The Spartan Krypteia

The Spartan krypteia (also spelled crypteia) is one of the most fascinating and yet enigmatic features of the Lykurgan Constitution. Every scholar, going back to the ancient Greeks themselves, seems to have imagined their own version of this mysterious practice—perhaps not surprisingly, since it was clearly something done rather secretly, or at least in the shadows, in a society not known for its openness to outsiders. Thus, it seems useful to gather together in one place not only these various interpretations but also the original sources themselves, especially since many of them are only available in languages other than English. Any student of Ancient Sparta should be able to use this page to draw their own conclusion about what the krypteia was really all about.

Reference Materials

Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968):

κρυπ-ταδιος [α], α, ον (and ος, ον Aeschylus.Choephori.946 (lyric poetry)),

secret, clandestine, κρυπταδιη φιλοτητι Iliad.6.161;

κρυπταδιου μαχας Aeschylus.Choephori.946;

κρυπταδια φρονεοντα Iliad.1.542.

Regul.Adv. -ιως Manetho.2.195, 6.182.

-τεια, η, (κρυπτευω) secret service at Sparta, Plato.Leges.633b;

employed against the Helots, Aristotle.Fragmenta.538;

ο επι της κ. τεταγμενος Plutarch.Cleomenes.28.

-της, ου, ο, member of the Spartan κρυπτεια, Euripides.Fragmenta.1126 (si vera lectio)

της πολιτειας το κ. the secret character of the [Spartan] institutions, Thucydides.5.68

η κρυπτη (sc. αρχη) secret service, used by the Athenians in the subject-states, Anecdota Graeca 2.73

Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, eds., Oxford Classical Dictionary, Third edition, revised.

krypteia Part of the Classical Spartan upbringing (see agoge), during which (probably, selected) youths traversed the countryside, concealing themselves by day. It represents arguably the transformation of an early initiation rite. Some sources present it as a lengthy test of individual endurance without equipment or prepared rations, others as a brief exercise by a group provided with supplies and daggers for killing prominent helots; these may be sequential stages of the institution. Different modern interpretations of the krypteia—military preparation or a transitional period of ‘opposition’ to adult hoplite life—are not necessarily incompatible.

E. Levy, Ktema 1988, 245-52; P. Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter (1986; Fr. orig. 1981), ch. 5

Stephen J. Hodkinson

Christine F. Salazar and Francis G. Gentry, eds., Brill’s New Pauly. English Edition.

(κρυπτεία; krypteía). There are two different versions regarding the institution called krypteia in Sparta. According to Plato, the krypteia was a military training under the harshest conditions in the open field, with the soldiers supplied only with small amounts of equipment. The goal was to increase the courage of the Spartans and their capacity to bear pain (Pl. Leg. 633b-c; cf. P Lond. 187). Plutarch, on the other hand, reports that young Spartans, solely provided with a sword and little food, had the task of hiding by day and murdering helots by night. Because of the very brutality of the krypteia, it is of importance to him to date its introduction only to the time after the great uprising of the helots before the middle of the 5th cent. BC, and hence to deny a link with Lycurgus (Plut. Lycurgus 28 = Aristot. fr. 538 R).

These two versions are by no means incompatible. Possibly, a test of toughness which was originally military later took on more extensive functions that were legitimized through the ephores' annual declaration of war on the helots. It is a convincing hypothesis that the κρυπτοί (kryptoí) in the Classical period were specially chosen young Spartans shortly before the attainment of full citizenship, and that the krypteia should therefore be viewed as an initiation rite at which the agōgḗ was concluded through the killing of an enemy. In 222 BC the krypteia seems to have fought as a unit in Sellasia (Plut. Cleomenes 28).

Cartledge, Paul A. (Cambridge)

Bibliography

1 W. den Boer, Laconian Studies, 1954

2 P. Cartledge, Agesilaus and the Crisis of Sparta, 1987

3 J. Ducat, Crypties, in: Cahiers Glotz VIII, 1997, 9-38

4 Id., Les Hilotes, 1990

5 M. I. Finley, Sparta, in: K. Christ (ed.), Sparta, 1986, 327-350

6 S. Hodkinson, s.v. Krypteia, OCD, 31996, 808

7 H. Jeanmaire, La cryptie Lacédémonienne, in: REG 26, 1913, 121-150

8 N. Kennell, The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta, 1995

9 P. Vidal-Naquet, Le chasseur noir, 1981.

See also the Wikipedia entry (Crypteia).

Ancient Sources

Plutarch, Life of Lykurgus, 28 (Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA), translated by Bernadotte Perrin)

28 (1) Now in all this there is no trace of injustice or arrogance, which some attribute to the laws of Lycurgus, declaring them efficacious in producing valour, but defective in producing righteousness. The so-called "krupteia," or secret service, of the Spartans, if this be really one of the institutions of Lycurgus, as Aristotle says it was, may have given Plato also [Laws, 630d] this opinion of the man and his civil polity. (2) This secret service was of the following nature. The magistrates from time to time sent out into the country at large the most discreet of the young warriors, equipped only with daggers and such supplies as were necessary. In the day time they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, where they hid themselves and lay quiet; but in the night they came down into the highways and killed every Helot whom they caught. (3) Oftentimes, too, they actually traversed the fields where Helots were working and slew the sturdiest and best of them. So, too, Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian war [Thuc. iv.80], tells us that the Helots who had been judged by the Spartans to be superior in bravery, set wreaths upon their heads in token of their emancipation, and visited the temples of the gods in procession, but a little afterwards all disappeared, more than two thousand of them, in such a way that no man was able to say, either then or afterwards, how they came by their deaths. (4) And Aristotle in particular says also that the ephors, as soon as they came into office, made formal declaration of war upon the Helots, in order that there might be no impiety in slaying them.

And in other ways also they were harsh and cruel to the Helots. For instance, they would force them to drink too much strong wine, and then introduce them into their public messes, to show the young men what a thing drunkenness was. They also ordered them to sing songs and dance dances that were low and ridiculous, but to let the nobler kind alone. (5) And therefore in later times, they say, when the Thebans made their expedition into Laconia [under Epaminondas, 369 BC], they ordered the Helots whom they captured to sing the songs of Terpander, Alcman, and Spendon the Spartan; but they declined to do so, on the plea that their masters did not allow it, thus proving the correctness of the saying: "In Sparta the freeman is more a freeman than anywhere else in the world, and the slave more a slave." (6) However, in my opinion, such cruelties were first practised by the Spartans in later times, particularly after the great earthquake [464 BC cf. Plutarch’s Cimon, xvi], when the Helots and Messenians together rose up against them, wrought the widest devastation in their territory, and brought their city into the greatest peril. I certainly cannot ascribe to Lycurgus so abominable a measure as the "krupteia," judging of his character from his mildness and justice in all other instances. To this the voice of the god also bore witness. [See Plut. Lyk. v.3.]

Plutarch, Cleomenes, 28 (Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA), translated by Bernadotte Perrin)

“He therefore called Damoteles, the commander of the secret service contingent, . . .”

Plato, Laws I.633b-c (translated by Benjamin Jowett)

“Megillus: I think that I can get as far as the fourth head, which is the frequent endurance of pain, exhibited among us Spartans in certain hand-to-hand fights; also in stealing with the prospect of getting a good beating; there is, too, the so-called Crypteia, or secret service, in which wonderful endurance is shown⎯our people wander over the whole country by day and by night, and even in winter have not a shoe to their foot, and are without beds to lie upon, and have to attend upon themselves. Marvelous, too, is the endurance which our citizens show in their naked exercises, contending against the violent summer heat; and there are many similar practices, to speak of which in detail would be endless.”

Plato, Laws I.633b-c (translated by R.G. Bury)

[633b] “Megillus: The fourth also I may attempt to state: it is the training, widely prevalent amongst us, in hardy endurance of pain, by means both of manual contests and of robberies carried out every time at the risk of a sound drubbing; moreover, the “Crypteia,” as it is called, affords a wonderfully severe training [633c] in hardihood, as the men go bare-foot in winter and sleep without coverlets and have no attendants, but wait on themselves and rove through the whole countryside both by night and by day. Moreover in our games, we have severe tests of endurance, when men unclad do battle with the violence of the heat,—and there are other instances so numerous that the recital of them would be well-nigh endless.”

Scholiast on Plato’s Laws

“This is what the crypteia was: a young man was sent away from the city, and he should not allow himself to be seen for a certain period. He was therefore forced to live by wandering in the mountains and only sleeping while still on alert so as not to be surprised, and with neither servants nor provisions. This was also another form of training for war. In effect, each youth, being consigned to live without any equipment, was thereby encouraged to wander about freely for a whole year in the mountains and to feed himself through theft and other such means, and all this without being seen; this is also why it is called the krypteia; in fact, those who allowed themselves to be discovered were punished.”

Aristotle, frag. 538 Rose (ap. Plut. Lyk. 28)

“The so-called 'Krypteia' of the Spartans, if this really is one of Lykourgos' institutions, as Aristotle says, may have given Plato (Laws 630D) too this idea of (Lykourgos) and his polity. The Krypteia was like this. The magistrates from time to time sent out into the country those who appeared the most resourceful of the youth, equipped only with daggers and minimum provisions. In the daytime they dispersed into obscure places, where they hid and lay low. By night they came down into the highways and despatched any Helot they caught. Often too they went into the fields and did away with the sturdiest and most powerful Helots. . . . And Aristotle specifically says also that the Ephors upon entering office declared war on the Helots, so that their murder might not bring with it ritual pollution.” [quoted in Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia, 304-5]

Aristotle, Lak. Pol. (excerpted by Heraclides Lembi 373.10 Dilts)

“It is also said that he [Lykurgus] was the creator of the Krytpeia, in which the rule, still in force today, is that while making an armed expedition, they should hide themselves by day and then spread themselves out by night and kill as many helots as they can.”

or

“It is said that (Lykourgos) also introduced the Krypteia. In accordance with this institution even now they go out by day and conceal themselves, but by night they use weapons to kill as many of the Helots as is expedient.” [quoted in Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia, 305]

Plato, Laws VI.760-763 (translated by R.G. Bury)

. . . All the rest of the country must be guarded in the following manner: we have marked out the whole country as nearly as possible into twelve equal portions: to each portion one tribe shall be assigned by lot, and it shall provide five men to act as land-stewards and phrourarchs (“watch-captains”); it shall be the duty of each of the Five to select twelve [760c] young men from his own tribe of an age neither under 25 nor over 30. To these groups of twelve the twelve portions of the country shall be assigned, one to each in rotation for a month at a time, so that all of them may gain experience and knowledge of all parts of the country. The period of office and of service for guards and officers shall be two years. From the portion in which they are stationed first by the lot they shall pass on month by month to the next district, under the leadership of the phrourarchs, in a direction from left to right,— [760d] and that will be from west to east. When the first year is completed, in order that as many as possible of the guards may not only become familiar with the country in one season of the year, but may also learn about what occurs in each several district at different seasons, their leaders shall lead them back again in the reverse direction, constantly [760e] changing their district, until they have completed their second year of service. For the third year they must elect other land-stewards and phrourarchs. During their periods of residence in each district their duties shall be as follows: first, in order to ensure that the country shall be fenced as well as possible against enemies, they shall make channels wherever needed, and dig moats and build crosswalls, so as to keep out to the best of their power those who attempt in any way to damage the country [761a] and its wealth; and for these purposes they shall make use of the beasts of burden and the servants in each district, employing the former and supervising the latter, and choosing always, so far as possible, the times when these people are free from their own business. In all respects they must make movement as difficult as possible for enemies, but for friends—whether men, mules or cattle—as easy as possible, by attending to the roads, that they all may become as level as possible, and to the rain-waters, that they may benefit instead of injuring the country, as they flow down from the heights into all the [761b] hollow valleys in the mountains: they shall dam the outflows of their flooded dales by means of walls and channels, so that by storing up or absorbing the rains from heaven, and by forming pools or springs in all the low-lying fields and districts, they may cause even the driest spots to be abundantly supplied with good water. As to spring-waters, be they streams or fountains, they shall beautify and embellish them by means of plantations and buildings, [761c] and by connecting the pools by hewn tunnels they shall make them all abundant, and by using water-pipes they shall beautify at all seasons of the year any sacred glebe or grove that may be close at hand, by directing the streams right into the temples of the gods. And everywhere in such spots the young men should erect gymnasia both for themselves and for the old men—providing warm baths for the old: they should keep there a plentiful supply of dry wood, [761d] and give a kindly welcome and a helping hand to sick folk and to those whose bodies are worn with the toils of husbandry—a welcome far better than a doctor who is none too skilful. They shall carry on these, and all similar operations, in the country districts, by way of ornament as well as use, and to furnish recreation also of no ungraceful kind. The serious duties in this department shall be as follows:—The Sixty must guard each their own district, not only because of enemies, but in view also of those who profess to be friends. And if one either of the foreign neighbors or of the citizens [761e] injures another citizen, be the culprit a slave or a freeman, the judges for the complainant shall be the Five officers themselves in petty cases, and the Five each with their twelve subordinates in more serious cases, where the damages claimed are up to three minae. No judge or official should hold office without being subject to an audit, excepting only those who, like kings, form a court of final appeal. So too with regard to these land-stewards if they do any violence to those whom they supervise, [762a] by imposing unfair charges, or by trying to plunder some of their farm-stores without their consent, or if they take a gift intended as a bribe, or distribute goods unjustly—for yielding to seduction they shall be branded with disgrace throughout the whole State; and in respect of all other wrongs they have committed against people in the district, up to the value of one mina, they shall voluntarily submit to trial before the villagers and neighbors; and should they on any occasion, in respect of either a greater or lesser wrong, [762b] refuse thus to submit,—trusting that by their moving on every month to a new district they will escape trial,—in such cases the injured party must institute proceedings at the public courts, and if he win his suit, he shall exact the double penalty from the defendant who has absconded and refused to submit voluntarily to trial. The mode of life of the officers and land-stewards during their two years of service shall be of the following kind. First, [762c] in each of the districts there shall be common meals, at which all shall mess together. If a man absents himself by day, or by sleeping away at night, without orders from the officers or some urgent cause, and if the Five inform against him and post his name up in the market-place as guilty of deserting his watch, then he shall suffer degradation for being a traitor to his public duty, and whoever meets him and desires to punish him may give him a beating [762d] with impunity. And if any one of the officers themselves commits any such act, it will be proper for all the Sixty to keep an eye on him; and if any of them notices or hears of such an act, but fails to prosecute, he shall be held guilty under the same laws, and shall be punished more severely than the young men; he shall be entirely disqualified from holding posts of command over the young men. Over these matters the Law-wardens shall exercise most careful supervision, to prevent if possible their occurrence, and, where they do occur, to ensure that they meet with the punishment they deserve. [762e] Now it is needful that every man should hold the view, regarding men in general, that the man who has not been a servant will never become a praiseworthy master, and that the right way to gain honor is by serving honorably rather than by ruling honorably—doing service first to the laws, since this is service to the gods, and, secondly, the young always serving the elder folk and those who have lived honorable lives. In the next place, he who is made a land-steward must have partaken of the daily rations, which are coarse and uncooked, during the two years of service. For whenever the Twelve have been chosen, [763a] being assembled together with the Five, they shall resolve that, acting like servants, they will keep no servants or slaves to wait on themselves, nor will they employ any attendants belonging to the other farmers or villagers for their own private needs, but only for public requirements; and in all other respects they shall determine to live a self-supporting life, acting as their own ministers and masters, and thoroughly exploring, moreover, the whole country both by summer and winter, [763b] under arms, for the purpose both of fencing and of learning each several district. For that all should have an accurate knowledge of their own country is a branch of learning that is probably second to none: so the young men ought to practise running with hounds and all other forms of hunting, as much for this reason as for the general enjoyment and benefit derived from such sports. With regard, then, to this branch of service—both the men themselves and their duties, whether we choose to call them secret-service men or land-stewards or by any other name— [763c] every single man who means to guard his own State efficiently shall do his duty zealously to the best of his power.

Plato, Laws VI.763b (translated by Benjamin Jowett)

The wardens and the overseers of the country, while on their two years service, shall have common meals at their several stations, and shall all live together; and he who is absent from the common meal, or sleeps out, if only for one day or night, unless by order of his commanders, or by reason of absolute necessity, if the five denounce him and inscribe his name the agora as not having kept his guard, let him be deemed to have betrayed the city, as far as lay in his power, and let him be disgraced and beaten with impunity by any one who meets him and is willing to punish him. If any of the commanders is guilty of such an irregularity, the whole company of sixty shall see to it, and he who is cognizant of the offence, and does not bring the offender to trial, shall be amenable to the same laws as the younger offender himself, and shall pay a heavier fine, and be incapable of ever commanding the young. The guardians of the law are to be careful inspectors of these matters, and shall either prevent or punish offenders. Every man should remember the universal rule, that he who is not a good servant will not be a good master; a man should pride himself more upon serving well than upon commanding well: first upon serving the laws, which is also the service of the Gods; in the second place, upon having. served ancient and honourable men in the days of his youth. Furthermore, during the two years in which any one is a warden of the country, his daily food ought to be of a simple and humble kind. When the twelve have been chosen, let them and the five meet together, and determine that they will be their own servants, and, like servants, will not have other slaves and servants for their own use, neither will they use those of the villagers and husbandmen for their private advantage, but for the public service only; and in general they should make up their minds to live independently by themselves, servants of each other and of themselves. Further, at all seasons of the year, summer and winter alike, let them be under arms and survey minutely the whole country; thus they will at once keep guard, and at the same time acquire a perfect knowledge of every locality. There can be no more important kind of information than the exact knowledge of a man's own country; and for this as well as for more general reasons of pleasure and advantage, hunting with dogs and other kinds of sports should be pursued by the young. The service to whom this is committed may be called the secret police, or wardens of the country; the name does not much signify, but every one who has the safety of the state at heart will use his utmost diligence in this service.

Justinus, Epitome of Pompeius Troga III.3

He [Lykurgus] ordered boys to be carried, not into the forum, but into the field, that they might spend their early years, not in effeminate employments, but in hard labour and exertion; not suffering them to put anything under them to sleep upon, or to live on black broth, and forbidding them to return into the city till they arrived at manhood.

Papyrus Fragment BM 187

“. . . having received an animal skin and some sandals, they stayed for two full years to drink from the water, to be covered in snow, to dig, to submit themselves to a strict diet, neither living under the laws of a doctor or the government nor having any desire for softness or sweetness. Agesilaus the Laconian surprised...

Modern Sources

Martin P. Nilsson, “Grundlagen des spartanischen Lebens” Klio 12 (1912): 336.

Henri Jeanmaire, “La cryptie lacédémonienne,” Revue des études grecques 26, no. 117 (1913): 121-150.

The most explicit information on the Lakedemonian custom of the krypteia is provided by Plutarch (Lyc. 28), who is not surprised himself about what he relates. At certain times designated by the magistrates, he tells us, young Lakedemonians spread about the countryside, carefully hiding themselves during the day and, at nighttime, falling upon the helots that they encounter and mercilessly killing them. A passage attributed to Heraclides Ponticus (Müller, Fr. Hist. Gr.. Didot, II, 210), some allusions in the Laws of Plato (I, 633B), and an important commentary on one of these passages allows us to affirm that the krypteia was a regular institution to which all young Spartiates were called. . . . [continued on a separate page]

T. Rutherford Harley, “The Public School of Sparta,” Greece & Rome 3, no. 9 (1934): 139.

At the age of sixteen school days were over; the boys joined the Syssitia, or men's clubs, and life became even more strenuous. They had to undergo an intensive training in controlled pugnacity to fit them for their Ephebate at eighteen, when they joined the Krypteia, the Secret Service or State Patrols of sinister fame.

H. Mitchell, Sparta (Cambridge University Press, 1964), 162-64.

A Spartan institution, which has invariably horrified both ancient and modern commentators, was that of the secret police or crypteia. According to the account given by Plutarch,^{Lyc. xxxviii} the ephors ‘from time to time’ sent out young Spartans armed with daggers into the country parts. Hiding by day, they sallied out at night and murdered indiscriminately any unsuspecting and helpless helot they could find. Apparently this was done on the principle of thereby encouraging the other helots to a submissive state of mind. The crypteia was, therefore, a secret police of the most tyrannical and vicious description for the express purpose of terrorism, in which, if our information can be relied upon, they must have been singularly successful.

Secret assassination has always been a favourite weapon of all tyrannies, and we need not hesitate to attribute such means to the Spartan ephors when dealing with a disaffected and, at times, mutinous helotry. It is altogether probable that they did send out assassins to ‘liquidate’ particularly obnoxious helots. But that is not to say that indiscriminate murder was regularly resorted to. It is to be noted that Plutarch carefully says ‘from time to time’, and we may infer therefrom that this drastic measure was only resorted to on extraordinary occasions. There is nothing whatever to show that every young Spartan took a course in murder as part of his regular training.

But, however that may be, there does seem to have been some secret body⎯the name crypteia implies that⎯which was at the disposal of the ephors for special service, a kind of ‘commando’ corps made up of picked youths. Pompeius Trogus says that every Spartan either served in it, or was liable to be called up to the age of thirty.^{Justin, iii, 3} Regular service in it seems to have been for two years, and Giraud^{REG xi (1898), pp. 31ff.} suggests that possibly recruits were melleirens, youths from eighteen to twenty, after which they might be called up at any time for special service. We hear of the corps again when it was employed at the battle of Sellasia,^{Plut. Cleom. xxviii} which suggests that at least at that date, it was a regularly constituted part of the army.

Several explanations of the existence of this singular body have been given. Jeanmaire,^{REG xxvi (1913), p. 121} in an important study of the crypteia, seeks to show that it was part of the long series of initiations through which youths had to pass before entering the status of full manhood. Numerous examples drawn from primitive peoples at the present go to support his argument. A withdrawing from the rest of the tribe for a period, hiding outside the settlement and living on whatever theft or ingenuity can provide, are all to be found in the primitive savages in Australia, South Africa and the North American Indians. The parallels drawn by Jeanmaire are so exact that it is impossible to deny the strength of the argument. There is little doubt that service in the crypteia was part of the arduous training that went to the making of a Spartan.

Giraud puts forward the theory that we have in Plato's^{Legg. vi, 760ff.} description of the rural guardians or agronomoi an account of the crypteia as it actually did function. These youths, who were to serve for two years, were to busy themselves, somewhat on the pattern of the boy scouts, in all sorts of ‘good deeds’ in the rural parts and in making themselves generally useful. Certainly it is hard to suppose that the Spartan youths busied themselves in mending watercourses and broken down walls, as Plato would have his agronomoi. Such manual labour would have been utterly alien to the whole spirit of Spartan philosophy in the training of the warrior caste. We know that the ephebes of Attica were employed as rural patrols.^{Pollux, viii, 105; Aesch. de Falsa Leg. 167; Thuc. iv, 67; viii, 92; Aristoph. Aves, 1167.} It is not unlikely that the crypteia was made similar use of.

One pertinent suggestion is that the crypteia was used as a kind of guard against the thieving of the boys. The contest between this body of secret police and the hungry boys, who were forced to supplement their meagre fare by theft, came to be a kind of game played between them, designed to sharpen the wits of both sides. Perhaps this was so; nothing definite can be said on that score. The only conclusion to which we can arrive is that service in the crypteia was a part of the training of Spartan youths, who were used by the ephors at their discretion, and that sometimes the removal of undesirable people was carried out through its agency. We are not expressly told so, but it is reasonable to suppose that the arrest of Cinadon was carried out by members of the crypteia.^{Xen. Hell. iii, 3, 8-9} It is also obvious that as a check upon the helots it was useful. That the youths were sent out to commit murder indiscriminately is so monstrous as to be incredible.

A.H.M. Jones, Sparta (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967).

[pp. 9-10] There was also the institution of the Krypteia (Plut. Lyc. 28), whereby young Spartan warriors were sent out into the country with an iron ration and dagger, and hid by day and killed the most active Helots by night. [Note c: Jeanmaire, (Revue des études grecques XXVI (1913), pp. 121 ff. ‘La Cryptie Lacédémonienne’) prefers to believe with Plato (Laws, VI, 760 ff. and the scholiast) that the Krypteia was a kind of boy scout training in tracking. I prefer to believe the factual Aristotle rather than the idealizing Plato.] Plutarch had to admit that this unpleasant institution was attributed to Lycurgus on the evidence of Aristotle.

[p. 99] “Early in Agesilaus’ reign (398) an alarming incident took place. An informer came to the ephors and told them that he had been approached by Cinadon, a man who was not one of the peers, probably an Inferior. . . . Cinadon, who was in the service of the ephors, apparently as a member of the krypteia, was sent out with six or seven Spartiates on a pretended mission to arrest some suspect Helots, and was then arrested, and, after revealing his confederates, executed.”^{Xen. Hell. III.iii.4-11}

M.I. Finley, "Sparta" in The Use and Abuse of History (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), 165, 239n.

This ancient rite of initiation at the age of eighteen became rationalized, that is, re-institutionalized, by being tied to a new police function assigned to an elite youth corps. Significantly, policing the helots was one of their duties.⁹

• 9. On the whole I follow the interpretation of the krypteia by H. Jeanmaire, Couroi et Couretes (Lille 1939) pp. 540-69. Aristotle, according to Plutarch, Lycurgus 28, tied it entirely to policing the helots, but that this is too narrow seems a legitimate inference from Xenophon's carefully veiled generalities (4.4), from the few details we have about the suppression of Cinadon's revolt, and, if it is to be trusted, from the reference to the krypteia in Plutarch, Cleomenes 28.3. On the other hand, I do not believe that the silence in Plato, Laws 633B-C (and in the scholia on the passage), entitles us to reject the Aristotelian tradition as a pure invention reflecting the outside world's image of Spartan brutality to the helots.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, translated by Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998). [orig. 1981]

[p.6] The time between childhood and adulthood, which is the time of war and political life, becomes a period of trial and initiation like that practiced by "primitive" societies. The Spartiate krypteiai (secret missions) are composed of the elite youths, who roam the mountains in winter and steal, deceive, and murder the helots before becoming, by a brutal reversal of values, hoplites.

[p.112-114] It may help to formulate these problems more precisely if I now digress in order to discuss the Spartan krypteia, an institution that has often been compared to the Athenian ephebia, and which, although it involved a much smaller number of young men, was indeed parallel to it in some respects. It is well known that we have a very small number of sources for the krypleia,³⁵ but the scholiast on Plato's Laws 1.633b says explicitly that it was a preparation for military life. And Koechly argued as early as 1835 that this training was to be compared to that of the Athenian peripoloi; a point made even more clearly by Ernst Wachsmuth, who lucidly observed that this military apprenticeship took the special form of a helot-hunt.

A brilliant article by Henri Jeanmaire elucidated the fundamental characteristics of the krypteia by means of comparison with certain African societies: compulsory isolation of certain young men around the time of puberty; living in the bush; even the killing of helots⎯all these can be paralleled in black Africa, in the initiation ceremonies and secret societies of Wolf-men and Panther-men. But if this is so, what is the military role of the krypteia? Jeanmaire's reply was unequivocal: "The whole of Spartan military history cries out against the idea of turning the Spartan hoplite into a tracker in the bush, clambering over rocks and walls." And he added wryly that if the krypteia, with its camping out in the mountains, had really been a training for military life at the time of the battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.), Ephialtes' path⎯by which the Persians surprised the Spartans⎯would have been discovered and guarded.

To my mind, Jeanmaire was both profoundly right and profoundly wrong. What he failed to understand was that the krypteia was by no means completely unrelated to the life of the hoplite: the two were symmetrical opposites. A list from what the sources tell us shows:

1. The hoplite is armed to the teeth; the youth in the krypteia is gymnos [naked], which means either that he carried no arms at all (Schol. to Plato's Laws 1.633b) or that he had only a dagger (Plut. Lycurgus 28.2).
2. The member of the phalanx is opposed to the youth on his own or living in a small group.
3. The fighter in the plain is opposed to the youth who runs wild in the mountains.
4. Plato's youth in the krypteia did his training in the middle of winter; the hoplite fought in summer.
5. The trustworthy hoplite cheered on by Tyrtaeus (seventh century B.C.) is opposed to the cunning killer of helots.
6. The man who fights in the light of day is opposed to the youth who fights by night.
7. The scholiast on Plato's Laws says that the youth in the krypteia ate whatever he could find, living from hand to mouth, probably without ever finding time to have anything cooked; whereas the hoplite is above all a member of a common mess, the syssition.
8. The members of the krypteia stayed in the areas that became, in a sense, the frontiers of enemy territories⎯for the ephors annually declared war on the helots in a ritual comparable to the Roman declaration of war by the Fetiales.³⁹ (In contrast, the full hoplites were obliged to remain, in peacetime, close to their syssitia, that is, close to Sparta itself.)

In sum, with the hoplite, order (taxis) reigns; in the krypteia there is nothing but cunning, deception, disorder, irrationality. To borrow Lévi-Strauss's terms, one might say that the hoplite is on the side of culture, of what is "cooked," while the krypteia is on the side of nature, of the "raw," bearing in mind of course that this "nature," the side of nonculture, is itself to some degree socially organized. And we might apply this point more widely: for example, in Crete we find agelai of young men, which Pierre Chantraine interprets as the "herds of animals that are driven along," as opposed to the hetaireiai, the "brotherhoods" of mature men. And I could go on, but I have said enough to indicate how, by a procedure that Lévi-Strauss would term a logical inversion, the krypteia dramatizes the moment when the young elite Spartan leaves his childhood behind him forever. . . .

I think we may generalize and extend what I have already said in discussing the Spartan krypteia: for we must recognize that in Athens and in many other parts of the Greek world⎯above all in Sparta and Crete, where very archaic institutions were preserved until well into the Hellenistic period⎯the transition between childhood and adulthood (the period of marriage and fighting) is dramatized both in ritual and in myth by what we might call the "law of symmetrical inversion."

[pp. 147-148] What was true of the Athenian ephebe at the level of myth is true of the Spartan kryptos in practice: the kryptos appears in every respect to be an anti-hoplite. The kryptoi were young men who left the city to roam, in secret and in isolation, "naked" (that is, not heavily armed), through mountains and countryside, feeding themselves as they might, assassinating helots under cover of night⎯the helots against whom the Ephors, to ensure that no pollution attached to such killings, declared war each year. According to the scholiast on Plato's Laws 3.633b, the period of seclusion lasted an entire year, although Plato himself expressly remarks that it occurred in winter. We have only to invert this text to find the rules that governed the manner of life and the moral and social behavior of the hoplite, whose virtues otherwise compose the very fabric of Spartan life: collective living and eating, fighting in the open, on the flat, in summer⎯a mode of fighting founded upon the face-to-face encounter of two sets of phalanxes. And yet, just as only a tiny number of Athenian girls played the part of "bears," only a tiny number of Spartiates followed this mode of life, which Jeanmaire compared to the "lycanthropy" known particularly in Africa. Plutarch noted that it was "the most astute" (tous malista noun echein dokountas; Lycurgus 28.2) young Spartiates who were chosen for this ritual of status-transition; and it is probable that, once they became adults and full warriors, it was the kryptoi who composed the elite formation of three hundred "cavalrymen" concerned above all with police duties.⁶⁰ In other words, it is impossible to detach the krypteia from the practical part it played in Spartiate society, a role that must have been developed for the most part from the eighth century, the date of the conquest of Messenia; that is, to maintain in every way possible a repressive regime faced with the endemic rebellions of the subject population of Messenia and of Laconia itself. The kryptos, like the ephebe of Athenian myth, is a guileful hunter⎯but he hunts helots. The temporary "wildness" of the krypteia is an utterly socialized, even political, wildness: it functions directly to maintain the political and social order.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “The Black Hunter Revisited,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, n.s., 32, no. 212 (1986): 127.

What was the central intuition of the paper [his original article on this subject, “The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian ephebeia”]? It was related not to Athens but to Sparta, and was an answer to a question raised by Jeanmaire in 1913. What was the military role of the krypteia, this strange institution of Sparta? Did these very select young men, the kryptoi, who ran in the mountains during winter time and killed helots with cunning, undergo a military preparation? Jeanmaire protested: “The whole of Spartan military history cries out against the idea of turning the Spartiate hoplite into a tracker in the bush, clambering over rocks and walls.” My answer was that we should read this contract as a table of social opposition. The kryptos was to the hoplite what the mountain was to the plain, the gymnos youth to the face-to-face fighter of the phalanx, the night and day, and, of course, the raw to the cooked.

Paul Cartledge, Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta (London: Duckworth, 1987), 30-32.

Two versions of the Krypteia, a hard and a soft, are contained in the ancient literary sources. The 'soft' version is presented by the generally pro-Spartan Plato (Laws 633bc, cf. 760e, 761b, 763b). In a consideration of Spartan practices instituted for the purpose of war Plato's Athenian interlocutor (a surrogate for Plato himself) cites gymnastic exercises and common meals. To these the Spartan interlocutor Megillos adds hunting and, as a broad category, the endurance of pain ― 'a very conspicuous feature of Spartan life', as he rightly says. Under the latter general heading Megillos cites boxing matches and whippings, which would both affect the paides [young man]; then the Krypteia, during which the participants go without shoes and bedding even in winter; and finally the Gymnopaidiai, the annual festival of the 'Naked Boys' in which the men display extraordinary endurance of the summer heat. This sequence apparently confirms that the Krypteia was the speciality of those between the status of boys and men, but Megillos' picture of the Krypteia as a kind of glorified endurance test in which the only sufferers of pain were the Spartan youths is monstrously one-sided.

Or at least it is if we are to believe the radically different 'hard' version that Plutarch found in the work on the Spartan politeia [constitution] compiled under the direction of Plato's most distinguished pupil, Aristotle, a thinker who consistently and cogently took a far less favourable view of Sparta than his master. According to the Aristotelian Lak. Pol. (fr. 538, ap. Plut. Lyk. 28), the Ephors annually on taking office (in late autumn) made a solemn declaration of war upon the Helots in the name of the Spartan state. The express aim of this declaration was to exonerate in advance from the taint of blood-pollution any Spartan who should happen to kill a Helot; and it was under cover of this precautionary exemption that the members of the Krypteia fulfilled their primary function of doing away with unwanted Helots, according to the Aristotelian version. This they did by going out into the country, presumably in Messenia as well as or rather than in Lakonia (hence the need for the special mountain-leggings called kalbateinai mentioned in the London papyrus), lying hidden by day and coming out at night to perform their dirty business.

The kindly Plutarch could not believe that Lykourgos could have sanctioned let alone invented such a dreadful institution and salved his conscience by ascribing its introduction to the aftermath of the particularly savage Messenian revolt of the 460s during which for example a detachment of 300 Spartans was annihilated (Hdt. 9.64.2, cf. 35.2). Modern historians of course need neither be as squeamish as Plutarch nor indeed adopt a moralizing attitude of any kind, however outlandish they may find this hitherto unparalleled example of a ruling class ritually declaring war in a literal sense upon its entire workforce. They need merely turn to a splendid pioneering article (Jeanmaire 1913) in which a French historian amply demonstrated through a host of especially African ethnographic parallels the striking similarities between the Krypteia and the final phase of male initiation rites in tribal societies.

Jeanmaire's hypothesis about the ultimate origins of the Krypteia has been brilliantly confirmed by another French historian (Vidal-Naquet 1981,151-74, excellently translated into English in Gordon 1981), who has pointed out that the kruptoi were a sort of anti-hoplites. Whereas the adult citizen hoplites fought heavily-armed and en masse in the heat of a summer's day, the members of the Krypteia hunted their prey alone and at night even during the winter, armed only with a dagger and wearing the barest minimum of protective clothing. Such a reversal of the norms of adult society is utterly typical of the final phase of the adolescent initiation rites studied by anthropologists across a very broad spectrum of natural and social environments and levels of technical development. The best explanation of the Krypteia, in other words, is that it represents a re-institutionalization or re-adaptation of an existing initiation rite in order for it to serve not merely a social but also a police function. If Sparta may under certain circumstances properly be described as a police state, the Krypteia offered the appropriate kind of paramilitary training for those who were destined to be the superintendents and chief constables of this society. It would therefore have been entirely appropriate for Agesilaos to have participated in the Krypteia, and the stress in the sources on his model performance in the agoge is consistent with the suggestion that he did in fact do so. It is not absolutely certain whether all Spartan ephebes took part or only a select number of them . . .

Edmond Lévy, "La Kryptie et Ses Contradictions" KTEMA 13 (1988): 245-52.

The Krypteia and Its Contradictions

The Spartan krypteia¹ has often been compared to the initiation rites so dear to anthropologists. But we have not been concerned enough to know how that really worked, at least in the classical period, say from the fourth century, the date at which the krypteia appears² in our sources.

It is mentioned and described in four main sources:

1) Plato, Laws, I.633b-c;

2) the scholiast of the same passage;

3) Plutarch, Life of Lykurgus, 28.1-7;

4) the pseudo-Heraclides Lembi, C. Müller, FHG, 2, p. 210 = Aristotle, fragement 538 Rosë

to which we can add two allusions:

5) Plato, Laws, VI.763b;

6) Plutarch, Life of Cleomenes, 28.4.

Some commentators have also thought to have seen the krypteia in

7) a papyrus fragment from the British Museum, no. CLXXXVII,

8) Justin, 3, 3.³

. . . .

[248] The krypteia has generally been described by combining the features mentioned in these different texts, which then comprises a test imposed on young Spartans, or to a selection from among them, and a repressive institution towards the helots, the military aspect of the institution being left out more often by the commentators.

There are, in fact, three distinct sets of texts:

1) some make the krypteia out to be an endurance exercise (#1), that is a kind of test imposed on some Spartan youths (#2);

2) others insist on the repressive function (#3 and #4); [249]

3) still others make the members of the krypteia into a patrol around the country, like the Athenian peripoloi or the Platonic agronomes (#5 and maybe #7, and in some sense #1).

1. In Text #1, Plato, who presents the krypteia as something not well known (cf. “the so-called krypteia”), sees in it “a prodigiously difficult exercise of endurance” from the simple fact of the lack of comforts (no shoes, no bedding, no slaves). There is no question of killing helots nor of the need to hide oneself: the day’s travels could even impede one from concealing oneself.

It is difficult to decide if the text is alluding to the trials indicated in the scholiast, who is thought to be commenting on it—that’s what best corresponds to thaumastos polyponos [secret service]—or to patrols like those of the agronomes [wardens], compared to the “secret police” in Text #5as the daily wandering would suggest and the use of the plural (e.g. “attending upon themselves”), although that could also mark the repetition. Otherwise, it is not impossible that, underlining the discomfort common to both activities, some sort of synthesis has occurred, the night marches corresponding especially to the test described in the scholiast and the day marches to the patrols suggested by Text #5.

In Text #2 the scholiast makes the krypteia a test cum ritual, of which modern scholars have found numerous ethnographic parallels. The first element of this is the solitude suggested by the expression “tis . . . neos” [“a young man was sent away”]. Even if ekaston can be mean that they sent several young men at the same time, they had to remain separated and are never described except in the singular.¹⁵ Their age is not specified, but the néoi usually make up the youngest contingents of the army¹⁶ and the expression tis apo tes poleos neos [“a young man was sent away”] could indicate that the author still hesitates to class them as citizens.

Their test essentially consists of remaining hidden for an entire year. The text greatly emphasizes this aspect, which is supposed to explain the very term krypteia: it consists of not being seen (me ophthenai), not being captured, and not showing yourself to anyone (medeni katadelon genesthai), because those who let themselves be seen (oi opoudepote ophthentes) will be punished. It is the necessity of remaining hidden which is thought to require them to wander in the mountains and to even stay up during the night on watch.

Their life is so much more difficult that, contrary to what happened during their agoge [training, education],¹⁷ they do not have any slaves, and they cannot take any supplies with them: they are thus forced to live by thieving and scrounging, which is in fact the logical follow-up to the agoge, where they supplemented their everyday fare through theft.¹⁸ [250]

This way of life is presented as training for wartime. In fact, even if it has nothing to do with the clash of phalanxes,¹⁹ it creates warriors capable of living off the land and spying against the enemy without being seen, activities of the kryptists [those undertaking the krypteia] attested in Text #6 (concerning Sellasia). In view of the military context, apoluontes ekaston gymnon [‘each youth being dispatched without any equipment’], where apoluo [‘being dispatched’] definitely already has a military meaning,²⁰ gymnos could well mean not ‘nude’, which is to say without his cloak, but rather ‘without military equipment’, which could mean either completely without any weapon or simply without the full hoplite panoply.

Neither in this scholiast, nor in any other text of Plato, is the murder of helots mentioned, although, according to Plutarch (Text #3), it was this aspect of the krypteia which led Plato to criticize Lykurgus. Furthermore, far from chasing down helots, in the scholiast, the kryptists act more like the prey than as predators, since they must avoid capture, meaning by the other Spartans, who search for them in a sort of great game of hide-and-seek.

2.— The repressive function of the krypteia is, however, evoked at length by Plutarch (Text #3), who refers to Aristotle, and, very briefly, by the pseudo-Heraclides of Pontus (Text #4), which is supposed to be a summary of Aristotle.

These texts discuss expeditions in arms: echontas egcheiridia [‘carrying a dagger’](Text #3), meth ‘oplon [with military equipment] (Text #4); of young men or, more precisely, of a selection of youths: tous malista noun echein dokountas (Text #3). If these youths must hide themselves and rest during the day, then this is not to be understood as a test of endurance—they do not simply stay hidden for a long time and eat their provisions—but as a way of taking the helots by surprise: the prey has become a wily hunter.

The helots are killed either on the roads, which is a way to establish a curfew for them,²¹ or ‘often’—but not always—in the countryside, but, since Plutarch says that that the kryptists hide themselves and rest during the day, the expression tous agrous epiporeyomenoi must refer not to the fields where the helots work during the day,²² but to the farms where one can surprise them, even at night. In the latter case, Plutarch suggests a selection of helots to kill (tous romaleotatous kai kratistous), based perhaps on the example of 425, which he mentions just as he begins to summarize Thucydides. The pseudo-Heraclides, which uses the same verb, anairein, as Plutarch, suggesting a common source for both, is happy enough to evoke the elimination of all those helots (osous) which it would be advisable to eliminate. But, whatever expression is employed, it is clear that the authorities—for Plutarch the leaders of the neoi, although they would most likely have received their orders from the ephors²³—have designated in advance which helots are to be killed.

These specific missions are obviously of short duration, as suggested by dia chronou [‘from time to time’](Text #3); they also do it as a group, since Plutarch must specify that during the day, in order to remain hidden, the participants scatter themselves in covered areas. It is therefore difficult to see a “prodigiously difficult endurance drill,” as in Text #1. [251]

3.— Another image of the kryptists could be drawn from the passage in the Laws (Text #5) where Plato compares the kryptists to agronomes [overseers of the land]. These, to the number of 60 in the Platonic city, each command a group of 12 neoi [“youths”] aged 25 to 30 (Laws VI.760b), who systematically patrol the region for two years in order to maintain it and make it prosperous. Since the kryptists were never presented as leaders of a small group of neoi,²⁴ the comparison is, no doubt, not to be taken word for word and only suggests that the kryptists patrol or wander about in the region, which is effectively suggested by the two series of texts which we have already considered. It adds certain details, where the example of the kryptists were able to inspire the Plato of the Laws, as well as the absence of a servant: he must be for himself his own servant, suggested in Text #1 as in the Laws VI.763a.

Various features prompt us also to bring together the Platonic agronomes and the papyrus fragment (Text #7), which the mention of Agesilaus the Laconian obliges us to connect to a Spartan context: in Plato, Laws, VI.760e, as in the papyrus, the service is for two years,²⁵ life is uncomfortable一even more than in the papyrus一and one must perform among other things labor on earthworks.²⁶ But, even if the young Spartans are forced into such an ‘ephebic service’, nothing suggests that it has anything to do with the krypteia.

As for the text of Justin (Text #8), which could be brought together with the papyrus and even, with the phrase vitam sine pulmento degere [‘living without regular food’], to justify the conjecture of Apelt for Laws VI.762[e],²⁷ it evokes nothing more than pueri puberes [pubescent boys] and not the iuvenes ‘youths’, restricted in the preceding phrase: we are still in the setting of the agogē [education system] of the paides [students] and not in the krypteia of the neoi [youths].

Some elements are found in several of these texts and are not weakened by any other text. Thus, it appears that the kryptists travel about the country cf. Texts #1, #2, #3, and #5 especially the mountains一cf. Texts #2 and #3 ('come down') and maybe #1 (allusion to the cold of winter). They do not have any servants一cf. Texts #1, #2, #5 and without doubt #3. They hide themselves, at least during the day一cf. Texts #2, #3, and #4, except that the daytime wandering in Text #1 creates some difficulty.

On other points the texts differ remarkably. The fact that Plato, in Text #1, does not evoke the repressive role of the krypteia is not a problem, since the Spartan Megillos, comparing the tests of endurance, only had to consider this one aspect of the krypteia. But there are more serious problems: the kryptist remains isolated and hidden for one year, without equipment nor clothing (Text #2), or does he conduct group raids with arms and food (Texts #3 and #4)?

We could be tempted to resolve the contradiction in supposing different stages in the history of the krypteia. But the scholiast (Text #2) is supposed to evoke the situation at the time of Plato and, even if Plutarch’s information does not all come from Aristotle, his text makes an allusion to Plato and bases itself on a passage from Thucydides. Thus, it would be better to seek the solution in the individual career of the kryptist.

Texts #1 and #2 evoke a very difficult test; it is not very likely that a whole age class was subjected to it, especially in the period when the Spartans were still fairly [252] numerous;²⁸ in any case, not all would have passed the test: “those who let themselves be seen . . . were punished (Text #2).

Those who had passed the test formed the elite of the néoi [youths], those whom Plutarch qualifies as ‘the most discreet of the young warriors.’ These kryptists, distinguished in this way as conforming to the standard principles of emulation and of selection in Spartan society,²⁹ made up a kind of commando unit, used either to terrorize the helots and to eliminate certain of them or for reconnaissance missions during wartime.

As for the young Spartans who patrol in the countryside (Texts #5 and #7), they were simply fulfilling their ephebic service, and nothing really supports the idea that they were called kryptists. If we insist on finding an exact parallel with the agronomes of Plato, we could imagine that those who have passed the krypteia (which only lasts one year) find themselves at the head of bands of néoi [youths] who are performing their ephebic service,³⁰ but this is surely to be over-interpreting a simple allusion.

The proposed explanation will sadden the ethnographers, who can no longer imagine that the young Spartan does not become a man until after he has killed his first helot, but it has the merit of reconciling the meager sources that we have. Of course, nothing actually proves that they are worthy of belief, but if we reject their testimony, wisdom would be not to substitute our own theories but to avow our ignorance.

Edmond Lévy (Strasbourg)

NOTES:

Giuseppe Cambiano, “Becoming an Adult,” in The Greeks, ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant; translated by Charles Lambert and Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 97-98.

The real process of initiation, however, with its moments of separation and segregation followed by reintegration, took place in the so-called krypteia. This concerned only an elite of ephebes and was undertaken by isolated individuals rather than groups, in difficult conditions, deprived of shelter, clothing, and food and armed with a single knife. By day they were expected to hide, while by night they operated as a kind of secret police, organizing ambushes against the helot population. It should be remembered that adult Spartans were obliged to eat together daily at common messes, and that they did not generally live on their own property. Furthermore, helot revolts were not infrequent, explaining the importance of surveillance and policing. It was in this way that the ephebes began to prepare themselves for public service. As an institution, the krypteia was the direct opposite of hoplite combat. It was carried out in the mountains at night, far from agricultural land. It dramatized the abandonment of childhood and the preparation for war. As soon as they had become men, those who had been subjected to the krypteia were probably enrolled in the select corps of the Three Hundred Knights, who actually fought on foot.

Jean Ducat, "CRYPTIES" Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz 8 (1997): 9-38.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24359130

Paul Cartledge, Spartan Reflections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 87-88.

“When―and if (fatal accidents in the agôgê are easily predictable and in fact attested: Xen. Anab. 4.8.25-6)―a Spartan boy eventually reached the age of eighteen, the formal educational cycle came to an end and he entered the liminal phase of his life during which he was classified technically as ‘boy-ish’(paidiskos), that is, between a ‘boy’ (pais) and a man (anêr). The majority of the paidiskoi now underwent, like their Athenian coevals known as epheboi (those on the threshold of hêbê), a period of ‘national service’, as it were, preparing them for entry at the age of twenty (provided they passed the next test, election to a common mess) into the standing army of adult citizen warriors. However, apparently an élite few of the eighteen-year-olds were specially selected (again, we know not how nor by whom) to join a corps dubbed rather sinisterly the Krypteia or ‘Secret Service Brigade’. On the one hand, in a manner characteristic of rituals of adult initiation, this period of service continued and indeed reinforced the inversion of adult norms that we have already detected in the second stage of the agôgê: the Kryptoi lived away from Sparta (whereas adult Spartans most of the time lived concentrated in the central place, unlike, say, the citizens of Athens, who resided in demes scattered throughout Attica, most of them outside the Athens Peiraieus ‘City’ area); they lived as isolated individuals, not as corporate members of a solidary band; they were armed only with a knife (not strictly a piece of military equipment), and they were obliged to fend and forage for themselves (whereas as adult members of a common mess in Sparta or as soldiers on campaign they had their material wants met from their common mess-fund or by the state’s elaborately organized commissariat). They were, in short, as Vidal-Naquet has brilliantly described them, ‘anti-hoplites’.³²

32 Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. A. Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: 1986): Chapter 5, at 112-14; cf. H. Jeanmaire, “La cryptie lacédémonienne” Revue des Études Grecques 26 (1913): 121-50; Vidal-Naquet, “The Black Hunter revisited” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society n.s. 32 (1986): 139, n. 8; G. Cambiano, “Becoming an Adult” in The Greeks, ed. J.-P. Vernant (Chicago: 1995), 86-119.

Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History, 1300-362 BC (London: Routledge, 2002).

[p. 151] Then there is the evidence for the 'Krypteia', which has been illuminated by Jeanmaire (1913) with a wealth of comparative anthropological material. This too appears to have been a routine institution, whereby youths who had passed through the agoge (the state educational system) completed their apprenticeship by going out into the country, lying low by day and killing Helots by night. Plutarch is emphatic that this exercise in brutality was no part of the 'Lykourgan' order, but only became general after the revolt following the great earthquake of c.465. Herodotus, however, in a rarely noticed passage (4.146.2) almost casually remarks, ostensibly with reference to a context of c.800, that the Spartans perform their official killings by night; and Isokrates (12.181), admittedly with hyperbole, claimed that only the Spartans denied the wickedness of all homicide.

[p. 211] With Pylos in Athenian hands, Thucydides says, the Spartans wanted a good pretext for sending some Helots out of Lakonia or (Thucydides' Greek is ambiguous) they had good reason to send them. For they feared the unyielding character of the Helots (or, according to a variant reading, their youthful impetuosity). . . .

Next, Thucydides describes the Spartans' action. They made a proclamation that the Helots should select from among themselves those who thought they had best served Sparta in the wars. The implication of the proclamation was that these Helots were to be freed (like those who had volunteered to take over provisions to Sphakteria), but the real intention was to sort out the most obdurate dissidents, who, the Spartans anticipated, would be the first to put themselves forward. The Helots selected about 2,000 from their number, who crowned themselves with wreaths and made a progress of the local sanctuaries as if they were freed. The Spartans, however, 'liquidated' them (presumably at night), and no one knew how (a journalistic exaggeration designed to convey the secrecy and enormity of this mass execution; Plutarch, Lyk. 28.6, makes the educated guess that the Krypteia was responsible).

[p. 235] Ostensibly to accompany, but in fact to arrest, Kinadon the Ephors sent six or seven 'younger'or 'young' men (Xenophon uses both words). Since the selection of this squad was by pre-arrangement entrusted to the eldest of the (three) Hippagretai (cf. Xen. Lak. Pol. 4.3), we may assume that these men were Hippeis. We should not, however, simply infer from this that Hippeis were regularly used to arrest Helots and Perioikoi, let alone that they were the mainstay of the Krypteia. Rather, the choice of members of the royal bodyguard is an index of the Ephors' apprehension and may even imply that Agesilaos himself was actively involved in the counter-measures, although Xenophon only says vaguely that the Ephors had consulted some Gerontes. In case of trouble, however, the Ephors also detailed a mora of cavalry as a back-up force. This is our first evidence that the cavalry, which had first been regularly raised in 424, was also organized in morai.

Paul Cartledge, The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2003).

[p.33] Sinisterly, the most promising teenage boys on the threshold of adulthood were enrolled in a kind of secret police force known as the Crypteia (roughly, ‘Special Ops Brigade’), the principal aim of which was to murder selected troublemaking Helots and spread terror among the rest.

[p.70] The Agoge lasted until the age of eighteen, when a process of selection was operated to single out those Spartans who were destined for the highest positions of an adult Spartan life⎯membership of the elite royal bodyguard, holding the top military offices, eventually election to the Gerousia. These elite Spartans formed what was known as the Crypteia or Secret Operations Executive (SOE); their task was to control the Helots as well as prove their readiness for the responsibilities of warrior manhood.

Their selection, like the management of the Agoge as a whole, was presumably in the hands of the Paidonomos, literally the Boy-Herd, who was appointed by the Ephors (‘Overseers’).

[p. 73] This was designed to place the [Helots] under martial law and to absolve any Spartans in advance from the taint of blood-guilt should they find it necessary or desirable to kill a Helot (as the members of the Crypteia regularly and of set purpose did.)

[p. 235] This was the intermediate stage at which certain especially distinguished youths were selected for the Helot-hunting Crypteia or secret service brigade, when they were sent out into the countryside armed only with a dagger and with no rations other than what they could glean or steal for themselves. As a sort of manhood test or initiatory ritual, they were required to ‘blood’ themselves by killing any Helots they happened on⎯or perhaps rather Helots who were known troublemakers.

Stefan Link, “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der spartanischen Krypteia” Klio 88 (2006): 34–43.

Jean-Christophe Couvenhes, "Les kryptoi Spartiates” Dialogues d'histoire ancienne S11 (2014): 45-76.