The key privilege enjoyed by a Similar was the opportunity to participate full-time in public affairs: military training, battle, oversight of the youth, and state government. Money-making was meant to be strictly irrelevant to his life. (Many did make money, but they had to be sneaky about it.) All adult Similars were members of the Citizen Assembly of Spartans (the Apella), and as such they had the right to acclaim all matters of state policy (especially decisions on whether or not to go to war). Normally, however, their approval was indicated only by shouting in favor of the decisions reached by an inner elite of Spartan magistrates.

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In addition to two hereditary kings, who served as religious officials and field marshals, Sparta was run by five state officers called Ephors (Overseers), elected annually by their Similar equals. The Ephors were in turn advised by a body of twenty-eight Elders, who were chosen from the ranks of the senior Spartans. There was much room for confusion in this system; the lines of authority between the two kings and the Ephors were unclear, and much depended in practice on the personality of individuals. Clashes between competitive, headstrong kings and intransigent Ephors led to deadlocks in Spartan policy. Those deadlocks were sometimes broken by personal initiatives, alternately bold or foolish. Sparta’s most ambitious king was notably remembered as ‘Cleomenes the Mad.’ Though at the end of his life, his behavior became extremely violent and erratic, it was Cleomenes’s aggressive policy with his neighbors that may have set up the madness accusation. The internal social rigidity of Sparta was weirdly complemented by highly erratic foreign policy.

The Spartan Similar did not enjoy much physical comfort–at least in public. ‘Similarity’ meant avoiding any public display of wealth or taste for luxury. Each Spartan was expected to dress in rough clothes exactly like his fellows, to maintain his family in a simple house no different from that of other Spartans, to dine on the rough fare (especially a black bean soup famous among the Greeks for its unpalatability) provided in the mess units. He would spend most of his life in public, under the jealous and watchful eyes of his fellow Similars. He would not spend much time at home. His male children, of course, were growing up in the herds, under the same harsh regime that he had endured.

He spent little time in the company of his wife; indeed he might lend her to another Similar for breeding purposes. Spartan women were expected to accept this sort of treatment without demur, and to devote themselves to inculcating the doctrine of obedience, bravery, and duty in their children. It is a Spartan mother who, perhaps apocryphally, enjoined her son to return from a military mission ‘with his shield or on it’–a victor or a corpse.

For a long time, from the mid-seventh century through the early fourth, this austere system worked to produce the best soldiers in the Greek world. The Spartan Similar spent his entire life preparing for the rigors of battle, and he became extraordinarily good at it. This does not mean that he was a berserker, capable of defeating multiple opponents in single combat. The fifth-century historian Herodotus imagined a conversation on the topic of military valor between Demaratus, an exiled Spartan king living in Persia, and Xerxes, the king of the Persian empire: In 480 B.C. Xerxes was preparing to invade Greece with a huge army, and he was interested in learning about what sort of men he might encounter. Hearing that the Spartans were the best warriors in Greece, he summoned Demaratus. Since Xerxes expected to fight at odds close to ten to one, he supposed that he would not encounter any great difficulties. But Demaratus quickly disabused him: it was not outstanding capacity for fighting as individuals that distinguished the Spartans; rather it was the intense discipline and training that allowed them to fight effectively in the close order of the hoplite phalanx.

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