This Myth About the Spartans Just Got Blown Up

On a crisp November morning in 1915, Harry Haiseleden, the chief surgeon at the German-American Hospital in Chicago, was awoken early in the day to consult on the case of a newborn, John Bollinger. Bollinger had some serious health issues that could be rectified by surgery, but Haiseleden decided that the disabled child should be allowed to die because if he lived he would become “an imbecile and possibly criminal.” This sad episode in the history of eugenics might go unnoted were it not for one thing: Haiseleden decided to make a racist and ableist film about the incident called The Black Stork. Not short on ego, he even played himself.

In both the film and during the controversy that surrounded the Bollinger case, spokespeople for both sides invoked history’s most notorious practitioners of infanticide: the Spartans. According to the historian Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus, the Spartans would submit newborn infants to a council for assessment. If they were found to be “lowborn or deformed” they were exposed to the elements to die. In commenting on the Bollinger case in The New Republic, Helen Keller (Yes, the Helen Keller) suggested a similar system in which physician courts would decide the fate of the “malformed idiot baby [sic].” After all, she wrote in a statement that deserves a content warning, “It is the possibilities of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature.” An advertisement for The Black Stork read: “Kill Defectives, Save the Nation and See ‘The Black Stork.’”

Most early 20th-century eugenicists who advocated for forcible sterilization used the Spartans as the outliers next to whom they appeared as reasonable moderates. Dr. William Johnson, a supporter of Haiselden, said that “no eugenic considerations will induce us to adopt Spartan-like methods.” Eugenicists weren’t like the Spartans, they claimed, they wanted to prevent disabled and “genetically inferior” children from ever being conceived. Though eugenicists position themselves as morally superior to the Spartans the argument is always delivered with a sly wink: no one loves the ancient Greeks and Romans more than white supremacists and eugenics advocates. They instead grounded their arguments in the economic and social burdens that providing care, education, and accommodations for people with disabilities would place on the state. All the same, in numerous repulsive tracts, the idea of Spartan infanticide appears either as model or strawman.

But what if the stories of Spartan infanticide are a myth? A new article, published in Hesperia magazine, argues that the Greeks did not routinely expose disabled children to the elements.

Dr. Debby Sneed, a lecturer in the department of Classics at California State University, Long Beach, and the article’s author, reassesses the ancient evidence and finds it lacking.

The most famous piece of literary evidence, Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus was written hundreds of years after the subject’s death and is focused not on informing us about Spartan social control but, rather, painting a picture of Lycurgus’s character. Sneed told The Daily Beast “The practice is not mentioned in any other literary source, including those that discuss Spartan law or Lycurgus, even where the author was similarly eugenicist (e.g., Aristotle) and would have appreciated the validation of their own thinking. And we have no archaeological evidence for it, either.”

At this juncture, some might object, on principle, that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we don’t know about the exposure of disabled infants in Sparta from other sources doesn’t mean that they didn’t practice eugenics. To this, Sneed replies, that “In addition to having zero evidence of the Spartan practice, we have a wealth of evidence of ancient Greek adults actively encouraging the survival of infants with congenital disabilities.” Among them was the fourth-century B.C. disabled Spartan king Agesilaus II, whose military prowess and skills as a leader were widely admired.

More broadly, Sneed notes, ancient medical texts associated with Hippocrates discuss the treatment of “infants with congenital limb difference, clubfoot, and cleft palate. They discuss the economic and productive potential of these infants, outline treatments and discuss the benefits of physical therapy, and refer to assistive devices that will be helpful for such people as they grow and develop.” This rather feels like a waste of space if these infants were killed shortly after birth. More important, Sneed told me, “Physicians were not typically present at childbirth, so if physicians interacted with such infants, it was because their parents did not kill them and instead sought assistance with their care. Other ancient authors refer to congenitally disabled infants, and they not only don’t recommend infanticide, but they discuss ways to treat and care for them.”

Archaeological discoveries support Sneed’s case. The burial of a 6-to-8-month-old child with hydrocephaly found in a second-century B.C. deposit in the Athenian agora, she said, suggests that the infant, whose condition would have been apparent earlier in its life, “was not abandoned at the first sign of hydrocephaly, but was cared for as the condition worsened, until it died.” Similarly, the discovery of feeding bottles in the graves of infants (and sometimes older children and adults) from Pydna suggests that people assisted small children who had difficulty nursing, potentially because of disabilities. What all of this means, says Sneed, is that “instead of abandoning infants who require additional care, ancient Greek adults took extra steps to care for them.”

None of this means, Sneed says, that ancient Greeks didn’t expose infants. In fact, we know that exposure happened in antiquity, and I’ve written about it myself. But the fact of exposure does not mean, as Eleanor Scott, Christian Laes, and others have argued, that these infants were abandoned just because they were disabled. All kinds of financial, social, and familial pressures contributed to the practice. Moreover, infants did not always die as a consequence of exposure. In the Roman period there was a clear expectation that children were abandoned at locations—often trash heaps and dunghills—known to human traffickers. Not all those children abandoned at these sites were trafficked into slavery. The Roman poet Juvenal writes of women who went to “foul pools” to find infants to pass off as their own. These were brutal and bloody times, but it is much too simple to suggest that it’s all about eugenics. The goal of historical research, said Sneed, is to gain “a more accurate picture of ancient Greek life” and it’s important to recognize that out-and-out eugenicists like Aristotle and Plato are not as representative of ancient Greek thought and behavior as some would believe.

As a rhetorical device, Spartan infanticide has had a lengthy shelf life. The reasons for exposing infants, Plutarch and Plato agree, is that it is “neither better for themselves nor for the city for [these children] to live [their] natural life poorly equipped.” Disabled people are, according to this logic, ‘better off dead’ and a drain on social resources. In the early 20th century the same explicitly economic argument reappears. Popenoe and Johnson, the authors of Applied Eugenics (1920), expressed concern that “The feeble-minded child is painfully “educated” often at the expense of his normal brother or sister.” The Christian philanthropic spirit, they went on, mindful of Roman Catholic outrage over the Bollinger case. was “leaving a staggering bill to be paid by posterity.” Along with inaccurate claims about criminality, scaremongering about bankruptcy and financial costs was rhetorically effective. Similarly misleading claims about “staggering costs” have been leveraged by those who object to gender-neutral bathrooms. Human rights can really run up a tab.

In early 2020, many conservative commentators claimed that policies aimed at protecting high-risk populations from covid would have a damaging effect on economic growth. Some politicians suggested that high risk populations like the elderly and the disabled should “sacrifice themselves” for the good of the economy. A Real Housewife hypothesized that COVID-19 is “God’s way of thinning the herd.” As the pandemic continues, disabled disposability has been normalized. As Mia Mingus and Jillian Weise have powerfully written, high-risk individuals are expected to place themselves at risk because to do otherwise is too costly. Disabled life is sacrificed for abled convenience. This is, as Mingus puts it, “eugenic thinking.” And that, as it turns out, is something even the Spartans didn’t do.

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