Sparta's revered lawgiver may never have existed at all
Spartans worshipped Lycurgus as a god and credited him with nearly everything distinctive about their society, from communal mess halls to austere living. Yet ancient writers disagreed over his dates by more than a century, and many modern historians suspect Sparta invented him to give its customs a sacred pedigree.
Tradition credited Lycurgus with Sparta's eunomia, or good order: a constitution, the syssitia where citizens ate together, the equal division of land among citizens, a culture of frugality and distinctive rules for weddings and funerals. His reforms were supposedly set down in a decree called the Great Rhetra. Most of these institutions, however, seem to date from shortly before 500 BC, centuries after his supposed lifetime, and the land redistribution appears to be pure invention.
Ancient chronologies scatter him widely. Ephorus and Eratosthenes placed the Rhetra around 885 BC, while a passage in Thucydides points to about 804 or 821 BC. Aristotle tied him to the first Olympic Games around 776 BC on the evidence of the Disc of Iphitos, which is probably a fourth-century forgery. Timaeus solved the puzzle by proposing two men of the same name. Tellingly, the poet Tyrtaeus, Sparta's earliest surviving voice, never mentions him, which suggests the legend took shape in the late seventh or early sixth century, when Spartan military success invited an explanation.
Herodotus, the oldest written witness, offers two origins for the laws: a gift from Apollo through the oracle at Delphi, or a copy of Cretan practice. Shared institutions between Sparta and Crete more likely reflect a common Dorian heritage than one man's borrowing. Both Spartan royal houses claimed him as an ancestor, and in some stories he served as regent for a boy king and then stepped aside, or left the city, to quash rumours that he wanted the crown.
The figure stayed useful because he could be reshaped. The land reforms attributed to him appear only after the third-century kings Agis IV and Cleomenes III tried to redistribute land themselves, presenting novelty as a return to ancient ideals. The historian Antony Andrewes summed up the modern view: if a real Lycurgus lived, nothing about him is known.
Source: Lycurgus
