That understanding of courage [of First Nations tribes of the Great Plains] was itself almost utterly alien to, for instance, the classical Greeks. While Greek notions of military excellence had their roots in Homer (on this, see J.E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (2005)) and an ethic of individual combat where honor was gained by killing notable enemies, by the fifth century this had been replaced by an ethic almost entirely focused on holding position in a formation. As Tyrtaeus, a Spartan poet, writes (trans. M.L. West):
I would not rate a man worth mention or account
either for speed of foot or wrestling skill,
not even if he had a Cyclops’ size and strength
or could outrun the fierce north wind of Thrace;
I would not care if he surpassed Tithonus’ looks,
or Cinyras’ or Midas’ famous wealth,
or were more royal than Pelops son of Tantalus,
or had Adrastus’ smooth persuasive tongue,
or fame for everything save only valour: no,
no man’s of high regard in time of war
unless he can endure the sight of blood and death,
and stand close to the enemy and fight.
This is the highest worth, the finest human prize
and fairest for a bold young man to win.
It benefits the whole community and state,
when with a firm stance in the foremost rank
a man bides steadfast, with no thought of shameful flight,
laying his life and stout heart on the line,
and standing by the next man speaks encouragement
This is the man of worth in time of war.This is not a daring courage, but a stoic (in the general sense) courage – the courage of standing a place in the line. And note for Tyrtaeus, that courage is more important than skill, or strength or speed; it matters not how well he fights, only that he “bides steadfast” “with a firm stance”. There is no place for individual exploits here. Indeed, when Aristodemus (another Spartan), eager to regain his honor lost by having survived the Battle of Thermopylae, recklessly charged out of the phalanx to meet the Persian advance at the Battle of Plataea, Herodotus pointedly notes that he was not given the award for bravery by the Spartans who instead recognized those who had held their place in line (Hdt. 9.71; Herodotus does not entirely concur with the Spartan judgement).
This was a form of courage that was evolving alongside the hoplite phalanx, where either shameful retreat or a reckless charge exposed one’s comrades to danger by removing a shield from the line. While, as Lendon is quick to note, there was still a very important aspect of personal competition (seeking to show that you, personally, had more bravery to hold your position than others), this is a fundamentally collective, not individual style of combat and it has values and virtues to match. Indeed, the Greeks frequently disparaged the fighting style of “barbarians” who would advance bravely but retreat quickly as cowardly.
And so the man who holds his place in the group and does not advance recklessly is the bravest of Greeks, but among the Crow Native Americans would seem a coward, while the bravest Crow who cleverly and daringly attacked, raided and got away before the enemy could respond would in turn be regarded by the Greeks as a reckless coward, unworthy of honor. These notions of courage aren’t merely different, they are diametrically opposed demanding entirely different actions in analogous circumstances!
The translator will call both of these ideas “courage”, but clearly when one gets down to it, they demand very different things. And these are just two examples. As Lendon notes (op. cit.), the virtus of the Roman was not the same as the andreia of the Greek, though both words might well be translated as “courage” or “valor” (and both words, etymologically mean “manliness”, lest we forget that these are very gender-stratified societies). Roman virtus was often expressed in taking individual initiative, but always restrained by Roman disciplina (discipline), making that system of military values still different from either the Crow or the Greek system.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
August 11, 2024
QotD: Greek and Roman notions of courage
July 30, 2024
Sparta’s bane – Cicero labelled him “the foremost man of Greece”
The Theban general who finally broke the military power of Sparta:
Epaminondas defending Pelopidas by William Rainey.
Illustration from Plutarch’s Lives for Boys and Girls: being selected lives freely retold (1900) via Wikimedia Commons.
The ancient Roman orator and statesman Cicero labeled him “the foremost man of Greece”. Cornelius Nepos, a biographer and contemporary of Cicero’s, regarded him as “incorruptible”. The 16th-century French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne judged him “one of the three worthiest and most excellent men” in all of history.
This man was a warrior-philosopher, a revolutionary, an ascetic, a statesman and diplomat, a liberator, and a military genius. Yet the deeds for which he is best remembered spanned less than two decades (379–362 BC), 2,400 years ago.
To whom am I referring?
His name was Epaminondas. If it doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. Outside of Greece, few people anywhere today know of him. I never heard his name until this past April when an economist friend, Dr. Luke Jasinski of Maria Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, suggested I write about him. Luke says he:
…was a broad-minded man with a libertarian streak, a visionary who showed the Greek world a viable alternative to the endless wars of the time. For modern libertarians, his story is worth remembering. Impressed by it myself, I dedicated one of my economics books to him.
What we know about Epaminondas comes entirely from secondary sources. He left behind no writings that have survived, but from contemporaries and later historians, we do know at least this much about him:
- He was born in the Greek city-state of Thebes in the central Greek region of Boeotia, sometime between 419 and 411 BC, when Thebes was a tiny backwater. It would be largely due to Epaminondas and his loyal friend and fellow general Pelopidas that Thebes would become a powerhouse a few decades later.
- Sparta, the brutal city-state that governed the Greek region of the Peloponnesus, orchestrated a coup against the Theban government in 382 BC and installed an armed garrison there. Three years later, Epaminondas played a key role in a revolution that ended the Spartan dictatorship, restoring local, democratic government.
- In the wake of the Theban revolution, Sparta went to war with Thebes and its Boeotian allies for the next decade. When peace talks broke down in 371 BC, the stage was set for the climactic Battle of Leuctra. Through masterful and unprecedented tactics on the battlefield, Epaminondas led the outnumbered Theban armies to a decisive victory over the Spartans.
- To end the Spartan threat for good, Epaminondas invaded the Peloponnesus a year later. He liberated the region of Messenia that the Spartans had occupied and savaged two centuries earlier. Epaminondas did not subsume and subdue the Messenians; instead, he introduced democratic rule and then left. Grateful for their liberation, the Messenians became allies of Thebes and a buffer against the Spartans. Shortly thereafter, Epaminondas founded a new city in the northern Peloponnesus and named it Megalopolis. With Sparta shrunken and bottled up, its days as a menacing bully were numbered.
June 2, 2024
QotD: The Spartans do not deserve the admiration of the modern US military
Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises — an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.
Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other”, a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.
To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War — but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.
Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.
April 12, 2024
Greek History and Civilization, Part 6 – The Search for Stability
seangabb
Published Apr 7, 2024This sixth lecture in the course deals with the period of Greek history between the end of the Persian Wars and the assassination of Philip II of Macedon.
(more…)
February 27, 2024
Greek History and Civilisation, Part 4 – The Ancient Greeks: The Great Invasion
seangabb
Published Feb 18, 2024This fourth lecture in the course deals with the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC, ending with the glory of Thermopylae and the burning of Athens.
(more…)
February 21, 2024
Greek History and Civilisation, Part 3 – The Ancient Greeks: Rising Tensions with Persia
seangabb
Published Feb 18, 2024This third lecture in the course deals with the rise of the Persian Empire, and the growing tensions between the Persians and the Greeks, culminating in an account of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.
(more…)
February 13, 2024
Greek History and Civilisation, Part 2 – Sparta and Athens: Contrasting Societies
seangabb
Published Feb 11, 2024This second lecture in the course contrasts Athens and Sparta, the two leading societies in Greece — one a commercial society with high levels of personal freedom and citizen participation, the other a militarised oligarchy.
[NR: Some additional information to supplement Dr. Gabb’s lecture:
– “Citizenship” in the ancient and clasical world
– Sparta had Lycurgus, while Athens had Solon … who at least actually existed
– The Constitution of Athens
– The Constitution of the Spartans
– The Myth of Spartan Equality
– Relative wealth among the Spartiates
– Sparta’s military reputation as “the best warriors in all of Greece”
– Sparta – the North Korea of the Classical era
– Spartan glossary]
(more…)
February 6, 2024
Greek History and Civilisation, Part 1 – What Makes the Greeks Special?
seangabb
Published Feb 1, 2024This first lecture in the course makes a case for the Greeks as the exceptional people of the Ancient World. They were not saints: they were at least as willing as anyone else to engage in aggressive wars, enslavement, and sometimes human sacrifice. At the same time, working without any strong outside inspiration, they provided at least the foundations for the science, mathematics, philosophy, art and secular literature of later peoples.
(more…)
QotD: Sparta’s actually mediocre military performance
The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War.
Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats.
Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.
August 31, 2023
QotD: A typical polis
In any case there certainly were a lot of them. The Polis Center’s inventory counts just over a thousand archaic and classical poleis (it does not extend into the Hellenistic period), of which probably around 800-900 existed at one time. Now our vision of these poleis is necessarily a bit skewed: most were very small and leave little evidence, while the two most prominent poleis in our sources by far, Athens and Sparta, were both very unusual in their size and governing structures. That said while most poleis were very small, it doesn’t follow that most Greeks lived in very small poleis; M.H. Hansen notes ((2006), 83) that by his estimates 80% of all of the poleis housed around 35% of the polis-living population, while the top 10% largest poleis housed roughly 40%.
But the smallest poleis could be very small. A touch over 200 poleis in the inventory had territories of less than 100km2. A small polis like that might have a total population of just a few thousand, with an even smaller subset of that population consisting of adult citizen males. On the other hand, very large poleis like Athens or Sparta might have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, though as M.H. Hansen notes in the inventory these sorts of massive poleis with territories in excess of 1,000km2 were very rare: there are just thirteen such known.
But crucially for this survey, what we’re going to see is that there some fairly common and standard polis institutions, which seem fairly common regardless of size. Indeed, the language and thinking of our Greek sources is often informed by a sort of idea of an ideal or standard polis, from which every real polis deviates in certain ways. These little communities had institutions which resembled each other, to the point that the difference between “oligarchic” or “democratic” or even “tyranical” poleis could be surprisingly slight. So that’s what we’re going to look at here: a basic sense of what a polis notionally was. And we’ll begin by looking at the parts that comprised a polis, which is going to be quite important as we go forward, since the way one structures a government depends on how one imagines the component parts being governed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.
August 22, 2023
History Summarized: Sparta’s Finest Hour
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 12 May 2023It’s not Thermopylai.
SOURCES & Further Reading:
Constantine Cavafy, The Collected Poems. Translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou, Oxford University Press, 2008. – George Economou, On Translating C.P. Cavafy’s “Come, O King of the Lacedaimonians”. https://newohioreview.org/2013/09/02/… – Plutarch, Lives of Agis and Cleomenes. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin, W. Heinemann, 1968. – Polybius, Histories. Edited by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht. Translated by W. R. Paton, VI, Harvard University Press, 2012.
– For way the heck more about Kleomenes and Kratisikleia, you can also read my undergraduate Honors Thesis, Greekness in Peril: Cavafy and the Essence of Hellenism. 2018. https://www.academia.edu/44709355/Gre…
(more…)
July 27, 2023
History Summarized: The Cities of Ancient Sparta
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Apr 2023Is. This. Sparta???
SOURCES & Further Reading:
– “The Spartans” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
– “The Greek Polis – Sparta” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble
– “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland
– “Being a Greek Slave” from The Other Side of History by Robert Garland.
– The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton
– The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline.
– AskHistorians posts by u/Iphikrates “Is the Military Worship of the Spartans Really Justified?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
– “This. Isn’t. Sparta.” by historian Bret Devereaux argues that Sparta was a horrible place to live, had poorly educated citizens, was militarily mediocre, culturally stagnant, and was ruled by elites who were pretty crappy too. Anything inaccurate in that assessment?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
(more…)
May 25, 2023
The Hoplite Heresy: Why We Don’t Know How the Ancient Greeks Waged War
The Historian’s Craft
Published 9 Feb 2023Hoplites are probably one of the first things that come to mind when one thinks of “Ancient Greece”. Equipped with a bronze spear and wearing bronze armor or a linothorax, and hefting the aspis — the hoplite‘s bronze shield — they fought in phalanxes. The classic mode of fighting in this formation was the “othismos“, the push, with the aim being to disrupt the enemy phalanx and break their formation. But, over the past few decades, views on hoplite warfare have been called into question and seriously revised, because there are problems in the source material. So, what are these problems, and how do historians of Ancient Greece understand hoplite warfare?
March 25, 2023
QotD: Sparta’s fate
What became of Sparta?
In short, Sparta became a theme-park. A quaint tourist get-away where wealthy Greeks and Romans could come to look and stare at the quaint Spartans and their silly rituals. It developed a tourism industry and the markets even catered to the needs of the elite Roman tourists who went (Plutarch and Cicero both did so, Plut. Lyc. 18.1; Tusc. 5.77).
In term of civic organization, after Cleomenes III’s last gasp effort to make Sparta relevant – an effort that nearly wiped out the entire remaining Spartiate class (Plut. Cleom. 28.5) – Sparta increasingly resembled any other Hellenistic Greek polis, albeit a relatively famous and also poor one. Its material and literary culture seem to converge with the rest of the Greeks, with the only distinctively Spartan elements of the society being essentially Potemkin rituals for boys put on for the tourists who seem to be keeping the economy running and keeping what is left of Sparta in the good graces of their Roman overlords.
Thus ended Sparta: not with a brave last stand. Not with mighty deeds of valor. Or any great cultural contribution at all. A tourist trap for rich and bored Romans.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
January 19, 2023
QotD: Did Sparta achieve its strategic objectives?
And yet Sparta’s failure here was perhaps the most complete of all. The collapse of the Spartiate class did not abate after Leuktra; by the 230s, there were hardly any Spartiates left. Meanwhile, the transition of Messenia from a group of subject communities supporting Sparta economically to an active and hostile power on Sparta’s border essentially represented the end of the Spartan social order as established in the seventh century with the reduction of Messenia to helotry in the first place.
So, does Sparta achieve its strategic objectives? By and large, I think the answer here has to be “no”. Sparta – the supposed enemy of tyrants – by mismanaging its own leadership invited one foreign oppressor (Macedon) into Greece after another (Persia). As a state that seems – to me at least – to have considered itself the natural and rightful leader of all of the Greek states, Sparta, routinely and comprehensively proved itself unworthy of the position.
The one thing we may say for Spartan foreign and military policy is that it seems to have made the world safe for helotry – it preserved the brutal system of oppression which was foundational to the Spartan state. But consider just how weak an achievement that is – we might, after all, make the same claim about North Korea: it has managed only to successfully preserve its own internal systems of oppression.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
