e help of any iron blade. During winter they added the so-called thistledown and mixed it into the mattresses, since it was a substance thought to give out warmth.
By this age the boys came to be courted by lovers from among the respectable young men.
~Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 16, 17, translated by Talbert.
There were probably four categories of males within the agogé:
1. Boys aged 7 - 17, called Paides.
2. "Youths of fighting age," aged 18 - 19, called Paidiskoi.
3. Eirenes, aged 20, that is, at least two years beyond the class of boys, and who had charge of a troop or herd -- Boua -- of younger males.
4. Young Men, aged 20 - 29, called Hebontes.
At the age of 30, men married, and joined an all-male dining club or mess, the Phidition.
This is classicist W. G. Forrest's description of the agogé:
... After six years with his mother, the child who had been accepted was taken from home and enrolled in a group of his contemporaries under the leadership of an older boy ...
With his group the boy lived for the next fourteen years as he worked his way up through the increasingly brutal and brutalising training schedules which passed for education among the Spartans. Music and dancing he would learn, for both had their military uses, but reading and writing, as Plutarch remarks, 'only because they were unavoidable'. For the rest everything was designed to produce toughness, endurance and discipline ...
So schooled, at the age of twenty or thereabouts, the young man graduated to another class, that of the so-called eirenes, in which he remained for a part, perhaps even the whole of, his twenties, not yet a full citizen but liable for military service and for the time being occupied in doing to others as he had been done by, acting as leader of a younger group, ... and, a nice touch, allotted to one of two large teams to encourage rivalry in bravery, such rivalry that 'members of each team fall to fighting each other whenever they meet'.
At the age of thirty the Spartan was admitted to the assembly. Whether he had already 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 sprin