This is Sparta!

By Professor Paul Cartledge

Sparta, for better or worse, is a 'brand', not just a name. Whenever we casually drop into our everyday conversation the two little words 'spartan' and 'laconic', we are paying silent tribute to our Spartan cultural ancestors, continuing a tradition that descends from at least the fifth century BCE. Absolutely central to that tradition is the story - indeed in some ways, myth - of Leonidas and his '300'. The movie of that title is just the latest, but by no means the least interesting or important, manifestation of it.



Laconia and it's capital Sparta

In August 480 BCE King Leonidas of Sparta, along with all but two of his 300 chosen champions, perished in an act of gloriously heroic self-sacrifice at the narrow pass of Thermopylae ('Hot Gates') in north-central Greece. They were defending Greece and also - so it was claimed at the time and yet more stridently later - a radical notion of political freedom against a massive invasion led by Great King Xerxes, emperor of the largest and fastest-risen oriental empire to that date.

Scholars still debate furiously over exactly why Leonidas and his Spartans came to die in this way, but there is no dispute over the mythical fall-out of that famous deed. Simonides the praise-singer was an early contributor to the Spartan tradition, with his archetypically laconic epigram that begins 'Go, tell the Spartans ...'. From here there ran a direct line of ideology in antiquity to Horace's dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ('sweet and fitting it is to die for one's fatherland'), though few Greeks or Romans were able or willing to emulate the massive impact of Leonidas's men. And the tradition of patriotic self-sacrifice clearly still lives on vibrantly, or else a movie like 300 would not have been conceived let alone made.



The father of the Spartan ideology,Lycurgos 800 B.C

But - and it is a very big 'but' - making a stunningly successful Hollywood movie about a major real past event with shockingly contemporary reverberations carries enormous risks and responsibilities. It is by no means obvious that Zak Snyder (director) and Frank Miller (creator of the 'graphic novel' on which the movie was based, and also the film's consultant) were always or fully enough aware of that. Of course it was not their fault that the U.S. and its allies chose to invade Iraq in 2003, and that the catastrophic consequences of that choice were still being played out when the movie was released in 2006. Nor did the movie make any pretence to being a historically authentic reconstruction of the original battle - in the way that Miller's own 'source', the movie The Three Hundred Spartans (1962), had done. What drove Snyder and his very gifted team of actors, creative consultants and technicians above all else was the desire to tell a rattling good yarn using the very latest in CGI technology. (The director's commentary on the DVD makes that unambiguously clear).

However - and again it is a very big 'however' - none of that explains let alone excuses the decision to tell the tale in the crudest black-and-white, goodies vs baddies, cowboys and indians style. When I was writing my own book on Thermopylae*, I knew very well that the movie was being made, since I was actually asked to do a bit of consulting for it in a very minor way (on the pronunciation of certain Greek names). But so far from wanting just to re-tell a rattling good yarn, my main aim in my book was to enhance understanding of a critical moment in the early history of East-West relations. Indeed, if you follow Tom Holland's line in his excellent Persian Fire, the Persian Wars of 480-479 were precisely when 'the West' as a cultural concept was first defined, by opposition to some notion of an 'East'. All the more important therefore that one should struggle desperately to avoid prejudice and propaganda and strive as hard as one could for an - admittedly impossible - objectivity.



The filmmakers of 300, by contrast, seem to have been keen to (if you'll pardon the pun) sell the pass on this one from the word go. For them, all orientals - from the multiply pierced drag-queen-like Xerxes down - were more or less despicable; indeed almost as animalian as the rhinoceros and elephant, African rather than Asian beasts, that they nevertheless managed to include on the Persian side, along with hideous gigantesque subhuman figures. And that is not to mention the reduction of the crack Persian fighting force known to the Greeks as the Immortals to the status of grotesque Ninja Turtle-like fighters in Darth Vader-style masks.

I feel so strongly about this, because it seemed to me a great opportunity lost. I don't actually agree with the official protest by the Iranian delegation to the U.N. that this was a covert form of U.S. anti-Iranian propaganda at a time of increased mutual hostility - the timing of the film's conception and development goes against that, and in any case it seems to have been the technical brilliance rather than the historicity or the movie's political impact that most preoccupied the filmmakers throughout. But whereas persons and events on the Spartan side are treated with perhaps exaggerated respect - and some considerable degree of authenticity, whether accidental or incidental or not - the representation of the Persian side is quite simply a caricature.

On the other hand, there is another story to be told, about Sparta, and one that makes for by no means such pleasant reading. The Sparta that stood for and crucially helped achieve freedom for Greece from alien, Persian control also stood, at home, for the very opposite of freedom, for very large numbers of Greeks.



The tomb of Leonidas the most famous of all Spartans lies today in the northern part of the modern town of Sparta.

The Spartans' ruthless devotion to the common good, their communal training, their public educational programme aimed at producing mighty and patriotic warriors, and, not least, their eugenic practices involving the disposal of unfit or disabled infants were all ultimately based on the need to keep down a much larger population of near-slaves whom they called the Helots or 'Captives'.

All ancient Greek societies had slaves, but in most of them the slaves were foreigners, bought from abroad on the market. The Spartans' Helots were Greeks, originally enslaved through conquest, and for centuries kept in subjection even as they reproduced themselves naturally as a servile population, serving as Sparta's workforce. This large scale exploitation has made it impossible any longer to appeal straightforwardly to ancient Sparta as a political-social ideal or model for today and tomorrow, even if there is still a case for recalling the morally admirable community headed by Leonidas: one that could not only conceive but also put into practice the idea (l) of fighting and dying for a concept of shared Greekness and a concept of freedom.

So we end with a paradox. Had it not been for the Spartans, I suggest, what we call the 'Glory that was Greece' would largely either not have happened at all, or would have been forgotten by posterity. On the other side, no one today should so unthinkingly buy into the Spartan tradition as to forget the dark underside of the very odd society that generated it.

Thermopylae. The Battle that Changed the World (Macmillan, London, 2006, pb 2007; Overlook Press, New York, 2006; Vintage, New York, 2007)

Footnote:

Diēnékēs (Dieneces) (Greek: Διηνέκης) (died 480 BC) was a Spartan officer present at the Battle of Thermopylae. He was acclaimed the bravest of all the three hundred Spartiates selected to fight in that battle. Herodotus related the following anecdote about Diēnékēs:

"Although extraordinary valor was displayed by the entire corps of Spartans and Thespians, yet bravest of all was declared the Spartan Diēnékēs. It is said that on the eve of battle, he was told by a native of Trachis that the Persian archers were so numerous that, their arrows would blot out the sun. Diēnékēs, however, undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh, 'Good. Then we will fight in the shade'" - Histories, 7.226

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