Cryptīa
(
κρυπτεία, κρυπτία, or
κρυπτή). A system of secret police adopted by the Spartans in order to maintain
their control over the Helots; perhaps, as Grote thinks, over the Perioeci also. As to the
main features of this system there is no doubt. We learn that a number of active young
Spartans were despatched every year by the Ephors, immediately upon their entry into office,
to the different parts of the country. They were to post themselves as secretly as possible in
convenient places from which to explore the neighbourhood and to make observations. If they
found anything suspicious, they were either to report it or to suppress it themselves on the
spot (Schömann,
Antiq. i. 195, Eng. trans.). The institution served
not merely to break up organization and to check the possibility of an outbreak among their
oppressed subjects, but as a useful military training in habits of endurance suited to a
dominant race. On the latter ground it is proposed by Plato for his ideal Cretan colony in the
Laws, and his way of expressing himself shows that he is referring to a
Spartan custom really existing (i. 633 B; vi. 763 B; cf. Grote, ii. 144 n.). The
cryptia may thus be considered as to a certain extent a species of armed
police force, and the young men who were ordered to undertake it appear also to have formed a
special corps in the army; at least we read of a commander of the
cryptia in the battle of Sellasia (
Plut. Cleom.
28). To these undoubted facts later authors added some curious statements, which have
been much criticised in recent times. According to Plutarch, who quotes Aristotle as his
authority, the Ephors every year declared war formally against the Helots, in order that they
might be killed without scruple; and they further, not every year as sometimes stated, but at
intervals (
διὰ χρόνου), sent young Spartans armed with
daggers to assassinate such of the Helots as were thought formidable (
Lycurg.
28). The language of Plutarch is somewhat loose. In one sentence he states that the young men
went out into the roads by night and slew all whom they caught (
τοὺς
ἁλισκομένους), implying that the Helots lived under a sort of
“curfew” law, which confined them to their houses at night to prevent
conspiracies; in the next sentence that they often ranged over the fields, and despatched the
strongest and bravest of them. The latter phrase, however, agrees with the account of
Heraclides Ponticus that they killed
ὅσους ἂν ἐπιτήδειον
ᾖ (
Fragm. ii. 4
ap. C. Müller, ii.
210). Otfried Müller, whose criticism habitually tends to soften the harsher features
of the Spartan institutions, combats the notion that the Helots were annually hunted down and
destroyed (
Dorians, iii. 3.4); and Schömann calls it “an
exaggeration which is really too absurd to deserve serious confutation”
(
Antiq. l. c.). Grote, no friend to Sparta, rejects the annual or periodical
massacre of the Helots and the formal declaration of war against them, which, he justly
observes, “would provoke the reaction of despair rather than enforce
tranquillity”; and even suggests a doubt as to the fact of Aristotle's having really
made the statement ascribed to him by Plutarch, on the ground that he does not mention
the subject in his
Politics, where he speaks at some length both of the Spartan
constitution and of the Helots. See
Helotae.