#Spartan never quit quotes how to#

#Spartan never quit quotes how to#

It looks like from a very early time - you hear about people called helots and how to define a helot is not simple. So, when you first see anything that is Sparta, we see Dorians running it, and we see subordinate Greek peoples in different degrees of subordination, who are presumably Achaean Greeks who have lost out in the competition and who are under the Spartans. By then they are Dorians who have come into the Peloponnesus at some point after the fall of the Mycenaean world and in most places, almost all places, have become the dominant people in the Peloponnesus. But that’s not what they’re doing when we first see them historically and when they emerge in the form of the people who will make the poIlis. The story is you come into the Peloponnesus at the beginning of the Dark Ages and it’s before the Dorians have taken over, so that the people inhabiting that area are Greeks who are of the branch of the family who speak an Achaean kind of Greek, meaning the language the Greeks spoke in the Mycenaean Period. So here’s the most common interpretation I’ll be giving you now. As you will see, or have seen in your problems book, on one question there really is no consensus, but again just a majority opinion as to the question of how and when Sparta got to be what it was. Again, what I will be attempting to pass on to you is the most widely accepted set of opinions about these things, but one cannot be sure that other evidence might not emerge or new ways of seeing things might change the picture somewhat. Well, of course, that kind of reasoning leads to controversy and there are different opinions about all these things. Well, first I guess, we ought to take a look at how Sparta got to be what it ultimately became and once again I have to say that all we can do is to reason from very limited evidence, better than what we’ve had up to now, but still mostly from written evidence that comes from a time after the facts we are talking about, practically no contemporary evidence, although we do have a bit and the archaeological remains that we do have and then reason from that. The Spartans became the most powerful and most important state in Greece, right down to and including, the Persian Wars. So, it’s worthwhile, and of course - it’s added to these ideas and feelings about the Spartans, there is the fact that Sparta would emerge in the sixth century as the most powerful of the poleis and the first leader of a lasting alliance of states with the Spartans as the leading power among them, the first international organization you might say if you were speaking loosely, so that there is a practical aspect to it.

I mean especially Plato and Aristotle, who certainly had some criticisms of the real Sparta that existed, but who modeled their notions of ideal poleis on Sparta with the variations that they wished to introduce. One other thing to remember as we take a look at the way the Spartans lived was that they became a sort of a model for the philosophers who came along in the late fifth and into the fourth century. Now, they admired it very, very much but they didn’t admire it so much they were ready to live like the Spartans, because the price was very high indeed.

They admired the Spartans very, very much, because the Spartans carried to this extreme degree the feeling that the polis was the center of a Greek man’s life, and that it had the virtues that were associated with the polis to an extraordinary degree. Sparta had a special place in their minds, in their imaginations. And it’s important to remember that the other Greeks felt that way too. It’s like the polis lifted to a new level in the sense of all the sort of theoretical elements and psychological elements that go into creating a polis is intensified in Sparta to such a degree that it seems to be almost a different thing. Now, when you come to Sparta you are coming to a polis that you almost want to spell it in capital letters with stars between them. So, it’s okay to keep talking about Sparta and Spartans. Professor Donald Kagan: Well, as we continue with our investigation of the emergence and development of the polis, we come to the polis - just to use its proper name in Greek, Lacedaemon, and that is the proper Greek name for it, but the capital city of it was Sparta and its people were called Spartans. Introduction to Ancient Greek History CLCV 205 - Lecture 9 - Sparta (cont.)Ĭhapter 1.