This Is Not Sparta
Why the Modern Romance With Sparta Is a Bad One
Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon loves Sparta. According to Bannon’s former writing partner, Julia Jones, the previous executive chairman of Breitbart News adored Plato and was fascinated by the Peloponnesian War. She even noted that the password to access his computer was once, rather laconically: “Sparta.” As The Daily Beast discussed in a profile on Bannon, Trump’s former right hand man has always been beguiled by military terminology and Spartan history. And now, it seems, he is bringing his brand of racism, pitched as a “populist movement,” to Europe.
Few know that Bannon served in the Navy. He was deployed in 1978 and 1980. At first glance, Bannon’s attraction to ancient military history appears in line with the deep impact that military service can have on the formation of identity. My father was a helicopter pilot in the 9th Cavalry who served two tours in Vietnam, and while he rarely speaks about combat, his service deeply informed who he is today. I have always been aware of the impact that his service had on his ideas, his attitudes towards loyalty and his sense of self.
Bannon has also spoken candidly about the fact that his service in the Navy during the Carter administration — and particularly a failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980 — has influenced his beliefs on the need for strong presidential leadership. To Bannon, Jimmy Carter simply did not embody the strength he wished to see in a US president. Only a few years ago, Bannon noted, “I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter fucked things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am.” As a result of his disenchantment, Bannon looked to other models of strength: in Nazi Germany; in the Reagan Revolution; in the ancient Peloponnese.
However, Sparta had its own problems. Bannon’s fascination with Sparta may have been sparked by his military service, but his glorification of the Lacedaemonians has a darker subtext.
In the popular imagination, Sparta embodies the ideal of strength and tenacity for many—particularly those on the right—concerned with defense of the second amendment. One need only glance at Neville Morley’s superb “Thucydides and Contemporary Politics” syllabus to see how this romance with Sparta and with Thucydides has influenced the political climate today. Within NRA groups in particular, historical figures like King Leonidas are valorized for their bellicosity and patriotic dedication.
Not all modern depictions are accurate illustrations of Sparta, however. While the movie 300 focuses on the fight for Greek liberty in the conflict with Persia in the early 5th century BCE, it also neglects to tell the audience that Sparta also took liberty from others. Sparta was a slave society dependent on unfree workers, called helots, who were tied to the land to work the fields. They were not chattel slaves (i.e. they were not the property of the Spartans), but were still unable to leave or to participate as citizens. The use and abuse of helots is what allowed Spartan citizens the time to train — at least until 371 BCE, when Sparta was defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Leuktra.
Spartan turns of phrase are also still in popular use today, particularly by the Alt-Right. Their pithy wit was direct and perfect for a soundbite—in fact, the word “laconic” comes from the ancient word for the region: Laconia. There was also a streak of anti-intellectualism in Sparta, with the rejection of complex rhetorical exercises that was in stark contrast to the education standards in Athens. The re-inscribing of nationalism over cosmopolitanism; militant conformity over uniqueness has greatly appealed to the Alt-Right.
Perhaps the most famous of these short Spartan retorts involves weapons: “Molon Labe.” The phrase comes from an ancient quote given to us by the (much) later historian Plutarch, who lived ca. 46–120 CE. Writing about the famed 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and Leonidas’ refusal to surrender, he wrote: “When Xerxes wrote again, ‘Hand over your arms,’ he wrote in reply, ‘Come and take them’ (molôn labe).” Recently, classics blogs like Pharos and ancient historian Matthew Sears have examined the phrase and its popularity. It is not uncommon to see it emblazoned on t-shirts, beer koozies, and bumper stickers, although one wonders if this same demographic would agree with all of Sparta’s policies. Sparta, for instance, rejected the use of large city walls.
“Molon Labe” has been popularized by gun rights activists, but has also — perhaps to some people’s surprise — been co-opted by other groups, such as Texans active in the fight for women’s reproductive rights. The rally rejoinder in fact has a long history in the US. During the Revolutionary War, when the British tried to get Fort Morris in Georgia to surrender in 1778, Col. John McIntosh reportedly replied, “Come and take it.” It is particularly popular in Texas, where it was allegedly used in the Battle of Gonzales of 1835, a conflict that came about when the Texans living in the town of Gonzales were told by Mexican forces to return a cannon that had been given to them. The skirmish, a relatively bloodless battle with only one casualty (on the Mexican side), was a victory for Texans during the Texas Revolution, and one remembered to this day in the state. As such, the phrase stays true to the ancient context within which it was allegedly first spoken.
A problematic area for valorizing the Spartans lies not only in quoting their famously short (and often witty) turns of phrase and turning them into bumper stickers, but rather in also looking to the Hellenistic culture as a socio-political model for our own society. In a recent article within the ancient history journal Historia, historian Timothy Doran addresses the evidence for the use of eugenics in ancient Sparta. In the fourth century BCE the number of elite Spartan citizens had declined sharply, from about 8,000 adult males around 480 BCE to around 1,000 in the mid-fourth century. Doran attributes the dwindling of the Spartan population to their “cultural, eugenic, and racial exclusivity” that kept marginalized groups from becoming part of Sparta as its numbers decreased. Citizenship was notoriously hard to achieve and was predicated on ideas of purity and lineage. Deformed babies and the disabled were not tolerated and were rejected by the community through the practice of exposure.
Sparta had a number of strict marriage regulations for citizens and those men deemed unfit for service could be kept from taking a wife — as could their sisters — in order to keep them from reproducing. Moreover, Sparta was deeply afraid of foreigners infiltrating their society and of Spartan boys leaving to go elsewhere, a policy often referred to with the Greek term xenêlasia. In the 3rd century BCE, Spartan kings began to adopt policies that could be characterized as directed reproduction and the upholding of favoring the “elegant” and “good-looking” men among the non-citizen perioikoi group to become new initiates hoplites. While Spartan eugenics were indeed more about selectivity than genocide, Doran points out that both are founded on ideologies of superiority, violence, and death: “The vision of [the Spartan kings] Agis and Kleomenes lining up perioikoi like Miss America contestants and picking out the best-formed from among them strikes us as peculiar. Yet unless our sources are inaccurate, they support something occurring along these lines.”
Eugenics has a long and sordid modern history as well. Sir Francis Galton (d. 1911) is credited with coining the term, though it is said (with some debate) that he first imagined it without the later racial overtones that the term would acquire. Galton was in fact a cousin of Charles Darwin, and the eugenic movement indeed adapted many tenets of Darwin’s theories on evolution. Applied within the strong European nationalist movements of the early 20th century, the Social Darwinist concepts that underpinned eugenics and ideas of racial purity took on a frightening appeal that was further built on the views of men like German evolutionary biologist August Weismann and the chance rediscovery of Mendel’s work on plants and genetics.
Adolf Hitler in fact drew on these modern ideas as well as the ideal of Spartan purity in his own eugenics policies and endorsements of textbooks for young German boys, a fact which has been explored extensively by historian Helen Roche. Celebration of Spartan ideals was not just a German or Prussian preoccupation. As historian Dan-el Padilla Peralta has recently underscored, the dangerous use of Athens and Sparta as political and social models has precedent in other places as well. He notes the example of the Dominican Republic, where the appropriation of the poleis was part of a “racialized cultural-nationalistic program that continues to exert a powerful subterranean influence on Dominican debates about statehood and race.”
As America’s own modern history of eugenics, involuntary sterilization, and race-based marriage laws reveal, the valorizing of any type of eugenics policy is a dangerous step backwards and is without a defensible stance. At my own alma mater, the University of Virginia, we continue to grapple with the fact that UVA professors in the earlier 20th century participated actively in the state’s eugenics movement; a history reconstructed most extensively by former UVA professor of law and medicine Paul A. Lombardo.
With all this in mind, the growing citation and championing of Spartan ideas of selectivity and superiority, as well as their place within the false construction of “Western Civilization” is, as I have written about before, deeply troubling. Coded language that upholds the right of Europeans to immigrate to the US to the exclusion of countries like Iran, Chad, Somalia, and many others named in Trump’s travel bans, as a way of maintaining European influence is indeed a form of cultural eugenics. One need only look to Iowa Representative Steve King’s comments (pictured) about the “destiny” of demographics and restoring “our civilization” (“our” meaning Europeans) to recognize the xenophobic fear that is similarly evident in 300 and t-shirts with those emblematic Corinthian helmets on them.
The rise of Sparta in the romantic imaginations of Bannon and others that occupy the Alt-Right is about more than weapons. Their celebration is directly linked to Hitler’s similarly troubling admiration for Sparta’s cultural control and eugenic policies. But does that mean that those who do not identify with the racist ideals of the Alt-Right must reject Sparta in toto? The question comes comes down to whether we as a society can valorize and analyze some aspects of an ancient society without glorifying all of it.
Our answer requires us to talk more openly as classicists about Sparta’s faults and its merits. The conversation requires complexity and nuance, in the manner that Ijeoma Oluo advocates when confronting the idea of the “problematic fave.” Oluo remarks on the human inclination to project ourselves onto our favorite celebrity. When a racist, homophobic, or insensitive comment is then made by that celebrity, we feel wounded: “[W]e see ourselves in them. If your favorite smart, talented, successful celebrity can be classist, sexist or racist then what does that say about you? Well, it says that you can be classist, sexist, racist, homophobic, or transphobic.” Similarly, it is all too easy either to canonize Sparta or to abandon them as an exemplum altogether. As it turns out, cities make for imperfect heroes too.
Should we then classify all lovers of Spartan culture as members of the Alt-Right? Of course not! But we can and should complicate that romance. When Classicists use their knowledge of the classical world to point out the cultural and political flaws in Spartan culture — e.g. their use of enslaved labor and eugenics—when they point out to students and the public that their championing of Sparta is coexistent with (or sometimes originating from) movements in Nazi Germany and modern hate groups, and when they engage with the fact that praise for Sparta has become a dog-whistle for signaling beliefs in European exceptionalism, they are providing important nuance to the conversation. But they are also making more space for unblinkered appreciation of Sparta. The incredible push by classicists and medievalists alike to call out the appropriation of the ancient, late antique, and medieval Mediterranean in the past two years has been an example of the good that public history can do. It has also galvanized academics to state: You want our history? Well, molon labe.
Sarah E. Bond is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa. She is a digital humanist, blogger, tweeter, and frequent contributor to Hyperallergic. She is often told that it is frustrating to watch movies or TV shows focused on antiquity with her.
