Rejected babies of Sparta: The cruel reason the Spartans killed their own children

According to the historian Plutarch, who wrote in the first and second centuries CE and composed his Life of Lycurgus, stated that infants born in Sparta had undergone official inspection by a council of tribal elders known as the gerontes.

Soon after birth, the father carried the newborn to these men, who considered neither affection nor lineage.

Instead, they looked for physical strength and symmetry as evidence of future capability, as any departure from these expectations labelled the child as a burden rather than a future help to the city.

If the infant passed their inspection, the family gained permission to raise it. If not, the elders ordered it to be abandoned without delay.

Often, the child was taken to a chasm at Mount Taygetus known as the Apothetae, where it was left to die from exposure, starvation, or injury.

However, archaeological studies have not uncovered any infant remains at the Apothetae, and some scholars doubt whether it was ever actually used for this purpose.

Still, the reported practice shows the strictness of Spartan custom described in surviving literary sources.

Plutarch, who wrote centuries later, may have exaggerated the ritual, but the social system that placed the polis above the individual appears throughout accounts of Spartan public life.

Every decision made by Spartan leaders appears to have aimed to maintain a disciplined population of full citizens, Spartiates, who prepared for war and tried to live without outside support.

From the age of seven, boys entered the agoge, a compulsory military training system that taught obedience and endurance in preparation for armed combat, including ritualised theft and survival exercises that, for some boys, led to initiation into the secret policing duties of the krypteia.

To survive this brutal education, children required physical toughness from birth.

Therefore, the state eliminated those who might later fail the trials of soldiering, since weakness was seen as a threat not just to the individual but to the survival of the army.

To support this system, Spartan women trained as well, not for war, but to produce children capable of withstanding it.

Athletic exercise and strict diets were reinforced by public praise for healthy childbirth and created pressure for women to bear only strong sons, as writers such as Xenophon described how girls trained physically to ensure they would produce robust offspring.

If a baby failed inspection, the mother bore social dishonour. As a result, we are told that few protested publicly, and many accepted that their value rested in the strength of the sons they delivered to the state.

When the state enforced infant inspection, Sparta appears to have built a system of eugenics into law and custom that placed the whole community above private wishes and the healthy above the weak.

According to state ideology as described in later sources, every child existed for a single purpose, to support the polis in warfare.

Anything that hindered that aim, including disability or deformity, had no social value.

As a result, the exposure of infants was treated as a public duty performed for the supposed good of the community instead of a response to personal choice or money problems.

Elsewhere in the Greek world, including in Athens, exposure occurred privately and often stemmed from financial hardship or family shame, as depicted in works such as Euripides’ Ion and referenced in the legal speeches of Demosthenes.

In contrast, the Spartan system placed life-or-death decisions in the hands of elders acting on behalf of the state, thereby removing sentiment and replacing it with fixed rules for judgment.

According to these accounts, this process created a society where every full citizen had survived a test of selection before enduring a lifetime of discipline, and where difference from that pattern invited exclusion or death.

To some ancient writers who admired Sparta’s military discipline, the practice seemed logical, although Aristotle criticised such rigidity in his Politics, warning that it contributed to the state’s future instability.

Xenophon, who described the agoge and other institutions with admiration, ignored or downplayed their harshness.

Later thinkers, who wrote in different periods, began to question the morality of killing infants on the basis of seen imperfections.

Cicero, who wrote under Roman rule, viewed such actions with unease, and Christian authors wrote more broadly about pagan customs and later condemned them as morally wrong and against divine law.

Modern historians such as Paul Cartledge and Sarah Pomeroy have questioned the accuracy of the sources that describe infanticide as a consistent state policy, since many accounts come from later periods or were shaped by outsider perspectives.

Pomeroy in particular noted the lack of direct evidence for regular exposure controlled by the state in Sparta, even as she acknowledged the set of ideas behind such reports.

Still, even if the number of infants killed was smaller than claimed, the social attitude that allowed the practice remained firmly in place.

The principle that individual life must serve the collective controlled the structure of Spartan citizenship, and that belief shaped how every child’s worth was judged. 

Over time, the very policies that had once preserved Sparta’s strength, in the view of many historians, contributed to its decline.

By the late fourth century BCE, Sparta’s strict definition of citizenship and refusal to adapt had led to a sharp fall in the number of full citizens, with only about 700 Spartiates available for military service at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE.

Fewer boys survived the inspection, and fewer men became warriors. While non-citizen groups such as perioikoi and helots, along with the lesser-known mothakes, existed in the city-state, they did not participate in the full rights and responsibilities of the citizen body.

As other Greek city-states adjusted to political and military changes, Sparta remained committed to ideals that no longer matched its circumstances, and its strict and narrow rules weakened the base of its power.