Did Spartan Boys Really Have to Steal Food?
Yes. Spartan boys were underfed on purpose so that they would have to steal, and they were punished not for stealing but for being caught.
Xenophon is the best source, because he lived in Sparta and sent his own sons through the system. He says the boys were given barely enough food, so that they would learn to go without, and that they were expected to make up the difference by theft (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians 2.5–2.8).
The punishment was for incompetence. A boy caught stealing was beaten, not because theft was wrong but because being caught meant he had done it badly. The point was to produce men who could forage and move unseen on campaign.
Plutarch preserves the famous version of this, the boy who hid a stolen fox cub inside his cloak and let it tear his belly open rather than be discovered (Life of Lycurgus 18). Plutarch is writing some five hundred years later and that story may be improving with age, but Xenophon's account of the hunger is first-hand.
Further in
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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