Women in ancient Sparta

Spartan women were famous in ancient Greece for having more freedom than elsewhere in the Greek world. To contemporaries outside of Sparta, Spartan women had a reputation for promiscuity and controlling their husbands. Unlike their Athenian counterparts, Spartan women could legally own property and inherit, and were better educated.

Our knowledge of the lives of women in Sparta is limited, however, and frequently rests on conjecture, as the written sources we have are limited and from a largely non-Spartan viewpoint. As Anton Powell puts it, to say that the written sources are "'not without problems'... as an understatement would be hard to beat".

According to Plutarch's testimony, Spartans practiced infanticide as a matter of course if children were thought to be unhealthy. It is unclear from this passage whether this applied to girls as well as boys, though evidence from elsewhere in Plutarch and Xenophon implies that it does not. It is likely that girls were simply given into the care of their mothers immediately after birth. There is not enough evidence, however, to say whether this was the case throughout Spartan history. Female Spartan babies were as well fed as their male counterparts – in contrast to the situation in Athens, where boys were better fed than girls – in order to have physically fit women to carry children and give birth.

Spartan boys were educated in the agoge from the age of seven, at least for some periods of Spartan history, and it seems that whenever the state arranged for the education of boys, it also institutionalised the education of girls. Unlike their male counterparts, however, Spartan girls would have been raised at home with their mothers while they were being educated. There is evidence for some form of official educational programme for girls as early as the archaic period, and this system seems to have been discontinued in the Hellenistic period. The extent to which education for girls was restored under the reforms of Cleomenes III is unclear, but it may have become voluntary rather than compulsory. State-supervised education for girls was once again restored in the Roman period, the agoge having been once again abolished in 188 BC. Women also took part in gymnastics and dance as physical activities, so they could give birth to healthy babies.

Literacy was, in Sparta, a skill limited to the elite. There is evidence from the Classical period that some women could read. For instance, anecdotes about Sparta are preserved which feature mothers writing letters to their sons who are away. As well as reading and writing, women studied mousike – which consisted not just of music, but also dance and poetry. Women seem to have learned to play musical instruments, as shown in surviving statuettes.

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