I Study Ancient Sparta. There’s One Major Thing Its Contemporary Fans Are Missing.
Many self-professed champions of freedom throughout the centuries have looked to ancient Sparta as an inspiration. The doomed stand of 300 Spartan warriors against the Persian Empire at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E.—the subject of Zack Snyder’s 2006 film 300—has been particularly influential for figures ranging from Lord Byron rallying support for Greek independence from the Ottomans to Cold Warriors mythologizing the virtues of the “West” against the Soviet Union. It’s easy to ridicule such a simplistic view of history, and to point out that the Spartans might not have deserved their reputation as invincible warriors. But the blunders and brutalities of today’s champions of “Western civilization” follow Sparta’s example remarkably closely. This should give us pause.
Sparta’s famous militarism was inseparable from the all-consuming fear the Spartans had of their oppressed neighbors. Unlike other Greeks, who only took up the spear when their city went to war, the Spartans trained as soldiers full time. The skill acquired over years of drill and exercise made the Spartans unbeatable for centuries in any straightforward clash of infantry. This professional army, however, was possible only because the Spartans enslaved their neighbors, called the Helots, and forced them to take care of the farming and other necessary tasks to keep the community functioning while the Spartans honed their soldiering talents.
At the same time, the Spartans drilled so incessantly, and were constantly under arms, because they were afraid the Helots would revolt. This fear of the Helots kept Spartan soldiers at home, preventing the Spartans from using their peerless army abroad as often as they might. Among other things, Spartan isolationism born of paranoia gave Athens free rein to throw its own weight around, leading to the Peloponnesian War.
The interconnection of military power and violent oppression corroded the Spartan soul, too. Buff Spartan hoplites brandishing their spears were not enough to assuage fears of a Helot uprising. The Helots had to be ritually humiliated to keep them in their place. Plutarch, writing for a Roman audience curious about this peculiar Greek polis, says that the Helots were subjected to various degradations, including forced drunkenness, demeaning public spectacles, and, most horrifyingly, ritual murder as part of a Spartan coming-of-age ceremony. Thucydides, an Athenian author who nevertheless had close ties to some Spartan sources, writes that the Spartans once gathered the most industrious and spirited Helots under the false pretense they would be set free; 2,000 Helots came forward, only to be disappeared. While ghastly even by ancient standards, these measures served only to make the Helots hate the Spartans even more, all but guaranteeing future Helot revolts and worsening Spartan paranoia.
Spartan militarism as both the cause of and solution to being surrounded by bitterly oppressed peoples made Sparta a profoundly weird place. Many authors from antiquity took it upon themselves to describe the Spartans and their bizarre way of life to others, typically concluding that being on constant war footing made the Spartans the curiosities that they were. This weirdness played out no more conspicuously than in the forced military education system for Sparta’s boys, which amounted to a Boy Scout troop from hell, taking children from their homes at the age of 7 and forcing them to fight each other and steal food in order to survive.
Though the tough Spartans and their famous “come and take them” line have inspired many, including advocates for the Second Amendment in the U.S., the Spartans were great warriors only because of their subjugation of the Helots. Even the Greeks did not find this to be a particularly wholesome marker of a civilized state. Some Spartans voted with their feet when they were exposed to Greek life outside of their own isolated and strange society. The Spartan authorities tried to prevent their generals from spending too much time abroad, which more often than not led to those generals catching a glimpse of the good life and acting decidedly un-Spartan.
Vile as Spartan abuse of the Helots was, the end result of Sparta’s eventual championing of the cause of freedom abroad was arguably even worse. As I argue in my new book, at the time of the stand of the 300 at Thermopylae, the Spartans cared not a whit for freedom or liberating others. Instead, they fought for glory and fame, much like the epic heroes in Homer’s Iliad did in the Trojan War. Counterintuitively, glory-seeking did not lead the Spartans to fight many battles outside of their own territory. It was usually only the Helots and other neighbors who had to fear the Spartan spear. The glory and fame the Spartans won from those few battles they did fight farther afield were enough to cement their reputation and prevent others from picking any fights.
After the Peloponnesian War, however, in which the Spartans ostensibly fought in order to curb the expansionism of their Athenian rivals, they took up the mantle of liberators—whether the objects of that liberation wanted to be “freed” or not. When the Spartans started talking about freedom, they engaged in ruinous campaigns abroad that lasted for months or even years, leading to the deaths of Spartan soldiers and many others and turning most of the Greek world against them. It turns out that most people don’t want to be forced to be free, especially when that freedom means subservience to one’s supposed liberator. Startlingly few leaders have taken this lesson to heart in the 24 centuries since.
Interventionism and military adventures abroad in the name of freedom did not merely weaken Sparta’s position in the wider Greek world. It also led to the collapse of Sparta itself, at least as a major military power. If there was any Greek state that could stand toe-to-toe with Sparta on the battlefield, it was Thebes, mythical home of Oedipus and bad-boy of Greece for taking the side of the Persians in 480. A hundred years after the Persian Wars, the Thebans grew enraged at the Spartans using their military might to force other Greeks to refrain from holding influence over their neighbors, even as the Spartans continued to oppress many in their own territory, not least the Helots. Even the most powerful state can push things too far and rankle too many rivals.
The Theban leader Epaminondas stepped forward to put an end to Spartan arrogance and hypocrisy. On a battlefield near Thebes in 371, Epaminondas broke the Spartan hoplite phalanx and killed one of its kings. But it’s what he did after the battle that was truly revolutionary, and laid bare the dangers of behaving as the Spartans had.
The Thebans and their allies marched deep into Spartan territory, an astonishingly brazen act. The ancient sources tell us that before this, no Spartan woman had ever so much as seen the campfires of the enemy, since no army had been able to come near Sparta itself. Epaminondas very nearly took Sparta, prevented only by a river flooding its banks. No matter, since he then set his sights on cutting off Spartan power at its source. Epaminondas aided those who had been oppressed by the Spartans for centuries, helping them shore up their own cities’ defenses and even building entirely new cities to serve as capitals opposed to Spartan dominance. The most impactful of these measures was the foundation of Messene, an impregnable city for the Helots right on Sparta’s doorstep.
Now protected by their own walls, and in possession of all the civic tools needed to form their own polis, the Helots were liberated from Spartan tyranny at long last. Epaminondas was not only the tactical genius who bested the Spartan army; he was also one of history’s greatest liberators. Spartan violence in the supposed service of freedom was crushed by someone bringing genuine freedom to the oppressed. I recommend reading the graphic novel series Three, which tells the story of Helot liberation and is a welcome corrective to the jingoism of 300.
The case of ancient Sparta suggests that basing a society on the violent and humiliating oppression of others is bad, both morally and practically. Even the best army, and the best propaganda to bolster that army’s image, can’t stave off the day of reckoning forever. Even without an Epaminondas showing up to call oppressors to account, the extreme measures a society must enact to keep the oppressed under thumb end up corroding that society from within, making it into a place few sensible people would want to live. Those measures also make uprisings of the oppressed more, not less, likely, leading to a vicious circle in which the oppressor becomes even more outrageous and paranoid, and the oppressed more desperate to strike back.
Today’s champions of “Western” civilization and freedom, both real and self-imagined, would do well to take note.
