dy received the other mark of manhood, admission to a sussition [an eating-club or mess], either on becoming an eiren or on ceasing to be one, is unknown ...
This was the last formal test the Spartan had to pass. Beyond it lay freedom, freedom to marry, to lead something like a normal life. His duties were light -- he had to dine with his fellows, to train with them and to fight with them; and from his kleros [land allotment] he had to provide the stipulated contribution to maintain the mess.
But it is easy to underestimate the effect even of this amount of communal living in a society where there was no other focus for a man's interests. The Spartan did not work -- he trained, with the men of his mess, he fought, with the men of his mess, or he was idle, again for the most part, one would imagine, with the men of his mess.
Many writers have commented that this sort of training, which encouraged strong -- indeed ferocious -- same-sex bonds between the warriors, was not unusual in Warrior societies.
This is from Peter Wilcox, writing about the Celts:
From early puberty the young man of the warrior caste progressed through the martial arts of the Celt, with the accompaniment of hunting, feasting, and drinking. As a fully-fledged warrior he would support and be supported in battle by a close age group of his own peers, who had been with him throughout his training for manhood. In this way many young men developed a strong man-to-man bond; and Diodorus, Strabo, and Athenaeus all remark that homo-erotic practices were common among the Celts.
As they were among the Spartans.
Classicist JE Lendon:
At Sparta lover and beloved stood beside each other in the hoplite line; before battle the Spartans sacrificed to Eros, to love.
And, Prof Lendon adds,
such relationships were institutionalized, played a large role in the training of boys, and were thought to contribute to bravery in combat.
Classicist Werner Jaeger:
It is, after all, easy to understand how a passionate admiration of noble bodies and balanced souls could spring up in a race which for countless years had prized physical prowess and spiritual harmony as the highest good attainable by man, and which had striven by grave and ceaseless rivalry, by exertion involving the utmost energies of mind and body alike, to bring those qualities to the greatest possible perfection.
Men who loved the possessors of those enviable qualities were moved by an ideal, the love for areté. Lovers who were bound by the male Eros [the God of Romantic Passion] were guarded by a deeper sense of honour from committing any base action, and were driven by a nobler impulse in attempting any honourable deed.
The Spartan state deliberately made Eros [male-male love] a factor, and an important factor, in its agogé.
See also Areté, Agon, Athlos, Natural male sex aggression, Warrior Altruism, Warrior Ethos, Fidelity, Heroes, Heroic Man2Man, and Heroic Love.
And AGOGE: The Spear-points of Young Men Blossom There.
And seven other articles in the AGOGE series, listed in the Heroes Site Guide.
Plus!! -- The Secret Craft of Warriorhood.