{"id":2664,"date":"2008-04-02T03:30:52","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T03:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2664"},"modified":"2008-04-02T03:37:38","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T03:37:38","slug":"go-tell-the-spartans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2664","title":{"rendered":"“Go, tell the Spartans!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I\u00a0finished reading Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World <\/strong>(Vintage)<\/a>\u00a0and The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Cambridge professor\u00a0and\u00a0historian of classical Greece,\u00a0Paul Cartledge<\/strong>. Scholars of the classical period have to be artists among historians for it is in this subfield that the historian’s craft matters most. While modern historians are literally drowning in documents,\u00a0classical sources are, for the most part, fragmentary and\/or exceedingly\u00a0well-known, some texts having been continuously read in the West for well over twenty centuries. The ability to “get the story right” depend’s heavily upon the historian’s ability to elicit an elusive but complicated context in order to interpret for the reader or student. Dr. Cartledge acquits himself admirably in this regard.<\/p>\n

Thermopylae<\/u><\/strong> and The Spartans<\/u><\/strong> can be profitably read by specialists yet also serve as an enjoyable\u00a0introduction to the world of ancient Sparta to the general reader. Cartledge concisely explains the paradox of Sparta, at once the “most Greek” polis among the Greeks yet also, the most alien and distinct from the rest of the far-flung\u00a0Greek world:<\/p>\n

“Again, when Xenophon described the Spartans as ‘craftsmen of war’ he was referring specifically to military manifestations of their religious zeal, such as animal sacrifices performed on crossing a river frontier or even the battlefield as battle was about to be joined. The Spartans were particularly keen on such military divination. If the signs (of a acrificed animal’s entrails) were not ‘right’, then even an imperatively necessary military action might be delayed, aborted or avoided altogether”<\/strong> (1)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Plutarch in his ‘biography’ of Lycurgus says that the lawgiver was concerned to rid Spartans of any unnecessary fear of death and dying. To that end, he permitted the corpses of all Spartans, adults no less than infants, to be buried among the habitations of the living, within the regular settlement area-and not, as was the norm elsewhere in the entire Greek world from at the latest 700 BCE, carefully segregated in separately demarcated cemetaries away from the living spaces.\u00a0 The Spartans did not share the normal Greek view that burial automatically brought pollution (miasma).”<\/strong>(2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The quasi-Greeks of Syracuse probably had more in common in terms of customs\u00a0with their Athenian enemies under Nicias <\/strong>than they did with the Spartans of Gylippus<\/strong>. Cartledge details the unique passage of the agoge and the boldness of Spartan women that amazed and disturbed\u00a0other Greeks as well as tracing the evolution of “the Spartan myth”. In Cartledge’s work the mysterious Spartans become, from glorious rise to ignominious fall, a comprehensible people.<\/p>\n

1. The Spartans, P. 176.<\/p>\n

2. Thermopylae, P. 78.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I\u00a0finished reading Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World (Vintage)\u00a0and The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece\u00a0by\u00a0Cambridge professor\u00a0and\u00a0historian of classical Greece,\u00a0Paul Cartledge. Scholars of the classical period have to be artists among historians for it is in this subfield that the historian’s craft matters most. While modern historians are literally drowning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120,216,414,215,118,334,165,294,51,501,121,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-120","category-academia","category-ancient-history","category-culture","category-empire","category-europe","category-historians","category-historiography","category-history","category-myth","category-spartans","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}