“The best are those who are raised in the severest school.” To the best of my knowledge, my grandmother never read Thucydides (whence that quote comes; Archidamus at 1.84), or Herodotus, or Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, or any of the other ancient accounts of Sparta and its values, but she didn’t have to; she could draw on a substantial popular tradition of images of Spartan life and attitudes, including her favourite admonitory story of the Spartan boy and the fox. As a child I was never sure what the lesson was supposed to be – don’t get caught? if you get caught, never confess? – but in retrospect I think it was more a kind of mood music: big boys don’t cry, that’s just a scratch, a family of starving Bangladeshis could live on that for a week (on failing to eat one’s crusts), and in my day we’d have been sent to bed without any supper for less than that. The Spartans tell you why you shouldn’t ever have more than one slice of cake.
The point of this anecdote is to emphasise – and remind myself, as much as anything – that it’s perfectly possible to set up the Spartans as a kind of model without this automatically being a sign of fascist sympathies (my grandmother being a fiery socialist from the Welsh valleys). Of course from a historical perspective this invocation of Spartan values rests on ignoring, or simply not knowing about, the brutal reality of Spartan society, but that’s true of at least 95% of the tradition of Spartan reception, as studied in Elizabeth Rawson’s classic book and in more recent research by people like Steve Hodkinson, and doesn’t get us very far in actually understanding that tradition. And instinctive reaction against it by eating too much cake isn’t especially helpful either as a political statement.
The same can be said of the admiration of the Spartan warrior in military contexts over the centuries, up to and including the US Marines, as I (or rather one of my alter egos) ended up discussing on the Twitter the other day with @crispinburke. The ancient best of the best: check. Total dedication to military life: check. Great victories and examples of courage: check. Absolute loyalty to your comrades: check. Society built around military dictatorship, slavery and unprovoked violence against ‘inferiors’: not so much.
Sparta – and it should be stressed that I’m really talking about ‘Sparta’, the inherited and throughly worked over cultural concept, first invented by a bunch of aristocratic Lakonia fanboys in Athens, rather than the vastly more complex historical reality that lurks somewhere behind that image – Sparta is all these things and more. A given instance of reception tends to grab a handful of these associations: courage and discipline, or austerity and discipline, or black bread, fox-stealing and discipline. There’s always a possibility of sliding into some of the others, from an idealisation of the warrior caste to the idea that the military really ought to be running everything, or from praise of clean living and self-discipline to an aggressive anti-intellectualism, but there’s no reason to suppose that such slippage is inevitable.
The reason I feel I have to remind myself of this is that so many contemporary evocations of Sparta *are* thoroughly toxic, as Sarah Bond discusses in a just-published article. Take the appalling pillocks of Generation Identity, heroic defenders of 100-metre lines of plastic netting against any foreigners who might happen to be trying to sneak across the Swiss Alps, who popped up in London on Saturday at a suspiciously well-funded far-right rally. Their chosen symbol is a stylised lambda within a circle, as their website explains:
Our symbol, the lambda, was used by the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. Led by King Leonidas of Sparta, the Greek forces were vastly outnumbered, over 21 to 1 by a massive Persian army. The Greeks held off the Persians for seven days before their rear-guard was annihilated in one of history’s most famous last stands.
After the second day, a local resident named Ephialtes betrayed the Greeks by revealing a small path that led behind the Greek lines. Leonidas, aware that his force was being outflanked, dismissed the bulk of the Greek army and remained to guard their retreat with 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians, and 400 Thebans, fighting to the death.
Both ancient and modern writers have used the Battle of Thermopylae as an example of the power of a patriotic army defending its native soil.
The lambda circle can also be seen as a shield. The top of the arrow stands for the metapolitical centre that we want to conquer, with the Identitarian movement as the spearhead.
The scholarly consensus is that the lambda symbol wasn’t used by the Spartans at Thermopylae, but was adopted only in the 420s, when they were substantially less invincible – but that hasn’t stopped a whole bunch of far-right groups in Europe and the US, including Greece’s Golden Dawn, from adopting it in order to lay claim to the Spartan myth in general and the ‘defence of civilisation against savage barbarians’ trope in particular. Much of the credit seems to belong to Frank Miller’s 300 (or, since it involves fewer long words, most likely Zack Snyder’s film version), and beyond that (as Marc Larance, @bleuyank, helpfully noted) the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, both of which feature the lambda on the Spartans’ shields – in Miller’s images, a distinctly stylised version that’s close to the GI icon in everything but colour.
My tweet about this last week sparked an interesting exchange with Nicholas Tibollo (@brassandbald), who initially took it as an attack on Miller and wanted to emphasise that he and others had found their way to the study of ancient history as a result of reading 300, and D. Franklin (@D_Libris), who questioned what people were learning from it – certainly not a well-rounded, historically accurate picture of Thermopylae or Spartan society. I wasn’t actually making any claims about Miller’s work except that it was the source of Generation Identity’s logo, but it probably says something that an academic commenting on 300 may be assumed, more often than not, to be denouncing it – and that raises some important questions about history, reception and the modern meaning(s) of Sparta.
Full disclosure: such is my dislike of Miller’s other work, including his take on Batman, that I’ve simply avoided 300; and the extent to which the film has been interpreted (whether or not that was its author’s intention) in terms of the Clash of Civilizations, the eternal battle between Western Values and the barbaric Orient, hasn’t inclined me to investigate. Donna Zuckerberg’s suggestion that I should live-tweet a viewing of the film is so appalling that I’m half inclined to do it – when I have any free time, and have caught up with the final episodes of The City and the City (where I am getting cross with the way they’ve approached the source material…). For the moment, at least, I can comment only in general terms.
Tibollo’s core point, that modern reworkings of ancient material can bring people to serious study of classical antiquity, is undeniable; there’s the continuing influence of I, Claudius on conceptions of Roman imperial politics, the power of Mary Renault’s anthropologically-influenced retelling of the Theseus myth, and numerous other examples. I’m happy to accept that 100% scholarly accuracy in such receptions is impossible – not least because the scholarly view is always influenced by anachronistic factors, and hence changes over time – and, more importantly, in many cases undesirable, as the enemy of art. My objection to, say, the recent BBC adaptation of Homer was not the liberties it took with its source material, but the fact that it failed as drama (and maybe the clunky dialogue was even an attempt at faithfulness to the original…); while the glorious silliness and playful anachronism of Bromans nevertheless captured something important about the confused masculinity of the gladiatorial arena.
But things get more complicated when the anachronism not only serves artistic purposes, bringing the past to life, but is also used to push an ideological agenda (rather than simply, inevitably, reflecting contemporary assumptions and concerns), such as the idea of an endless war between East and West. A certain proportion of those reading 300 may be led to explore Greek history in more depth, discovering its complexity, but plenty of others will take its account at face value and enquire no further – and what if a certain number of those become more inclined to pay heed to the toxic politics of Generation Identity and their ilk as a result?
That is, the potential issue with Miller’s work is not whether it plays somewhat fast and loose with the historical material, but the extent to which it processes it into a form that promotes a dangerous political agenda. Certainly there are people seeking to draw on the success of 300 for their own ends, as a source of identity, reinforcement for their chosen values and propaganda tool; and, as with the examples of figures like Wagner or Nietzsche and their subsequent appropriation by the Nazis, that doesn’t reduce the originals to what a particular group of admirers made of them, but it certainly requires us to look very hard at them to evaluate how far they contain elements that do support or even encourage such readings.
As Bond puts it, “Should we then classify all lovers of Spartan culture [or indeed all Frank Miller fans] as members of the Alt-Right? Of course not! But we can and should complicate that romance.” And that means not just bringing to bear knowledge of the real complexity of antiquity, the fundamental problems of evidence and interpretation in trying to get at the reality of Sparta rather than just its always-politicised image, but also engaging with the different traditions of reception – not least because that should alert us to the likelihood that scholarly pedantry is not enough to combat the tendency for Spartan imagery to be deployed as a far-right dog whistle. As Tim Whitmarsh (@Twhittermarsh) suggested, Generation Identity and the rest can happily claim that the lambda symbol offers a direct link to Thermopylae “because identity is fundamentally emotional, and correction on points of fact will always be dismissed as the authoritarianism of the intellectual elite?” They care about history enough to make a fuss about it on their website – but one suspects that it is a history founded ultimately on conviction, in which an academic insistence on acknowledging uncertainty and debate can be taken as legitimate grounds for dismissing any criticism of what they feel to be authentic.
***
‘Sparta’ holds a powerful appeal. It tells people with an ill-defined anger against mainstream society that their alienation and marginalisation are the world’s problem, not theirs, because they can be the inheritors of a tradition that is purer and stronger, marking them out as innately superior to those who have usurped their rightful place. At any rate that’s how things play out in the ‘Revelations’ episode from Season 3 of the peerless Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Faith, ever-resentful at (and at the same time envious of) Buffy and her ‘normal’ life and friends, is addressed by her new Watcher:
Mrs Post: Faith, do you know who the Spartans were?
Faith: Wild stab: a bunch of guys from Spart?
Mrs Post: They were the fiercest warriors known to Ancient Greece. And
they lived in quarters very much like these. Do you know why? Because a
true fighter needs nothing else.
Through this prism, Faith’s prickliness, arrogance and insecurity are reinterpreted, not least by her, as signs of her elite status as a born warrior. She responds to the discovery that Gwendolyn Post has been manipulating them all by doubling down on her new source of identity, characterising her room as “real Spartan” and insisting to Buffy that “you can’t trust people… I’m on my side, and that’s enough” – a path that leads her in due course to turn rogue, fighting against her former friends in order to impose a new order on society. Admiration of ‘Sparta’ doesn’t automatically lead everyone to start aiding and abetting demonic forces, but it can certainly enable it…
Sphinx 
Great, merits recirculation. Even in antiquity reception of the Spartan myth in remarks like οἱ δὲ Λάκωνες … θηριώδεις δ᾽ ἀπεργάζονται τοῖς πόνοις, ὡς τοῦτο πρὸς ἀνδρείαν μάλιστα συμφέρον )”The Spartans … with their exercises, produce brutes, thinking this brings manliness”), Aristotle Politics 1338b11-14
very possibly, Ellen Millender asserts, exaggerated things. But θηριώδεις, “beastly,” is hard to forget. Moses Finley, alone among classicists, I think, pointed to the underlying anomie of Spartan culture, though Steve Hodkinson has admirably put meat on the bones of that assertion (as has J. Lendon). Promoters of Sparta often ignore Mao’s advice: look for the contradictions.
i know this post is ancient by internet standards but the stuff about miller was well said (though i did like his art back in the day he’s a very one-note “writer” at best.) i think it was said best by an actual writer named alan moore:
“Frank Miller is someone whose work I’ve barely looked at for the past 20 years. I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny; 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. I think that there has probably been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time.”
that was after miller’s unhinged scum right attack on occupy wall street. keep in mind he’s also a fanatical pro-israel and islamophobic zealot. gosh…why would a pro-israel guy write about spartans fighting persians?
Thanks for this (the nice thing about having to approve comments is that I know if someone has found an old post). One of the reasons I admire Alan Moore is that he is deeply thoughtful about comics generally, not just his own, whereas Miller… isn’t.