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Quote of the Day: The Laconic Phrase
“If.” — The Spartans to Philip II of Macedon
Where ancient Athens loved beauty, Sparta loved austerity. They punished their bodies to prepare for war. They reviled opulence, figuring the poorer their city-state, the less likely it would be attacked. Their staple dish was black broth, a revolting concoction made of blood and boiled pigs’ legs. They even refused to build city walls for protection; defensive postures should be left to the effete Athenians.
This austerity extended even to words. While Athens wrote plays and philosophized ad nauseam, Sparta valued action over talk. The less a warrior spoke, the better, and thus was created the laconic phrase. Named for their home province of Lacedaemonia, these quips were blunt, terse, and often mysterious. Best to keep your enemies guessing.
Many laconic phrases were highlighted in the film 300. As Xerxes faced the small army at Thermopylae, he ordered the Spartans to surrender their weapons. Their reply was “come and get them.” The Persian warned that their arrows were so numerous, they would blot out the sun. “Then we shall fight in the shade,” the Spartans said.
More than a century after that famous stand, Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s dad) prepared to conquer all the Greeks. Most city-states simply gave up, but Sparta ignored the growing threat. This annoyed Philip, so he sent a messenger to Lacedaemonia with a dire warning:
“You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army on your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.”
Sparta focused on just one word in that threat and made the following reply:
“If.”
Philip decided the headache wasn’t worth it. Both he and Alexander focused on conquering the whole known world but avoided the city without walls.
Published in General
The verse says, obedient to her laws, persuaded by her laws.
Which is how it should be.
There appear to be quite a few translations. I chose one that scans better.
There are lots of translations, but that is besides the point. The Spartans are defined by their obedience to their laws. If you read Herodotus, you will see this is the difference between the Persian army & the Spartan-
My USMC vet husband (infantry) would love this on a t-shirt!
The point isn’t brevity for the sake of brevity. Did Philip get the message?
Well OK, then. As we say in ASCII, ETX.
ASCII, ETX ?
The Spartans seemed to have been brief for the purpose of engaging the listener’s attention to, and concentration on (consideration of) the message. That’s certainly what the answer “If” does.
He’s reading excerpts from Herodotus.
Yes, the battle of Salamis tells about Queen Artemisia, who was allied to the Persians and, when the battle had turned against the Persians and her ship was being chased by the Greeks, turned to an allied ship and attacked it so that the Greeks assumed she was their ally and left her to go chase another ship so she could get away, after destroying the ship of her own ally.
Xerxes thought she was manly.
Re: 38
Does Herodotus discuss this queen Gorgo that She mentions ?
A computer’s way of telling another computer “I’m done talking.”
That brings back old – and bad – memories. Serial line control bleah! My first programming gig out of school was as a ‘protocol droid’…
Lots of industrial stuff still exists with serial lines. Lasts practically forever.
Yes.
Gorgo.
Not unique to the Spartans. The Greeks considered themselves “free men” obligated, by their citizenship and honor, to serve in the defense of the polis.
Mostly Spartans.
A lot of that was for vaporator-ware.
There’s an anecdote (or Spartan joke) in Plutarch* (I think) about a Spartan who goes to the big city, buys a fish for his dinner, and hires a chef to cook it. The chef immediately gives him a shopping list for the preparation of the fish: olives, cheese, capers, etc., etc. So the Spartan sez: “If I had all those good things, why would I need a fish?”
The keyword is simplicity. Explains the speech, the daily diet, the lack of walls, and even the long hair.
*I guess Plutarch is considered a suspect source on Sparta. And, come to think of it, he was pitching vegetarianism (meat is a luxury–clearly Plutarch never made his living as a farmer/rancher, which is to say, animals are useful in other ways than being delicious and you might as well eat them when they become not useful.).
Yes, it is unique to the Spartans. If you don’t understand this, break out your Herodotus & get to learning. & don’t talk about Greeks. Who ruled the polis mattered & the idea that the demos would have felt obligated by honor to fight for oligarchs or tyrants or even kings–well, I wonder at your ideas…
Of course, the oligarchic parties in democracies themselves had unusual ideas.
This story is likely apocryphal, but a man from Sybaris (famed for its luxury and gluttony) visited Sparta and was served black broth. His response was pretty laconic: “Now I know why the Spartans do not fear death.”
I think moderns are fascinated by Sparta for the same reason they love films about the mafia. Both cultures (at least in theory) have simple, unbending allegiance to a strict moral code. Of course these “morals” are often 180 degrees out of phase with conventional morality (often brutally so).
Yet there is something about the sense of duty unto death that inspires admiration. And then there’s the fascination that the viewer is admiring a person for doing such awful things.
I think it might go further. Not sure how many would admit it, but Spartans were defined by law. Their lives were shockingly public. Privacy was in various ways criminalized or subject to surveillance. Inasmuch as virtue could be politicized, they did it.
I agree, too, that the ugliness is in itself attractive, for reasons we shan’t discuss.
Catharsis.
Jon and / or Titus,
Why do you consider the Spartans so horrible ? And what finally happened to them ?
They trained kids for psychopathy & murder. These are often considered bad things.
Spartans didn’t ever have enough kids, because they murdered children who seemed weak &, well, rates of survival to adulthood were unhelpful. They dwindled-
I don’t get this Spartan worship. The Spartans were, in practically every way, weak. They practiced extreme eugenics for the time, they practiced extreme xenophobia, extreme totalitarianism, extreme stratification, extreme etc. They exemplify Socialism.
They weren’t even that powerful militarily speaking, they were defeated by the Thebans, Macedonians, and pretty much everyone else after their decline in the 4th century BC. Their height of power wasn’t even a flash in the pan chronologically speaking after their expansion into Asia Minor (which geographically was quite small for any kind of “empire”).
And to get to the “If” statement Philip didn’t carry out the response because he smashed every other Greek City-State in combat. He annihilated the Thebans (the Greeks who had ended the short-lived Spartan supremacy of Southern Greece) and Athenians at Chaeronea, the Theban phalanx being broken by cavalry charge (an unheard of event at the time), and created the League of Cornith not long after–which put the poor and strategically useless Spartans surrounded by Macedonian allies.
Even when the Spartans tried to invade Macedonian territory, to help the Persians, during Alexander’s invasion of the Persian Empire they were smashed by the Macedonians at the Battle of Megalopolis.
The Spartans are a shining example of what a state should not want to be. If you want a successful, brutal, and materially simplistic people to laud then praise the Mongols. At least they got somewhere with their simplicity and brutality.
Though he wasn’t laconic :
Epaminondas (/ɪˌpæməˈnɒndəs/; Greek: Ἐπαμεινώνδας, Epameinondas; d. 362 BC) was a Thebangeneral and statesman of the 4th century BC who transformed the Ancient Greek city-state of Thebes, leading it out of Spartan subjugation into a pre-eminent position in Greek politics. In the process he broke Spartan military power with his victory at Leuctra and liberated the Messenian helots, a group of Peloponnesian Greeks who had been enslaved under Spartan rule for some 230 years after being defeated in the Messenian War ending in 600 BC. Epaminondas reshaped the political map of Greece, fragmented old alliances, created new ones, and supervised the construction of entire cities. He was also militarily influential and invented and implemented several major battlefield tactics.
Re: 54
As I said, I don’t know anything about them. Who were the people the kids were trained to murder ? Did they murder to terrorize their slave population or something ? I think I once read that somewhere.
Also, to me, there isn’t as much of something grim in the remark of the man trying out black broth as there is in the other remarks we’re calling laconic.
Years ago, online, I saw this given as an example of a question answered laconically: A young man asks an elderly rancher, in Montana or somewhere, “Have you lived here all your life?” The rancher answers “Not yet.”
Re : 55
We’re fascinated by what we imagine we know about their heroism (300, Andrew Klavan once called that movie “conservative porn”) by their rejection of luxury, and (in my case) by the examples we have of the way they were said to have communicated.
Also stars in The Soul of Battle. Much recommended.
Their own children.
Spartan boys were raised in military training camps from early boyhood, given not enough to eat because they were expected to steal, and killed by the adults if they were too weak or shameful.
Girls were also expected to be strong, in order to bear strong healthy children, and learned to wrestle, ride, hurl the javelin, and run, competing in athletic competitions unlike other females in Greece.
A line from the Wikipedia entry that kind of sums it all up: