Agoge

The agoge (Greek: ἀγωγή, translit. ágōgḗ in Attic Greek, or ἀγωγά, ágōgá in Doric Greek) was the training program pre-requisite for Spartiate (citizen) status. Spartiate-class boys entered it age seven, and aged out at 30. It was considered violent by the standards of the day, and was sometimes fatal.

The agōgē was divided into three age groups, paides, paidiskoi, and hēbōntes, roughly corresponding to young boys (7-12), adolescents (12-20), and young men (20-30). The agōgē deliberately deprived boys of food, sleep, and shelter. It involved cultivating loyalty to Sparta through military training (e.g., pain tolerance), hunting, dancing, singing, and rhetoric.^[1] There seems to have been ritual beating. It was intensely competitive, and the boys were encouraged to use violence against each other; by Plutarch's account, this included sexual violence by hēbōntes against paides,^[2] while Xenophon says the relationships were widely but wrongly considered to be sexual. Participants were required to live in the open or in barracks, and were restricted from contact with birth families or wives.

Participants were the sons of Spartiates and Spartiate-class mothers (that is, those eligible for citizen status, totalling perhaps 1/10 to 1/32 of the population). Spartiate-class girls (who could not become citizens) did not participate in the agōgē, although they may have received a similar state-sponsored education.^[3][4] Helots (slaves), mothax (free non-citizens, thought to be children of slave rape by Spartiates), and other freeborn boys who did not have two Spartiate-class parents, were also excluded. The firstborn sons of the ruling houses, Eurypontid and Agiad, were exempted; a few trophimoi (very well-connected metics or perioeci) took part by special permission, as did syntrophoi (children of helot mothers adopted by Spartiates).

The word agōgē had various meanings in Ancient Greek and comes from the verb ἄγω (to lead).^[5] There is no evidence that it was used to refer to the Spartiate education system until the 3rd century BC, but it was often used before then to mean training, guidance, or discipline.^[4] Sources are unclear about the exact origins of the agōgē. According to Xenophon, it was introduced by the semi-mythical Spartan law-giver Lycurgus, and modern scholars have dated its inception to the 7th or 6th century BC^[4][3][6][1] Regardless, the structure and content of the agōgē changed over time as the practice fell in and out of favour throughout the Hellenistic period.^[6] In the Roman period, it became a tourist attractions for Romans.