A child deemed worth raising is given to its mother to be cared for until the age of 7, although during the day, it accompanies its father to the syssitia (dining clubs) where it sits on the floor picking up Spartan customs by osmosis. Lycurgus instituted the practice of appointing a state officer, the paidonomos, who puts children in school, supervises and punishes. Children are barefoot to encourage them to move swiftly, and they are encouraged to learn to withstand the elements by having only one outfit. Children are never satiated with food or fed fancy dishes.
At the age of 7, the paidonomos organizes the boys into divisions of about 60 each called ilae under the supervision of an eiren aged about 20, at whose house the ilae eats. If the boys want more food, they go on hunts or raids. After dinner, the boys sing songs of war, history, and morality or the eiren quizzes them, training their memory, logic, and ability to speak laconically. It is not clear whether they learn to read. [For more on the issue of literacy in Sparta, see "Cretan Laws and Cretan Literacy," by James Whitley. American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 101, No. 4. (Oct., 1997), pp. 635-661 and "Literacy in the Spartan Oligarchy," by Paul Cartledge. Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 98, 1978 (1978), pp. 25-37.] The boys play ball games, ride, and swim. They sleep on reeds and suffer floggings -- silently, or they suffer again. Spartans study dance as a kind of gymnastic training for war dances as for wrestling. This was so central that Sparta was known as a dancing place from Homeric times. [For more on the importance of dancing in Sparta, see "Dionysiac Elements in Spartan Cult Dances," by Soteroula Constantinidou. Phoenix, Vol. 52, No. 1/2. (Spring - Summer, 1998), pp. 15-30. ]
Not only were the schools for the sons of the Spartiate, but also for foster sons. Xenophon, for instance, sent his two sons to Sparta for their education. Such students were called trophimoi. Even the sons of helots and perioikoi could be admitted, as syntrophoi or mothakes, but only if a Spartiate adopted them and paid their dues. If these did exceptionally well, they might later be enfranchised as Spartiates. Harley speculates that guilt may be a factor here because the helots and perioikoi often took in the children that the Spartiates had rejected at birth as unworthy of rearing.
At 16 the young men leave the agoge and join the syssitia, although they continue training so they can join the youth who become members of the Krypteia (Cryptia).
Krypteia
Passage from Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus:Hitherto I, for my part, see no sign of injustice or want of equity in the laws of Lycurgus, though some who admit them to be well contrived to make good soldiers, pronounce them defective in point of justice. The Cryptia, perhaps (if it were one of Lycurgus's ordinances, as Aristotle says it was), Gave both him and Plato, too, this opinion alike of the lawgiver and his government. By this ordinance, the magistrates dispatched privately some of the ablest of the young men into the country, from time to time, armed only with their daggers, and taking a little necessary provision with them; in the daytime, they hid themselves in out-of-the-way places, and there lay close, but, in the night, issued out into the highways, and killed all the Helots they could light upon; sometimes they set upon them by day, as they were at work in the fields, and murdered them. As, also, Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian war, tells us, that a good number of them, after being singled out for their bravery by the Spartans, garlanded, as enfranchised persons, and led about to all the temples in token of honors, shortly after disappeared all of a sudden, being about the number of two thousand; and no man either then or since could give an account how they came by their deaths. And Aristotle, in particular, adds, that the ephori, so soon as they were entered into their office, used to declare war against them, that they might be massacred without a breach of religion.
