The Spartans

A nation of fighters

Sparta became famous for two things:  its frugality – which is where we get our word 'spartan' from – and its fighters.

The whole of Spartan society conformed to a strict code of extreme discipline and self-sacrifice. Their aim was to create the perfect state protected by the perfect. Although Spartan hard-line ideals don't have the charisma of Athenian culture, they have meant as much to Western civilization as the ideals represented by the Parthenon. Down the centuries, the Spartans have inspired a diverse range of people. Anyone with a plan for a utopia turned directly to the Spartans for ideas and inspiration. 

Early history
The southern most part of the Greek mainland, the Peloponnese is a  huge peninsula crowned by rugged mountains and scored by deep gorges, which forms the southern-most part of the Greek mainland.

Many of the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War more than 3,000 years ago came from here. King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, came from Mycenae, in the eastern Peloponnese. And to the south, in the city-state of Sparta in the region known as Lakonia, was the palace of Menelaus and his wife Helen – for Helen of Troy, whose beauty caused the Trojan War, had once been Helen of Sparta.

The heroes of the Trojan War, their palaces and possessions, the beauty of Helen – all offered a standard against which the later Spartans would measure their own actions and aspirations.

At some point in about 1200 BC, all this disappeared.

No one knows for sure what happened – earthquakes, tidal waves, slave revolts have all been blamed. But all over the eastern Mediterranean, the world of Helen of Troy disappeared in a cataclysm of fire and destruction. A remnant clung on for a few hundred years, but finally the Dark Ages came to Greece and the thread of history snapped.

The new Spartans
A new people came out of the north, seeking more hospitable lands called the Dorians.  They settled all over the Peloponnese, and some found their way to Lakonia and the lands that had once belonged to King Menelaus.

It had been a journey worth making. The plain of the Eurotas river was, north to south, 50 miles of precious, flat, fertile farmland. And the river ran through it all year round. In land-hungry Greece, where 70% of the land couldn't be farmed and what was left was squeezed between the mountains and the sea, that was a lot of elbow room.

To the west were the spectacular Taygetos mountains, rising to more than 8,000. Snow still lingered while down on the plain spring was turning into summer.

In the period of renewal following the Dark Ages, new city-states like Sparta appeared all over Greece. They varied in size and power, but had one thing in common: they were all communities governed according to a set of mutually agreed laws and customs. The rules by which people agreed to live varied, but their aim was broadly the same: to create good order and justice and to protect against chaos and lawlessness.

Few clues
Unlike the Athenians, the Spartans were famous for not building, not making things and, in particular, not writing about themselves. Nearly every account we have of the Spartan way of life was written by an outsider.

Of all the cities and civilizations in the ancient world, the Spartans remain the most intriguing and the most mysterious.

According to legend, the great-grandsons of Heracles (Hercules) wrestled control of Peloponnese from the descendants of King Agamemnon, which gave birth two Sparta having two kings.

Slavery
Slavery in ancient Greece was an accepted fact of life. But slaves were supposed to be foreigners – barbarians who spoke no Greek and so were obviously suited by nature to be slaves. The enslavement of fellow Greeks and on a massive scale was something else. The crushing of Messenia set Sparta apart from the rest of Greece.

It also shaped the kind of place Sparta became – wary of unrest, paranoid about revolt.

Enslaving the Messenians was no easy task. It took two full-scale wars, each lasting 20 years or more. We know something about the second one because we have an eye-witness to the events – one of the first identifiable eye-witnesses known to history. He was called Tyrtaeus:

It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he has fallen among the front ranks while fighting for his homeland.
Let us fight with spirit for this land and let us die for our children, no longer sparing our lives.
Make the spirit in your heart strong and valiant, and do not be in love with life when you are a fighting man.

Keeping paradise safe
The Spartans finally defeated and enslaved the Messenians in about 650 BC. For the next 300 years, the latter would be forced to slave in the fields of their Spartan masters 'like asses, worn out by heavy burdens', according to Tyrtaeus.

But now that Messenia had been won, the critical question for the Spartans became, then and for centuries to come: how would they keep it?

Elsewhere in Greece, city-states were being torn apart by civil war between rich and poor. With the spoils of Messene up for grabs, the chances of that happening in Sparta were greatly increased.

To keep their paradise safe, the Spartans chose to act in a totally radical way. From now on, they would dedicate themselves to the creation of a perfect society, and it would be modeled on the hoplite phalanx – disciplined, collective and unselfish. There was going to be a revolution in Shangri-la.

Rite of passage
Although Sparta encouraged the collective spirit, it placed a higher value on individual achievement. The boys were tested constantly – against each other and against their own limitations.

Indoctrinated with the tenets of endurance and perseverance, and determined to excel in this public display, the 12-year-olds would brave the gauntlet again and again. Meeting the whips face on, they would have suffered the most horrific injuries. The weakest never left alive.

War music
From the age of 12, the boys' training became, if possible, even more exacting. Reading and writing were taught 'no more than was necessary', but music and dancing were regarded as essential.

The battlefields on which hoplites clashed were once memorably described as the 'dancing floors of war'. A phalanx that was able to move together in a coordinated way made for a formidable dancing partner.

The Spartans spent many hours perfecting what was known as 'war music', a kind of rhythmic drill in which changes in direction and pace were communicated musically. The Spartans earned the reputation for being 'the most musical and the most war-like of people'.

The Persians
Persia was the regional superpower of the eastern Mediterranean – a vast empire stretching from present-day Afghanistan to the Aegean. The Greeks were an insignificant but increasingly troublesome presence on the western limits of the empire, inciting rebellion among the king's Greek subjects in Asia Minor.

In 499 BC, a major rebellion ended in the destruction of the royal city of Sardis. This was too much for the Persians. They demanded oaths of loyalty from all the Greek city-states. Some caved in, but others followed the defiant examples set by Sparta and Athens. When Persian heralds went there demanding water and earth as tokens of submission, they were executed – an act of sacrilege and a declaration of war.

King Darius made the first move. In 490 BC, he landed a punitive force on the Greek mainland at Marathon, only to see it sent packing by Athens and her allies. When Darius died, it was left to his son Xerxes to avenge the insult. Around the year 485, he began assembling a massive invasion force to sort out the Greek problem once and for all.

The Persians set out, by land and sea, early in 480 BC. The land army was so vast that, according to the Greek historian Herodotus (who lived during this time), it drank whole rivers dry. Herodotus also reckoned that the combined Persian forces numbered more than 1.5 million men. A more sober estimate would put the ceiling at 300,000 – far more than enough to crush the minnow-like city-states of Greece.

The legacy of Thermopylae
Militarily, Thermopylae was insignificant. The Persian advance, delayed for less than a week, was soon rolling south again. A far more important battle took place shortly afterwards in the bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet, led by Athens, destroyed the Persian armada. It was a scrappy, hit-and-miss affair, but Salamis marked the beginning of the end for the Persians' invasion, and the following year, they were finally driven out of Greece.

But in the aftermath of victory, it was the doomed heroism of Thermopylae that captured the imagination.

The 300 were buried at Thermopylae and honoured with an inscription that still echoes down the centuries:

Go tell the Spartans,
Stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

And if, in spite of everything, the Fates have decreed that we should once more in the course of our history be crushed by forces superior to our own, then let us go down with our heads high and secure in the knowledge that the honour of the German people remains without blemish. A desperate fight remains for all time a shining example. Let us remember Leonidas and his 300 Spartans! In any case, we are not of the stuff that goes tamely to the slaughter like sheep. They may well exterminate us. But they will never lead us to the slaughter house!