Agogé

Spartan system of Warrior training.

At the age of seven all Spartan boys were taken from their mothers and made to live in all-male groups where they were trained in the arts of war and survival.

Plutarch, writing ca 100 AD, says the boys were taught

to endure pain and conquer in battle. To this end, as they grew in years, their discipline was proportionately increased; their heads were close-clipped, they were accustomed to go barefoot, and for the most part to play naked.

After they were twelve years old, they were no longer allowed to wear any undergarment; they had one coat to serve them a year; their bodies were hard and dry, with but little acquaintance of baths and unguents; these human indulgences they were allowed only on some particular days in the year. They lodged together in little bands upon beds made of rushes that grew by the banks of the river Eurotas, which they were to break off with their hands without a knife; if it were winter, they mingled some thistle down with their rushes, which it was thought had the property of giving warmth. By the time they were come to this age there was not any of the more hopeful boys who had not a lover to bear him company.

There were three categories of males within the agogé:

1. Boys / youths aged 7 - 18, called paides.

2. Youths, ages 18-19, called paidiskoi.

3. Young adults, aged 20-29, called hebontes or eirenes.

At the age of 30, men married, and joined an all-male dining club or mess, the sussition.

This is classicist W. G. Forrest's description of the agogé:

... After six years with his mother, the child who had been accepted was taken from home and enrolled in a group of his contemporaries under the leadership of an older boy ...

With his group the boy lived for the next fourteen years as he worked his way up through the increasingly brutal and brutalising training schedules which passed for education among the Spartans. Music and dancing he would learn, for both had their military uses, but reading and writing, as Plutarch remarks, 'only because they were unavoidable'. For the rest everything was designed to produce toughness, endurance and discipline ...

So schooled, at the age of twenty or thereabouts, the young man graduated to another class, that of the so-called eirenes, in which he remained for a part, perhaps even the whole of, his twenties, not yet a full citizen but liable for military service and for the time being occupied in doing to others as he had been done by, acting as leader of a younger group, ... and, a nice touch, allotted to one of two large teams to encourage rivalry in bravery, such rivalry that 'members of each team fall to fighting each other whenever they meet'.

At the age of thirty the Spartan was admitted to the assembly. Whether he had already received the other mark of manhood, admission to a sussition [an eating-club or mess], either on becoming an eiren or on ceasing to be one, is unknown ...

This was the last formal test the Spartan had to pass. Beyond it lay freedom, freedom to marry, to lead something like a normal life. His duties were light -- he had to dine with his fellows, to train with them and to fight with them; and from his kleros [land allotment] he had to provide the stipulated contribution to maintain the mess.

But it is easy to underestimate the effect even of this amount of communal living in a society where there was no other focus for a man's interests. The Spartan did not work -- he trained, with the men of his mess, he fought, with the men of his mess, or he was idle, again for the most part, one would imagine, with the men of his mess.

Many writers have commented that this sort of training, which encouraged strong -- indeed ferocious -- same-sex bonds between the warriors, was not unusual in Warrior societies.

This is from Peter Wilcox, writing about the Celts:

From early puberty the young man of the warrior caste progressed through the martial arts of the Celt, with the accompaniment of hunting, feasting, and drinking. As a fully-fledged warrior he would support and be supported in battle by a close age group of his own peers, who had been with him throughout his training for manhood. In this way many young men developed a strong man-to-man bond; and Diodorus, Strabo, and Athenaeus all remark that homo-erotic practices were common among the Celts.

See also natural male sex aggression, Warrior Altruism, Warrior Ethos, Fidelity, Heroes, Heroic Homosex, and Heroic Love.

And AGOGE: The Spear-points of Young Men Blossom There.