what do we mean when we say Spartan as
an adjective
Spartan means austere tough without
luxury this comes straight from the
ancient stereotype of the Spartans the
inhabitants of Sparta in southern Greece
the Spartans were the ultimate warriors
raised from childhood to endure terrible
suffering and hardship the Spartan
character is summed up perfectly by the
ancient accounts of the Battle of
Thermopylae in 480 BC the Persians
invaded Greece and the spartan king
leonidas with 300 spartans held the pass
against them and died in the attempt
they didn't succeed in stopping the
Persian advance merely slowing it down
buying precious time for their fellow
Greeks and giving their lives in the
process the battle exemplifies so much
of what we admire about the Spartans
their loyalty to a cause bigger than
themselves their devotion to Liberty in
the preservation of their homeland in
the course of their fighting they
managed a kind of grim humor which is
familiar to us today from all sorts of
action heroes whose pithy one-liners are
uttered at the moment of ultimate peril
for example when the Persians demanded
that the Spartans laid down their arms
Leonidas famously replied come and get
them
likewise when a hail of lethal Persian
arrows blocked the Sun they are no disk
whipped to his companions this is
excellent
we will fight in the shade we can also
admire the Spartans association with
great physical fitness and toughness and
endurance in the present day they have
given their name to a particularly
extreme kind of obstacle race which
challenges people to achieve their own
athletic and physical best in the face
of enormous hardship what is more
Spartan women were just as tough and as
strong as the men we're told by the
ancient sources that they exercised they
received an education and they were able
to own property in their own right all
things denied to the women of other
parts of Greece however I think there
are some ways in which we need to
hesitate before accepting the Spartans
as the perfect icon of our modern values
today first they can become figure heads
of the xenophobe the Battle of
Thermopylae can start to stand for
holding out against the encroachment of
an alien invader the most pernicious
example of the Spartans usage of this
kind is in 1930s Germany and they came
to stand for the ancestry of the Aryan
master race and essentially legitimated
anti-semitism and other extreme forms of
xenophobia another question is whether
we today really want to claim the
Spartan paradigm with masculinity in
motion was anathema the individual was
nothing the state was everything as we
realized more and more the need to
encourage people to express rather than
deny their emotions and to show the
distress they might be feeling maybe the
Spartan ideal of masculinity is not the
one we actually want to claim for the
present day it's no coincidence that the
Spartans inspired the British public
school system of the 19th and early 20th
centuries a system in which ideals of
discipline endurance and austerity were
paramount even the toughness of Spartan
women is suspect the ancient sources
tell us that they trained their bodies
to produce strong sons so even the
athleticism for which they were famous
serves ultimately the Spartan war
machine and the grim joy with which they
saw their sons go to their deaths in
battle it's unpalatable today Spartan
women are said by the author Plutarch to
have told their men folk going off to
war come back with your shield or on
your shield on one's Shield of course
meant dead evoking Sparta is often a way
of trying to recover values which are
thought to be lost or receding old
fashioned values of resilience and
self-denial which some in modern society
feel that we have squandered in fact
however historians of ancient Sparta
have long challenged the historical
truthfulness of the ancient stereotype
of the Spartans for decades now they
have been trying to put forward an
alternative Sparta with a richer more
complex culture art music and a much
more complex range of values than have
traditionally been at
fitted to them there is no sign however
of this happening we are too addicted to
the Spartan stereotype
however inaccurate to give it up in
favor of a more complex and nuanced
reality thanks for watching don't forget
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