Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
Why does this ancient society capture the modern imagination?
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If you’re American, you’ve probably seen it on the rear window of a car or perhaps on a too-tight T-shirt on a muscly guy: two Greek words, “ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ.”
There seems to be a thriving business in ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ (molon labe, in the Latin alphabet) merch — if you visit your online retailer of choice, you can get the phrase on stickers, hats, shirts, flags, keychains, sew-on patches, tie pins, pop sockets, license plate frames, and ammunition boxes. The phrase often appears next to the American flag, the “don’t tread on me” snake, militia insignia, and, most of all, guns.
Molon labe means “come and take them.” It’s used by American gun enthusiasts and Second Amendment fundamentalists as a message: you can take my military-style assault rifles over my dead body.
The phrase comes from Plutarch’s Sayings of the Spartans, which is just what it sounds like: a collection of little snippets from important Spartan leaders. The quote supposedly comes from a moment when the Persian king Xerxes demanded the surrender of Spartan soldiers at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The Spartans were badly outnumbered but controlled a narrow passage in the mountains. Xerxes made Leonidas, the Spartan king, an offer:
Xerxes wrote to him, ‘It is possible for you, by not fighting against God but by ranging yourself on my side, to be the sole ruler of Greece.’ But he wrote in reply, ‘If you had any knowledge of the noble things of life, you would refrain from coveting others’ possessions; but for me to die for Greece is better than to be the sole ruler over the people of my race.’ When Xerxes wrote again, ‘Hand over your arms,’ he wrote in reply, ‘Come and take them.’
Very cinematic! The modern popularity of the phrase almost certainly originates from the 2006 movie 300, a cartoonish adaptation of a comic book based on the events of the Persian Wars (the general approach of the film is to take the spiciest scenes from the ancient sources and turn them up to 11 with a bunch of naked ladies and monsters):
Did it happen like this? Almost certainly not. Plutarch lived 500 years after these events. Another historian, Diodorus Siculus, records the events this way:
After the Persians had encamped on the Spercheius River, Xerxes dispatched envoys to Thermopylae to discover, among other things, how the Greeks felt about the war with him; and he commanded them to make this proclamation: “King Xerxes orders all to give up their arms, to depart unharmed to their native lands, and to be allies of the Persians; and to all Greeks who do this he will give more and better lands than they now possess.” But when Leonidas heard the commands of the envoys, he replied to them: “If we should be allies of the king we should be more useful if we kept our arms, and if we should have to wage war against him, we should fight the better for our freedom if we kept them; and as for the lands which he promises to give, the Greeks have learned from their fathers to gain lands, not by cowardice, but by valour.”
This is not to say that Diodorus Siculus recorded a more accurate depiction of these events, but his phrasing does more closely mirror the flowery language with which ancient leaders probably addressed each other.
But I guess if I were a second-amendment-sticker-on-my-pickup-truck guy, I wouldn’t want a T-shirt that said “If we should be allies of the king we should be more useful if we kept our arms….” either.
The enthusiasm for Sparta on the American right is just the latest example of a modern movement seeing something to emulate in ancient Sparta. The people who admire Sparta generally fixate on a few ideas about the ancient society:
The prowess of the Spartan military, which was a product of strict discipline and tough training;
A code of honor and bravery, exemplified by the supposed instruction of Spartan mothers to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it” (another Plutarch gem);
An austere culture that was uncorrupted by extreme wealth or material greed;
A strict social order designed to produce ruthlessly excellent warriors;
And an ethos of military brotherhood and belonging.
It’s not hard to see how such a warrior-culture ideal might appeal to a certain Type of Guy. The problem is that it might not be very historically accurate.
The Spartans certainly had a very effective military and were a major power in the 400s BCE — they defeated the much larger city of Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars and seem to have been widely feared. But we don’t have any historical sources about Spartan society from the Spartans themselves. Heck, there’s not even much left of the city-state itself.
Everything we know about ancient Sparta was written by outsiders, most of whom were either the contemporary enemies of Sparta or later writers looking back on Sparta and using it as a mirror for their own values, fears, or agendas.
The French scholar Francois Ollier wrote a famous book in the 1930s called The Spartan Mirage, which argued that the Romans idealized Sparta during their own period of expansion. The Athenians and other Greeks wrote a lot about the Spartans, too, but they used them mostly as an object of fascination and a foil for the vision of Greek culture that they wanted to promote. The Athenians’ depictions of the Spartans were probably akin to Americans’ portrayals of the Soviets during the Cold War — based on reality, but skewed by the rivalry between the two societies.
Yes, the Spartans had an intimidating military and a strong warrior culture, but it seems that we can’t trust many of the details of these ancient sources. For every truism about Sparta in the ancient sources — they never surrendered! — there are exceptions that make Sparta seem less unique — over 120 of Sparta’s best men surrendered at Sphacteria in 425 BCE.
Over the centuries, philosophers took these imperfect and incomplete accounts and used them to illustrate ideas that were important to them.
Medieval writers looked to Sparta as a model for their monarchs. Philosophers like John of Salisbury used the ancient Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus — who may never have existed — as an example of a wise leader who created a balanced and stable state. These medieval authors turned Sparta — a society they didn’t have much information about — into an exemplar of the Christian virtues that they admired. Later Renaissance authors used Sparta for their own purposes, portraying it as a society that strayed from its original values and ended up declining. Sparta became a cautionary tale for Renaissance princes.
Enlightenment thinkers also twisted the history of Sparta, using it to support their arguments. Rousseau believed that cultured, artistic societies like Athens were too easily led into moral and military decline. He praised the Spartans for their steadfast focus:
O Sparta! How you eternally shame a vain doctrine! While the vices led along by the fine arts were introduced together with them in Athens, while a tyrant there collected with so much care the works of the prince of poets, you were chasing the arts, artists, the sciences, and learned men from your walls.
Voltaire, on the other hand, saw Sparta as a powerful but deeply flawed city-state. He railed against its supposed lack of culture:
What good did Sparta to Greece? Did she ever have Demosthenes, Sophocles, Apelles, Phidias? The luxury of Athens produced great men in every sphere; Sparta had a few captains, and in less number even than other towns. But how fine it is that as small a republic as Lacedaemon retains its poverty.
The Sparta of these philosophical debates was an exaggeration — an impossibly austere and militaristic counterpoint to cultured, democratic Athens. Thinkers used it as an object for self-reflection rather than trying to understand it as a real historical society.
Sparta hasn’t just been an inspiration for philosophers; some of the most extreme modern political movements have found inspiration there as well.
During the French Revolution, Rousseau’s idea of an austere, disciplined Sparta appealed to rebels who were fed up with the extravagance and inequality of the ancien regime. Even though the real Sparta had been a deeply unequal society whose success relied on the fact that the vast majority of people there were Helots, or slaves, French radicals developed a narrative about Sparta as an egalitarian society that shunned extreme wealth.
A bust of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus looked out on the legislators in the French National Convention alongside more straightforwardly republican figures like Demosthenes, Brutus, and Cincinnatus. Under Lycurgus’ gaze, revolutionaries dreamed of establishing an educational system based on Sparta’s that would create a republic of virtue. When the Terror came, radicals like Robespierre looked to Sparta as an example of a society where individuals had to sacrifice their freedom and even their lives for the good of the collective.
The Nazis admired the Spartans for different reasons. They saw the city-state as an example of successful eugenics, as Spartans had supposedly killed sickly and disabled children to ensure that their armies were strong. Hitler, when arguing that the government should “limit the number who are allowed to live,” said that “The Spartans were once capable of such a wise measure… The subjugation of 350,000 Helots by 6,000 Spartans was only possible because of the racial superiority of the Spartans.”
The Nazis saw Sparta as a fellow militaristic, totalitarian, imperialist power, one in which the state was supreme and the people carried out its wishes. They thought of the Slavic people of Eastern Europe as modern Helots. Nazi officials modeled their educational system after the supposedly fierce agoge system that molded young Spartan men into fanatically loyal and disciplined warriors (German children read from a textbook entitled Sparta: The Life Struggle of a Nordic Master Caste).
The Nazis were especially fixated on Thermopylae as the epitome of the Spartan mindset. They, too, repeated a pithy quote to summarize the glory of Thermopylae: “The Fame of Dead Men’s Deeds Lasts unto Eternity.” When the brutal Battle of Stalingrad started to turn against the Germans, Nazi leadership tried to inspire the troops by comparing them to the 300 Spartans. As historian Roderick Watt writes,
Deliberate, spurious parallels were drawn between the last stand of the Spartans against the Persian invaders from the East and the defence by the German Sixth Army of Stalingrad against the Russians. It was, of course, conveniently forgotten that in the latter instance the Germans were in fact the aggressors and their forces were ultimately sacrificed to the military and political incompetence of their leaders. Just as the Spartans’ suicidally heroic holding action gained time for the rest of Greece to concentrate its forces and eventually defeat Xerxes decisively at Salamis so, Nazi propaganda implied, the Germans at Stalingrad gallantly immolated themselves to stem the advancing Russian hordes and win time not only for Germany, but for all Western Europe to prepare an effective defence against what the Nazis chose to brand as the Asiatic onslaught from the East.
Here’s the thing about Thermopylae: the Spartans lost.
Leonidas’ 300 men made a brave stand in the mountains, and a superior Persian force wiped them out. You can see it like the Nazis did and the guys in the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ T-shirts do, as a glorious battle in which an honorable band of brothers sacrificed their lives for their principles. Or you can see it as a tragedy in which the leaders of an oligarchical, slave-dependent society threw away their finest soldiers’ lives, and for what? To briefly delay the Persian Army while failing to achieve their goal of protecting Athens and the rest of northern Greece from the Persian attack?
Sure, the popular perception of the Spartans as a uniquely austere, disciplined, value-driven society is attractive in some ways. I’d love to have abs like those guys in the movie version of 300. But we should remember that, in actual history, Sparta was an oppressive society that established itself as the enemy of the Greek city-states that valued democracy and the arts. We should also remember that many of the modern people who have been most enthusiastic about the Spartans as historical role models have also been really enthusiastic about oppressing and killing their fellow human beings.
As a new generation of people adopts the Spartans as historical role models, we should understand that they’re probably telling us more about themselves than the actual people who lived in Sparta more than two millennia ago.
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A version of this essay was also published here
Interesting how people pick and choose from history whatever supports their ideas. About the current muscle guys and gun enthusiasts etc.: aren't many of them homophobic? Do they know that the Spartan military not only allowed, but encouraged homosexuality? And (according to Wikipedia) accepted pederasty, "the sexual relationship between an adult man and a boy"???