Last year of agoge?

[mikehmike]

I have a memory of seeing on these forums that the last year of the agoge in Sparta was around 235BC. Is this correct or does anyone know?

[Antigenes]

It was abolished and reinstated several times. Kleomenes III restored it (and had people train under a foreigner, the horror!) in the 220s BC after it had slowly died out over the previous decades. Then Philopoimon ended it in the 180s BC after the final defeat of Nabis. I think it may have been reintroduced after the collapse of the Achaian League in 146 BC, but dunno about that for sure or what its status was under the Romans.

[Timoleon of Korinthos]

I have a memory of seeing on these forums that the last year of the agoge in Sparta was around 235BC. Is this correct or does anyone know?

There is no definite answer, I am afraid, as there has not been a continuous recording of Sparta's domestic policies throughout the ages. However, in "Hellenistic and Roman Sparta", page 41, Cartledge writes:

...Agis IV, eldest son of Eudamidas II, would not have been obliged as heir-apparent to go through the distinctively Spartan educational curriculum known as agoge even if it had still existed in its full rigour by 250. As it was, the system had apparently lapsed at some point after the late 270s.


As Antigenes already pointed, the agoge was reconstructed by Cleomenes III after his coup in 227BC with the help of his teacher, Sphaerus of Borysthenes, but as Spawforth comments on the same book, page 207:

But the old agoge had already undergone one revival under Cleomenes III, about which nothing is known, although the probable involvement of the Stoic philosopher Sphaerus should warn us against assuming a straightforward return to old ways in this occasion.

For example, in page 201 he remarks:

...since in the Classical age the agoge was under the overall supervision of the ephors, aided by a specially appointed official, the paidonomos: conceivably the bideoi [overseers, annual magistrates] were another constitutional innovation of Cleomenes III, belonging to his larger assault on the powers of Sparta's traditional magistracies.

or in page 207, within the context of explaining the Roman era training, he wonders:

A classical precursor can be identified with some confidence only in the case of the "endurance-contest", the idea on which seems to have been based on the Xenophonic cheese-ritual around the altar of Orthia. Scholars also agreed, however, that the contest in its Roman form was a recent invention (could it have been the Stoic Sphaerus who first turned the old ritual with the cheeses into a test of physical endurance?).

In 189BC Philopoemen forcefully brought Sparta under the Achaean League, which according to Livy would suppress the 'ancestral, Lycurgean institutions', meaning the ephebic training would be reorganised along Achaean lines, until they were 'revived' under Roman patronage at a date left vague by Pausanias ('later'), but which Plutarch by implication assigns to the Roman settlement of 146/145 BC after their victory over Achaea in Leucopetra, a war Sparta had not participated in and which in turn marked Sparta's final secession from the Achaean League.

The 'revived' ephebic training maintained with tenacity an archaising facade, claiming direct descent from the Lycurgean agoge, but in essence it differed rather significantly from its alleged counterpart. It can be said to have comprised instruction in song, dance, athletic and military exercises, prowess in which was tested in a series of contests attached to religious festivals. It continued to be organised around age-sets with properly archasing names (such as mikikhizomenoi, pratopampaides, hatropampaides, melleirenes and eirenes) and it was based around the city's citizen-tribes, named after the city-wards of Mesoa, Pitana, Limnae, Cynosura and the Cleomenean Neopolitae. It also included a set of contests for girls. But that's about the only vestiges of Lycurgean legitimacy: The division of age-sets into 'herds' (agelai) under the supervision of older youths was replaced by the boagos or heard-leader as a youth of the same age, describing his companions as fellow-ephebes (synepheboi), probably because in the late Hellenistic and Roman era the 'agoge' had to compete with the demands of conventional higher education abroad and because it depended significantly on the practice of euergetism (honorific finanancial support) from prominent families, who the heard-leaders now probably belonged to, as the fact that their post had now become a quasi-liturgy suggests. What is more, whereas the old agoge would begin to recruit at the age of seven (and would not be over until the twentieth year of a man's life), in the Roman era it lasted for a period of up to 6 years and the presence of boys that young is not attested. The Crypteia was also gone. Four new grand religious/athletic festivals attracting flocks of foreign visitors would be introduced over the course of the Roman period aside the old Carnea, Hyacinthia and Gymnopaedia, as well as three unorthodox for Greek (and former Spartan) standards athletic contests: the battle of companies in Platanistas, the tournament between fourteen strong teams of ball players or sphaereis, and the contest of endurance. Nonetheless, this artificially revived training enjoyed prominence in civic life, which can be explained by the extra-ordinary degree of interest it generated outside the city. To conclude, should one perceive the Roman era training as a direct continuation of the old Spartan agoge, then the end would be placed soon after the law promulgated by Theodosius I in 391AD, which banned pagan rites and closed temples for public use.

[HIC SVNT LEONES]

The Greek Military should make a big boot camp base in Sparta and call their training program there the Agoge. lol.