Spartan

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Yes. They’re very secretive. The idea often put forward is that they deliberately didn’t write things down. They hid the way they did things so that outsiders couldn’t know what they were like. As a result, the sources we’re reading, because they’re written by outsiders, have that big question mark about them. Are they telling us what the Spartans were really like? Or what the Spartans wanted them to think they were like? Or what they wanted the Spartans to be like because they were this romantic other? These days, the standard line of thought in Spartan scholarship is that if something is only in one of the later sources, we worry about its reliability” To toughen them up even more, Spartan boys were compelled to go barefoot and seldom bathed or used ointments, so that their skin became hard and dry, Plutarch wrote. For clothing, they were given just one cloak to wear year-round, to make them learn to endure heat and cold, and made their own beds from plants that they had to rip out of the ground with their bare hands from river banks. Anne continues: “Rod Hall-Jones owns the last flying three-seater Spartan in the world. Rod, who lives in New Zealand, hopes his bi-plane can return to the Isle of Wight where it was built in 1932. When Leonidas was leaving to fight The Persians at Thermopylae, his wife Gorgo inquired if he had any instructions for her. Leonidas replied "To marry good men and bear good children."

Off the battlefield, the rigid acceptance of the status quo that the Spartan educational system enforced made it difficult for the Spartans to deal with social problems in their society, such as inequality in land ownership and a declining population.

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You mentioned earlier that he was the origin of stories about Spartan women being pushy. What did he mean by that? At some point in time, the Spartans made a decision to behave the way they did, but it doesn’t seem to be anything to do with the Helot threat, unless they suddenly experienced a threat that is not recorded anywhere. It’s not geographical, in the sense that no one else in the Peloponnese develops a reputation for that type of behaviour. The closest I can think of were the Argives, who had a similar reputation for brevity of speech, which could be some sort of geographical-cultural thing—they’re both Dorian Greeks. But the Spartans seem to be what has been called a ‘hyper-version’ of other Greek city states, where certain behavioural patterns were amplified. To the wretched character who frequently kept asking him who was the best Spartiate, his response was; "The one least like you" They were strangely attracted to Egypt. Even Menelaus found himself blown to Egypt by bad winds after the Trojan War. Agesilaus served as a mercenary commander in Egypt to raise money for Sparta, and Cleomenes fled as a refugee to Egypt, where he was kept under house arrest and where he eventually killed himself after a failed attempt to escape.

Given Sparta’s reputation as this brutally harsh martial society: were there very obvious social, political, economic or even geographical factors that produced that society? Charlotte Halliday said: “My father was a friend of Dorothy Spicer and her husband, Richard. I have a copy of the painting on my desk.” He doesn’t describe it in a way that we’d like him to describe it. Thucydides describes it as unimpressive physically, but Herodotus doesn’t go into those sorts of details. He’s more focused on telling you about what’s going on in Sparta and who talks to who—that kind of thing. He doesn’t even say he saw the monument with the names of the 300 on it. He says he learned their names and a later travel writer says that the Spartans had a monument set up with the names of the 300 on it. So it would make sense that that’s what Herodotus saw, but he doesn’t say, ‘I stood there and looked at the monument’. He’s a bit vague on some of those details. Well, several of the leading lights of the French Revolution wanted to recreate Sparta. Robespierre and Saint-Just thought they were going to be able to radically reshape French society to be more like Sparta. They wanted to redistribute the land as Lycurgus was supposed to have done and reconstitute the government in a Spartan style.

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Yes. Thermopylae was fought by the Spartans plus the Peloponnesian and some Central Greeks as well. The Athenians were, at that stage, occupied with the fleet at the Battle of Artemisium, which popular culture versions of the story tend to leave out. In part to attract mates, females engaged in athletic competitions, including javelin-throwing and wrestling, and also sang and danced competitively. As adults, Spartan women were allowed to own and manage property. Additionally, they were typically unencumbered by domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and making clothing, tasks which were handled by the Helots. Stealing food was allowed as long as it was successful. It was thought that this developed cunning thoughts which could be useful on the battlefield. However, if the thief was caught they'd be whipped as unsuccessful thieves were treated with disdain.

How bad these solecisms – stylistic and grammatical – really are, is debatable. That Francois should be unable to spot myriad literals, typos, misspellings and egregious repetitions in his own text is perhaps excusable – even we who make our living reading and writing can become astonishingly word-blind when it comes to our own copy in particular. For tyros it’s far worse – which explains, among other reasons, why publishers exist. The stability that the agoge fostered also “led to a certain inflexibility,” Hodkinson says. For all the Spartans’ efficiency, they relied heavily on a limited set of maneuvers, and when those failed, they didn’t have a plan B. Early on in his political career, Francois (who doesn’t seem to have done much else with his life besides weekend play-soldiering and a little PR) fought Ken Livingstone for the seat of Brent East. The Spartans’ real secret wasn’t physical fitness or indifference to pain and suffering, but rather superior organization. Spartan troops drilled relentlessly, until they could execute tactics with perfection. “It was probably their training in tactical maneuvers which really gave Spartan soldiers their edge on the battlefield,” J.F. Lazenby writes in his book The Spartan Army. Francois says that Livingstone taught him a valuable lesson during the campaign, which is that an MP is only the employee of his constituents: his job is to represent their views, nothing more and nothing less.On Sparta is a rather mixed bag. First, there are four biographies of Spartan kings: Lycurgus, Agesilaus, Agis, and Cleomenes. There follows by far the most interesting sections, a chapter of "Saying of Spartans" followed by "Sayings of Spartan Women." [Note: There are no sayings of Athenian women, except for hetairae like Aspasia.] Finally, there is an essay attributed to Xenophon called "Spartan Society." Xenophon’s Spartan Society is a fine look at the city-state (if indeed Xenophon wrote it; translator Richard J.A. Talbert of the University of North Carolina has his doubts). But readers of On Sparta may derive more enjoyment from the collection of “Sayings of Spartans” and “Sayings of Spartan Women” that Plutarch collected. The word “laconic,” after all – referring as it does to a pithy saying that conveys a great deal in a few words – comes from “Laconia,” the name of the Peloponnesian region of which Sparta was the capital; and these statements, from both famous and otherwise unknown Laconians, unquestionably have that laconic quality. Sparta, also known as Lacedaemon, was an ancient Greek city-state located primarily in a region of southern Greece called Laconia. The population of Sparta consisted of three main groups: the Spartans, or Spartiates, who were full citizens; the Helots, or serfs/slaves; and the Perioeci, who were neither slaves nor citizens. The Perioeci, whose name means “dwellers-around,” worked as craftsmen and traders, and made weapons for the Spartans.