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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
Which given their lack luster military record would make one wonder why they persisted in it (the last King of Sparta, Nabis, undid a ton of Spartan tradition in order to rebuild Sparta; one being that he freed the helots and made them Spartans by decree).
Perhaps Sparta being a xenophobic stratified society with eugenics would have over time produced a “limited” genetic pool which meant the negative effects of inbreeding would have reared its ugly head for quite a while. Another reason to not emulate Sparta.
What motivated the last king of Sparta, this Nabis, to free the Helots? I thought Toggle said some general, Epamindas, liberated them (comment 56).
Was there any threat to Sparta that wouldhave made its people more inclined to xenophobia?
Certainly, there are also things about the Spartans, beyond the vivid and cryptic way we’re told they communicated, worth emulating, right?
Peoples love affair with the Spartans eludes me. They are the least accomplished people in history, having contributed nothing of note or value to subsequent generations. Had they never existed not much would be missed, and certainly nothing of consequence.
They were a soulless military hegemony 100% preoccupied with keeping their slaves in check. Their only real accomplishment was to triumph over Athens, but is that something to be celebrated or mourned? Do we cheer for some sociopath who murders a man of great acomplishment?
Spartans deserves to be reviled at all possible times. Its way of life and the paltry accomplishments of its people must always be scorned and properly acknowledged as inferior to those of every other Greek.
Think for a second on what Toad stated. Every facet of Spartan Society was geared towards the military. What does the military do? Its objective is, ultimately, to destroy things. Total social mobilization for war footing requires a negative and hostile mentality because you are seeing the world through the lens of destruction, every other state is a potential enemy by default. It is also simplistic and thus inflexible and inaccurate.
How would the Spartan state know how many men it would need for war? How would it know the optimal number of helots or perikoi (the non-citizen free men class)? How would it know who should marry who or how long it would take to train men adequately for war? Think about the fact that Spartans invested their entire society into war and yet they repeatedly lost to other nations that did not invest their entire society into war.
The fact is that the Spartan Constitution (their legal code and operating government structure) was logically inconsistent. How is your population supposed to maintain itself– let alone grow–when you are killing your offspring through training, eugenics, war and also restricting population growth through marriage control and strict citizenship.
How are you supposed to have the population necessary to fight both wars and hold the Helots in check? Eventually this fact of reality caught up with the Spartans at the Battle of Selassia in 222 BC where the Macedonians slaughtered them on Mt. Olympus, killing close to 6,000 of them at a time when they had only about 10,000 total.
Nabis was a regent to the next King, Pelops (who was also a child)–as Cleomenes the preceding King was exiled after defeat . But he wanted power and so killed the child, purged the remainder of the two royal families, and then purged most of the Spartan nobility and finally made the Helots Spartans and granted them the land confiscated from the purged Spartan nobility.
This gave Nabis both the money and manpower necessary to attempt a resurgence for Sparta. Didn’t last long though because they got into a war with the Roman Republic and surrendered without even fighting a pitched battle.
According to the historical record they were xenophobic from the start. Most of the other Greek city-states neighboring them didn’t start wars with them, it was the other way around.
Why should one emulate their “short” form of speaking? I haven’t seen any arguments for that aside from the weak link made in the OP that they were supposed to be paragons of manliness.
What does 300 exemplify that is philosophically “conservative”? The movie was sold as an action film and its plot is almost entirely about action. It was about Spartans appearing as super-soldiers fighting the alien-like armies of the decadent Persians. Their isn’t any discussion about Spartan’s believing in conservative ideals and the Persians taking those ideals away or imposing progressive ideals. The only thing that is even remotely linked in the film is the idea of national sovereignty (and conservatives don’t even believe that is absolute).
300 plays on man’s psychological cues of the best men being sculpted and fighting large beasts in their underwear. Its not something a conservative should idealize.
Re: 65
I should try watching it. I never did see the movie.
Also, I might be mistaken about what Andrew Klavan said. He might have said “right wing porn” or “alt right porn”.
O.k., so here’s what I’m getting from what you people are telling me.
(1) The virtues of the Spartans were magnificent. (Obviously, you’re not saying that. But that’s what I’m gathering.) I mean, for instance, the average Spartan peon was very effectively conditioned by his culture to put the survival of his people, and his culture, before his own survival. For instance, the Spartan rejection of luxury and self indulgence would certainly lift a lot of people now out of the slums.
(2) A decline in the best of Spartan values and virtues didn’t bring about Sparta’s demise. Instead, Sparta’s military orientation, and some flaw or inconsistency in the country’s code (Constitution), turned Sparta’s cultural conditioning of self sacrifice for the sake of Sparta into a deadly weapon against its people. (So then what was the flaw in Sparta’s code that C.B. Anyone mentions in comment 64 ?)
(3) Sparta seems to have been like a mini, much slower to self-destruct Soviet Union; or, in its story, it’s like an enormous and very slow-motion version of The People’s Temple (that cult and settlement led by Jim Jones where, I hear, the children were brought forward to die first.)
I don’t think anybody has mentioned Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, in which his fictional narrator tries to answer the Persian king’s post battle question: “What kind of men were these Spartans…?”
Pressfield, from an interview:
Do we know if there were any gods or goddesses unique to Sparta or more worshipped in Sparta ?
Of so, how were they portrayed ? What were they understood to demand ?
That’s a book highly recommended to American Marines.
So that’s some reason to think maybe we owe some honor to Sparta after all.
Another reason is, Plato & Xenophon thought hard & long about Sparta. Whoever wants to learn should read Herodotus on Sparta; then Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedemonians (the Spartans–Lacedemon is the place where they lived) & then the first couple of chapters of his Education of Cyrus.
America is much better than Sparta in many ways; Americans ended their slavery. Of course, Americans still murder children like Spartans did, though for different reasons–but at least the nation’s divided on it & it may end. (Though I’m not holding my breath.) In other ways, Americans are just very lucky & you people should be far less smug. The luck of oceanic separation from political threats makes a big difference; the luck of having come about when technology could replace so much human labor, too.
But even given American virtues, beyond the luck & the vices, there are virtues Spartans had that Americans don’t. Patriotism was much more serious there than anywhere now. Both Americans & Spartans believe in professional armies, but the Spartans relied on patriotism far more than on commerce. So they would never have come to political crises over Vietnam, to give one example, or Iraq these days. So maybe there’s stuff to learn. In the good old days of republican virtue in America, the country was almost torn apart over the French Revolution, too. It’s worth considering whether the country won’t break up in the future. A lot of people who would look down on Sparta are kinda happy to say, yeah, let’s have a new civil war, a new secession, or whatever such thing. A time is coming when Americans will have to learn what law really means.
“The luck of oceanic separation from political threats makes a big difference….”
It has been argued that out of determination to ultimately gain American control from “sea to shining sea”, the Polk administration actually ruthlessly provoked a war with Mexico.
They say President Polk’s real fear was of what England, or some other country, might be able to do to us in the future if we didn’t control more territory. And maybe that’s understandable since, in about 1844, the war of 1812 wasn’t so distant a memory.
It is easy for us now to be smug or blind about how the world looked to the Spartans, or even how it looked to Americans of an earlier time. In fact, it’s easy to fail to understand what the dangers to them actually were.
Smug is my middle name. And also everybody else’s.
It sometimes seems that way, at least to those of us who worry a lot about the near future…
Care to unpack that a bit?
That’s the deception of it. The Spartans only had soldiers for citizens and everything else was accomplished by the two classes. For some people that may seem “magnificent” because it makes it appear like every Spartan seem like a stud muffin but that is not the case.
First is the fact of diminishing marginal returns. At a certain point further investment does not yield more than it costs. Those costs were all the dead innocent children in the exposure and the dead bodies on Olympus after Selassia and Sparta’s collapse. Your intrepretation that Spartans were trained to value their collective over the individual is accurate but it is inaccurate in its goal of survival. Nabis’s reforms are evidence that Spartans even lost faith in the original constitution.
Second imposing Spartan ideology would not end poverty. Spartan ideology did not emphasize being an entrepreneur or a merchant of any kind but being a soldier. Mercantile actions were done by the Perikoi, the non-citizen free men. It would also not solve the poverty which exists in the USA because most people in poverty in the USA are mentally unstable or suffer from untreated illnesses. No amount of ideology can fix that.
The flaw is establishing a society predicated on war and totalitarian/collectivist ideals. It creates too many pressures for decreasing rather than increasing population, which eventually means civilizationsl collapse, for reference at Sparta’s population height in 500 BC it is estimated that it had 35,000 men. You cannot have a thriving civilization if you control who can marry, who should be born, and fight constant wars.
Sparta is an example of a nation trying to fight the market and the market won. It should also be noted that Spartan ideology did not explicitly or implicitly advocate self sacrifice. There is a reason they were taught to lie and steal when young. Glorifying war is not glorifying sacrifice.
The pith is strong in this one.
Re # 75
“It [shunning luxuries] would also not solve the poverty which exists in the U.S.A. because most people in poverty in the U.S.A. are mentally unstable or suffer from untreated illnesses.”
I meant only that people here who think they are too poor to have money to set aside (for, say, their children’s education or something) are frequently spending money on things the Spartans would have considered luxuries to be shunned.
“It should also be noted that Spartan ideology did not explicitly or implicitly advocate self sacrifice.”
You mean, maybe, that the Spartans didn’t acknowledge or recognize a “self” in the way that we do, that they didn’t see people as having selves to sacrifice ?
Spartans don’t self sacrifice. That’s the enemy’s job.
I think one has to take into account the fact that many ancient writers always seemed to turn to various barabric civilizations as a means of highlighting the flaws in their own society by essentially drawing false contrasts. Oh Athens is so decadent and effete look at those Laconic stud muffins, that do nothing but push ups, and military drills. We could use less theater and more seriousness… be like Sparta.
You see this with Tacitus and his descriptions of the Germans. Oh look that those lovely, strong, naked Germans. So manly while us Romans are really letting ourselves go. We even see it in the modern world where various writers and intellectuals writing to criticize their open democratic societies always speak of the virtues of totalitarian military states. If only we could be China for a day, and other nonsense like that. All though I should note that open society is a relative term in this case, Rome and Athens are hardly open by modern standards but still for their day they were somewhat revolutionary.
This all reminds me of a joke.
When Napoleon dies he goes up to heaven, after some time St. Peter calls him over and asks him to come look down on what is happening on Earth to give his opinion as a former grand strategist and military genius. The two look out over the world and witness the ongoing Cold War between the US and USSR. After a while St. Peter asks Napoleon “Well what do you think?”
Napoleon answers back “If I had had American industrial and technological might I would have never lost my wars.”
“And, about the USSR?”
“Well, if I would have had their propaganda machine, no one would have known I lost my wars.”
I think the Spartans have a good propaganda wing.
I like how President Trump doesn’t talk about ongoing military operations, ever, which is a great force multiplier and has probably saved many lives.