardly surprising that Plato might be disgusted with the very idea of democracy. The Athenian mob executed his beloved mentor Socrates for his ties to Critias and the former oligarchy; Plato himself may have come perilously close to execution for his family connection as well. But his discontent with democracy stretched even further back. Following their defeat in the Peloponnesian War, many Athenians yearned for the earlier years when their polis followed the wise counsel of Pericles. They reasoned that as long as “Pericles was at the head of affairs the state was wisely led and firmly guarded, and it was under him that Athens was at her greatest” (Thucydides 2.65). In contrast to his successors, the bombastic Kleon and the timid Nicias, Pericles was celebrated as the embodiment of true leadership, the one man who might govern a democracy, who might have led Athens to victory. Yet Plato rejected this idolization of Pericles, at one point writing “as far as I know, Pericles made the Athenians slothful, garrulous and avaricious” (Plato, Gorgias 515e).[1] Plato thus rejected all existing models of democratic leadership, and openly opposed the Athenian model of democracy.

To Plato, the supreme rationalist, the faults of democracy were evident enough. The Athenian polis was like a chariot hitched to a restive stallion and a reticent mare. One lunges forward, the other stands its ground; likewise, Athenian democracy could be one day agitated by passions, and the next paralyzed by fear—traits not at all befitting Plato’s contemplative ideal. The Athenian mob could be too easily be influenced by demagogues like Cleon on the one hand; yet on the other, it could too easily exert its influence on leaders like Nicias. Plato had no patience for individual personalities; he would not resign his utopia to the whims of a mob or a leader. As Dominic Scott writes in his essay “Plato’s Critique of the Democratic Character”, “There is no unity underlying [the] manifold lifestyle [of those within a democracy,] because there is no longer sufficient reasoning power to provide it” (37). Later, in the Republic, Plato mocked democracy as “an agreeably anarchic form of society, with plenty of variety, which treats all men as equal, whether they are equal or not” (Plato, Republic 558c). Freedom, choice, innovation—such values were alien to his philosophy. Plato sought a rational order to society.  And like all rationalists and utopians, he predicated his theory on the assumption of stasis. The ideal polis would necessarily be one without change or variety, for any deviation from a perfect model must be ultimately detrimental. Yet democratic freedom entailed choice and thus change, and would not benefit Plato’s supremely rational utopia.

In the Republic, Plato elevated the oligarchic system (or rather, the distinctively Spartan form that he called “timarchy”[2]) far above the model of Athenian democracy.  While imperfect, Sparta was seen as a significant improvement over Athens. Specifically, Plato discerned the great merit of Spartan society in the area of political organization, for its emphasis on stability. Sparta employed a rigid hierarchy of three classes, which dated to its early history and perhaps even to Lycurgus, the famed (and possibly mythic) legislator featured in Plutarch’s Lives (“Lycurgus” 6). At the base were the helots, the Messenian serfs tied to aristocratic land, whose labor sustained the rest of society. The next caste consisted of the Lacedaemonian hoplites—aristocratic citizens devoted to enforcing the social order by force—and their military vassals, a subclass of non-citizens known as the periokoi. While the hoplite-citizen class composed only ten percent of the general population, even it was subject to a final layer of hierarchy. Twenty-eight elders were selected by acclamation to the Gerousia, a legislative body presided by two kings and five ephors, holding executive and judicial powers, respectively. The values of hierarchy and stability, embodied by Spartan culture, were deeply embedded in Plato’s philosophy. In fact, Plato defined justice as a state in which “each of our [classes] does its own job and minds its own business” (Plato, Republic 434e). Thus, the Spartan model remains essential to a proper understanding of the Republic, for Plato relied heavily on its tripartite division to construct his own utopian model.

Like the Messenian helots, the farmers, merchants, and ordinary workers occupied the lower tiers of the social order. It might be argued that Plato would expose his lower classes to far less repression than that faced by the helots. Certainly, they would face nothing like the Spartan Krypteia, a secret police sent by night to slaughter helots more or less at random, though they singled out the strongest and most rebellious of their number. But Plato treats killing rather casually in the Republic, at one point writing that his state “will leave the unhealthy to die, and those whose psychological constitution is incurably corrupt it will put to death” (Plato, Republic 410a). Later he proposed that “children of the inferior Guardians, and any defective offspring of others, will be quietly and secretly disposed of” (Plato, Republic 460c). And this is the treatment reserved for the upper classes; we can only imagine the hardships inflicted upon the masses.

Next in his social order, Plato placed a specialized warrior-class, “Guardians” devoted to military service, and a subclass of “Auxiliaries” to serve them. These were responsible for enforcing social stability: they controlled the lower orders, while following orders received from their superiors. Besides the distinctive solider-vassal grouping feature, clearly inspired by the Lacedaemonian model, there are other indicators to confirm Plato’s emulation of Sparta. Later in the Republic, when he is assigning virtues to the various classes, he endowed the Guardian class with the quality called courage—to stand up for the right even in the face of pain and fear. While we cannot interpret such a general assignment with any certainty, this description of courage would easily apply to what we might call the Spartan mystique, the public persona of the polis, as it appeared to other Greeks. During the Persian Wars almost a century before, 300 Spartans led by King Leonidas had held the pass of Thermopylae in northern Greece against a massive Persian army, defending their homeland in the face of certain death. Such courage was widely regarded as a uniquely Spartan virtue—so widely that Pericles devoted part of his Funeral Oration to refuting this public perception. “We pass our lives without all these restrictions [of Spartan society, yet are just as ready to face the same dangers as they are” (History 2.39). By marrying a distinctively Spartan virtue to a distinctively Spartan class structure, Plato confirmed his general intention of incorporating its hierarchical organization into his model for utopia.

The Republic further laid out a rigorous public-education program for these Guardians, strikingly similar to the Spartan system of military instruction (agoge). Plato described Sparta as a timarchy, driven by an implacable urge to win glory for oneself and honor to the community through battle. Herodotus reports that Othryadas, the lone survivor of Thermopylae, was so “ashamed to return to Sparta, his companions being lost, [that he] slew himself on the spot at Thyreae” (Thucydides 1.82). All aspects of Spartan life were sacrificed to this fierce militarism. Young women were allowed to exercise (allegedly nude) alongside the men, to give them the strength to endure childbirth; Plato later incorporated this practice into his Republic, in the fifth book on “Women and the Family.” The Gerousia established a custom of marriage-by-rape, thought to produce stronger offspring, and separated married couples until the husband was released from his military obligations; any ties to family might have weakened the paramount duty to the polis. Spartan culture sanctioned the institution of pederasty, in which older youths would molest the younger boys to reinforce their training in obedience. The agoge was a crucial element of raising Spartan youths with self-discipline and courage. While conquest was not the ultimate end of Plato’s Republic, such rigor and martial structure was required to sustain his utopian hierarchy.

The final end of the Republic’s education system—and indeed of his entire social policy towards to the young—lies in Plato’s philosophy and his proto-Lamarckian strain of eugenics. In the early nineteenth century, before Darwin wrote Origin of Species, French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck developed his own evolutionary theory centering on the genetic inheritance of non-genetic (or ‘acquired’) characteristics. Lamarck applied his theory to natural phenomena like muscle development; Plato applied this model to the social realm, emphasizing leadership and intelligence. Plato even tried to indoctrinate his subjects in this social engineering: at the end of the Book Three, he composed a ‘Foundation Myth’ for his utopian society.

You are, all of you in this community, brothers. But when god fashioned you, he added gold in the composition of you who are qualified to be Rulers (which is why their prestige is greatest); he put silver in the Auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and other workers…. Therefore, the first and most and most important of god’s commandments to the Rulers is that in the exercise of their function as Guardians their principal care must be to watch the mixture of metals in the characters of their children. If one of their own children has traces of bronze or iron in its make-up, they must harden their hearts, assign it its proper value, and degrade it to the ranks of the industrial and agricultural class where it properly belongs: similarly if a child of this class is born with gold or silver in its nature, they will promote it accordingly to be a Guardian or an Auxiliary. (Plato, Republic 415a-c).

 

For Plato, if a thing is a Good, then it deserves the attention of authorities. Its fate cannot rest on chance or individual choice; it must be propagated by a supreme overarching reason. Plato treats intelligence as a hereditary feature, and thus worthy of attention by the leadership in a society. His education program in the Republic is chiefly geared to sorting out the best and most capable of the youths from their inferiors. Plato sought to not merely elevate these “gold or silver” elements, but to in fact set them apart from the others and establish them as a separate and superior class.

This race of “Rulers”—better known to moderns as the ‘philosopher-kings’—comprises the third and final class of the Republic. These all-knowing navigators of the Platonic ship of state possessed absolute authority, and like the elders of the Gerousia were to be obeyed by the lower orders of society without question. Even so, there are fundamental differences—if not in authority, then in composition—between the Gerousia and the Rulers of the Republic. Not even the stratified Spartan social order was centralized enough to suit Plato. After all, the elders were selected by popular acclamation—horror of horrors! Plato did not trust the collective insanity of a boisterous mob to provide for the future security and stability of his Republic. Thus, any new Rulers would be selected and bred by the previous generation; only these possessed the requisite wisdom and experience to make ideal choices. Thus, the ruling class of this utopia would be both separate and self-perpetuating.

While Plato incorporated many aspects of Lacedaemonian society into his own ideals—centering around Spartan hierarchy and social organization—he drew the line at the ruling class. While he considered timarchy superior to democracy and baser forms of oligarchy, Plato deemed the Spartan model as fundamentally flawed. Plato outlined three levels for his ideal individuals, parallel to those for his Republic: the rational element would guide the inner element of spirit (what Schopenhauer would later call ‘the Will’), which would in turn control the appetitive desires of the body. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “The head rules the belly through the chest” (24). But the timarchic man is

…torn in two directions, his father’s influence [representing the Platonic ideal] fostering the growth of his rational nature, and that of others his desire…. [Therefore] he takes a middle course between the two, and resigns control of himself to the middle element and its competitive spirit, and so becomes an arrogant and ambitious man. (Plato, Republic 550a-b)

 

Thus, Plato condemned the timarchic character for rejecting the contemplative life and so elevating the selfish ambition of men. The Spartans were obsessed with glory, and their universal pursuit of recognition threatened the very fabric of their social organization. If society were not governed by a supreme reason, but rather left individuals to their own desires and ambitions (however noble), the hierarchy would be critically destabilized. Individuals would naturally aspire to enter the next caste of society, and envy those who were already members of that superior caste. By planting even the possibility of social mobility, Sparta planted the seeds of internal conflict and thus of its own destruction. Plato thus rejected their example of timarchy, and relegated ambition to a lower station

In this way, the Republic reinstated the contemplative life as the supreme end of utopia. There are a number of distinct elements that can be found in all utopian theories, from medieval Christian millennialism to the secular plans of Robert Owen, from the evolutionary teachings of Social Darwinism to the revolutionary ideology of Marxism. Many of these elements are derived from Platonic idealism. Plato recognized the depravity of the human condition, the imperfection of our nature and social institutions. Yet, by pointing towards abstract ideals and a ‘world of forms,’ his Republic provided a sense of hope in the midst of this civilized depravity. Plato emphasized the formation of a new order, renewing both individuals and communities, through his extensive proposals concerning education and social stratification. In formulating his Rulers and Guardians in the tripartite hierarchy, Plato tried to distance these classes from the existing state of affairs: “First, they shall have no private property beyond the barest essentials. Second, none of them shall possess a dwelling-house…. They alone… of all the citizens are forbidden to touch or handle silver or gold; they must not come under the same roof as them…” (Plato, Republic 416d-e). Plato’s Republic is profoundly idealistic—he paints a portrait of the life contemplative, in his subtle attempt to overturn the pragmatic roots of the existing social order.

And yet the Republic was no impracticable scheme, for Plato clearly intended that these blueprints for utopia would be implemented: “Our proposed legislation, if put into effect, would be the ideal, and that to put it into effect, though difficult, would not be impossible” (502c). As we have seen, the Spartan model provided the foundation for many of the pragmatic elements of Plato’s utopian ideology. The Lacedaemonians emphasized stability and discipline, and offered little room for innovation and variety in their rigid hierarchy. Often, their leadership exhibited an obsession with (even trivial) details; they felt the need to oversee all aspects of society to ensure their own survival and their order’s stability. Similarly, Plato spent an entire book forming an educational program suitable to the youth of his Republic, censoring the epic poets and critically considering such minutiae as the appropriate formal structure for music. The Spartans also emphasized the sovereignty of the central authority, and the formation of a strong military class to enforce the orders of the philosopher-king. In this way, Plato incorporated the authoritarian forms of Sparta into his ideal society.

Plato’s Republic cannot be dismissed as an idyllic vision of utopia or a mere intellectual exercise: it was fundamentally a political program, based on the stratified social order typified by Sparta. Indeed, at one point, Plato’s brother Glaucon challenged the expositor Socrates to demonstrate the practicality of this system. While the purest ideal could never be realized—for this world can but reflect, not instantiate, the world of forms—Socrates states that this ideal order might transpire if “philosophers become kings of this world, or… those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers” (Plato, Republic 473d). Some twenty years before, Plato had pursued precisely this course “in the year 367 [BCE], with… the young tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius II” (Klosko 387). A contemplative man must control the body politic, just as the contemplative mind must control the body.

Plato’s entire work—this sweeping quest to discover the ideal polis, a universal political Good—was informed and predicated on his rationalist principles. Yet he was also bound by practicality, for he had to provide the necessary power-structure for his philosopher-king. The primary challenge and greatest success of the Republic lies in reconciling the divergent elements of his theory, in connecting Lacedaemonian political means to its philosophic ends. Plato applied the institutional framework of Spartan timarchy—especially its rigid hierarchy and rigorous military education—to his own contemplative ideals. Thus ensured of stability and order, Plato could use this ideal society as a platform for his real end: the deification of reason as the supreme value of humanity, governing all aspects of individual and communal life.

Works Cited
 

Cartledge, Paul. The Spartans. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2002.

——————. “What have the Spartans done for us? Sparta’s Contribution to Western Civilization.” Greece & Rome. 51.2 (2002): 164-179.

Herodotus. Histories. Trans. A.D. Godly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920. 7 March 2007 <www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin///ptext?lookup=Hdt.+1.82.1>

Klosko, George. “Implementing the Ideal State.” The Journal of Politics. 43.2 (1981): 365-389.

Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1944.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 1955.

——. “Gorgias.” Plato. (Vol. III). Trans. W. Lamb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. 9 Feb. 2007. <www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Plat.+Gorg.+515e>

Plutarch. “Pericles.” Greek Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 140-179.

———. “Lycurgus.” Greek Lives. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. 3-41.

Scott, Dominic. “Plato’s Critique of the Democratic Character.” Phronesis. 49.1 (2002): 19-37.

Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1972.