Syssitia

The common mess. Every Spartan of citizen standing ate his evening meal not at home but in a fixed group of about fifteen men, and continued to do so for life. Xenophon, who lived in the Peloponnese and knew the system at first hand, says Lycurgus brought the messes into the open precisely so that men would be ashamed to overeat or to arrive drunk, and that the walk home in the dark, with no torch permitted, was itself training.

Membership was not automatic. Plutarch describes election by secret ballot, each existing member dropping a pellet of bread into a bowl, and a single flattened pellet sufficing to exclude a candidate. A Spartan who could not pay his contribution in barley, wine, cheese and figs lost his place, and with it his standing as a full citizen. The mess was therefore the mechanism by which equality was both performed and policed: it looked like shared austerity, and functioned as a property qualification.

Xenophon notes a second effect that mattered more in war. Because the mess groups were also the units in which men campaigned, a Spartan already knew, before any battle, exactly who would be standing beside him.