Episode #225 - What is the Spartan Mirage? (Part I)

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If you ever find yourself in the Louvre, There's a painting I think you should see.

And no, it's not that painting.

although the painting I'm thinking of is hung rather close to that famous smiling lady that we've spoken about here before.

No, I'm talking about Jacques-Louis David's gigantic neoclassical masterpiece, Leonidas at Thermopylae.

When you enter Le Salle d'Arux in the Louvre's Denon wing, you cannot miss this painting.

The canvas is roughly four meters high and over five meters in length.

That's roughly 13 feet by 17 feet for the metric intolerant among you.

It depicts the legendary last stand of the 300 Spartans at the Pass of Thermopylae, one of the best remembered and most heavily mythologized battles in history.

You know the one I'm talking about.

This is Sparta!

Yeah,

that battle with those 300 Spartans.

Now I find it interesting that when you visit the Louvre, Leonidas at Thermopylae is one of the first paintings you can encounter after you leave the room that holds the Mona Lisa.

Because in many respects, the giant neoclassical painting has the opposite effect of the much-hyped Leonardo portrait, where the Mona Lisa is small, subtle, and enigmatic, Leonidas is big, bold, and brimming with allegorical meaning.

But this is typical of the neoclassical style.

of which this painting is one of the most famous examples.

As the name suggests, neoclassical painting was deeply inspired by the art of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

In the late 18th century, classical Mediterranean sculpture, temple paintings, and vase decorations were idealized by a generation of artists who, according to one of the style's greatest proponents, believed that they possessed, quote, a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, end quote.

The neoclassicists sought to revive everything they saw saw as worthy in the Greek and Roman forms, but then added a certain modern flair and drama to their compositions.

For many artists living through the tumultuous and transformative decades of the French Revolution, scenes from the ancient Mediterranean past became rich sources of allegory for their own times.

Their message was that we should not only be imitating the art of the Greeks and Romans, we should also be deriving inspiration from their politics, philosophy, and moral virtues.

In Leonidas at Thermopylae, the artist dramatizes the moment before the famous 300 Spartans come into contact with the Persian army commanded by King Xerxes.

The vastly outnumbered Spartans are assembled between the cliffs of the so-called hot gates at Thermopylae.

In the distance, Xerxes' Persian army looms.

The Spartan camp is filled with activity, but in the center of the composition, we have the Spartan king Leonidas, heroically nude, sword-drawn, but in repose, unbothered by the coming battle.

He is the calm in the eye of the storm, muscled, elegant, and exuding a certain Spartan resolve.

He looks more like a Greek god than any real historical figure.

The painter, Jacques-Louis David, has been celebrated as one of the most consequential French artists of the revolutionary era.

Many of his most famous paintings, like the Tennis Court Oath and the Death of Marat, documented and glorified the French Revolution as it was happening.

But he also used scenes scenes from antiquity to draw instructive parallels between the past and his own historical moment.

You see, David was not simply an artist.

He was a propagandist who was knee-deep in the politics of the revolution.

He was a proud member of the Jacobin Club and eventually got in deep with Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the most radical and bloody phase of the revolution.

In those years, David vigorously pushed for the execution of King Louis XVI and used his artistic talents to glorify the newly declared French Republic.

This also meant that he was closely associated with the mass arrests and executions known to history as the terror.

But if you know anything about the French Revolution, then you know it had a way of

revolving.

By the early 1800s, David, the once unshakable Republican, was now deep in the camp of the man who ended France's first experiment as a republic, Napoleon Bonaparte.

In fact, many of the most iconic images of Napoleon were painted by Jacques-Louis David.

Napoleon crossing the Alps?

That's David.

The coronation of Napoleon?

David.

In fact, you can see that one in Le Salle d'Arue, just a few paintings down from Leonidas.

David's heroic neoclassical style, that at one point had promoted republicanism, just a few years later, was being employed to exalt a new French monarchy.

Now, because of that, most of David's art can be neatly divided into clear periods associated with his political affiliations,

except, notably,

Leonidas at Thermopylae.

In fact, you could argue that the meaning of that particular painting evolved more drastically than any other French painting from that period.

You see, the Spartans have proved to be surprisingly malleable historical figures whose legacy has been used and abused by a dizzying array of admirers from every corner of the political spectrum.

For instance, in the early 1790s, as France violently shook off its monarchy and established the First Republic, the Spartans were held up as ancient examples of the French Republic's stated virtues, liberté, fraternité, and egalité.

The fact that the new revolutionary government found itself at war with a coalition of European powers only strengthened the perceived historical parallels between the new French Republic and Sparta under Leonidas.

When France won a surprise victory in 1792 at the Battle of Valmy against the Prussians, it was celebrated as France's thermopylae from a revolutionary perspective all the despotic crowned heads of Europe easily slid into the role of the ancient Persians.

In 1793, two popular French plays about the Spartans at Thermopylae cast Leonidas and his 300 Spartans as a brotherhood of heroes, fraternite, who fought for the cause of liberty, liberté, in the face of monarchical tyranny.

In one of those plays, a Spartan warrior exclaims,

Insane despots, you will finally know that a few free men are enough to fight and conquer a whole world of slaves, end quote.

When Jacques-Louis David started his painting of Leonidas in 1799, he was trying to reconnect with some of that old revolutionary magic.

Like I said, the revolution had been revolving.

By 1799, Robespierre had been executed, and the new government of the Directory had taken the place of the radical clique of Jacobins with whom David had been closely associated.

But France was still at war, and once again a coalition of European allies was closing in on them.

It seemed like a good time to re-invoke the memory, or perhaps the myth, of the 300 Spartans.

But then, later that year, Napoleon orchestrated his coup d'état and French politics was upended once again.

Now, a giant painting celebrating an ancient figure symbolic of the Republican hatred of tyrants seemed

a little out of step with the French political climate.

Napoleon apparently dropped some hints that David should abandon the project.

But a decade passed and times changed again.

In 1812, as Napoleon's Grande Armie was being forced to retreat from Russia, David once again picked up his brush and started working on Leonidas at Thermopylae.

But now Leonidas was no longer a symbol of the French Republic.

He was a historical parallel for Napoleon.

Far from being the enemy of kings, Leonidas's kingliness was now being emphasized.

Like Napoleon, he was a king and a general, who, propaganda would have us believe, remained courageously unmoved even as his enemies closed in around him.

Even Napoleon himself came around to the painting.

During his dramatic return to power after his exile on Elba, Napoleon began to see himself in Leonidas.

After his return to France, the Emperor encouraged David to finish the painting, and apparently told the artist that, quote, I hope that copies of this painting will soon be placed in military schools.

They will remind young students of the virtues of their state, end quote.

But by the time the painting was finally finished, the revolution had completed yet another turn.

Napoleon was gone for good, and Louis the 18th, a restored Bourbon monarch, was back on the throne of France.

Now, you would think that given all that, Leonidas at Thermopylae would once again be completely out of step with the French political climate.

After all, Jacques-Louis David had a gigantic painting that at one time symbolized the people who killed the last Bourbon king, and then went on to symbolize the recently deposed Emperor Napoleon.

That's a double layer of bad meanings in Restoration France.

But amazingly, in the 1820s, the painting was reclaimed and reinterpreted once again.

This time, it was helped by the Greek Revolution.

In the 1820s, Leonidas and his Spartans seemed to represent the modern Greeks as they tried to win their independence from the Ottoman Turks.

What's more, the Greek independence movement became a cause supported by liberals around Europe, and especially in France.

Jacques-Louis David's painting had swung from the extremes of the European political spectrum to now being seen as an emblem of 19th-century liberalism.

In 1826, with a Bourbon still sitting on the French throne, Leonidas at Thermopylae was first displayed at the Louvre.

This is the thing about the Spartans.

They have been claimed as historical heroes by groups from literally every corner of the political spectrum.

In the early 20th century, the Nazis infamously became fascinated with the Spartans and held them up as pseudo-Nordics whose military might came from an uncompromising program of eugenics.

To them, Leonidas was the model Führer.

Since then, successive waves of fascists and other far-right groups have glommed on to Spartan imagery and have appropriated supposed Spartan sayings for their own purposes.

For these groups, the Spartans represent a type of blood and soil nationalism and the violent opposition to immigration.

In recent years, the appropriation of Spartan history by the far right has been so total that it can be easy to forget that the Spartans have also been used as symbols of republicanism, liberalism, and anti-authoritarianism.

But were the real ancient Spartans a good historical analog for any of these modern political movements?

You see, the trouble with Spartan history is that it has been mythologized and remythologized countless times since the Greek city-state's classical peak in the 4th century BC.

The result is what the influential French classicist François Ollier dubbed Le Mirage Spartiat,

or the Spartan Mirage.

There's a popular idea that Sparta was an uncompromising, austere society devoted solely to military greatness, and that the Spartans single-handedly saved the Greeks at their moment of greatest need.

According to Ollier and many generations of historians who have followed him, this is all part of an elaborate mirage.

Many centuries' worth of exaggerations, inventions, and idealizations have given us a deeply skewed understanding of who the ancient Spartans were and how their city-state functioned.

There's a reason why Jacques-Louis David's painting of the Spartans at Thermopylae proved remarkably adaptable to the changing political winds in revolutionary France.

This was a a painting of the Spartan mirage.

And a mirage, by its very nature, refuses to be pinned down in any one place.

So, what exactly is this Spartan mirage?

And can it be overcome?

After so many centuries of myth-making, can we get a clear picture of what ancient Sparta was actually like?

Let's see what we can do today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five.

Episode number 225, What is the Spartan Mirage?

Part 1.

Hello and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story.

It simply must be told.

Before we get going this week, I just want to remind everyone listening that an ad-free version of this podcast becomes available to you if you become a patron.

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This includes shows on El Dorado, Merlin, Nicola Tesla, and my upcoming

only show.

And one more thing before we dive into our topic today.

I want to let you know about something new we are going to be trying on the podcast.

Anytime I complete a series, like the recent one we just did on Al Capone, I usually get a bunch of emails, comments on my social media, questions, sometimes corrections that I end up responding to individually.

Well, I thought it would be fun to make that stuff more a part of the podcast.

So I'm going to start doing bonus podcasts that will come out on the off weeks between series.

So that means that the regular episodes will still be out every two weeks, but then a little something extra every month or so, depending on how long a series has run, will come out as well.

These bonus episodes will give me a chance to talk to the listeners, answer your questions, respond to comments, muse on topics I maybe didn't get a chance to cover on the regular episodes.

It's something I'm going to be doing instead of those throwback episodes that I've been putting out in the last year or so.

Now, I'm still going to be using the throwbacks when I do my season break at the end of August, but otherwise we'll do these fun little bonuses.

I'm hoping it'll give me more of a chance to connect with you, the listeners, and will give you, the listeners, something brand new to listen to.

So as this series is going along, if you find yourself with questions or comments, send them to me at ourfakehistory at gmail.com and I will respond to as many as I can in the bonus episode.

Patrons, I'm going to set up a special chat for this on the Patreon page.

So feel free to send me your questions through that chat.

And I should say questions from my patrons will be given priority.

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I need to take care of you.

The first of these bonus episodes will be dropping on May 13th, 2025.

So while you're listening to this series on Sparta, do not hesitate to send me your thoughts or questions.

I'll also be taking questions for our last series on Alcapone as well.

Sound like fun?

I hope you dig it.

We're going to give it a try.

This week, we are headed back to ancient Greece to explore one of the most famous and popularly misunderstood Greek city-states.

I am speaking, of course, of Sparta.

The southern Peloponnesian city has been celebrated as the birthplace of a ferocious and dominant warrior culture.

According to popular tradition, the Spartans engineered their society to create the most well-trained and brutally efficient soldiers in the ancient world.

Allegedly, this process started from birth.

Babies born with any perceived weaknesses or physical deformities were discarded and left for dead.

Then at the age of seven, young boys were taken from their families and were subjected to the Agoge,

a rigorous state-run educational program that hardened Spartan youth into the warriors of tomorrow.

As adults, Spartan men were forbidden from working at anything other than exercising their bodies and improving their skills as soldiers.

They dressed simply, ate simply, used iron money instead of silver or gold, and spoke little.

But this lifetime of austere discipline and physical training was ultimately worth it as it created warriors that were unstoppable on the battlefield.

Warriors who saved the Greeks during the Greco-Persian Wars and then came to dominate the Greeks after the Peloponnesian War.

Or,

so goes the tale.

This image of the Spartans has been part of our cultural conversation for so long that it's worked its way into our language.

In English, when we describe something as Spartan, we mean that it is admirably simple, sturdy, and unadorned.

We also use the word laconic to describe someone who speaks in a way that is straightforward, uncluttered, and to the point.

Laconia being the region of Greece where Sparta was located.

And uh, for the record, I have never once been accused of being laconic.

The rigorous and uncompromising nature of classical Sparta has fascinated history lovers for centuries.

Everything about their society can seem like a grand social experiment.

And their supposed success on the ancient battlefield could be seen as proof that this experiment paid off.

But in the 1930s, a pioneering French classicist named François Ollier published a book that completely turned the study of ancient Sparta on its head.

This was Le Mirage Spartiat, or the Spartan Mirage.

In the book, Ollier argued that for centuries historians had been getting the Spartans wrong.

Specifically, the popular understanding of Sparta has been shaped by distortions and inventions found in the historical sources dating back to the earliest times.

This was partially due to the fact that the Spartans left behind so few written records and accounts in their own words, especially when compared to fellow classical Greeks like the Athenians.

As a result, we have come to know the Spartans through the writings of outsiders.

According to Ollier, many of these writers, especially from the Roman period onwards, presented an idealized version of the Spartan past.

In other words, the idea that the Spartans were uncorruptible, austere super-soldiers might be fake history.

As I hopefully demonstrated in the introduction, one of the fascinating things about the Spartan mirage is that it grew and changed over time, depending on who was conjuring the Spartans.

As the Spartan expert E.

N.

Tigerstedt has pointed out, quote,

the idea of Sparta was influenced by the opinions of her admirers and changed accordingly.

The Sparta of the Venetian aristocracy was not the Sparta of the French Revolution, which again differed greatly from the Sparta of the Third Reich.

Sometimes the differences are so fundamental that we begin to suspect that Sparta is nothing more than a projection from the present into the past, a wish fulfillment that has been given a historical label.

End quote.

Sparta as wish fulfillment.

That is an interesting idea.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that in the last 20 years, the popular understanding of Sparta has been hugely influenced by the 2006 film 300.

Directed by Zack Snyder, 300 was a faithful adaptation of the Frank Miller comic series and later graphic novel of the same name.

I'm sure many of you have seen it.

But 300 is the Spartan mirage on steroids and speed and a monster energy drink.

All of the mythology that inspired Jacques-Louis David's grandiose painting of Leonidas at Thermopylae is on display in 300, with an added shot of modern superhero cinema aesthetics, CGI excess, and some good old-fashioned Orientalism.

But there's no denying that 300 reinvigorated popular interest in Spartan history.

In fact, when I went to the Carlton University Library here in Ottawa and picked up Ian Tigerstedt's book, The Legend of Sparta in Classical Antiquity, I couldn't help but notice that on the title page, a student had written, this is Sparta, above the name of the city.

300 has clearly had an impact.

But as much as I love it when people get excited about history, it's worrisome that so many people seem to have gotten their history from 300.

That movie is Sparta as wish fulfillment.

And when you watch it, you should ask yourself, what exactly Frank Miller and Zack Snyder seem to be wishing for?

What is their Spartan mirage?

And why do they find it so appealing?

For the last 20 years, 300 has set the tone for the discourse around Sparta.

So I think it's important that we come to a more nuanced, balanced, and historically accurate understanding of who the Spartans really were.

To do that, we need to pick apart a whole lot of mythology.

You see, since Ollier first proposed the concept of the Spartan Mirage, successive generations of scholars have refined the idea.

Now, many argue that a distorted view of Sparta goes right back to ancient Greece.

In fact, the Spartans themselves may have promoted many of these misconceptions and exaggerations.

So let's start with some of the foundational Spartan myths and see where the Spartan Mirage begins.

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In the first chapter of his Tour de Force book, The Legend of Sparta in Classical Antiquity, the historian E.

N.

Tigerstedt warns his reader that, quote, the greatest hindrance to any real insight into the history of Sparta and of the Spartan legend is the deliberate attempt to envelope itself and its past in an obscurity of its own making.

In Sparta, from the beginning, legend and truth are closely, indeed inextricably interwoven.

End quote.

Now, it should be said that all of the classical Greek city-states had local myths that were used to explain their founding and connect their cities to particular gods, demigods, or Greek heroes.

In this regard, Sparta was quite typical of ancient Greece.

However, the Spartans cultivated a certain mystique around their history that even their fellow Greeks found unusual.

More than one visitor to Sparta in the classical era commented on how the Spartans treated their past as a type of state secret.

Archaeologists believe that the city we know as Sparta originally came into being sometime around 1000 BC.

It was situated in the mountainous region of Laconia, in the southern part of Greece's Peloponnesian Peninsula.

Sparta sat at the natural entrance to the Eurotus River Valley, one of the more fertile river valleys in all of Greece.

To get to the Eurotas Valley by land, you needed to go through Sparta.

In Spartan myth, the river itself was dug by the city's first king, Eurotas.

According to myth, Eurotas had a beautiful daughter named, you guessed it, Sparta.

But the king had no sons who could inherit his throne.

So he found for his daughter a remarkable husband, a demigod, son of of Zeus, and a water nymph named Lacedaemon.

The union between Lacedaemon and Sparta produced the people who from then on would be known as either Spartans or Lacedaemonians.

A few generations later in the mythical timeline, the Peloponnese was rocked by a disruptive military campaign carried out by the greatest of Greek heroes, Heracles, or as some of you might know him, Hercules.

Now, those of you who listened to our series on the Olympics might remember that while completing one of his famous 12 labors, Heracles got deeply mixed up in Peloponnesian politics.

This resulted in a war, a number of regime changes in nearby city-states, and culminated in the very first Olympic Games.

Well, in Spartan lore, their city was one of those places that was conquered by Heracles.

This resulted in one King Tendarius ruling as the representative of the great hero.

Now, this might seem like a weird mythical sidebar, but for the Spartans, this encounter with Heracles would prove to be very important.

Now, one of the interesting quirks of Spartan government that survived for centuries was the institution of having two kings who ruled concurrently.

Nowhere else in ancient Greece do you see this specific form of government, sometimes called a diarchy.

Now, archaeologists have pointed out that the earliest physical evidence found at Sparta suggests that the city originally was two distinct villages that at one point amalgamated into one big city.

It's been guessed that this merger may have birthed the institution of two kings, each one representing one of the original villages.

But, you know, Spartan myth has a different explanation.

In the Spartan story, mythological twins are a repeating motif.

The wife of Tindarius was the mythical Leda, as in Leda and the swan.

For those that don't know, Leda's story is one of the more disturbing tales in Greek myth.

The story goes that she was sexually assaulted by Zeus in the form of a swan.

It's one of those scenes that, for some reason, has fascinated painters for thousands of years.

It pops up again and again in the canon of Western art.

Anyway, after Lida's encounter with the swan, we're told that she gave birth to four eggs.

Yeah, eggs.

These eggs represented two sets of twins, the brothers Castor and Pollux, and the sisters Clytemnestra and Helen.

Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking, oh, Castor and Pollux, I've heard those names names before.

Were they the first dual kings of Sparta?

Well, weirdly, the answer is no.

But their story does seem to echo the tale that actually seeks to explain the institution.

You see, this part of the Spartan mythical foundation story is messy and reflects the fact that different, often contradictory, mythical traditions can get mashed up in the storytelling process.

You see, Helen is, of course, the famous Helen of Sparta, perhaps better known as Helen of Troy.

As all my Iliad heads out there know, Helen was married to Menelaus, who in the Trojan War mythic cycle is identified as the king of Sparta.

Now, some traditions have it that Menelaus got to be king because Castor and Pollux had died, but other traditions aren't so clear about that.

It seems like Menelaus had to be shoehorned into the broader Spartan mythological tradition so that the local stories could better line up with the famous tale of the Trojan War.

As many of you know, the Trojan War was sparked after Helen was kidnapped from Sparta by the Trojan prince Paris.

The Spartans liked this detail because it made Sparta a key part of that mythic story cycle.

But after the mythical side quest of the Trojan War, Spartan myth gives us a second foundation story.

This is sometimes called the return of the Heraclids.

The story goes that after the fall of Troy and the end of the Age of Heroes, the descendants of Heracles, who had been living in exile in the far north of Greece, returned to the Peloponnese.

These great-grandchildren of the demigod came with an army at their backs to claim what they believed to be their birthright, namely the kingship of a number of Greek cities, including Sparta.

In Sparta's case, we're told that a pair of Heracles' descendants were twins, and they both believed that they were entitled to the kingship of Sparta.

The issue was that typically the older brother would have the right to the inheritance.

But in this case, the mother of the twins couldn't remember which of them was born first.

So, She did what every pious Greek would do at the time.

She consulted the oracle at Delphi.

Interestingly, the oracle came back with the advice that both twins should rule together.

And so, the institution of the diarchy was established.

For centuries in Sparta, the two kingships were held by two dynasties, known as the Aegeids and the Europontids.

The kings were drawn from those two families and no others.

Now, what's fascinating about the return of the Heraclids is that the myth seems to reflect some real history.

After the Mediterranean Bronze Age collapse, Greece experienced an influx of new migrants, primarily from an ethnic group known to history as the Dorians.

It's not exactly clear where the Dorians originally came from, but they seem to have entered Greece from the Balkans region.

The Dorians had their own language and distinct cultural traditions that were different from the Bronze Age Proto-Greeks we typically call the Mycenaeans.

What we think of as archaic and classical Greek culture was deeply affected by this Dorian migration.

Now, interestingly, the Spartans identified themselves as ethnically Dorian, which, from one perspective, could suggest that their ancestors were not the original people of Laconia.

But the myth of the return of the Heraclids helped smooth over that uncomfortable idea by making the Spartan leadership descended from Heracles, the most Greek of Greek heroes.

The Dorians were simply the army at the Heraclids' back.

In this way, the Spartans could be both Dorians and the kings of Sparta could be ethnically Achaean.

That is to say, unimpeachably Greek.

So, these were the mythic traditions that the Spartans used to explain their ethnic identity and their connection to Laconia.

But none of this stuff really explains why we have this image of Sparta as the home of these austere super warriors.

Now, there is a tradition that seeks to explain that, but this is where we move into that blurry space where myth and history combine.

You see, the figure that is most associated with turning Sparta into something Spartan is a man known as Lycurgus, sometimes called Lycurgus the Lawgiver.

You will often read that the Spartans credited Lycurgus with transforming their society and creating a constitution and code of laws that made them into who they were.

But the frustrating thing is that we get that information from people who were not Spartan.

The Spartans wrote very little down, and as such, we do not have a single Spartan source that describes the life and impact of Lycurgus.

What's more, we have no written record of the constitution and law code that Lycurgus allegedly implemented in the city.

The story goes that one of Lycurgus' commands was that his laws were never to be written down, so that the Spartans would commit them all to memory.

This creates a situation where everything we know know about the Spartan Constitution, legal code, education system, and prescriptions for daily life are based largely on hearsay.

That's crazy.

This is truly the start of the Spartan mirage.

The Spartan system that so many later people would idealize or vilify has been communicated to us by foreign writers who at best heard about it from famously tight-lipped Spartan informants.

At best!

One of our key early sources is our old buddy Herodotus of Halicarnassus, father of history, father of lies.

Good to have you back, bud.

The Greek historian Xenophon also gives us descriptions of Lycurgus and his laws.

Between the two of them, we get a sense of how Lycurgus and his constitution were likely perceived in most of Greece in what we call the classical era, that is, around the 400s BC.

But the most detailed source on Lycurgus and his laws comes from a Roman writer.

Plutarch.

Now, Plutarch has come up on this podcast a few times before, as he's been one of our key ancient sources on previous episodes.

As you might remember, Plutarch was a Roman Greek who was writing in the first and second centuries AD.

That means he was writing a solid 500 years after Herodotus and Xenophon, and potentially 1500 years after when Lycurgus was supposed to have lived.

It's also worth noting that Plutarch writes about Lycurgus in a work called Parallel Lives, where the author paired the biographies of famous Greeks with those of famous Romans.

Parallel Lives uses these biographies to teach specific lessons about leadership, morality, and civic virtue.

This means that while Plutarch is generally accepted as being a scrupulous researcher, he's also using these stories to make a point.

So, given how late Plutarch was writing and the general thrust of his project with parallel lives, what he tells us about both Lycurgus and the Spartan state needs to be handled with care.

That doesn't mean that Plutarch is completely unreliable, but if a detail about Sparta appears in Plutarch and nowhere else, then there's a higher probability that it is a myth.

Now, it's worth noting that at the start of Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, the author gives this disclaimer, quote,

concerning Lycurgus the lawgiver.

In general, nothing can be said which is not disputed, since indeed there are different accounts of his birth, his travels, his death, and above all his work as lawmaker and statesman, and there is least agreement among historians as to the times in which the man lived.

End quote.

He then cautiously pledges that, quote, although the history of these times is such a maze, I shall try in presenting my narrative to follow those authors who are least contradicted.

Now, given how often Plutarch is cited as a key source on Spartan history, we should not not just breeze past this warning.

Even Plutarch seems to understand that his account of Lycurgus and his laws is at best a blurry approximation of the truth.

So, what is the Lycurgus story?

We are told that sometime in Sparta's distant past, the Spartans had been, to quote Herodotus, quote, the worst governed of the Greeks and had no dealings with strangers, but then changed to good government, end quote.

How exactly did this change occur?

Well, at the time there was an aristocrat named Lycurgus, who was a member of one of the royal houses, which one is hotly debated.

He was acting as the regent for his young nephew, who had recently become one of Sparta's kings.

Worried that his city was descending into political chaos, Lycurgus set out on a mission to learn as much as he could about good governance.

Now, in some versions of the story, he went first to the island of Crete, where he discovered a very orderly and well-run government.

Then he went to Ionia.

that is, the Greek settlements in what is today western Turkey, and there he observed cities that were decadent and corrupt.

This fact-finding mission helped him develop a new constitution and set of laws for Sparta.

However, in another version of the story, we're told that Lycurgus went directly to the oracle at Delphi and was given the Spartan constitution by the priestess there known as the Pythia, who in turn channeled it directly from the god Apollo.

Plutarch combines these traditions and tells us that Lycurgus traveled abroad, devised a new constitution, and then had it approved by the oracle.

Anyway, after visiting the oracle, Lycurgus returned to Sparta and set about convincing the people to adopt these new directives.

In some versions of the story, the Spartans do this readily.

In other versions, Lycurgus needs to do a bit of clever politicking to get his reforms across the line.

In yet another version, there's a straight-up rebellion on the part of the aristocrats who do not want to change, and a small-scale civil war breaks out in Sparta.

But in the end, the laws of Lycurgus are ultimately adopted, and Sparta is transformed forever.

Then, according to Plutarch, Lycurgus sealed the deal by telling his fellow Spartans that he needed to verify with the Delphic oracle that the Constitution that they had adopted was indeed pleasing to Apollo.

So he needed to make one final trip.

But before he left, he gathered all the Spartans together in the central square and made them take a solemn oath that they would not change anything about his constitution until he returned.

When Lycurgus eventually got to Delphi, he checked to see if the god was pleased, and when he got a positive report, he made the fateful choice to starve himself to death and never return to Sparta, sacrificing himself to hold the Spartans to their solemn oath forever.

Plutarch explains, quote, he therefore abstained from food till he died, considering that even the death of a statesman should be of service to the state, and the ending of his life not void of effect, but recognized as a virtuous deed.

He would make his death the guardian, as it were, of all the blessings he had secured for the Spartans during his life, since they had sworn to observe and maintain his polity until he should return.

In this telling, Lycurgus's final act would act as a model for all future Spartan leaders.

Sacrifice for the greater good of the city would be held up as the ultimate ideal for any Spartan.

Or was it?

You see, as I've already been hinting at, there are many reasons to doubt the historicity of the Lycurgus story.

And if we have doubts about Lycurgus, then what does that mean for his famous constitution and body of laws?

The story would have us believe that the Constitution of Lycurgus not only laid out how the Spartan government would function, it prescribed laws for every aspect of Spartan life.

Author Philip Matisik explains that Lycurgus could be seen as, quote, the ultimate control freak whose laws not only covered the constitution of the state, but issues such as where and how often a man could have sex with his wife, what clothes their children were allowed to wear, and even the conduct of the child walking down the street.

Lycurgus dictated what a person could eat at a meal, whom that person could eat it with, how much wine could be consumed as an accompaniment, and that no torches were permitted to light the way home afterwards.

Matters such as the length of one's hair were determined by Lycurgus, who even carefully considered obscure matters, such as the number of strings a musician could have on his instrument.

End quote.

That gives you a flavor of just how all-encompassing Lycurgus's reforms were reported to be.

But most significantly, Lycurgus supposedly determined that Sparta should always be on a war footing and its citizens should constantly be training to become the world's greatest warriors.

But if Lycurgus' constitution is what made the Spartans Spartan, what should we believe if that body of laws was built on a bedrock of myth?

Well, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll break it down.

The first issue with the Lycurgus story is that it's almost impossible to place it on the historical timeline.

Even the Roman writer Plutarch knew that this was a problem, and he cops to it in the introduction to his Life of Lycurgus.

One tradition recorded by Herodotus has it that Lycurgus lived around 1000 BC, around the time that the descendants of Heracles were supposed to have returned to Sparta.

But the historian Xenophon places him at about 100 years after that.

And the Greek historian Thucydides believes that he lived 100 years after that.

The philosopher Aristotle believed that the real Lycurgus lived sometime around the first Olympiad.

You might remember from our Olympic series that there was a decorative discus allegedly kept at Olympia that commemorated the first games with Lycurgus' name on it.

That would place the life of Lycurgus around 776 BC.

But as Plutarch admits, all of these traditions contradict one another, and there doesn't seem to be much evidence to support the validity of any of them.

Also, Lycurgus' Constitution, as it is presented in Plutarch, contains elements that are completely anachronistic, no matter where you choose to place Lycurgus between 776 and 1000 BC.

For instance, one of Lycurgus' laws was that the Spartans should never use silver or gold coins, because they would lead to a corrupting love of money.

Instead, Lycurgus decreed that commerce should be conducted with specially made iron coins, which he insisted would keep the Spartans from becoming greedy or money-grubbing.

Now, there is some evidence that the Spartans may have used a form of iron currency at one point in their history.

However, Even if we use the most recent dates given for the life of Lycurgus, and that is the mid-7th century BC,

that means that the lawgiver lived a solid century before the first coinage of any kind appeared in Greece.

There is no evidence that the Greeks had coins before the 6th century.

How could Lycurgus ban gold coins if they didn't exist yet?

The earlier you place Lycurgus on the timeline, the more ridiculous this anachronism becomes.

And this gets us to the heart of the Lycurgus problem.

He is likely an example of an invented tradition.

Now if you're a patron and you listened to the recent extra episode that we featured from History on Fire, then you're already well schooled on the concept of the invented tradition.

But for everyone else, the term invented tradition was coined by the influential historians Eric Habsbaum and Terrence Ranger.

It was popularized in a famous book of essays they edited called, What Else?

The Invention of Tradition.

In broad strokes, an invented tradition is when a relatively new tradition is given the veneer of ancientness to make it seem more important, authentic, or steeped in meaning.

We've explored many examples of this on the show before.

For instance, the modern Olympic torch relay with all of its faux ancient Greek pageantry is a textbook example of an invented tradition.

Well, Lycurgus might be similar, and here's how.

All the best research seems to suggest that if there was a constitutional change in Sparta, it took place around the turn of the 6th century BC.

These changes likely came about as the result of the city's first major wars.

These were known as the First and Second Messenean Wars.

Messenia was a region to the west of Sparta in the Peloponnesian Peninsula.

Over the course of two drawn-out conflicts, the first likely between 743 and 724 BC, and the second between 660 and 650 BC,

Sparta was able to conquer this region and enslave its entire population.

Now again, we shouldn't be thinking about the Spartans of Thermopylae doing this conquest.

as none of that Spartan training had likely come into being yet.

In fact, the Spartans lost many battles in the Messenian Wars.

Commanders fled from the field.

The Spartans were known to use bribes.

They did a lot of things that were not stereotypically Spartan.

But significantly, the Spartans won.

And in victory, they chose to establish one of the more remarkable slave states in all of ancient Greece.

The conquered people became known as Helots, and if we believe our ancient sources, they became the property of the Spartan state.

After the wars, the lands of Messenia, or Messenia, were divided among a group known as the Spartiates.

This was essentially the Spartan aristocracy.

Now, according to one tradition, Lycurgus spelled out exactly what it meant to be a Spartiate.

But it may have been the Messenian wars that really enshrined this group as a concrete social caste.

Because from that point onward, being a Spartiate meant having land and making sure that land was being worked.

Who was doing the work?

Well, the enslaved Helots, of course.

Every Spartiate was responsible for a group of slaves who worked the land and did all the domestic chores.

Now, to be clear, slavery was common all over ancient Greece.

There were slaves in every major Greek polis or city.

Aristotle famously wrote long philosophical justifications for the institution of slavery.

But the Helots were different in a few key ways.

Most slaves in ancient Greece were not ethnically Greek.

They were often prisoners of war taken from places considered non-Greek.

Now, it was not unheard of for Greeks to keep fellow Greeks as slaves, but it usually took the form of debt bondage.

That is, people forced into slavery after incurring debts that they could no longer pay.

But in the case of debt bondage, there was the hope that one day you could work off your debt and regain your freedom.

For a Greek city-state to enslave an entire population of fellow Greeks and keep them and all their descendants enslaved in perpetuity was unique to Sparta.

Greek writers from other city-states, who usually had no problem with the morality of slavery, often commented on how the Spartan institution was particularly harsh and gave that society a different feel from other Greek cities.

This was because for most of Sparta's history, the Helots hugely outnumbered both the Spartiates and the freeborn tradesman class known as the Periokoi.

Now,

Some of the most outrageous stories about the treatment of the Helots may be historical myths, and I plan to speak more on that a little bit later.

But

every expert agrees that to understand Sparta, you need to understand that it was an unusual slave state for ancient Greece.

The laws of Lycurgus start to make more sense when you factor in the reality of a giant oppressed slave population in Sparta.

Even the famous slavery apologist Aristotle thought that the system of helots was dangerous as it created quote an enemy constantly sitting in wait of the disaster of the Spartans end quote.

But perhaps the most helpful insight comes from the ancient historian Thucydides who comments that quote most Spartan institutions have always been designed with a view to security against the Helots.

End quote.

Sparta's laws were about maintaining this precarious social order.

Now, those Spartan institutions referenced by Thucydides get credited to the ancient Lycurgus, but they likely evolved, starting in the mid-6th century BC as a response to the new reality of the Spartans being slave masters.

The slaves gave the Spartan elites the free time they needed to be constantly training for war.

And the ever-present threat of a slave rebellion gave the Spartan elites a reason to be constantly training for war.

It's likely that as Spartan society changed and new laws came into being, a fictional ancestor was created to give these laws an ancient and noble pedigree.

This fictional ancestor was Lycurgus.

Now, there may have been a historical Lycurgus, a figure whose name was known from the distant past, but there's no way that he gave Sparta her constitution.

At different points in Sparta's history, when changes needed to be made to the laws, it was always framed as a return to the pure constitution of Lycurgus.

So, most scholars think that the Lycurgus story was devised after Sparta's society changed in the wake of the Messenian Wars.

The story helped explain the new social order and made it seem like it had existed for centuries.

Any future reforms or additions to the Constitution were always presented as returns to a pure constitution that had never changed.

So, this raises the question.

If Lycurgus wasn't real, then was his constitution real?

Were all these directives on how to be a Spartan actually followed by real Spartan people?

Well, the answer seems to be sometimes yes and sometimes no.

Now, over the course of the rest of this series, I plan on breaking down which of these laws were likely real and which were likely myths.

But before we wrap up today, I would like to tackle one of the most notorious Spartan practices that apparently came from the Constitution of Lycurgus.

You may have heard that the Spartans were early eugenicists who used a selective breeding program and uncompromising standards for their offspring to ensure the quote-unquote purity of their elite warrior society.

We're told that they did this by killing any infants they deemed to be physically compromised.

In other words, children who may have had disabilities or who were judged to be unacceptably weak were left for dead.

This information comes from one source and one source only, Plutarch.

Here is the notorious passage.

Quote,

A child was not reared at the will of the father, but was taken and carried by him to a place where the elders of the tribes officially examined the infant, and if it was well-built and sturdy, they ordered the father to rear it and assigned it one of the 9,000 lots of land.

But if it was ill-born and deformed, they sent it to the so-called apothetee, a chasm-like place at the foot of Mount Tegetas, in the conviction that the life of which nature had not well equipped at the beginning for health and strength was of no advantage either to itself or the state.

On the same principle, the women used to bathe their newborn babies not with water, but with wine, thus making a sort of test of their constitutions.

For it is said that epileptic and sickly infants are thrown into convulsions by the strong wine, and lose their senses, while the healthy ones are rather tempered by it, like steel, and given a firm habit of body.

This passage, which Plutarch tells us reflects the the laws of Lycurgus, has for centuries been focused on by some of history's most despicable people.

The Nazis were noted enthusiasts of ancient Sparta, and they were particularly fond of Spartan practices such as the one described in that passage.

This Spartan example was used to help justify Nazi eugenics programs and and their own murderous attempts to bring some form of imagined purity to the Third Reich.

Plutarch was used by Nazi propagandists to give their ideology an ancient pedigree, and they pointed to it as a test case for why such brutal practices might be desirable.

It worked for the Spartans.

Why shouldn't it work for the Germans?

Or so went the thinking.

But here's the thing: the idea that the Spartans killed weak or disabled children is very likely a historical myth.

How do we know?

Well, as I mentioned, this practice is only recorded in Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus.

And remember, that book was written in the Roman period, at least 500 years after the fact.

This practice cannot be found in any of our earlier sources.

Our more contemporary Greek historians, like Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides, do not mention it.

Even philosophers Plato and Aristotle, who were super interested in this kind of thing and discuss Sparta at length, say nothing about Spartan infanticide.

In 2007, an archaeological study was done by the Athens Faculty of Medicine anthropologist Theodoros Pizios at the infamous chasm known as the Apothete.

This was the place that Plutarch tells us the Spartans threw all their unwanted infants.

Notably, Pitsios and his team discovered human remains in this pit.

But

all the remains they found were from people who were between 18 and 35 years old.

They did not find any remains that could have belonged to infant children.

None.

And this was the place where the Spartans apparently threw countless babies.

Not a single infant bone was recovered.

So this story only appears in a very late source and it is not supported by archaeology.

It's also noteworthy that we get occasional references in our ancient Greek sources to Spartans who are described as having physical disabilities or having underdeveloped arms or legs.

Now it's not always clear if these people had had these disabilities from birth, but the fact that they are mentioned at all

is worth considering.

So why is this passage about infanticide in Plutarch?

Did he just make it up?

Well, it's not really like Plutarch to straight up invent things.

But he's not above including a popular legend that had grown up over the centuries.

Some scholars have suggested that this legend of Spartan infanticide may have been influenced by Greek utopian writing, like Plato's Republic.

In The Republic, one of Plato's characters suggests state-sanctioned infanticide as a practice in a hypothetical society.

Aristotle also includes this as a hypothetical idea idea in his book, The Politics.

So, it's possible that by the time Plutarch was writing his book, an idea first proposed as a hypothetical in utopian philosophical writing had transformed into an accepted fact about Sparta.

Since Lycurgus' Constitution had never been written down, Plutarch had no way of confirming this.

But there is very little evidence that the Spartans had an ancient eugenics program.

Eat it, the Nazis.

So, if one of the most widely discussed Spartan cultural practices was in fact a historical myth, then what else about the Spartans is made up?

Is it all just a Spartan mirage?

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks time when we will continue our look at the ancient Spartans.

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