Sparta

Sparta was a prominent city-state in Laconia in ancient Greece. In antiquity, the city-state was known as Lacedaemon, while the name Sparta referred to its main settlement on the banks of the Evrotas River in the Evrotas Valley, Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. Around 650 BC, it rose to become the dominant military land-power in ancient Greece.

The king marched against the enemy in close companion­ship with one who had been crowned victor in the great games. And they tell of a certain Spartan who refused to be bought off from a contest at Olympia by large sums of money, and after a long struggle outwrestled his antagonist. When some one said to him then: "What advantage, O Spartan, hast thou got from thy victory?" he answered, with a smile: "I shall stand in front of my king when I fight our enemies." ~ Plutarch

Given its military pre-eminence, Sparta was recognized as the leading force of the unified Greek military during the Greco-Persian Wars, in rivalry with the rising naval power of Athens. Sparta was the principal enemy of Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), from which it emerged victorious after the Battle of Aegospotami.

Quotes

• Here is what you do, friends. Forget country. Forget king. Forget wife and children and freedom. Forget every concept, however noble, that you imagine you fight for here today. Act for this alone: for the man who stands at your shoulder. He is everything, and everything is contained within him. That is all I know. That is all I can tell you.
  • Dienekes at Thermopylae, as cited from Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire

• Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will.
  • Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

• Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine.”
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

• It was natural for [Spartan women] to think and speak as Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, is said to have done, when some foreign lady, as it would seem, told her that the women of Lacedaemon were the only women of the world who could rule men; 'With good reason,' she said, 'for we are the only women who bring forth men'.
  • Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives: Volume I

• Their [Lacadaemonian] women, it is said, were bold and masculine, overbearing to their husbands in the first place, absolute mistresses in their houses, giving their opinions about public matters freely, and speaking openly even on the most important subjects.
  • Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives: Volume I

• The freedom which thus prevailed at that time in marriage relations was aimed at physical and political well-being, and was far removed from the licentiousness which was afterwards attributed to their women, so much so that adultery was wholly unknown among them. And a saying is reported of one Geradas,​ a Spartan of very ancient type, who, on being asked by a stranger what the punishment for adulterers was among them, answered: "Stranger, there is no adulterer among us." "Suppose, then," replied the stranger, "there should be one." "A bull," said Geradas, "would be his forfeit, a bull so large that it could stretch over Mount Taÿgetus and drink from the river Eurotas." Then the stranger was astonished and said: "But how could there be a bull so large?" To which Geradas replied, with a smile: "But how could there be an adulterer in Sparta?" Such, then, are the accounts we find of their marriages.
  • Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives: Volume I

• The king marched against the enemy in close companion­ship with one who had been crowned victor in the great games. And they tell of a certain Spartan who refused to be bought off from a contest at Olympia by large sums of money, and after a long struggle outwrestled his antagonist. When some one said to him then: "What advantage, O Spartan, hast thou got from thy victory?" he answered, with a smile: "I shall stand in front of my king when I fight our enemies."
  • Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives: Volume I

• Four hundred thousand slaves must be devoted to forty thousand citizens; weak and deformed children must be exposed; morality and humanity, as well as all the comforts, elegancies, and pleasures of life, must be sacrificed to this glaring phantom of vanity, superstition, and ambition. Separated from the rest of mankind, they lived together, destitute of all business, pleasure, and amusement, but war and politics, pride and ambition; and there occupations and passions they transmitted from generation to generation, for seven hundred years; as if fighting and intriguing, and not life and happiness, were the end of man, and society; as as if the love of one's country, and of glory, were amiable passions, when not limited by justice and general benevolence; and as if nations were to be chained together for ever, merely that one family might reign among them… Human nature perished under this frigid system of national and family pride.
  • John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government (1794)

• The institution of Lycurgus was well calculated to preserve the independence of his country, but had no regard to its happiness, and very little to its liberty. As the people's consent was necessary to every law, it had so far the appearance of political liberty: but the civil liberty of it was little better than that of a man chained in a dungeon; a liberty to rest as he is. The influence of this boasted legislation on the human character was to produce warriors and politicians, and nothing else. To say that this people were happy, is to contradict every quality in human nature, except ambition. They had no other gratification: science and letters were sacrificed, as well as commerce, to the ruling passion.
  • John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government (1794)

• Through his doctrine of the similarity between Sparta and the perfect state, Plato became one of the most successful propagators of what I should like to call ‘the Great Myth of Sparta’—the perennial and influential myth of the supremacy of the Spartan constitution and way of life.
  • Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

• To understand Plato, and indeed many later philosophers, it is necessary to know something of Sparta. Sparta had a double effect on Greek thought: through the reality, and through the myth. Each is important. The reality enabled the Spartans to defeat Athens in war; the myth influenced Plato's political theory, and that of countless subsequent writers. The myth, fully developed, is to be found in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus; the ideals that it favours have had a great part in framing the doctrines of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and National Socialism. The myth is of even more importance, historically, than the reality.
  • Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1946)