Laconophilia

File:Leonidas statue1b.jpg

A modern statue of Leonidas, king of Sparta

Laconophilia is love or admiration of Sparta and of the Spartan culture or constitution. The term derives from "Lacones," a poetic term for the Spartans or Lacedaemonians, from Laconia, the part of the Peloponnesus which the Spartans inhabited.

Admirers of the Spartans typically praise their valor and success in war, their "laconic" austerity and self-restraint, their aristocratic and virtuous ways, the stable order of their political life and their constitution, with its tripartite mixed government. According to Karl Otfried Müller, the founding figure of modern Laconophilia, "Many of the noblest and best of the Athenians always considered the Spartan state nearly as an ideal theory realised in practice.". H.D.F. Kitto notes that Sparta, in contrast to Athens was admired not for its art and literature, but for the disciplined character of its citizens. The Lacademonians were masters "not of creating things in words or stone, but of men."

Ancient Laconophilia

Athens

In ancient Athens Laconophilia began as a current of thought and feeling after the Persian Wars. Some, like Cimon, son of Miltiades, believed that Athens should ally with Sparta against the Persian Empire. Cimon persuaded the Athenians to send soldiers to aid Sparta, when the Helots (serfs of the Spartans) revolted and fortified Mount Ithome. The Spartans sent the Athenians home again with thanks, lest the democratic Athenian ideas influence the Helots or the perioeci.

Some Athenians, especially those who disliked commerce, preferred a closed society and the rule of the few, believing that Sparta was a better system than they had at Athens. Some went so far as to imitate Spartan manners: going around Athens long-haired and unwashed, like the Spartiates. (Of course, these categories overlapped; Cimon was representative of the Spartans at Athens, and named one of his sons "Lacedaemonius".) In Plato's Republic, which is set in the 5th century BC, Socrates says that the Spartan and Cretan type of political regime is the favorite of "the many".

The extreme Laconophile oligarchs seized power in Athens in 404 BC, and held it for eleven months, with the assistance of a Spartan army. They are known as the Thirty Tyrants; they governed by exile, arbitrary arrests, and judicial murder.

In the Battle of Leuctra, in 371 BC, the Spartans were defeated. As a result of that single battle, Sparta's allies revolted, and the helots of Messenia were freed. After this, the Spartan economy became less able to support professional soldiers, and the inequalities between the supposedly Equal citizens increased.

As a result, the reputation of Sparta, either as a military success, or as a guide in domestic affairs, diminished greatly. One important group of Laconophiles remained, however.

Philosophers

Lycurgus of Sparta, legendary founder of the city's constitution

Some of the young men who were followers of Socrates had been Laconophiles. Socrates himself is portrayed as having often praised the laws of Sparta and Crete. Critias, a companion of Socrates, helped bring about the oligarchic rule of the Thirty Tyrants, which was supported by Sparta. Xenophon fought with the Spartans against Athens. Plato also, in his writings, seems to prefer a Spartan-type regime over a democratic one. Aristotle regarded the kind of laws adopted by Crete and Sparta as especially apt to produce virtuous and law-abiding citizens.

Greek philosophy, therefore, inherited a tradition of praising Spartan law. This was only reinforced when Agis IV and Cleomenes III attempted to "restore the ancestral constitution" at Sparta, which no man then living had seen. This attempt ended with the collapse of the institutions of Lycurgus, and one Nabis established a tyranny in Laconia.

In later centuries, Greek philosophers, especially Platonists, would often describe Sparta as an ideal state, strong, brave, and free from the corruptions of commerce and money. These descriptions, of which Plutarch's is the most complete, vary in many details. Whole books have been written, arguing what parts of these utopias are the actual customs of Classical Sparta, what parts are Cleomenes' reconstructions, and what parts are sheer imagination.

It became fashionable for the Romans to visit Lacedaemon and see the rites of Artemis Orthia, as a sort of tourist attraction - the nearest Greece had to offer to gladiatorial games.

Contrary views

Even in ancient cultures, Laconophilia was a tendency, not an absolute. None of the contemporaries of the Lycurgan Constitution praised Sparta without reservations, except the Spartans themselves.

Herodotus of Dorian Halicarnassus, consistently portrays the Spartans, except when actually facing battle, as rustic, hesitant, uncooperative, corrupt, and naïve. Plato had Socrates argue that a state which really followed the simple life would not need a warrior class; one which was luxurious and aggressive would need a group of philosophers, like Plato himself, to guide and deceive the guardians. Even Xenophon's encomium of the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians is not unalloyed praise.

Aristotle has a long passage (Politics II,9) criticizing the Spartans: the Helots keep rebelling; the Spartan women are luxurious; the magistrates (and especially the ephors) are irresponsible; reaching decisions by the loudest yell in the apella is silly; the wealth of the citizens is unequal (so that too many are losing the resources necessary to be a citizen and a hoplite); and the Spartiates let each other evade taxes, so the City is poor and the individual citizens greedy. (Above all, the Spartans know no other arts than war, so in peace they are incompetent and corrupt.) The Cretan institutions, he says, are even worse.

Even after the collapse, and idealization, of Sparta, Polybius wrote, "My object, then, in this digression is to make it manifest by actual facts that, for guarding their own country with absolute safety, and for preserving their own freedom, the legislation of Lycurgus was entirely sufficient; and for those who are content with these objects we must concede that there neither exists not ever has existed a constitution and civil order preferable to that of Sparta." (Histories VI, 50) . I,6}

Modern Laconophilia

Admiration of Sparta continued in the Renaissance. Niccolò Machiavelli agreed that Sparta was noteworthy for her long and static existence, but nevertheless asserted for virtù and glory, Rome was much preferable (Discourses). The Elizabethan English constitutionalist John Aylmer compared the mixed government of Tudor England with the Spartan republic, stating that "Lacedemonia [meaning Sparta], [was] the noblest and best city governed that ever was". He commended it as a model for England. The Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau contrasted Sparta favourably with Athens in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, arguing that its austere constitution was preferable to the more cultured nature of Athenian life.

Laconophilia increased in importance during the nineteenth century. The development of the English Public Schools was influenced by the schooling of Spartan children, as were Ivy League American universities. Sparta was also used as a model of social purity by Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Slavoj Žižek stated that "all modern egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to the Jacobins…imagined the republican France as a new Sparta".

Racial Laconophilia

Karl Müller

Karl Müller

A new element was introduced into Laconophilia by Karl Otfried Müller, who linked Spartan ideals to the supposed racial superiority of the Dorians, the ethnic sub-group of the Greeks to which the Spartans belonged. While the Greek Laconophiles like Plutarch had praised the Spartans, they did not extend this admiration to the Dorians as a whole. Plutarch argued that the founder of their constitution, Lycurgus, had inherited corrupt Dorian institutions. Argos, the traditional enemy of Sparta, was also a Dorian state; so were Corinth, Rhodes, and Syracuse, three of the most commercial states in Greece.

In 1824, however, Müller wrote Die Dorier, a history of the Dorian "race". It has been described as a "thousand-page fantasia", which portrays the Dorians as a heroic and noble race who expanded into Greece from the north. He used the new disciplines of comparative linguistics and source-criticism to argue that the Dorians represented a distinct ethno-linguistic group whose original culture could be isolated from later influences. He linked the origin of the Dorians to the mythic Myrmidons of the Trojan war, and their leader Achilles.

Nazi Laconophilia

Müller's emphasis on the northern origins and racial qualities of the Spartans later fed into the development of Nordicism, the theory of the superiority of a North European Aryan master race. Later German writers regularly portrayed the Spartans as a model for the modern Prussian state, which also emphasised military self-discipline. It was a short step from this to argue that the Prussians and the Spartans were originally of the same race. Frank H. Hankins summarises views of the American Nordicist Madison Grant, writing in 1916:

Sparta is pictured as particularly Nordic on account of the purity of its Dorian stock, while Athens is more of a mixture. Sparta thus exhibited the military efficiency, the thorough organization and the patriotic sacrifice of the individual to the state characteristic of Nordics everywhere and exemplified in modern Prussia, while Athens exhibited the intellectual brilliancy, the instability, the extreme individualism, the tendency to treason and conspiracy so characteristic of populations having a large Mediterranean element.

These arguments were repeated by Nazi race theorists such as Hans F. K. Günther and Alfred Rosenberg. Adolf Hitler particularly praised the Spartans, recommending in 1928 that Germany should imitate them by limiting "the number allowed to live". He added that "The Spartans were once capable of such a wise measure... The subjugation of 350,000 Helots by 6,000 Spartans was only possible because of the racial superiority of the Spartans." The Spartans had created "the first racialist state.".

Following the invasion of the USSR, Hitler insisted that the Slavs should be treated like the Helots under the Spartans: “They [the Spartans] came as conquerors, and they took everything”, and so should the Germans. A Nazi officer specified that “the Germans would have to assume the position of the Spartiates, while... the Russians were the Helots.”

Contemporary Laconophilia

See also: Sparta in popular culture

Modern Laconophilia has been present in popular culture, particularly with reference to the Battle of Thermopylae, as portrayed in films such as The 300 Spartans. It is also evident in graphic novel 300 and the film 300 derived from it.

See also

• Philhellenism
• Anglophile
• Germanophile
• Francophile
• Scandophile
• Italophile

Related Works

• The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, Frank Turner, New Haven & London
• The Victorians and Ancient Greece, R. Jenkyns, Oxford
• The Spartan Tradition in European Thought, E. Rawson, Oxford,
• Paideia, Werner Jaeger.
• The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, Paul Cartledge,
• Sparta, Paul Cartledge
• The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, Karl Otfried Müller, translated from the German by Henry Tufnell, and George Cornewall Lewis, A.M., publisher: John Murray, London, 2nd ed. rev. 1839.
• Dangerous Positions; Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the "Answer to the xix propositions", Michael Mendle, University of Alabama Press, 1985. .
• The Greeks, H. D. F. Kitto, Pelican (division of Penguin Books, Ltd.), Middlesex, England, 1st 1951, 1970. pg