The Spartan army was the toughest in the world. Every Spartan man was enlisted, and they were feared around the world. Sparta did away with city walls, believing its men strong enough to make walls useless. It was the only country that Alexander the Great saw and left unconquered—and he never even had the courage to march his men into their land.

Spartan men were warriors because Spartan boys suffered through some absolutely incredible experiences. A child raised in Sparta wasn’t raised by his mother. He was raised by the state, and he was put through an education unlike any other in history.

10 Half Of All Spartan Babies Were Left To Die

In Sparta, weak children weren’t given a chance. If they were born weak, ill, or deformed, they were left to die—and that happened a lot.

When a baby was born, the father would carry the newborn to the town’s elders. The elders would examine the child, looking for weaknesses and deformities. If any were found, the father was ordered to leave the child defenseless and alone in a pit called the Apothetae, where it would starve to death.

Even if a child passed inspection, though, there was no guarantee it would live. When the father returned home, the mother would wash the baby in wine as an early epilepsy test. If the child was epileptic, the wine would make it break into a fit . . . and tell the mother that it wasn’t worth raising.

If a baby could survive all this, it was promised a free plot of land, but the odds were pretty low. It’s estimated that about half of all babies born in Sparta died from either neglect or murder.

9 Boys Lived In Military Barracks From Age Seven

Mothers didn’t get to take care of their children for long. As soon as a boy turned seven, he was considered ready for education, known as the agoge, and he left his parents for the care of a teacher called a “warden.”

Life in the agoge wasn’t easy. The children would be actively encouraged to haze and provoke each other and even to challenge each other to fights. This wasn’t a school where teacher maintained the peace; if two kids were bickering, the warden would goad them into resolving it with their fists.

The warden also carried a whip at all times, and if a boy misbehaved, he would use it to beat him. The beating would be hard, but that wouldn’t be the end of it. If the child’s father found out he was beaten, then he was obliged to beat his child a second time. Anything less was considered spoiling the child.

8 They Had To Steal Food To Eat

During the agoge, boys only received the barest necessities. Shoes were considered a luxury, so the boys trained barefoot. Clothing made one weak against the elements, so the boys wore a single, thin cloak. And food made people fat, so the boys were only given the bare minimum they needed to survive.

That didn’t mean that they couldn’t get more. The trainees were encouraged to steal food if they were hungry. The catch was that they weren’t allowed to get caught. If a boy was spotted stealing food, he would be beaten and deprived of rations, but if he was stealthy enough to get away with it, the wardens figured he had earned a second course.

7 Starved Trainees Were Ordered To Fight Over Cheese

The Spartans had weird ways to pass the time. They held an annual festival in which cheese would be placed upon an altar to the god Artemis. Starving trainees would then be set loose, fighting each other in a desperate battle to grab as much cheese as they possibly could.

While they fought each other, older men would also be beating them with whips—sometimes even to death. It was the duty of the boys to keep strong faces throughout and to grin as they were beaten and clawed at while they fought for cheese.

To the audience, this was hilarious. Great rows of people would gather to watch the show and would laugh while they watched boys brutally maim each other. The one who left with the most cheese would also be honored with the title of “Bomonike.”

6 Spartan Food Was Terrible

When Spartans did eat, it wasn’t exactly the meal you’d get at a five-star restaurant. A man from Italy who sat down with a Spartan army and joined in one their meals famously said, “Now I know why the Spartans do not fear death.”

He was talking about “black broth,” a dish made by cooking meat in a mixture of blood, salt, and vinegar. Spartans ate together, with everyone sharing the same food under the same tent, and the black broth was considered the highlight of the meal. It was the only meat they served, and everyone only got a small portion.

The only way to get more meat was to hunt. If a hunter took down a deer, he had to share it, but he was allowed to take a little bit of the venison home for a second course. This was the only time a Spartan could eat at home; anything else was strictly forbidden.

5 If Trainees Failed Oral Quizzes, They Were Bitten

When supper was over, an under-master would sit down with the trainees and ask them questions. These questions were sort of like modern essay prompts: They’d be asked questions like, “Who is the best man in the city?” and would be expected to support their answers with reasons.

Their answer had to be clever, well thought-out, and prompt. If it wasn’t, they were punished—in an extremely weird way. According to Plutarch, anyone who gave a weak answer was bit on the thumb.

Life wasn’t much better for the under-master. When the question session was over, the under-master was taken out back and reviewed. If his masters felt he’d been too strict or too kind, he was beaten.

4 All Other Forms Of Education Were Banned

If you were a Spartan, you were a soldier. You weren’t an accountant or a merchant or a farmer; you were just a soldier. Your education made sure you stayed that way.

Spartans were taught to fight, to be tough, and—only as a necessity—to read. Everything else was strictly forbidden from the education system. Extracurricular education was considered a dangerous luxury. Spartan students weren’t allowed to spend their spare moments learning how to add and subtract or contemplating life’s philosophical mysteries.

Soldiers had to obey any order without delay, so traditional education was viewed as something that would make them weaker. If a Spartan soldier was considering a career as a lawyer or the complexities of free will, he wasn’t focusing on fighting and listening to his commander—so he was kept from learning anything else.

3 Boys Were Publically Whipped For An Annual Festival

The Spartans had a annual festival they called the “Diamastigosis,” and it was brutal. In this one, the boys were taken in front of a crowd and beaten with a whip until they couldn’t stand it anymore.

It sounds like torture, but for the Spartans, it was a great honor. They would eagerly volunteer to be whipped in front of a crowd, wanting to prove to their city that they could withstand the abuse for longer than any other person.

This was such a novelty to other cultures that, when the Romans found out about it, they started vacationing in Sparta just so they could watch it. By AD 300, the Spartans had even set up a theater and sold tickets, buying into a little commercialism to profit from the Roman Empire.

2 They Murdered Slaves For Sport

The Spartans kept Palestinian slaves whom they called “Helots,” and they were absolutely terrible to them. Among the many atrocities committed against them was a ritual called “Crypteia,” meant to strike terror in the slaves and to get boys ready for battle.

Spartan boys would be given daggers and small rations of food and then sent out on a mission to ambush and murder as many helpless slaves as they could. They would hide until night and then jump out and attack Helots walking on highways and working in the fields.

The slaves would be brutally murdered, giving the boys a little practice on the field and reminding the Helots where their place in society really was.

1 Spartans Only Got Tombstones If They Died In Combat

If a Spartan died of old age, he wasn’t given any honors. He’d be buried in an unmarked grave, essentially being shamed for living out a full life.

They only way to get a tombstone was to die in combat. If a Spartan died in battle, he’d be buried where his body laid, and, as a special honor, he’d be given a tombstone with his name and the words “in war” written below it.

Women, who didn’t fight in the wars, could still get tombstones, but only under one circumstance: If a mother died in childbirth, she was given a warrior’s honors. To the Spartans, she had died fighting a battle of her own—and creating more boys to become the soldiers of Sparta.

+Further Reading

Let’s face it—you can never read too much about the Ancient world. So here are a few more lists from the archives to satisfy your cravings:

10 Amazing Facts About Ancient Sparta
10 Common Misconceptions About the Ancient Greeks
Top 10 Greatest Historical Warriors
Top 10 Badass Female Warriors

Child labor still occurs today; in fact we even wrote a list about it. But going back through the history of Christendom (what we would largely consider the West these days) we see an almost constant use of young boys for the worst jobs we have to offer. Jobs that adult men either didn’t want, or were not equipped for in quite the same way (due to being too big for example). This list takes a trip through relatively recent history to explore ten of the worst jobs we have made our boys endure.

10 Gruesome And Shocking Facts About Victorian Surgery

10 Farming

Farming as a job for children remains, to this day, a big part of life on family-owned farms, but in the past children would work wherever they could and for whomever they could. That meant back-breaking laborious hours under the blistering sun being paid a pittance. Without parents in charge, little leniency was offered when a boy fell ill or was overwhelmed by the job. This is an industry that also hired many girls for less arduous jobs such as sorting of fruit and vegetables.

Children provided extremely cheap (and sometimes nearly free) labor for farmers who had profit margins that were minuscule in extremely difficult times. Not only was the depression raging, but the dust bowl was forming and the world was reeling from the aftermath of the Great War  . . .  and readying itself, perhaps subconsciously, for the next one.^[1]

Child labor was largely ended in the US in 1938 as part of the efforts to deal with the Great Depression. It was reasoned that by banning children from work, unemployed men would be able to take up those jobs. Combined with laws to compel the payment of higher wages as well as unionizing efforts in certain industries, it had the desired effect and children were, for the first time in modern history, allowed to be children.

9 Picolo

Ludwig Bemelmans, author of the Madeline series of books for children, described the lives of the Picolos in his fantastic book When You Lunch With The Emperor. The book is about his youth as am immigrant boy from Austria working in the New York Ritz during the great depression. The book recounts vivid and seedy tales from the underbelly of the New York Ritz where he worked as a young man during the Great Depression, after emigrating from Austria-Hungary.^[2]

“The child picolo is an institution in all European restaurants. His head barely reaches above the table; his ears are red and stand out, because everybody pulls them. And when he is a man he will still pull his head quickly to one side if anyone close to him suddenly moves, because he always did that to soften the blows that rained on him from the proprietor down to the last chambermaid; they hit him mostly out of habit.” He goes on to add: “[W]hen one sees [ . . . ] one of those old waiters [ . . . ] leaning on a chair, with ugly lightless eyes and a dead face that is filled with misery and meanness, one is seeing that little boy grown old, with flat crippled feet on which he has dragged almost to the end of his useless life his dead childhood.”

The picolo worked from 6am till 11pm and his job was to do everything undesirable that no one else wanted to do. He cleaned the ashtrays. He scraped the old food from plates. He folded newspapers, washed dishes, carried water, and spent half the day bowing to his superiors. Despite this, the job of the picolo was, for a boy at the time, not the worst option available to him as we shall see.

The 1993 film King of the Hill (unrelated to the animated TV series) is based on the life of a young boy forced by circumstances to become a picolo. It is considered to be Steven Soderbergh’s most underrated picture, so it is worth a look.

8 Apprenticeships

An apprenticeship for a boy typically began between the ages of ten and fourteen. Continuing with the words of Ludwig Bemelmans above: “[T]he picolo was looked upon with envy by the apprentices of plumbers and cobblers; they had the red ears, too, but not enough to eat, and no cigarettes, no drinks, no tips.” Considering that in the middle ages a boy had to pay to become an apprentice, it was something of a novelty that he would even be paid for the job in the 19th and 20th centuries.^[3]

Nevertheless, it was difficult work and punishments were liberally delivered by the tradesmen who took these boys on. But, unlike many of the other jobs on this list, there was at least a reasonably certainty that upon competition of your apprenticeship, a good job with an equally good pay awaited you. Such a prospect in such times of hunger and poverty would have seemed a true blessing to the boys “lucky” enough to end up in training. My how the world has changed!

7 Cannery Worker

Working in the canneries meant standing for hours in the freezing Atlantic winters chopping, packing, and hauling fish and other foods. Canning was still a fairly young enterprise and like so many other jobs on this list, needed a big workforce of unskilled laborers. Children, like the boy above, aged nine, were paid up to five cents per box that they processed.

Notwithstanding the dangers of working in such terrible conditions (terrible enough for grown men!) the boys were also required to handle extremely dangerous cutting tools and canning machines designed to slice and seal metal. One can only imagine the casualties that would have emerged from the sheds and boatyards where these boys worked.

Unfortunately many of these industries hiring young boys were run by do-gooders. Men (and sometimes women) who felt they were providing a better life for the child by offering them labor. This definitely brings to mind the famous quote of C.S. Lewis who said “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”^[4]

6 Bootblack (Shoeshine Boy)

There is an anecdote that tells us that Joe Kennedy (former President Kennedy’s father), upon being given stock tips from a shoeshine boy realized that if a kid who polished dirty old boots for a living could trade stock in the market, it might be time to get out of it! He immediately sold all of his stock and avoided the massive market crash the next day that launched the Great Depression.

Anecdotes aside though, the job of bootblack was a tough one. The boys involved frequently fought others in the same trade for their corner, and you can imagine how vicious that could get when starving children are involved. The job would produce barely enough money to live, and that meant that it was a seven day a week gig, rain or shine. But, for those who were able to acquire the expensive polish and kit needed, it was a far better option than many of the others at the time.

The very first recorded image of a person is that of a man having his shoes polished by a bootblack. The photo was taken in 1838 and you can see it here. The people are in the lower left quadrant. At the time of the photo, Gregory XVI was Pope; he was the last pontiff who was a simple priest when elected (he was ordained a Bishop four days after he became Pope). He was the Pope who condemned and forbade participation in the Atlantic slave trade.

Another bootblack-related fact is that the character of Enoch “Nucky” Thompson in the brilliant television series Boardwalk Empire credited his rapid rise to the reading of the book for boys called Ragged Dick or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks. Unlike the characters in the TV Series, the book is real and was written by Horatio Alger Jr. in 1867. It tells the tale of young Dick who starts life as a poor boy on the streets of New York blacking boots, and his lifting himself up through perseverance, thrift, and cleverness.^[5]

Ragged Dick’s bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) was immensely popular at the time of publication as it typified the good character that all boys sought to attain. Books such as these epitomized the American dream. I cannot recommend them enough—to modern teenaged boys and grown men alike for the sheer pleasure of their reading. You can buy them here. Ad astra per aspera!

10 Modern-Day Forms of Child Labor

5 Cotton Mill Worker

The invention of the cotton gin, and a variety of other mechanical devices soon after was a Godsend in the post-slavery west. The American civil war and the abolition of the slave trade by Republican president Lincoln led to a shortage of cotton in Europe which verged on a crisis for the nation. But, as life returned somewhat to normal in the states with a new approach to the cultivation and picking of cotton, the industrial inventions brought things back to their peak and beyond.

The new machines were faster than a man, more accurate than a man, but far deadlier. There was a very real risk of loss of life or limb through the use of the cotton gin and spinning machines. Safety mechanisms were not considered important and oversight in the factories was lacking. And, kids being kids, occasional mishaps were bound to happen. Pictured here is twelve year old Giles Newsom in 1912 who had two fingers ripped out of his hand by a spinning machine in the cotton mill. He had slipped and his arm got caught in the gears of the machine. Giles’ eleven year old brother was also working in the factory at the same time.^[6]

The reaction from his family to the accident is rather incongruous with our modern principles: “Now he’s jes got to where he could be of some help to his ma an’ then this happens and he can’t never work no more like he oughter.” This apparently-heartless quote from the boy’s aunt underscores how truly important child labor was to family survival in the days before central banking and easy credit. Or, perhaps the aunt was simply sending a message to the mill owner to cough-up bigly in compensation.

4 Soldier

Child soldiers are known to exist today, but this is true going right back to ancient time when the Romans regularly hired boys as young as fourteen for the general army. In recent times (for example El Salvador in the 1990s) boys fought for the rebel troops and many child soldiers were seen across the Balkan region during their troubles.

The most shocking example of an historic nature is that of Momcilo Gavric, the seven year old boy who was accepted into a Serbian army unit and made a corporal a year later at the age of eight. He joined due to being orphaned when his family were killed in the war. He assisted military in the destruction of the troops who had taken the lives of his parents. After the war he was sent to England to school but he returned in time and remained in Serbia until his death aged 86 in 1993. Many monuments have been erected to his memory.^[7]

Despite the fairy-tale story of Momcilo Gavric’s life, children in the military is a terrible situation that should be prevented and fortunately most nations (at least western ones) have laws against the use of children in battle.

3 Prostitute

One of the lowest jobs on this list is, tragically, one most frequently seen still today and perhaps performed in even greater frequency than in the past due to the secret nature of many online apps and websites abused for the purpose. Child prostitution is most frequently associated with girls but it is equally common and harmful amongst boys. In Victorian England, Jack Saul caused a scandal when he announced himself, shamelessly, as a “sodomite” and “a professional Mary-ann” in court at the age of 18, admitting to an already long and prosperous career as a rent boy (indicating that he had begun in the profession back in Ireland as a child). Rumors circulated that one of his clients was the handsome Prince Albert, a mere seven years older than he and the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, then reigning.^[8]

Interestingly this is the same Prince Albert who has many times been touted as having been Jack The Ripper. He died at 28 of the Spanish flu pandemic. Prostitution was particularly common amongst Catholic boys in a time when “Papists” were seriously discriminated against in England by law. Additionally, many of the children who took part in this occupation would have been practically enslaved for the purpose by pimps and street gangs. These days many of the boys involved are runaways with very few options for earning money legally due to child labor laws and absent families. Pictured are two boy prostitutes haggling with potential customers in Times Square, New York, in the 1970s.^[9]

2 Mine Worker

While we are busy fretting over our children playing video games or binge-watching disturbing YouTube videos when they should be out playing in the sun, we should spare a thought for the boys of days gone by who spent their entire childhood deep beneath the surface of the earth performing menial tasks for the men who labored to bring coal to the surface to keep the machinery of the world turning.

These children (such as the boy pictured in 1908 with an oil-wick lamp attached to his cap) worked from 7am to 5:30pm daily in the mines driving the animals that pulled the wagons of coal, opening and shutting doors that kept the miners safe from potential hazards should they arise, or basically performing any task assigned to them that their small bodies or hands were more suited to than those of adult men.^[10]

While our children have the promise of a future of opportunities, the boys who worked these mines had no future beyond that of lung disorders and hard labour for a lifetime. And that was the good news; the bad news was that you ran the risk, daily, of being killed by a mine-collapse. The eyes of the child pictured here cannot hide his acute awareness of that fact.

1 Chimney Sweep

The tragic life of the chimney sweep all too often ended in death. Alas the risk of death was deemed a necessary evil as the lack of clean chimneys would have been catastrophic on a far larger scale for city-dwellers through uncontrolled fires and freezing temperatures. In fact, it was the Great Fire of London in 1666 that led to the adoption of boys (some as young as four) for the task. The little boys were purchased from their parents and forced into tiny chimneys with brushes to do a job that was otherwise impossible due to the sharp angles and considerable length of some chimneys.

On a good day a young chimney sweep would clean chimneys through all the daylight hours, and then retire to a miserable meal sleeping on the floor of his master’s own decrepit lodgings. Standing on top of a roof as he prepared to sweep the first chimney of the day, every day, he would know that the sunrise he was seeing may be his last as there was a very real possibility that this chimney could be the one to finally kill him: by fall, by suffocation, or by becoming stuck tight.^[11]

In a horribly sad twist on an already tragic tale, the bodies of many of these innocent children remain entombed throughout London in the chimneys that killed them. There has even been speculation that the British Houses of Parliament are riddled with the corpses of dead boys. Even if the bodies were recovered, a lack of records in a time when the life of a poor boy was worth so little, it would impossible to attribute names to the dead.^[12]

An extremely good book on the topic is British Chimney Sweeps: Five Centuries of Chimney Sweeping and I do recommend it if you have an interest in this sordid side of the life of Victorian England.

Top 10 Creepy Aspects of Victorian Life