Spartan and Greek Eugenics Tradition
Throughout much of history, life was rough – as in orders of magnitude tougher than what we experience today – for the majority of mankind. Things that strike us today as shockingly cruel, such as infanticide of unwanted children, were once seen as routine by many. The ancient Greeks, for example, often abandoned unwanted children in the wilderness. There, they perished from exposure to the elements, thirst or hunger, attacks by wild animals, or, if lucky, were saved by a passerby. The Spartan government in particular ramped up infanticide into eugenics as a matter of state policy.
Plutarch wrote in his biography of the ancient Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus: “Offspring was not reared at the will of the father, but was taken and carried by him to a place called Lesche, where the elders of the tribes officially examined the infant, and if it was well-built and sturdy, they ordered the father to rear it, and assigned it one of the nine thousand lots of land; but if it was ill-born and deformed, they sent it to the so‑called Apothetae, a chasm-like place at the foot of Mount Taÿgetus, in the conviction that the life of that which nature had not well equipped at the very beginning for health and strength, was of no advantage either to itself or the state“.
