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In Defense of the Spartans

Sparta is synonymous with discipline and militarism, and has been since at least the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. Some people have a problem with this.  Sparta’s reputation exists and promotes certain forms of virtue; it’s also simply a description of the way the United States currently handles war.

I’m going to link several articles disparaging the Spartans, their reputation, or their admirers, and I was specifically motivated to write this in response to Myke Cole’s article in The New Republic.  However, this isn’t just about these links, but also what I’ve observed in reactions and comments to these writings, often from people I respect, and some private and/or offline discussions and conversations I’ve had in the past few years.

The Spartan Mythos

In brief, the Spartan mythos: warfare is the most important of human endeavors, and excellence in warfare is thus the highest form of human excellence.  The foundation of excellence in warfare is discipline and training.  War and the preparation for war being the most important individual or collective effort, they should be emphasized and prioritized at the expense of all other fields – commercial, artistic, philosophical, romantic, religious, etc.  Sparta is the exemplar of all these things.  I would add that even in the meanest conceptions this mythos is readily scaled – it can apply and be applied anywhere from the individual to the national level.

There are some other important secondary attributes of this mythos.  In short these are elitism, austerity, and the primacy of human over other factors in performance.  The Spartan mythos is also highly masculine, historically sometimes to the point of homoeroticism.

Modern complaints about this mythos amount to three things: that it’s factually incorrect, that it’s immoral, or that it inspires bad people.

The Myth as History

The focused study of anything will reveal previously unknown knowledge to the student.  This sounds obvious, but if the student subscribes – even implicitly – to critical theory, then even trivial revelations on hoary topics like Athens & Sparta can produce a sensation of toppling temples of narrative oppression.  My eighth grade teacher LIED!  In reality this is little more than a variation on the strawman.  Yes, there is more to the history and legend of Sparta than what’s in the head of a bro who just watched 300.  No, this doesn’t mean that you’ve “deconstructed” said history.

Just as a particularly egregious example, take this article.  The most charitable explanation for what’s written at that link is that the author – probably angry about seeing someone he didn’t like sporting a molon labe and/or 300 helmet symbol (this is a common irritant) – typed “Sparta” into Wikipedia, and combined it with some unexamined conceptions about Ancient Greece.  For instance, we learn that “The Spartans were Morons” because they used terrain to their advantage and, besides, “they lost”.  The battle, that is, not the war.

I know this might seem like cherrypicking a bad example, but the link above is only meant to illustrate the tendency of certain acquaintances to “well acktually” about various details whenever Spartan Ideals are brought up.

The facts are this: the Spartans had a distinctive constitution distinguished as much from other Greek states by communalism as by militarism dating back to some indeterminate period after the Greek Dark Ages.   By the time of the fifth century BC, Sparta was clearly one of the major, successful poleis.  The Spartans cemented a reputation for military prowess at Thermopylae in 480 BC, and continually proved their predominance until they were decisively defeated by the Thebans at Leuctra in 371 BC.  Yes, they had a hard time of it during the Peloponnesian War and some Spartans surrendered at Sphacteria, just as a far larger body of US Marines surrendered on Corregidor.  Sure, Thermopylae was a loss and the numbers involved were somewhat exaggerated for propaganda purposes.  But it was indeed a very heroic act of uncommon valor, had a significant if not decisive effect on the invading Medes, and inaugurated several generations of Spartan success.

So, a hundred-year run of markedly superior performance if not outright supremacy in war.  And that, without the benefit of any real edge in either armament or numbers.  Sparta instead relied on a “Spartiate” warrior class who trained a little harder than their competitors by driving their slaves a little harder to pick up the slack.  At the same time, this period happened to coincide with the Athenian Golden Age, supplying the historical record with several immortal philosophers and historians praising not merely the combat record of Sparta but also its national character, and by which we receive most of the details of the Spartan mythos: discipline, quasi-ascetic restraint, laconic wisdom.  While war and training for war enjoyed primacy in Spartan society, it did not come at the total exclusion of other functions: the Spartans held festivals, composed and recited poetry, constructed public buildings and monuments, etc.  The Spartans were rather insular and secretive compared to other Greek states and Athens in particular – “xenophobic” might be an appropriate modern term — something that subsequently got rolled into a general perception of “elitism”.  Nevertheless they were not a hermit kingdom, and conducted foreign relations in a more or less typical manner.

While it’s quite true that Sparta’s time in the sun didn’t last forever, it did in fact take place.  Yes, Sparta declined and eventually became a tourist attraction before fading into more or less complete irrelevance.  So have other great states, and on the subject of longevity I very rarely hear the same mouths mock the Spartan failure to maintain a three-thousand-year polity praise the millennial longevity of the Roman church.  There is certainly a degree of historical contingency as to why Sparta rather than, say, Thebes, or Switzerland, or Qin China epitomizes the militarized state in the Western mind.   But it is not a bad example of such a state; there is real history behind the legend.

The Moral Status of the Spartan Mythos

A more intelligent objection to the Spartan is that while it has a real basis in historical fact, it is morally wrong or just plain contradicts other values like republican democracy.  King Alfred may have been a great guy but that’s not how we roll.

I think it’s important to draw a distinction between Sparta as an object of national mythology or even emulation, and of individual inspiration.

Myke Cole’s article cites several historical examples (Machiavelli, John Adams, the Kibbutzniks, the Nazis, Brexiteers) of people or groups who aspired to some variant of the Spartan mythos.  I’d like to point out that none of these examples – even including the later, racist people who are Cole’s ultimate subject – wholesale adopted the constitution and social organization of a fifth-century BC Greek polis, what the kids today refer to as “LARPing”.  Indeed the very diversity of Cole’s examples shows that details matter and in reality even those who buy pretty heavily into Spartan mythology as an organizational principle can and do pick and choose what aspects of the mythos to incorporate without much danger of accidentally adopting Lycurgus the Lawgiver’s views on slavery.  This is something that I’m sure Cole has little trouble seeing when looking at e.g. ISIS vs the Islamic Republic of Egypt.

There’s also the fact that “Spartan” works just as well as an individual ideal as a national or organizational mindset.  It’s perfectly common for anyone who pursues excellence in some specific field to do so without any expectation that his goals have some universal applicability, and if this causes the practitioner to come across as or even actually be somewhat elitist in outlook this is not some great moral crime.  There is a very real and recent history of tremendous evil committed in the name of workers’ rights, but this isn’t automatically grounds to discredit OSHA, or the SEIU.

Besides, the Legend of Sparta isn’t even some key ingredient in actual militarized states!  North Korea, particularly under Kim Jong Il’s “military first” program, is at least a candidate for the closest extant analogue to the literal Spartan polis, and yet while I’m sure that some of their founders and leadership have at least heard of Sparta, Classical Greece Laconic or otherwise has no real historical influence on Korea.

(The other strong candidates for a modern Sparta are Switzerland and Israel.  Notice that all three are substantially different.)

Even other states that have to some degree deliberately adopted Spartan mythology have done so only partially, and the relationship is typically one of convenience rather than causation, the way interventionists prefer the philosophy of Wilson to Washington.  Neither Frederick II nor Jefferson Davis would have acted any differently had Sparta never existed.

This is particularly relevant to Myke Cole’s article – which is after all entitled “The Sparta Fetish is a Cultural Cancer”.   Cole notes, as I have, that a large and diverse array of people and peoples have expressed some admiration of the semi-mythical Spartan ideal, repeatedly and often with considerable fervor, since the establishment of the Spartan constitution sometime around 900 BC.  While this includes such benign entities as Medici Florence, it also includes people whom Cole doesn’t like (Trump supporters), and people whom nobody likes (Hitler).  Well, so what?  The very ubiquity of Sparta’s appeal across time, space, and ideology suggests that Cole’s “concern” about the appropriation of Spartan imagery by his political opponents means very little.

The Spartan Ideal as Descriptive

I think there is something else going on here too.  The Angry Staff Officer gets at it in this post.  “Stop Calling Us Warriors”, he pleads, singling out the Spartans among a few others.  I agree, but there’s a problem, which you might have noticed in the section above.  The Spartan mythos isn’t merely aspirational.  It can also be descriptive.  And the  description is basically accurate in an important way.

The United States is openly engaged in combat in 14 different countries as of January 2019, not to mention dozens of other “training and assistance” missions in which combat is at least a prospect.  Virtually all of this is conducted by special operations forces, who employ only the most rigorously selected and intensely trained troops in actual combat while maintaining a comparatively high ratio of support personnel and “enablers”.  If SOCOM thinks of itself as “Spartan”, as both Cole and Angry Staff Officer rightly point out they quite often do, then where’s the lie?  They are what they are, a feted warrior elite, and when they reach into the big bag of signifiers describing what they do all day, that helmet is going to be in there somewhere near the top.

This also, by the way, applies to law enforcement, which is afforded all sorts of privileges over the citizenry which bear more than a passing resemblance to those exercised by the Spartiate over the helot even as the origins of “law enforcement officers” as militia officers becomes ever less relevant.

The role of Spartan imagery in the above is completely irrelevant to any objections about the professionalization of military and law enforcement.

In conclusion, the legend of Sparta’s military prowess has a real historical basis, the legend itself has a long and varied history, and is a legitimate if rather amoral source of inspiration for both movements and individuals.