Jan-Maat's Reviews > Spartans An Epic History

Once upon a time, long ago (view spoiler)[ actual last Saturday (hide spoiler)] and far away I had a fancy to read about the French revolution, popped into an Oxfam bookshop, looked about at what they had and came out with this for two pounds and forty-nine pence, having read it, I feel it will return there shortly.

Wandering idly back (view spoiler)[ since I have never lived in a bookshop or a library (hide spoiler)] I wondered about left-handed Spartans, the ancient Greeks were known for their hoplite mode of fighting in close ranks were each man wore a large round shield strapped to his left arm and carried a spear in his right hand, the idea being that you could protect the right side of your body by nudging to the right of your neighbour and sheltering behind the side of his shield. Typically their armies were divided into a left, centre and right and the tendency for every-man to move rightwards meant that in battle the right flank of one army would defeat the left flank of the opposing army while the centres would clash irritably. This continued for hundreds of years apparently until the Thebians developed a cunning new deployment of a super strong left flank and so defeated their opponents on both the left and the right leaving the enemy centre feeling very lonely and homesick. This was highly efficient and sped up battles considerably, however shortly afterwards the Macedonians swept down from the north with a different innovation - a super long spear which enabled them to triumph over all opponents, which just goes to show that ideas are like buses, you wait around for centuries and then three come one after the other, three because the Romans were just across the sea biding their time to march in with a new kind of flexible tactical deployment which enabled them to crush all before them. But I am digressing from my digression which was that if you were left-handed you were pretty much buggered (view spoiler)[ and not just on account of the homoerotic socialisation into adult society (hide spoiler)], apparently tools from the stone age are fairly evenly divided between being suitable for left or right handed use but hop forward in time and the familiar dominance of right-handedness is apparent creating the mystery of the revolution of the right hand, so if you were a left handed Spartan were you just a bit sub-Spartan, or was it a case of 'I'm sorry lad, but you're just not cut out for the modern military, I hear that in Athens they want rowers'. Cartledge doesn't address himself to the left-handed conundrum, but it was only an idle thought.

Cartledge, I was familiar with from In our Time an ongoing radio series on which he spoke (and sometimes still speaks) on various classical themes, and his warm friendly, mildly witty approach does translate into the book as does a conversational manner which unfortunately makes for a book that is a bit rambling and noticeably repetitive.

Naturally my second thought was along the lines of 'oi, you, why'd jer write this book then?', I had to wait until the appendix to find out that Cartledge sees his job as haute vulgarisation which in English sounds slightly less demeaning as 'popularisation' (p.255). I am divided as to whether he is successful or not, my initial thought was no, this is more of a second book, not the kind of thing a total new-comer to the subject could run away with and become entranced by, however after a night's sleep and morning coffee I feel it is more in the ok but not inspiring category, sub-Spartan for sure.

I very much enjoyed the chapter on Sparta in Early Greece, but that took the approach of historical sociology or archaeological anthropology - who were the Spartans, what were the qualities of their culture, Cartledge instead wants to take a more historical approach running from Helen of Troy ( who came from Sparta and curiously became a cult figure there(view spoiler)[ curiously I think because the only two things we know about her was that she was very beautiful and that her adultery led to a ten year war, not automatically the grounds for becoming a cult figure I would have thought (hide spoiler)]) through to the Roman period. He does this through a series of mini-biographies, principally of the Spartan kings, on the plus side I suppose there is a focus on famous names and mighty battles, on the downside a tendency to repeat the same information once within about about 600 words as though the book was constructed like a jigsaw puzzle out of dozens of free-standing pieces with no view to the overall picture.

For me it felt as though he succeeded in neither addressing the interesting questions about the lasting appeal of Sparta in the European imagination( Wanderer kommst du nach Spa..., or Eugenics, Spartan lifestyle and exercise) whether Spartan society was as purposive as it seems or if this is simply an effect of the distorting gaze of the admiration of our sources, several of whom found Sparta distinctly fascinating either because they approved (Xenophon) or were horrified (Aristotle on account of women being in charge (view spoiler)[relative to their position elsewhere, which is rather like a commentator from Saudi Arabia being shocked by the social dominance of women in the Yemen (hide spoiler)], or that Helen the most famous adulterous woman in Europe became the cult figure of a culture in which women's lives were severely restricted (if liberal and free by ancient Greek standards) to being mighty mothers (view spoiler)[ with short cropped hair, it would be cut for their wedding and kept short there-after (hide spoiler)] with wondrous wombs to produce compulsive killers and certain soldiers and had no freedom to choose their own husbands let alone run off with other men (view spoiler)[ even if their husbands were red-haired and the other man was a pretty boy from Troy (hide spoiler)], although apparently the good Spartan was expected to share his wife with other Spartan men if required, nor in being a rollicking lowest common denominator story of 'gather round while I tell you about the roughest-toughest, longest-haired fighters that ever fought'. The aforementioned chapter in Early Greece seemed to me to cover more ground in less than twenty pages that Cartledge does in almost three hundred, but then Cartledge does get the opportunity to repeat himself a few times and the font size in Early Greece is smaller.

Cartledge only touches on the beginning of Sparta as a major tourist destination in the ancient world (p.237), itself a curious event since their food, the infamous black bean soup, was meant to be appallingly functional(view spoiler)[ something that Cartledge says that did catch my attention was that the Spartans had no cults of Demeter nor Dionysus at least not on a comparable scale to other Greek cities, this he puts down to agriculture and viticulture being entirely in the domain of the slave Helots whose enforced servitude made the leisured adulthood of Spartans possible, the Helots also did the cooking, building and breast feeding, adult Spartans were only expect to fight and breed but even this last proved too much for them despite the wife swapping and they more or less died out over time (hide spoiler)], nor were the ancient Spartans famous for their drink and party scene, however they were famously weird and the Romans in particular wanted to experience that oddness vicariously, and so aspects of Spartan life were redeveloped in the Roman period as a kind of theatre, Spartan boys were back in the day brought up in militarised boarding schools and systematically underfed to oblige them to steal food(view spoiler)[ this was felt to be a useful life skill for future soldiers , ie foraging (hide spoiler)], traditionally they attempted to steal food from the offerings made at a temple of Artemis(view spoiler)[ their traditional military education apparently didn't promote initiative or inventiveness nor cunning (hide spoiler)], these were guarded by older boys who would flog any youngster that they caught. This was re-enacted for Roman era tourists, fortunately or unfortunately depending on what you thought you had paid to view, the participants would sometimes get over involved in their role-play and a younger boy would get beaten to death, most of the architectural remains of Sparta come from this era - to cater for the demands of the tourist era, back in the day when the Spartans were the archetypal master race as Thucycides imagined the physical remains of their culture would be too unimpressive for any one to believe how militarily and politically dominant they had been .

More curiously and perhaps of great interest to the state of Israel, a High Priest of Jerusalem wrote to the Spartans (view spoiler)[ this was the period when Jewish culture was fascinated by Greek culture (hide spoiler)], so Cartledge tells us twice(view spoiler)[ interestingly he only ever repeats himself twice, perhaps an educators trick (hide spoiler)], requesting their assistance in war against the Seleucids on the basis of their common ancestry, allowing perhaps in future for the suburbs of Tel Aviv to stretch into the Peloponnese (view spoiler)[ why he thought they were related Cartledge doesn't say, though since the Romans were Trojans, one might say why not, presumably the assumption was that Hercules and Samson were the same person , despite having had ever so slightly different adventures in which case despite some superficial differences the Jews were Spartans and the Spartans Jewish, in which case Origen's comparison of Jesus to King Leonidas was quite reasonable (hide spoiler)].

I have a desire to end this review with anecdotes about the Sybarites and Pythagoras and dancing horses, but they don't really tie in the book at all, so I won't.