Ivory ex-votos found at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, Sparta, made in the form of protomes and depicting the goddess crowned. Now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo credit: Marsyas/Wikimedia Commons.
He looks back at the guy like, “SEE THAT? SHE SAID YES. YOU’RE SO FUCKED.”
Like, guys. Sparta was so kick ASS sometimes when it came to women. Spartan women were given these small knives so that if their husbands came home and tried to hit them or assault them, they had a weapon within reach. That weapon was for CUTTING THEIR HUSBANDS’ FUCKING FACES so that when he went out in public everyone would know he was an asshole, abusing jerkface and they would publicly shame him.
LET’S JUST TALK ABOUT SPARTAN WOMEN FOR A SECOND.
In Sparta, women could own land and were considered citizens. THAT IS A HUGE BIG FUCKING DEAL. Why? Because that was RARE AS FUCK and there are lots of places TODAY where women don’t even get that much.
Divorce was totally fine, and a woman could expect to keep her own wealth and get custody of the kids because paternal lineage wasn’t very important. And it didn’t make her a pariah! She could totally remarry, no big deal at all.
Spartan women participated in some fuckin’ badass sporting events, too. And because they were expected to be as physically fit as the Spartan menfolk (who all had to serve compulsory military duties, btw, and couldn’t marry until they finished them at thirty) they didn’t have time for lots of swishy dresses. So they wore notoriously short skirts. According to some accounts, their thighs were visible at all times. HOLY SHIT.
Also, In Sparta men only got their names on their graves if they died in battle. And women? Women only got their names on their graves if they died in childbirth. THE SPARTANS COMPARED CHILDBIRTH TO FUCKING BATTLE AND IT WAS VIEWED AS A GODDAMN BADASS AND HONORABLE WAY TO GO OUT.
FUCKING SPARTAN WOMEN. THIS DUDE HAD FUCKIN’ BETTER MAKE SURE SHE’S COOL WITH WHATEVER HE’S DOING, IF HE KNOWS WHAT’S FUCKIN’ GOOD FOR HIM.
^^ I throughly enjoyed the history lesson dashed with the colorful adjectives.
I mean, heknew she was Cersei… lol
And the women were trained the exact same way as men were. As children they were equals ; they were not allowed to wear clothing until a certain age and at that point they were sent away to a training camp until they were 18. It was only the men who were sent into the wilderness for an extra two years to ensure their strength for battle.
Plus the women could marry whomever they pleased and the men weren’t allowed to live with the women in their house until she said so. And they were tough in Sparta but also all about family. To have male offspring was good luck, to have female offspring was an honour.
This part of the movie was true; King Leonidas really did kill a man because he insulted his wife and he always ensured that he had his wife’s approval. And while Leonidas was away in battle she did rule Sparta on her own.
Sparta knew what was up.
#Hiccstrid
As a historian I can confirm all of this is totally true and amazingly badass.
It’s also worthy of note that people like to romanticize Athens because of its democracy whereas Sparta was a hardened monarchy. But Athens was nowhere near as open for women as Sparta was.
I’m sharing this here for those writers who need a touch of history or inspiration
I costumi sociali e sessuali di Sparta più liberi rispetto ad Atene
I costumi sociali e sessuali di Sparta più liberi rispetto ad Atene
Le donne spartane sono sempre state più libere di quelle ateniesi. Ad un certo punto della storia spartana, le figlie poterono ereditare i lotti di terreno che tradizionalmente si trasmettevano da padre a figlio: questo per evitare la diminuzione del numero degli Spartiati, la classe dominante sull’isola di Sparta, che contava sempre meno uomini. Se un padre moriva senza eredi maschi, il…
Were these braids historically accurate and how do they work? Were they little hair pieces and what did they stand for?
Now, I’ll admit that I’m not an expert on this subject but I might know some things that help answer your questions. From what we know, Spartans wore their hair long. This is mentioned, for example, by Herodotus in his Histories:
“He saw some of the men exercising naked and others combing their hair. […] This is their custom: when they are about to risk their lives, they arrange their hair.”
Hdt. VII, 208-209 (transl. by A. D. Godley source)
and by Xenophon in his Consitution of the Lacedaimonians:
“He [=Lycurgus, a mythical Spartan lawgiver] also permitted men who were past their first youth to wear long hair, believing that it would make them look taller, more dignified and more terrifying.”
So as far as I know, the hairstyles from 300andAssassin’s Creed: Odyssee are not historically accurate.
But we do have evidence of hairstyles similar to this, just not from Sparta. Look, for example, at the hair of the so called God of Cape Artemision (thought to depict either Poseidon or Zeus) from the 5th century BCE:
(source) now at the National Archeological Museum at Athens)
If I had to guess, this is where the people behind 300andAssassin’s Creed got their inspiration from. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you more about this hairstyle or what it represented. It might just have been popular around the time this sculpture was made.
Everybody is all about “Come and get them” and “We will fight in the shade” but this is hands down the best Spartan reply ever:
“The doctor Menecrates, who had been hailed as Zeus because of his success in a number of desperate cases, used this nickname with such vulgarity that he even had the impertinence to begin a letter with ‘Menecrates Zeus to King Agesilaus, greetings’, to which Agesilaus [a Spartan king] replied, ‘King Agesilaus to Menecrates, sanity’.
An old life drawing with #spartan #sparta #throwbackthursday #tbt #lifedrawingsession #lifedrawing #figurativeart #figuredrawing #parallelpen #lahabraartassociation #penandinkdrawing #lahabralifedrawing #lahabraartgallery #nudeart #orangecountylifedrawing (at La Habra Art Association Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdwaVlDvVMG/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Sparta had a profound influence on the subsequent philosophy of Greece through Plato and Aristotle, so Russell takes a chapter to explain their fascinating culture. We will see the politics of Sparta replicated in the Politics of Plato, and even as far in the future as Nietzsche’s thoughts on culture.
Helots
Sparta had no interest in being a part of Greek culture on the larger scale, they were…
I really hate it when fiction, when trying to be gritty and establish that their setting is free of frippery, or the land is super duper poor, etc, will say that the currency, rather than being gold or silver, is like ‘iron’ or ‘steel’ when like…
leaving aside the fact that iron rusts and such, it’s also… well, useful. You have better things to do with Iron then stuff it in a vault. Make shit out of it.
Gold? Pretty much only use for gold other then money (until we started using it in computer chips and stuff) is to sparkle. You can’t use it for much beyond a store of value.
There’s a reason why human society picked gold, and not something else.
I think they’re usually trying for a medieval-fantasy version of “bullets are currency”, seen in some post-apocalyptic settings.
And copper and bronze coins were used in Bronze Age societies, so there is a precedent for using the same thing for money as for making weapons and tools out of. (Copper and bronze are a lot easier to work than iron, though, so it’s easier to convert your currency into usable material.)
Apparently China sometimes used iron coins in place of copper, when copper was too expensive—like making ammunition with steel casings instead of brass.
Didn’t Sparta have iron currency?
Apparently that is either a fabrication or a legend, in Plutarch (he attributes the use of iron coins to Lycurgus but Lycurgus lived before Greece had any coins), or else someone, Plutarch or his source, misunderstanding “cooking spits” (obeloi) as “coins” (oboloi)—I think the words are related, and it’s possible that Spartans used cooking spits as a convenient unit of account given the communal feasts were central to their culture. Certainly, though, trading with others, Spartans used the same coins as the rest of Greece.
I would suspect Sparta’s main internal exchanges were barter, given the tightly controlled command economy; since almost every working person in Sparta was a slave (mostly state-owned helots but also privately-owned slaves like in the rest of Greece) or a free noncitizen protegee of one of the elite (Sparta’s only citizens were its nobles), there was no real need for a medium of exchange beyond the goods those slaves and protegees would give their elite masters and patrons, who could relatively conveniently just move the goods around among themselves.
The weird thing about the Spartan economy is it was illegal for the elite to have sources of revenue besides their state-allotted farmland, and an elite who could no longer afford to contribute to the aforementioned communal feasts was permanently stripped of status. (There was no way to rejoin the elite class, or otherwise enter it from outside, which meant its numbers permanently declined.)
Interesting. You learn something new every day, I guess.
That last bit about the elites seems like an extremely short-sighted system.
Oh, it was. One of the things that led to the downfall of sparta was how small the elite warrior class was getting. But the notion was to try to keep all the citizens equal to prevent like, class conflict or something within the elite that the slaves would take advantage of. So it came from a place that made sense.
We have to remember that in Sparta, the slave to citizen ratio was insane, like 7 to 1, according to Herodotus. You don’t get numbers like that anywhere else until the Carribean Sugar plantations. And given how it turned out for the French in Haiti, the Spartans were right to be paranoid about that.*
—
*For reference, the Haitian revolution was presaged by a conflict within the white planter class against France that eventually cracked the system wide open and allowed the slaves to take over, winning legal freedom/citizenship within the French Republic (since this was happening at the same time as the French Revolution) in the process, and then later full on Independence thanks to Napoleon being a complete idiot about Haiti and L'Ouverture.
The letter lambda, standing for Laconia or Lacedaemon, which was painted on the Spartans’ shields, was first adopted in 420s BC and quickly became a widely known Spartan symbol. The powerful city-state of Sparta used this symbol on their shields and banners back in the day of Ancient Greece, as the Greeks did not identify themselves with flags in this time.
Available on Amazon (US, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, JP) + Redbubble (worldwide) one link: geni.us/spartanlambda
Although Spartan women were famed for their athleticism, they were not allowed to participate in the original Olympic Games. The competitions were reserved for male athletes, but there was a loophole. The winners of the chariot racing competitions were the owners and trainers of the victorious horses, not the drivers.
In 396 BCE, Cynisca entered her horses in the four horse chariot race and won. She is considered the first female Olympic champion. Cynisca repeated her victory in 392 BCE. Several other women followed her lead and won horse racing events at the ancient Olympic Games.
Cynisca was the daughter of the Spartan king Archidamus II and the sister of Agesilaus II. After her victory, Cynisca commissioned two statues of herself, one at the Temple of Zeus in Olympia and one at the Planistai (plane-tree grove) in Sparta. The Planistai was generally reserved for kings of Sparta and Cynisca is believed to be the first woman honored there. Although neither statue survives, the inscription from the Olympia statue was recorded as:
What was Sparta up to during Alexander the Great’s Conquests?
During Alexander the Great’s conquest of what was then the known world, the Spartan’s contributed nothing to the conquest. Rather, when Alexander the Great marched off to war, the Spartan’s refused to participate unless they were leaders of the army. So what was Sparta up to all the while Alexander was conquering the world?
According to legend Alexander’s father, King Philip II sent the following message to Sparta, “You are advised to submit without delay, for if I bring my army on your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people and raze your city.” The Spartan’s responded with a single word, “If”.
Most likely this exchange didn’t happen, if it did then the Spartan’s were extremely naïve and stupid. Sparta during the times of Alexander was not the same Sparta as was during the Persian Wars or the Peloponnesian Wars. Spartan weapons and tactics had become outdated and quaint. A number of military defeats followed by a few slave revolts had sapped Sparta of it’s power, leaving Sparta a secondary power at best whose glory days were far behind. The Macedonians could have easily conquered Sparta, however, there were many members of the Corinthian League who hated Sparta, thus it was decided it was best to leave Sparta out of the league because of politics.
In 338 BC Agis III became King of the Spartans, and his number one goal was to make Sparta great again. In 333, with Persian military and financial support, Agis was able to raise a 20,000 man army and defeat a small Macedonian army in Greece. Agis and his men then sailed to Crete with the intention of capturing the island and adding it to Spartan territory. With Alexander the Great’s attention focused on conquering the Persian Empire, Agis and his army was easily able to overrun the island and lay siege to it’s largest city, Megalopolis, in 331. Finally the Spartan’s had become enough of a thorn in Alexander’s side that something needed to be done about them. Alexander sent his trusted general Antipater with a force of 40,000 men to deal with the Spartans. The two armies met outside of Megalopolis for a brief battle. The Macedonian’s outnumbered the Spartans 2 to 1, and in the subsequent battle they were easily able to break Spartan lines and send the Spartan army into full retreat, killing around 5,300 Spartans in the process. Agis III died in battle, supposedly staying behind to fight to the death in order to buy his army time to escape.
After the disastrous Battle of Megalopolis, the Spartans were forced to surrender to Macedonia and join the Corinthian League, lest the Macedonians send an army to destroy Sparta. The conquest of Crete was Sparta’s last hurrah, and from here Sparta would continue to decline until conquered by the Romans in 146 BC.
The selection of the infant Spartans by Giuseppe Diotti 1840. 138.5 × 207.5 cm (54.5 × 81.6 in). Oil on canvas.
In Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, he discusses some of the rules Lycurgus is supposed to have set in Spartan society 800 years prior to Plutarch’s day. This post is concerning the rumor of infanticide. Plutarch speaks in the past tense, showing that these were not behaviors practiced during his days, and he begins the story by saying all of this was under dispute and therefore unsubstantiated. Archaeological finds turned up no infant remains at the site believed discussed by Plutarch. Below are quotes from Plutarch and the archaeological finds:
“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, of his work as lawmaker and statesman…
For in the first place, Lycurgus did not regard sons as the peculiar property of their fathers, but rather as the common property of the state.
Offspring was not reared at the will of the father, but was taken and carried by him to a place called Lesche, 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 nine thousand lots of land; but if it was ill-born and deformed, they sent it to the so‑called Apothetae, a chasm-like place at the foot of Mount Taÿgetus, in the conviction that the life of that which nature had not well equipped at the very beginning for health and strength, was of no advantage either to itself or the state.”
-Plutarch, The Life of Lycurgus
…
“There were still bones in the area, but none from newborns, according to the samples we took from the bottom of the pit” of the foothills of Mount Taygete near present-day Sparta.
“It is probably a myth, the ancient sources of this so-called practice were rare, late and imprecise,” he added.
Meant to attest to the militaristic character of the ancient Spartan people, moralistic historian Plutarch in particular spread the legend during first century AD.
According to Pitsios, the bones studied to date came from the fifth and sixth centuries BC and come from 46 men, confirming the assertion from ancient sources that the Spartans threw prisoners, traitors or criminals into the pit.
The discoveries shine light on an episode during the second war between Sparta and Messene, a fortified city state independent of Sparta, when Spartans defeated the Messenian hero Aristomenes and his 50 warriors, who were all thrown into the pit, headded.“
The majority of human findings in the cave belong to male skeletons of biological age between 18 and 35 years. Only two adult skulls exhibit indications of biological age above 50 years, whereas few skeletal findings from two subadult skeletons indicate biological age between 14 and 17 years. Finally, parts of the frontal bone which must belong to another young person aged approximately 12 years was found. But this case could not be considered proof for the killing of infants in Keadas, since the involvement of older children and adolescents in violent confrontations and warfare is a fact accounted for in modern historical periods as well. Therefore, the improbable scenario of infant killing in Keadas as an application of eugenics seems to be unsubstantiated.”
-taken from Theodoros K. Pitsios’ Research Program of Keadas Cavern and ABC News
Lakonian Black-figure kylix, attributed to the Boreads Painter, ca. 570–565 BCE, currently in Malibu, Getty 85.AE.121.
Bellerophon slaying the Chimaera with Pegasus.
I’ve noticed how rarely Lakonian vase painting is mentioned when discussing Greek pottery, though I find it to be some of the most visually striking and distinctive pottery from Greece! Unlike the Athenians who limit their interior kylix decorations to a smaller tondo within the cup, the Lakonians use up almost all of the interior space of a kylix. This results in these huge images that would come within inches from someones face while they drank from their cups. This is an aspect of Greek pottery that I find to be commonly overlooked–that these objects were meant to be used and and interacted with, not just admired from a distance.
