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The organisation of Spartan society was certainly rather unusual. Boys and girls were separated at the age of seven. Boys were put into compulsory training that led directly to the military, from which they emerged in their late 20s. Lovers were encouraged to go into battle side by side. The theory was that soldiers would fight especially hard to protect their lovers. It seemed to work: the Spartan army was extremely successful. Three hundred of their elite troops held a pass against 30,000 Persians, until they were betrayed.

The state made marriage and children compulsory. The standard organization of a Spartan home became two male lovers at the centre, both married with children, and often owning slaves.

The Spartan experience suggests there is nothing inherently incompatible between homosexuality and military service, though it is worth questioning how much can be learned from the experience of a society so very different from any modern one. It also suggests that the claim that homosexuality is always or usually genetic in origin is open to considerable question.

Last but not least, it is a frequent misconception that Spartan society was also blatantly homosexual. Curiously, no contemporary source and no archaeological evidence supports this widespread assumption. The best ancient source on Sparta, Xenophon, explicitly denies the already common rumors about widespread pederasty. Aristotle noted that the power of women in Sparta was typical of all militaristic and warlike societies without a strong emphasis on male homosexuality—arguing that in Sparta this "positive" moderating factor on the role of women in society was absent. There is no Spartan/Laconian pottery with explicitly homosexual motifs—as there is from Athens and Corinth and other cities. The first recorded heterosexual love poem was written by a Spartan poet for Spartan maidens. The very fact that Spartan men tended to marry young by ancient Greek standards (in their early to mid-twenties) suggests they had less time for the homosexual love affairs that characterized early manhood in the rest of Greece. Certainly the state considered bachelorhood a disgrace, and a citizen who did not marry and produce future citizens enjoyed less status than a man who had fathered children. In no other ancient Greek city were women so well integrated into society. All this speaks against a society in which homosexuality was exceptionally common.

Sparta Reconsidered