Discussion Prompt:

This Discussion assesses .

By now, you should have most of your research done and have started crafting your paper. Remember, this research paper is supposed to make an argument that you will support through the presentation of your research.

For this week, you are expected to post a prospective thesis statement for your paper. The thesis statement should clearly answer the question that you posed back in Week 2; that is, it should clearly indicate the conclusions that you have reached from your research. Remember, be as specific as possible.

Need some help crafting your thesis statement? Please consult the Week 5 section of the for some helpful links.

Good luck!

Peer Reply Guidance:

No peer replies are required, but they are encouraged.

W2 Question

Class,

In my research paper, I have decided to address the following question: How did the Spartan agoghe influence ideas about obedience and collective identity among Spartan citizens?

The subject matter is of interest to me due to the fact that the Spartan education system is among the most unique systems ever used in the history of the world to form citizenship, and I am of the view that it has a lot to offer to people regarding the formation of shared values and behaviour based on well-structured training programs.

The agogee was much more than just mere military training; it was a whole system of socialization that deprived men of personality and identity in favour of corporate patriotism to the state. I will explore how certain rituals of this system, including child abduction at the age of seven, groupage, ritualized suffering, and controlled rivalry between generations, have helped to establish the mythical Spartan warrior culture. The psychological processes under which the system of obedience became internalized as opposed to imposed on the participants are of particular interest to me, and how this system continued to promote itself throughout several generations.

My initial research has already unearthed good sources, and one of them is Tridimas’ latest analysis of Sparta’s constitutions, and this will give a good background of how agogee helped in supporting the wider political stability, and this can be a tool of conflict resolution in the Spartan society. I will examine both ancient writings, such as Plutarch and Xenophon, and contemporary scholarly interpretations of the system, applying the anthropological and sociological spheres to the study, including comparisons between the system and other ancient systems of education. This narrowed-down question will enable me to evade the superficial account of the Spartan society during the research of a certain process of social control, which had far-reaching consequences for Greek history. I am interested in investigating how this distinctive education system formed one of the most unified and, at the same time, contentious civic identities in antiquity and what those lessons can tell us about state-sponsored identity formation in a more general sense.

Reply from Professor: Freddy, I think that this is fine to do. I think we want to be careful about structuring this as a ‘We should follow’ this especially given that the system is a, at best, somewhat problematic and toxic system and it’s also a system based upon the exploitation of enslaved humans who outnumber the Spartans 10 or 20:1 at times so it might be better to focus on why they created the agoge and what it represented to them rather than seeing it as something we should emulate.

Primary Sources

Plutarch. Life of Lycurgus. In Plutarchs Lives, translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.

Xenophon. Constitution of the Spartans. Translated by E. C. Marchant. London: Macmillan, 1925.

These primary sources offer primary ancient views of the organization, training, and ideological mission of the Spartan agg. Plutarch is a moralized biography related to the reforms of Lycurgus, and Xenophon is an analytical description in contemporary form of Spartan institutions. Collectively, these writings help to understand that the agg was not only a system of education but a system of state regulation and cohesion of the state. Their diverging points of view on being authors point to both the idealization and the practicality of their ideologies in the Spartan society. They are critical to read situations that bring to light tensions between discipline and individuality inherent in Spartan citizenship. Such comparative reliance on sources makes it easier to conduct historical analysis, balancing normative ideals and institutional practice as generations of Spartan citizens lived them.

Secondary Sources

Cartledge, Paul. The Spartan Invention of Citizenship. History Today 51, no. 6 (2001): 3339.

Ducat, Jean. Spartan Education: Youth and Society in the Classical Period. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2006.

Kennell, Nigel M. The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Tridimas, George. The Spartan System: Constitution, Agg, and Crypteia. Greek History 45, no. 2 (2018): 210235.

These academic secondary sources discuss the agg as a socialization, political regulation, and identity-building system. Kennell and Ducat give a background of the cultural and institutional analysis, and Cartledge and Tridimas give us citizenship, obedience, and political stability issues in Spartan society. These works combined allow examining the way the agogee contributed to collective identity due to the influence of agg and the obedience of Spartan citizens. These historians also criticize myths of Sparta by underlining the human expense of unwavering discipline and imposed conformity. Their commentaries bring out the conflicts between unity and repression, especially when it comes to the hierarchy between classes and the oppression of the helot population. This scholarship makes the agg not only a successful cohesive process, but also a contentious and morally ambiguous process of social control. This critical method enhances the analysis because it brings Spartan education into closer contact with other debates regarding power, coercion, and the identity formation process introduced by the state in the ancient world.

Reply from Professor Thanks, Freddy. This does look like a promising start. Have you looked at other fragmentary evidence on Sparta or any archaeological evidence? I think that might help expand your primary source offerings if we could do that and we can also get some monographs on Sparta, too, in addition to articles.