Spartan system of Warrior upbringing and training.
At the age of seven all Spartan boys were taken from their mothers and made to live in all-male groups where they were trained in the arts of war and survival.
Plutarch, writing ca 100 AD:
Lycurgus [the Spartan lawgiver] did not put Spartiate children in the care of any tutors who had been bought or hired. Neither was it permissible for each father to bring up and educate his son in the way he chose.
Instead, as soon as boys reached the age of seven, Lycurgus took charge of them all himself and distributed them into Troops [the Spartan word was "herd"]: here he accustomed them to live together and be brought up together, playing and learning as a group. The captaincy of the troop was conferred upon the boy who displayed the soundest judgement and the best fighting spirit. The others kept their eyes on him, responded to his instructions, and endured their punishments from him, so that altogether this training served as a practice in learning ready obedience. Moreover as they exercised boys were constantly watched by their elders, who were always spurring them on to fight and contend with one another: in this their chief object was to get to know each boy's character, in particular how bold he was, and how far he was likely to stand his ground in combat.
The boys learned to read and write no more than was necessary. Otherwise their whole education was aimed at developing smart obedience, perseverance under stress, and victory in battle. So as they grew older they intensified their physical training, and got into the habit of cropping their hair, going barefoot, and exercising naked. From the age of twelve they never wore a tunic, and were given only one cloak a year. Their bodies were rough, and knew nothing of baths or oiling: only on a few days in the year did they experience such delights. They slept together by Squadron and Troop on mattresses which they made up for themselves from the tips of reeds growing along the River Eurotas, broken off by hand without the 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 alrea