Spartans Were Losers

September 23, 2024 7:44 PM

The U.S. military’s admiration of a proto-fascist city-state is based on bad history. "Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society."
posted by AlSweigart (37 comments total)

The best part about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was murdering literally hundreds of Spartan assholes just because their camp was in my way and I didn’t feel like going the long way ‘round.

(I played as Kassandra, so screw you Sparta, behold my glorious flowing mane! Did you see me stick a spear straight through that guy? You’re all next!)
posted by aramaic at 7:50 PM on September 23 [25 favorites]

I was going to say this reminds me of Bret Devereaux's great series on Sparta, and lo, it's written by Devereaux.
posted by zompist at 7:57 PM on September 23 [36 favorites]

The author here is Bret Devereaux who blogs at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. There is a lengthier series of entries on the subject ("This isn't Sparta") that's worth a read if this your sort of thing.

my primary interest in ancient sparta is that i want a t-shirt that has 'molon labe' superimposed over a stack of books

edit: jinx
posted by logicpunk at 7:58 PM on September 23 [11 favorites]

Indeed, there’s a whole thread from 5 years ago featuring Bret and his amazing research on Sparta.
posted by ashbury at 8:02 PM on September 23 [10 favorites]

I saw the heading and thought, "Hopefully, something written by the excellent Devereaux"

Hopes fulfilled.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 8:09 PM on September 23 [4 favorites]

My only exposure to Spartan history was from from "300" and Ernle Bradford's Thermopylae, both of which are desperately uncritical takes on the Spartans. Frank Miller, if you've read any of his Batman oeuvre, comes across pretty fashy already, so it's unsurprising that the history would have been pretty twisted up. The FP link hits a paywall for me, but the Devereaux stuff is great so far.
posted by Dr. Twist at 8:11 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]

archive.is your way around the paywall
posted by axiom at 8:23 PM on September 23 [6 favorites]

The FPP article is great, and succinct, but if you have trouble accessing it, you can read Deveraux's blog posts that zompist et al. linked above and get the same argument with more detail.

Good for Deveraux for beating this drum. The myth of competent Sparta as an excuse to advance abusive hyper-militarism and conformity needs to be dismantled whenever encountered.
posted by biogeo at 8:31 PM on September 23 [9 favorites]

Sweaty muscular losers!
posted by Czjewel at 9:55 PM on September 23 [2 favorites]

> archive.is your way around the paywall

Thank you. I originally flagged my post as "self-delete request" because I realized there was as soft paywall that it wasn't showing to me and archive.org didn't work, but your link works.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:32 PM on September 23 [2 favorites]

Adding the Spartans to my "very effective propaganda" list: "so effective your enemies repeat lies you made up," along with "they were efficient" Nazi Germany. Thanks!
posted by rubatan at 2:06 AM on September 24 [5 favorites]

Devereaux wrote about the propaganda in one of the articles in his Sparta series:

That is one of the core things we can learn from Sparta: a reputation for military excellence can often be more valuable than the excellence itself – real or imagined. A powerful army can only fight one battle at a time, but the idea of a powerful army can intimidate any number of enemies all at once.

posted by runcifex at 3:51 AM on September 24 [9 favorites]

Revisionist history, I'm all for it. But I have to say that in 1991, inspired by William Golding's essay The Hot Gates [full text], I left for a conference in Greece two days early to go to Thermopylae. I was dropped off the bus in a dusty car-park; trudged up the man-made hillock (maybe the grave of the 300) read the inscription " Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι ", plucked two bayleaves (Laurus nobilis) from a nearby bush and went for a job-done-after-20-years beer. I still have those leaves.

Also Xenophon, author of the me-inspirational Anabasis, left Athens for Sparta when he got back from his Persian adventures. I don't think that makes him full fasch, but I'm happy to be corrected.
posted by BobTheScientist at 4:36 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]

to go to Thermopylae. I was dropped

Got this far and had a flash of an old greek guy telling me about how the spartans dropped folks into a deep hole and gosh had a moment.
posted by sammyo at 5:31 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]

Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe was my introduction to Sparta. That's where I learned about how completely fucked up they were as a society from forcing children to spend months in the wilderness acting as murder hobos because it built character to having an economy that couldn't function without greater and greater numbers of captive serfs and slaves to do all the basic stuff.

My favorite bit was that apparently Spartans wouldn't even compete in athletic games if they thought there was any chance they'd lose, which seems very appropriate for the kind of people who look up to Sparta these days...
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:58 AM on September 24 [24 favorites]

My only exposure to Spartan history was from from "300" and Ernle Bradford's Thermopylae, both of which are desperately uncritical takes on the Spartans. Frank Miller, if you've read any of his Batman oeuvre, comes across pretty fashy already, so it's unsurprising that the history would have been pretty twisted up.

If memory serves me right, Miller based 300 on a book by right-wing history talking guy Victor Davis Hansen, so it's even less surprising.
posted by Gelatin at 6:49 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]

It's also worth taking a look at Devereaux's series on the Fremen Mirage as part of this, as it gets into the false idea of cruelty as somehow being a sign of military skill.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:15 AM on September 24 [14 favorites]

BobTheScientist: I’ve read that inscription on a monument to war dead as well. But it wasn’t in Greece; it was on the green at the University of Mississippi, and the war dead were also brutal slaveholders. (I say that, who am descended from them.) So that is how I feel about Sparta.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:29 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]

From the article:

Unable to win that war either, Sparta again turned to Persia to enforce a peace, called the “King’s Peace,” which sold yet more Greek city-states to the Persian king in exchange for making Sparta into Persia’s local enforcer in Greece, tasked with preventing the emergence of larger Greek alliances that could challenge Persia.

Notable that in 300, Leonidas is depicted as explicitly rejecting this very offer.
posted by Gelatin at 7:38 AM on September 24 [6 favorites]

Devereaux's blog posts about the 'Fremen Mirage' and Sparta are both outstandingly good.
posted by rmd1023 at 8:26 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]

This. Is. Farta!
posted by kirkaracha at 9:38 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]

One of the pop-culture springs that fed 300 is plausibly the later science fiction of Jerry Pournelle, who himself imbibed the myth of the the Three Hundred pretty uncritically, and then barfed it back up as the ethos of the First Empire of Man, the interstellar polity that forms among Earth's colonies when rule from the homeworld collapses.

I know that Pournelle made the pilgrimage to Thermopylae himself. I'm pretty sure there was a writeup at jerrypournelle.com but I am unable to make Google find it. Perhaps I am mistaken and it was recorded only in dead-tree format. Pournelle had a lot of right-wing-follower admiration-of-militarism going and Spartan-worship was a natural for him.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:54 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]

If you are short on time, Devereaux's The Cult of the Badass wraps up the whole Fremen-Sparta-Dothraki thing with reference to warrior cop mentality, Frank Miller, violence as virtue, and "Ur-Fascism".
posted by away for regrooving at 12:13 PM on September 24 [6 favorites]

Every time I see a huge, clean pickup truck with a sticker that says molon labe, my brain rearranges it into "moron label."

I have yet to be wrong
posted by wenestvedt at 12:22 PM on September 24 [18 favorites]

When I read "Gates of Fire," right after a college degree that included a handful of Classics courses, I took away from it the notion that classical history education was really underselling how action-packed it all was! Why the drab, airless poems, when we could have been reading this ready-for-filming near-screenplay?!

Later I realized that mmmmmmaybe I shouldn't have been so credulous -- but it really was helpful in turning those names in Penguin paperbacks into living, breathing people.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:26 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]

One of the pop-culture springs that fed 300 is plausibly the later science fiction of Jerry Pournelle...

Eeyew, but does the stream from that brackish spring have a fascist reek.
posted by y2karl at 3:07 PM on September 24 [2 favorites]

Definitely recommend Oxford professor Roel Konijnendijk’s many videos about pop culture depictions of ancient warfare, especially Greek warfare. Here’s one of his deep dives on 300. As well as a discussion with other professors on Sparta and the Internet, about engaging in and moderating discussions of Spartan history online.

He is probably best known for his love of ditches.
posted by chrisulonic at 3:39 PM on September 24 [4 favorites]

"the later science fiction of Jerry Pournelle..."

Oh yeah.

[snip]
The Prince is a science fiction compilation by Jerry Pournelle and S. M. Stirling.[1] It is part of the CoDominium future history series.

[snip]
The title and subject matter of the book are inspired by The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_(anthology)
[snip]
Falkenberg carries out a military assault on the socialists in a stadium, killing thousands and eliminating their leaders. The scene of the soldiers descending from the topmost level of the stadium, firing in volleys, is very like the classic Odessa Steps sequence in the movie The Battleship Potemkin (except that the readers' sympathies are completely reversed). The ruthlessness of the assault is similar to Napoleon's tactics used when dealing with uprisings in Paris. The sequence is also reminiscent of Belisarius' slaughter of the Nika rioters in the Hippodrome in 6th century Constantinople.
posted by aleph at 3:42 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]

The real victor of the Peloponnesian War was not Sparta, but Persia. The empire(s) of Iran are very neglected by Western historians.
(Gore Vidal -- I know, I know -- wrote Creation, a novel, examining this notion.)
posted by CCBC at 3:57 PM on September 24 [6 favorites]

I was just thinking about Creation. Vidal was too clever by half -- his protagonist is sent to China as an ambassador of the court of Artaterxes and meets and hangs with meets Zoroaster, Socrates, Anaxagoras, the Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tsu, Confucius and Pericles along the way and back. It was an incredibly ambitious would be epic.
posted by y2karl at 5:55 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]

I kick in for Vidal's Creation: a really great novel, and a witty deconstruction of the glory that was Greece. And other things.
posted by ovvl at 9:35 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]

Kieron Gillen's comic Three is a good deconstruction of Frank Miller's 300 and Sparta's reputation in general. Steven Hodkinson was historical adviser and there are some pretty decent essays/conversations between the two of them on the actual historical Sparta in the back of each issue.
posted by invisible_al at 5:37 AM on September 25 [4 favorites]

Gene Wolfe got this right in his Soldier of the Mist series. The "rope makers" are villains and their country a prison.
posted by Ansible at 8:45 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]

It's ages since I read "Soldier of the Mists". Apparently:

Wolfe as "translator" explains in the introduction that Latro's names for Sparta and the Spartans reflects a common mistake made by uneducated speakers of the time, and has to do with the the Greek word for rope or chord, σπαρτον, or "sparton."

posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:35 AM on September 25 [1 favorite]

I still often recommend Soldier of the Mists as the book to start with when discovering Gene Wolfe for the first time, not the Urth cycle. It's that good.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:55 AM on September 25 [1 favorite]

Well this all just sent me down a massive Bret Devereaux rabbit hole. Excellent stuff! Thank you for posting!

Deep-diving into the "This Isn't Sparta" series, I think I was most amused by his description of the Spartan army marching to Attica every year, trying to start a fight, and then having to march home before they'd done too much damage because they'd run out of supplies, even though their ally Corinth was two days away in foot! And they did this almost every year for like ten years. Just utterly incapable of understanding supply operations.

There are way more serious reasons in these essays as to why Sparta sucked, actually, but this just amused me because it made them out to be absolute Timmys in the War Game, certain that their (marginally) superior hoplite formations will surely bring them victory, and learning nothing every time it failed to do so.

Anyway, again, thanks for the post!
posted by Navelgazer at 1:15 PM on September 25 [1 favorite]

> the Spartan political system denied any political voice to any but the leisured rich, who had little incentive to change.

Hmm, sounds familiar!
posted by anthill at 2:38 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]