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The Spartan Practice of Selective Infanticide and Its Parallels in Ancient Utopian Tradition

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The Spartan Practice of Selective Infanticide and Its Parallels in Ancient Utopian Tradition THE SPARTAN PRACTICE OF SELECTIVE INFANTICIDE AND ITS PARALLELS IN ANCIENT UTOPIAN TRADITION Talking with non–classicists, who have some notion of ancient culture and the Spartan state model, usually from what they were taught in high school, I have often experienced that the killing of defective infants was one of the shocking features they remembered. Also, the Spartan prac- tice of selective infanticide features prominently in modern studies, especially in general and popularizing books on ancient Greece, in which it is sometimes described with horrible details that are lacking in the ancient sources1. As a matter of fact, only one ancient text refers to the Spartan practice of the selection of newborns, viz. a passage from Plutarch’s Life of Lykourgos (16.1-2). The present paper intends to screen the interpretation and reliability of this late testimony and to con- front it with some comparable texts, which set the same practice in other ‘ideal’ societies, whether they are considered historical or belong mani- festly to the realm of utopian imagination. Two of these texts are unam- biguously philosophical, belonging to the designs of an ideal state as proposed by Plato (Resp. 460c) and Aristotle (Pol. 1335b); the other two appear in exotic travel accounts, viz. a description of the institutions of an idealized Indian tribe by the Alexander-historian Onesikritos (FGrHist 134 F21) and an even more fantastic report on the customs of the utopian Sun People by Iamboulos (Diod. II 58.5). All these texts chronologically precede the passage in Plutarch, which, however, goes back to much older sources. So the actual chronological distance between our testimonia, all related to the eugenic selection of newborns, is considerably reduced. Therefore it is certainly legitimate to ask whether they were influenced by one another or at least whether they 1 According to many modern authors they were thrown into a ravine, although this cannot be found in ancient sources: see e.g. I. MALBIN, Historische Betrachtungen zur Frage der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, diss. Königsberg 1922, p. 14: «Schwache und missgestaltete Kinder wurden… in einem tiefen Abgrund am Berg Taygetos gewor- fen»; W. DURANT, The Story of Civilization. The Life of Greece, New York 1939, p. 81: «any child that appeared defective was thrown from a cliff of Mt. Taygetus, to die on the jagged rocks below»; N.M. KENNELL, The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta, Chapel Hill–London 1995, p. 25: «Plutarch states that the Spartans «used to cast» weak infants into the Apothetae pit». Compare the quotation from the Süddeutsche Zeitung in n. 30. 48 M. HUYS belong in one way or another to the same philosophical or ideological tradition, the more so as these passages have never been studied together. In turn the results of such a comparative investigation will prove useful for the interpretation of these texts, especially of the Plutarch-passage and the question of its historical reliability, although I admit that scholarly caution should prevail here because of the loss of Plutarch’s sources. Finally, the analysis of these passages is of great interest, since some of them, especially those of Plutarch, Plato and Aristotle, have had enormous historical influence: they have been fre- quently referred to in the context of modern utopias or ‘ideal societies’ involving selective infanticide or, as it is often called nowadays, «non- voluntary euthanasia on severely disabled newborn children». In a sequel to this paper I will study how the modern debate on this issue continues to draw arguments from the ancient texts, in spite of their brevity and relative obscurity2. In this first part, however, I will concen- trate on the ancient passages, assessing their original meaning within their literary and philosophical context. My focus on selective infanti- cide within the framework of utopian societal projects implies that I leave aside the general historical question of the practice of infanticide of malformed or handicapped infants, which seems to have been wide- spread throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity3. 1. PLUTARCH, LYKOURGOS 16.1-2 Tò dè gennjqèn oûk ¥n kúriov ö gennßsav tréfein, âll’ ∂fere labÑn eîv tópon tinà lésxjn kaloúmenon, ên ˜ç kaqßmenoi t¬n fulet¬n oï presbútatoi katamaqóntev tò paidárion, eî mèn eûpagèv e÷j kaì Åwmaléon, tréfein êkéleuon, kl±ron aût¬ç t¬n ênakisxilíwn prosneímantev· eî d’ âgennèv kaì ãmorfon, âpépempon eîv tàv legoménav ˆApoqétav, parà Taúgeton baraqrÉdj tópon, Üv o∆te aût¬ç h±n ãmeinon ªn o∆te t±Ç pólei tò m® kal¬v eûqùv êz ârx±v pròv eûezían kaì ÅÉmjn pefukóv. 2 To appear in a future issue of Ancient Society. 3 For this question I refer to M. SCHMIDT, Hephaistos lebt –Untersuchungen zur Frage der Behandlung behinderter Kinder in der Antike, Hephaistos 5/6 (1983/84), p. 133-161; E. EYBEN, Family Planning in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, AncSoc 11/12 (1980/81), p. 15 with n. 37-38; W.V. HARRIS, Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire, JRS 84 (1994), p. 12; R. GARLAND, The Eye of the Beholder. Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World, London 1995, p. 13-17. THE SPARTAN PRACTICE OF SELECTIVE INFANTICIDE 49 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 thousands lots of land; but if it was ill-born and deformed, they banished it to the so-called Apothetae, a chasm-like place at the foot of Mount Tayge- tus, in the conviction that the life of that which nature had not well equipped at the very beginning for health and strength, was of no advantage either to itself or the state4. This passage stands at the beginning of Plutarch’s account of the Spar- tan âgwgß allegedly introduced by Lykourgos. Plutarch begins his Life of Lykourgos with the remark that nothing can be said about this legislator which is not a subject of debate. Modern scholarship has not changed this situation: some scholars have argued that Lykourgos was merely a product of fiction, others that he was a god5, and those who accept his historicity do not agree in which period he lived. It is cer- tain, however, that the legislation traditionally ascribed to him cannot have been the work of one person, and very probably many of its ele- ments known to us only through Hellenistic or later sources were cre- ated or at least fundamentally reshaped to support the reforms the Spartan kings were endeavouring to introduce in the second part of the third century6. So there is little doubt that Plutarch’s presentation of state-controlled eugenic infanticide as an institution introduced or at 4 Translation (slightly modified) of B. PERRIN, Plutarch. The Parallel Lives, vol. I (Loeb Classical Library), Cambridge (MA) — London 1914, p. 255. 5 This position was most exhaustively argued by E. MEYER, Lykurgos von Sparta (Studien zur alten Geschichte, 1: Zur älteren griechischen Geschichte), Halle 1892 (repr. Hildesheim 1966), p. 2ff. 6 A good survey of the hotly debated issue of the historicity of Lykourgos and his leg- islative activity may be found in P. OLIVA, Sparta and her Social Problems, Prague 1971, p. 63-70 (his conclusion: «The ancient tradition attributing almost all the specific features of this regime to a single man was created gradually, most probably during the fourth cen- tury»). See also M. MANFREDINI - L. PICCIRILLI (eds.), Plutarco. Le Vite di Licurgo e di Numa (Scrittori greci e latini), Milano 1980, p. XI-XVII; S. LINK, Der Kosmos Sparta. Recht und Sitte in klassischer Zeit, Darmstadt 1994, p. IX: «(dessen), was sich in klassis- cher Zeit zu «den Gesetzen des Lykurg» verdichtet hatte — der Ausdruck mit dem die Spartaner die geschriebenen und ungeschriebenen Gesetze, Regeln und Gewohnheiten als die große Einheit ihres Kosmos bezeichneten». Other references can be found in P. OLIVA, Die «Lykurgische» Verfassung in der griechischen Geschichtsschreibung der klassischen Zeitperiode, Klio 66 (1984), p. 533 n. 3. G. GROTE, History of Greece II, New York 1859, p. 400ff., was very influential with his argument that the whole of the Lykourgan legend was a Hellenistic fiction. This view was put in perspective by E.N. TIGERSTEDT, The Legend of Sparta in Classical Antiquity (Stockholm Studies in History of Literature, 9 &15), Stockholm 1965 & 1974, II, p. 77ff. 50 M. HUYS least legally established by Lykourgos is due to legendary condensa- tion7. But the question remains whether the institution as such is historical. To answer this question, one must first consider the nature and the his- torical reliability of this Vita as a whole and, secondly, analyze the pas- sage in question more closely. As to the former question Plutarch him- self gives us a precious hint when, at the end of the Life (31.2), he concludes that Lykourgos had put into practice an ideal state model as had been worked out only on a conceptual level by philosophers as Plato, Diogenes and Zeno, and that, thanks to him, the whole city of Sparta was «practising philosophy». There is no doubt that Plutarch selected material from his sources in view of the Platonic ideals he wanted to illustrate in his biography, especially the ideas of genuine human education directed toward virtue, and of the harmony based on îsótjv. Since a great idea is at work, actual shortcomings of the Spar- tan system can be overlooked or reinterpreted in this ethical-pedagogical perspective. In Plutarch’s ‘history of ideas’, historical accuracy is sub- sidiary because it tends to dwell unsuitably on chance events8.
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