Comment se vêtir, comment se tenir, à Sparte : réflexions et spéculations

Résumé Fr En

Sparte affichait ses idéaux par des moyens qui symbolisaient la singularité dont elle se targuait. Pourfendeurs des logoi verbeux et peu fiables des autres cités, les Spartiates valorisaient plutôt ce qui était susceptible d’être vu. D’où l'emphase qu’ils mettaient sur le corps, ses vêtements et parfois sa nudité. Le corps, soit du citoyen soit de l’hilote, était porteur d’un code vestimentaire qui dépassait par sa complexité celui des Athéniens. Mais comment imaginer que, dans une société qui se targuait aussi de sa capacité de tromper l’autre, ce code ne transmette qu’une vérité simple et sans fard ? La présentation spartiate du corps se révèle non moins tendancieuse que ne l’étaient les logoi honnis des autres. Une analyse de la propagande corporelle des Spartiates est révélatrice de leurs soucis les plus intimes.

Notoriously, classical Sparta despised long speech. Less well known is the corollary: that instead Spartans privileged the visual. They relied on what they could see . But just as speech could be an artefact of truth or falsehood, so Spartans created a rhetoric of the body, manipulated to persuade, often mislead, others. Eugenic measures and meticulous feeding were used – for girls and boys – to make the bodies of warriors as tall and slim as possible. Obesity was illegal. Homogeneity in dress, dancing in groups, and marching to music, created the image of a citizen corps harmonious and unbreakable, whether in battle or in the politics of the state.Long hair suggested leonine force as well as superior, citizen, status. Correspondingly, the Greek-speaking serfs of Sparta's homeland, the helots, had to be demoralised by their own movement, posture and clothes. A strong-looking helot was an implicit threat, a target for official assassination. By their short hair, their dogskin caps, and improvised, irregular, clothes of animal skin – as well as by enforced displays of clumsy, drunken, dancing and (probably) a humble posture in public – helots signalled not only to their masters but also to each other that they accepted and deserved their inferior place. Citizens (except for official “cowards”) were required to comport themselves as permanent victors, and helots as permanently vanquished – precisely because, in reality, the huge numbers of the helots were perceived as a potent threat, an enemy within.