Plutarch's Parallel Lives: First thoughts (mostly on Lycurgus)

I didn't find much of interest in his accounts of the Athenian Theseus and Roman Romulus.  Both men are either mythic or else real but grossly exaggerated, and their detailed exploits get tedious.  On the other hand, his examination of the social policies of Lycurgus, an apparently real (if exaggerated) leader of Sparta was absolutely fascinating.

I find the translated account hard to take at face value.  Plutarch attributes to Lycurgus the wholesale transformation of Sparta into a more or less Communist society in a single generation.  Lycurgus equalized the distribution of land, abolished silver and gold coins (replacing them with bulky iron that made commerce difficult), abolished all but the most practical manual arts and trades, completely overhauled the family unit, eschewed written laws, and turned the society into a martial one totally focused on raising warrior children.

Taken at face value, I don't believe it.  Communist dictators have never had nearly as much success as hoped for in redistributing wealth and overhauling society. Say what you will about how maybe people back then were different, but Communism has failed in every society where it's been tried, Eastern or Western, imperialist or post-colonial. However, I know that Sparta did function for many generations as a bizarre military cult.  Reading between a few lines, I can not the following:

1) Plutarch notes that his reign was preceded by considerable civic strife, and generations of back-and-forth whiplash between weak and overpowering rulers.  Strongmen always have more success when bringing stability after a long period of chaos.

2) Plutarch does note a coup attempt by the wealthy, and a restoration of Lycurgus on a populist tide.  It's not like this all went off without a hitch.

3) I know too little of Spartan social structure before (and after) Lycurgus, and the lives of people who weren't in the warrior caste. I suspect that a lot of what Plutarch is remarking on is the training and social structure of a warrior class/caste, not all of society.  There may have been parts of the economic structure that were run on some basis other than a warrior cult (though no doubt they lived under the rule of the warrior cult), and thus the social "reforms" of Lycurgus may have been focused on equalizing wealth among a warrior class that would be more amenable to military discipline than the average person.  Also, as Jane Jacobs noted in Systems of Survival, bad things happen when warrior classes get too tangled up in commerce.  You either wind up with feudalism, gangsterism, or rich and corrupt generals (e.g. Pakistan, Egypt, Russia, etc.).  (And it's debatable whether those 3 situations differ all that meaningfully from each other.)

4) Plutarch was writing centuries after Lycurgus, relying on sources written by the victors.  In all likelihood the transition to a strict military cult system was not the accomplishment of a single and mostly smooth generation (aside from the revolution, coup, and restoration), but what was ultimately cemented into place traces its roots to Lycurgus. Also, there were probably antecedents to his system, e.g. the 28 men who helped him in his first revolution, and he built on those antecedents rather than imposing an alien structure from scratch.

Read this way, as a summary of a system and the man who originated it, written centuries later without details, it makes more sense.

One interesting detail is that Plutarch dismisses Aristotle's contention that Spartan women enjoyed high status because the men were usually at war so the women had to run things.  Plutarch maintains that women enjoyed high status because Lycurgus believed that women must exhibit strength and athleticism so that they could raise warrior sons.  Obviously I wasn't there, but I don't see why there couldn't be elements of truth in both.  We know that in modern history women improved their status in the Western world in part because two successive generations saw their husbands and brothers mustered for war en masse, and had to step in and do things normally done by men.  It isn't crazy to think that Spartan women enjoyed some similar benefits from similar events.

Finally, I appreciate this rhetorical gem: "These public processions of the maidens, and their appearing naked in their exercises and dancings, were incitements to marriage, operating upon the young with the rigor and certainty, as Plato says, of love, if not of mathematics."

Onward to Numa Pompilius.