Spartan children were placed in a military-style
From a very young age, Spartan children learned to fight and practise rigour, physical fitness and obeying orders. They also staged pretend battles. This kind of formal training, called agōgē, started when they were about seven years old and continued to age 29. Boys and girls were trained separately.
Children were considered to belong entirely to the State and country and not to the families, nor were they considered independent individuals. Plutarch (Lycurgus, 24.1) records: “The training of the Spartans lasted into the years of full maturity.
BOYS: When a Spartan baby boy was born, soldiers came to the house and examined him carefully to determine how strong he was. If a baby was weak, the Spartans took him to the forest and left to die. The city-state decided the destiny of the child.
“Offspring was not reared at the will of the father, but was taken and carried by him to a place called Lesche, where the elders of the tribes officially examined the infant, and if it was well-built and sturdy, they ordered the father to rear it, and assigned it one of the nine thousand lots of land; but if it was ill ...
At age 18, if a Spartan girl passed her skills and fitness test, she would be assigned a husband and allowed to return home. If she failed, she would lose her rights as a citizen, and became a perioikos, a member of the middle class.
Spartan women enjoyed some freedoms that were not available to girls in other Greek cities. For example, they were allowed to own their own property and to participate in public life. In comparison to the city-state of Athens, where women were largely confined to their own home, Spartan women enjoyed much more freedom.
As adults, Spartan women were allowed to own and manage property. Additionally, they were typically unencumbered by domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and making clothing, tasks which were handled by the Helots.
The agōgē was divided into three age categories: the paides (about ages 7–14), paidiskoi (ages 15–19), and the hēbōntes (ages 20–29).
From birth till the age of seven a child lived with their parents (Harley, 1934). The child was raised by the family nurse to overcome its fears as a child. During the day the child accompanied their father to the dining halls or “syssitia” as a way to learn Spartan culture (Harley, 1934).
Spartan girls were not allowed to join but were educated at home by their mothers or trainers. Boys entered the agoge at the age of 7 and graduated around the age of 30 at which time they were allowed to marry and start a family.
That's right, a Spartan citizen was expected by law to be fit enough for hand to hand combat, in full bronze armor, under the blazing heat of the Mediterranean sun up to the same age people in the modern world are typically adjusting their knee braces before shuffling through the doors of a buffet.
"Come back with your shield - or on it" (Plutarch, Mor. 241) was supposed to be the parting cry of mothers to their sons. Mothers whose sons died in battle openly rejoiced, mothers whose sons survived hung their heads in shame.
If caught stealing, the boys were beaten. Additionally, boys were often beaten by older children who started fights to help make the younger boys strong. Children were commonly whipped in front of groups of other Spartans, but were not allowed to cry out in pain.
While Athenian women might have expected to marry for the first time around the age of fourteen to men much older than them, Spartan women normally married between the ages of eighteen and twenty to men close to them in age.
Spartan society didn't discourage romantic love, but marriage and childrearing were both subject to some peculiar cultural and governmental constraints. The state counseled that men should marry at age 30 and women at 20.
In Athens and Sparta, homosexuality was practiced to various degrees, and its status was somewhat “complicated,” according to Plato's Pausanias. In Thebes, on the other hand, it was actively encouraged, and even legally incentivized.
Sparta stands out as an important city-state in Ancient Greece because of the way it treated its women; Spartan women enjoyed more freedoms and held greater control over their own lives. However, this came at the price of harsher marital and familial duties, which both society and the state expected of them.
Xenophon also reveals that if an older man had a young, fertile wife, he could 'introduce' her to a young man whose physical and moral qualities he admired for the purpose of begetting children. Polybius (c. 200‒118 bce) even claims that it was 'common custom' for three or four Spartiates to share one wife.
Spartan marriage lacked the ceremony of Athens. Spartan women would be willfully captured and dressed as a man, also having her hair shaved as a man would. In this attire the bride would be laid alone in the dark where a sober groom would sneak in, remove her belt, and carry her to bed.
Because Spartan men were totally devoted to military matters, Spartan women were expected to oversee all other aspects of life. Life as a female Spartan meant a life devoted to producing and raising children (to the age of seven), running households and managing business affairs. Only strong children were raised.
As Cartledge writes in Spartan Reflections, it wasn't until age 60 that Spartans finally were allowed to retire from the army—provided that they lived that long.
The Spartans, noted among ancient writers for their austerity, prepared a black broth of blood and boiled pig's leg, seasoned with vinegar, which they combined with servings of barley, fruit, raw greens, wine and, at larger dinners, sausages or roasted meat. Spartan boys were sparingly issued barley cakes.