Wouldn't family life for such men have been an extremely difficult and unwelcome transition? In our time, just a year's absence at war or in prison has made re-assimilation problematic and oftentimes tragically unsuccessful. Isn't it more likely that leaving the barracks and making a home at age 30 usually meant settling with a close friend of the past 23 years?
These are the men who had spent the bulking-up of their lives in a world of men-only, who as bridegrooms had to be coaxed to the marriage bed for a brief liaison (before returning to the barracks) by shaving the bride's head, dressing her in a boy's cloak, and turning out the candles. Draw your own conclusion. And after that first night of marital brisk it's written that a husband would occasionally sneak away from the barracks to visit his wife while the other men slept, ashamed and apprehensive lest he be caught doing so. Even this has been described as a custom designed by the wise old king to foster desire through infrequency, and thereby, to have better baby-making. But with this explanation we're asked to believe that the men, who were already absent making war for long periods, were encouraged when they returned to make only occasional and furtive visits to their wives - a strategy for prolific procreation?
It sounds to me like an obvious rationalization (meant for the ears of inquisitive non-Spartans) to cover a serious dysfunction in the socially vital heterosexual task of making lots of little warriors. There are other indications as well. Women were allowed to take multiple husbands, and men were said to sometimes encourage comrades to visit their wives in their stead. These, at least, sound like coherent strategies for dealing with an acknowledged problem.
In any case, Sparta eventually collapsed for lack of warriors. So wouldn't the idea of promoting shame and infrequency (if it really was a strategy) have been abandoned as foolish and counter-reproductive long before the ultimate drop of the warrior population?
Was something else going on? Was the inadequate birthrate just a manifestation of the men's diminished sex drives, due perhaps to too much exercise, or was it an indication of an endemic preference for boys and other men? As far as we know, no one openly accused Spartan men of a tendency to homosexuality. It would be an unpalatable idea for anyone with a need to associate macho with hetero. And any suggestion that the early inculcation of young boys involved pederasty was considered an outrageous presumption. These would have been especially serious charges in Sparta, where the good of the State was paramount, and the good of the State dictated a commitment to procreation. But even today there are cultures where the penetrator in a man-to-man or man-to-boy relationship is not regarded as a homosexual, and it's widely considered an important distinction in prison life. So if a boy was typically the object of an elder's special affections till he reached maturity, and then switched roles to became the à ¼ber-tutor of a fresh new seven year-old, and if an occasional visit to the wife qualified as bi- sexuality, there could be, by definition, no homosexuality to offend the Spartan State.
It's notable that for nearly two thousand years, up until just recently, the Catholic Church and its chroniclers have been able to profess that priests practice celibacy religiously, with only a very few sinful and unaccepable exceptions. The society of Spartan men was insulated to a similar degree as the Church priesthood, and the urge to a double-life, a dissembling life, would have been the same in martial isolation from women as it is in religious celibacy. A naà ¯ve historian of Sparta would have been as oblivious to (or unwilling to confront) a sin against the Laws as would a naà ¯ve historian of the Church to a sin against the Teachings.
How else could the women have been so free, and the men so rigidly constrained, except by a conspiratorial scheme of the women, based on their systematic separation? What else could explain the deference the men showed the women that so scandalized foreigners - these Spartan men, perhaps the most brutal and willful men in history - except a comprehensive strategy of man-management, beginning with a strict course of obedience training in the boys' first seven years at home, much the same as a woman today might train her rottweiler puppy?
Sparta and Delphi
There's another dimension to the idea that the unique severity and extremism of Spartan manhood was actually the result of the clever machinations of the women. Plato and Plutarch both reported that the Spartan laws were given to King Lycurgus by the oracle, the priestess called the Pythia at Delphi. (An oracle is actually a prophesy, not a person.) It's suggestive that Delphi may have played an important role in the conspiracy.
Sparta was almost always treated as a special favorite of the Pythia, especially in early classical times. And the status of the caste of Delphic priestesses, who were believed to channel the prophesies of Apollo, was in those times much like the status of Spartan women, above the domination of men.
Delphi had been just a remote village of goatherds when a fissure in the earth was discovered that released a petro-chemical vapor, entrancing anyone who breathed it. It is assumed, in the same sort of patriarchal lens that looks back upon Sparta, that a Delphic priestess, who in her delerium would babble incoherently, was just a dramatic prop for priests behind the curtain who "translated" (but supposedly composed) the prophesies.
It has also been maintained that in the classical era the temple society consisted exclusively of local inhabitants, as would have been necessary to assure the patrons of the oracles of their international neutrality and objectivity. But the political sophistication of the prophesies, which sometimes shaped the destinies of kingdoms and empires, suggests an organization far more intriguing than a local sect of loopy goatherds. It seems more plausible that the organization had cosmopolitan influences, if not origins, and considering the pattern of favoritism in the earlier prophesies, it may have descended largely from Sparta. Much like the story of the legendary king, it seems plausible that the priestesses used the cover-story of men behind the scene to give themselves the requisite credibility as inspired prognosticators. (Note: Like much of what we know about Sparta, our information about Delphi comes in large part from Plutarch, who actually served there as a high priest. But Delphi, like Sparta, was just a relic of its classical glory in Plutarch's time, and its organization had by then clearly come under the domination of men.)
From this larger perspecitve, it seems plausible that the women of Sparta and Delphi co-conspired to use the costumed influence of a king and priesthood to produce the Spartan laws and rescue the women from subjugation. (Note: Herodotus wrote that his Spartan informants believed the classical civilization of Crete (specifically, the city-state of Gortyn) was the primary source of Lycurgus' inspiration. Cretan society was at that time also known for its relatively infuential women; it would be no less plausible that Crete played a role along with Delphi in an international conspiracy with international ambitions.)
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