2001, University of California Press, 276 pages

With the release of the sequel to 300 on hand, I thought it would be a good opportunity to review an academic sourcebook on the Spartans. Paul Cartledge is the dean of Spartan experts. Primarily due to their famous stand against the Persian Army at Thermopylae, when we think of Greeks we tend to think of Spartans. Keep in mind that these ancients held many things dear that we abhor, and would abhor us for many of the things we hold dear.

Spartan Reflections is a narrative of an extinct people who have impressed the world with their warrior prowess for thousands of years, told in 4 parts: Sparta-Watching; Polity, Politics and Political Thought; Society, Economy and Warfare; and The Mirage Re-Viewed.

Ancient warrior societies were essential scaled up primitive societies with improved technology. To understand the behavior of these warriors one must understand the very organic nature of his upbringing. In the case of the Spartans you had a society that was designed to, first and foremost, produce the most effective warriors possible. While Roman social organization for war would make sense to us, what predated it was generally alien to what we think of as military.

The two ironic aspects of the resulting cultural experiment that was Sparta, was the high status enjoyed by women—a status that would not be enjoyed by Western women again until the 1990s in America—and the prevalence of male-to-male sexual relationships, which cannot really be equated to modern notions of homosexual monogamy, hedonism, or bisexuality.

A very entertaining thing about the first 300 movie was the portrait of Xerxes, the Persian King of Kings as a homo-erotic fiend, while the Spartans were depicted as staunch heterosexual he-men. The actuality was quite the opposite. The Persians held notions of family values which were much more culturally akin to those held by modern Americans of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent. Xerxes was dumfounded when he noticed the Spartans combing each other’s hair before the battle. Imagine Ike on D-Day looking through his binoculars to see German troops giving each other massages and primping at their wigs!

I will quote Mister Cartledge briefly, to give you an idea of the detailed nature of his book. Footnote citations are omitted.

“The wedding night involved a strikingly bleak ritual…[a paragraph-long discussion of the bride having her hair chopped dyke-short and the groom now being required to wear his hair long]…the bride was then dressed up in a man’s cloak and sandals and laid on a pallet to await the attentions of her ‘captor’…it is also worth pondering the suggestion that the bride’s appearance was designed to ease the transition from the all-male and actively homosexual agoge and common mess to full heterosexual intercourse…”

Not surprisingly, the failure of the Spartan state to thrive in the long run has often been correlated with a low birthrate. Ancient Sparta was a patriarchal war-machine backed by a matriarchal anti-economy. It would be analogous to an America where the fighting men were oversees most of the time fighting wars or patrolling the homeland murdering unionized members of the working class, with the bedrock political will that backed the administration essentially beholding to a feminist ethic.

Hillary says, “Come back from Islamistan with your shield, or on it.”