Sparta and the Commemoration of War

by Matthew A. Sears

The tough Spartan soldier is one of the most enduring images from antiquity. Yet Spartans too fell in battle – so how did ancient Sparta memorialise its wars and war dead? From the poet Tyrtaeus inspiring soldiers with rousing verse in the seventh century BCE to inscriptions celebrating the 300's last stand at Thermopylae, and from Spartan imperialists posing as liberators during the Peloponnesian War to the modern reception of the Spartan as a brave warrior defending the “West”, Sparta has had an outsized role in how warfare is framed and remembered. This image has also been distorted by the Spartans themselves and their later interpreters. While debates continue to rage about the appropriateness of monuments to supposed war heroes in our civic squares, this authoritative and engaging book suggests that how the Spartans commemorated their military past, and how this shaped their military future, has perhaps never been more pertinent.

294 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 21, 2023

Reviews

[History Today]

‘If you thought history was boring, you haven’t read about the Spartans.’ So trumpets the ‘Hybrid Athlete’ website, which advocates – vigorously and not entirely unhistorically – pumping iron the ancient Spartan way. Whatever one thinks of the latter exercise (count me out), neither of these books could remotely be considered boring. Happily, too, both are by no means confined to antiquity. Besides, what matters for each of them is not only the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of history, but how what (may have) happened has been commemorated – or mythicised. For there was (and still is) a Spartan myth, or ‘mirage’ – but what exactly that consists of, and how to read it critically against other, reliable contemporary evidence as survives, is often beyond the capacity of the less professionally equipped.

The ‘commemoration’ that Sears has mostly in mind is ancient, and largely confined to the Archaic and Classical periods (c.700-300 BC in round figures). His use or interpretation of ‘commemoration’ is, however, somewhat unsettlingly expansive. This is not just a study of the ancient equivalents of the Whitehall Cenotaph, shall we say, though there is a good deal of that, usually well done. Instead we are given long passages of narrative of various aspects of Spartan militarism, not precisely defined, and confined to military actions, by no means all of which can be justified as strictly necessary background for appreciating Spartan commemoration proper.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Paul Cartledge is Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, Clare College, Cambridge and author, most recently, of Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (Picador, 2020).