The Dorian invasion and the Nazis

Ancient Sparta, the most famous city of the Peloponnesos in southern Greece, was Dorian. The ancient Greeks divided themselves into several ethno-linguistic groups, and the Dorians were one of them: there were also Ionians, Achaians, Aiolians, and so on.

But there’s a legend that the Dorians didn’t always live in the Peloponnesos. They invaded eighty years after the Trojan War, led by descendents of Herakles. They displaced or conquered the people who previously lived there. Supposedly.

Hans Günther, author of Racial science of Europe (1924; published in English as The racial elements of European history); Alfred Rosenberg, Reichsleiter and senior minister of the Nazi regime (1933–1945), and author of The myth of the 20th century (1930); Herman Wirth, founding director of the Ahnenerbe, and author of The rise of humanity (1928). Their books claim that the ancient Greeks, especially the Dorians, were Aryan invaders from Germany, descended from Hyperboreans and Atlanteans; and that modern Germans were descended from the ancient Greeks, while modern Greeks were supposedly a separate sub-human species.

Modern historians don’t regard the Dorian invasion as historical. They do sometimes still talk of a Dorian migration, though even that isn’t taken super seriously. Outside academia, though, it’s regularly taken for granted that the Dorian migration is an established fact; and that the Dorians came from outside Greece, somewhere to the north.

Why? Well, first, it takes time for old theories to dissipate. Scholarly ‘drag’ is a problem.

Second, ancient accounts of the Dorian invasion myth aren’t going to just vanish.

And third, the myth is really really appealing to racists.

In particular, the Nazis — I mean the 1930s German ones, not the modern ones who ban books like Maus — treated the Dorian migration as a part of their insane racial theories. And, given that Sparta is an important symbol for white nationalists, it isn’t hard to see why this bit of Nazi crackpottery is also attractive to modern racists.

Where the Dorians came from

In any case, our ancestors weren’t living [in Germany] back then. At most they passed through it: our land was a pigsty. If anyone asks about our ancestors, we must always point at the Greeks!

Hitler, ‘table talk’, 18/19 Jan. 1942

If you google a map of the ‘Dorian migration’, you’ll almost always find something like this.

Notice the arrows indicating that the Dorians — and other ancient invaders — came from somewhere far to the north. There is no historical or archaeological basis for this notion.

The main source people draw on for the idea of Dorians coming from ‘the north’ is Herodotos. Here’s what Herodotos actually says.

... the Dorians migrated a great deal. For in the time of the king Deukalion, they lived in the land of Pthiotis; then in the time of Doros son of Hellen, in the region beneath Ossa and Olympos, called ‘Histiaiotis’; they were forced by the Kadmeians to leave Histiaiotis, and they lived in the Pindos (mountains), in the place called Makednos; then again they went from that place to Dryopis; and from Dryopis they came to the Peloponnesos and were called Dorian.

Herodotos, Histories 1.56

Note. If you follow the link to the published edition, observe the footnote: these locations ‘are all in northern Greece’. That’s a dogwhistle, trying to weasel in the notion that the Dorians are invaders from somewhere beyond northern Greece.

And here’s an accurate rendition of the Dorians’ route according to Herodotos.

Herodotos’ Dorians simply do a circuit around the plain of Thessaly. People really don’t like depicting this accurately when writing articles about the ‘Dorian invasion’.

Now, the Nazis didn’t invent the idea of the classical Greeks coming from northern Europe. Back in 1824, Karl Otfried Müller’s book Die Dorier (‘the Dorians’) had claimed that they came from the north, ‘appearing’ in Thrace on the northern edge of Greece. Müller simply cherry-picked the bits of Herodotos he liked, and rejected the rest:

No one will regard this coherent account [in Herodotus] as flowing directly from ancient tradition; we can only regard it as the father of history’s personal scientific attempt to sort and arrange various sagas and traditions with each other; ... Eliminating this, we come to the second statement, which bears the stamp of ancient tradition: ‘Doros lived at Olympos and Ossa.’ Here, then, we latch on to genuine memory ... The Olympos range ... is also the place where the Dorians first appear in Greece.

Müller, Die Dorier pp. 17–18 (English edition pp. 20–21)

Müller’s notion is based on cherry-picking. Yet ‘the Dorians came from outside Greece’ is deeply embedded in how northern and western European historians think.

Standard tradition, e.g. Thuc[ydides] 1.12, held that the Dorians were newcomers who subjected the Achaeans when they arrived in Greece and especially the Peloponnese ...

S. Hornblower, ‘Dorians’, Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th ed. 2012)

Hornblower is a well known historian who has written a major commentary on Thucydides, so presumably he is aware that Thucydides doesn’t say the Dorians ‘arrived in Greece’. Neither does any other ancient source. In reality, ‘standard tradition’ held that they moved from one part of Greece to another.

In the 80th year [after the Trojan War] the Dorians occupied the Peloponnesos with the descendents of Herakles.

Thucydides 1.12

Arrived in the Peloponnesos, yes. Arrived in Greece, no. An accidental slip? Perhaps. But it has some really bad baggage.

Note. Ancient sources on the legend of the Dorian invasion/return of the Herakleids: Major sources: ps.-Apollodoros 2.8; Diodoros of Sicily 4.57–58. (Cf. also Diodoros 4.60.2, 5.80.2–3 on the Dorians supposedly launching an invasion of Crete from the southern Peloponnesos, many generations before the return of the Herakleids.) Early minor sources: Tyrtaios, frs. 2.12–15, 11.1–2 ed. West; Simonides, fr. eleg. 13.8–10 ed. West (2nd ed.); Pindar, Pythian 1.62–66, 5.69–72; Herodotos 1.56.2–3; Thucydides 1.12.3.

Diffusionism; Atlantis; Nordic ‘Hellenes’ and Slavic ‘Greeks’

The Germanics who stayed in Holstein were still flunkies after two thousand years, while their brothers who migrated to Greece rose up to civilisation. More than any other characteristic, what stays constant is the fodder. The soup I’ve found in Holstein is, I’m convinced, the soup of the Spartans.

Hitler, ‘table talk’, 4 Feb. 1942

In the 18th–19th centuries, histories of early migrations typically took a ‘diffusionist’ stance. Diffusionism refers to the idea that cultural and racial traits originated once, and spread out from a single origin: cultural commonality is always monogenetic, never polygenetic.

Until the 1750s the usual assumption was that ancient Israel, the culture of the Old Testament, was the origin point of all human culture. That began to change with Voltaire’s Essay on the customs and esprit of nations (1756), which turned to ancient India instead.

And then along came Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who was deeply interested in Plato’s story of Atlantis. Bailly reconciled Plato’s Atlantis with Voltaire’s orientalism by claiming that Atlantis wasn’t a sunken continent in the Atlantic Ocean: it was actually one and the same thing as the long-lost northern land of Hyperborea. (In reality, Hyperborea is just as fictional as Atlantis: see my previous articles on Atlantis and Hyperborea). Bailly blended this with a form of euhemerism, the notion that myths have a kernel of truth. So when people go beneath the earth in Greek myth, like Herakles or Persephone, supposedly that’s because the myth originated in a place where the sun periodically vanished from the sky — the far north, Hyperborea, which in Greek means ‘beyond the north’.

An outstanding article by Dan Edelstein shows that Bailly transformed Atlantis into a ‘floating signifier’: a mobile geographical label. Once Bailly put Atlanteans in Hyperborea, anyone could transplant them anywhere.

... [R]ather than orientalize Atlantis, [Bailly] Atlanticized the Orient, making a snow-white, northern European people, the Hyperboreans, responsible for the cultural achievements and splendors of the East. ... In this Atlantean version, Orientalism became a means of honoring Western accomplishments; the present Enlightenment simply the completion of the Atlantean odyssey.

Edelstein 2006: 273

Atlantis could be anywhere, Atlanteans could be anyone. Anyone that a northern European racist wanted to admire could be Nordic — including the ancient Greeks.

And by 1842 we find Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the English politician and novelist, saying precisely that.

For the pure Greeks, the Hellenes, whose origin has bewildered your dreaming scholars, were of the same great family as the Norman tribe, born to be the lords of the universe ...

Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni p. 137

He goes on to talk of the ‘sons of Hellas’ — that is, including Hellen’s son Doros — coming from ‘northern Thrace’, and refers to ‘blue-eyed Minerva’ and ‘yellow-haired Achilles’ (tendentious translations both) as signs of ‘Nordic’ race.

So the racists had their ‘Nordic’ classical Greeks. But, because racists gonna racist, they also had to make sure actual contemporary Greeks weren’t the same race. So along comes Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer.

Fallmerayer, a Tirolese byzantinist, argued in History of the Morea peninsula: downfall of the Peloponnesian Hellenes (1830–1836) that contemporary Greeks weren’t properly Greek — that is, they weren’t related to the ancient ‘Hellenes’. The ‘Hellenes’ disappeared in the Mediaeval period; the modern ‘Greeks’ were descended from the waves of Slavic and Albanian barbarian immigrants that replaced them.

The Hellenic race has been eradicated in Europe. ... The immortal works of its spirit, and some ruins on its home soil, are the only witnesses left that a Hellenic people once existed. ... The peoples whom we today call ‘Hellenes’ are Scythian Slavs, Illyrian Arnauts, children of midnight lands, blood relatives of the Serbs and Bulgars, Dalmatians, and Muscovites; and they move up, to their own astonishment, into the genealogical trees of a Perikles and a Philopoimen.

Fallmerayer, Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea i (1830) pp. iii–iv

Fallmerayer’s introduction to volume 2 (1836) argues, in beautiful and snide prose, that it’s the enthusiasm of western hellenophiles that has encouraged modern Greeks to get above themselves.

It ought to go without saying that this is all nonsense. But unfortunately it doesn’t. So here are a couple of refutations: an anonymous scholar on AskHistorians in 2016 citing some relevant anthropological and genetic studies, and Spencer McDaniel in 2020 giving a fuller history of this racist idea.

Müller provided racists with a race of ancient Greeks who were supposedly ‘Nordic’; Fallmerayer let them classify modern Greeks as a separate race. And Bailly’s Atlantean theory gave them licence to appropriate the cultural prestige of anyone they admired — including the classical Greeks.

Put them all together, and you’ve got a recipe for Nazi lunacy.

How lunatic, exactly?

Thus the Creto-Minoan maritime culture, like the Mycenaean, is at its foundation fully Atlantean-Nordic. It fell victim to the last wave of the overseas Atlantic Volk, that of the Sea Peoples, just as the Dorian migration invaded from the north and overwhelmed the old Pelasgian land. This was the end of the millennia-long journey and migration of the Atlanteans.

Herman Wirth, Der Aufgang der Menschheit (2nd ed. 1934) p. 432

How lunatic? Total pants-on-head raving bonkers. Atlantis and Hyperborea are just the beginning of it. We’re talking Fomorians and Tuatha Dé Danann, we’re talking Atlantean pyramids in Bolivia. We’re talking about people who thought the Mauri of ancient Morocco, the Amorites of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, the Armoricans of ancient Gaul, and the Māori of New Zealand were all descended from Atlanteans because they all have an ‘m’ and an ‘r’ in their names.

It would take forever to adequately cover all the insanity in the development of this story from Fallmerayer to the Nazis — such as

• Ignatius Donnelly’s American take on Bailly’s Atlantis theory, and Madison Grant’s take on Müller’s theory of Greek migrations;
• Helena Blavatsky’s The secret doctrine (1888) and her notion of ‘root races’, whereby Hyperborea gave rise to both Atlantean and ‘Aryan’ races, and her belief that Aryan leaders were telepathic;
• Guido von List, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, and Ariosophy, a proto-Nazi neo-pagan movement focused on Wotan (see Goodrick-Clarke 2004: 192–204 on Ariosophy’s influence on Hitler);
• the Thule Society founded in Munich in the 1910s by ‘Rudolf von Sebottendorf’ (a pseudonym), which taught that the Aryans were descended from Hyperborean ice-giants, and whose members included Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler;
• Hans Günther, who provided the standard Nazi version of the doctrine that the ‘Hellenes’ were Nordic (‘The heroic sagas of the Hellenes are a clear reflection of the Nordic race ... The so-called Mycenaean culture, whose end was brought about by the intrusion of the Nordic conquerors’), and imagined a sequence of various ‘Hellenic’ groups invading Greece, the Dorians being the last and therefore purest (Racial elements of European history, 1929 English version, ch. 8 part 2); he specifically cites the excerpts of Bulwer-Lytton and Fallmerayer quoted above (1929 German edition, pp. 203 and 214);
• Edmund Kiss, a member of the Nazi Ahnenerbe, whose books claimed that pyramids at Tiwanaku in Bolivia were built by Aryan conquerors from Atlantis.

Let’s spend some time on Herman Wirth, who with Heinrich Himmler co-founded the Ahnenerbe, a race thinktank, in 1935. Here’s Wirth’s picture of Atlantean migration.

Wirth’s idea of the ancient migration of the Atlanteans, Hyperboreans, and proto-Aryans, concluding with the Dorian invasion: Der Aufgang der Menschheit, 2nd edition (1934); pp. 85–188 on ‘the migration of the Nordic race’.

Modern commentators sometimes distance Wirth from the Nazi leadership. He had an ideological clash with Himmler, who idolised ancient Germanic culture and religion; Wirth thought the real Aryans were Atlantean-Hyperborean rulers who dominated the peasantry, just as the Aryan Spartans dominated the Messenians. Wirth’s position as president of the Ahnenerbe became honorary in 1937.

But on the whole, Nazi ideas were far from being at odds with Wirth’s theories. Hitler did reject ‘Atlantean motif research’ in a speech at Nürnberg in September 1936 — ‘National Socialism sharply rejects that kind of Böttcherstraße culture’ — but many of Wirth’s ideas remained in favour. Alfred Rosenberg, too, derived the Aryans from Atlantis-Hyperborea, and idolised a ‘principle of light’. And Hitler sided with Wirth, against Himmler, on the idea that the ancient German peasantry were a debased people. For Hitler, ancient Germans didn’t rise to glory until they invaded Greece and started to enjoy the Mediterranean climate.

In times and places where there were too many people, some of them emigrated. It wasn’t necessarily entire tribes. In Sparta, 6000 Greeks met 345,000 helots; the helots were there, the Greeks came over them, and they became the big landowners. I was cured of the idea of Odin’s and Wotan’s forests when I visited the Odenwald one day. In the Rhine plain we saw magnificent people; in the forest, outright cretins. Then it became clear to me: the Germanic conquerors settled in the fertile plains, while the natives withdrew into the miserable mountains.

Hitler, ‘table talk’, 5 Nov. 1941

Notes. Hitler similarly writes of Germanic Aryans achieving greatness only once they moved to the Mediterranean in Mein Kampf, p. 433 (1943 edition; bk. 2, ch. 2). The 1936 speech: Reden des Führers am Parteitag der Ehre 1936, p. 38. On Himmler’s and Hitler’s different views of ancient Germans see e.g. Pringle 2006, ch. 4 (‘In Hitler’s view, the Aryans began to achieve their full potential only when they reached the Mediterranean ... Himmler was well aware of these views, but did not share them. He was besotted by old accounts of the fierceness and valor of the Germanic tribes’). Hitler’s reference to ‘Odin’s and Wotan’s forests’ looks like a jab at Ariosophy.

And in spite of his 1936 rejection of ‘Atlantean motif research’, Hitler privately continued to refer to a primordial Atlantean ‘world empire’ in the 1940s — in Himmler’s presence, no less.

In one Greek source there’s a story of pre-lunar people, and we can see in that an allusion to the world empire of Atlantis, which fell victim to the lunar catastrophe.

Hitler, ‘table talk’, 21/22 Oct. 1941

Notes. ‘Pre-lunar people’ and a ‘lunar catastrophe’: this alludes to a notion that the Atlantis story is a folk memory of a time before Atlantis was flung away from earth into space to become the moon. This crackpot theory is built on the genuinely scientific theory of George Darwin that the moon was created by a fission of the rapidly spinning earth; the modern theory is that the fission was caused by a planetoid impact. The crackpot version is obscure, and how exactly Hitler came by it is unclear: it originates in a booklet by Morel Rathsamhausen, a French naval officer (La dernière époque géologique et explication des mythes et légendes cosmogoniques des divers peuples de l’antiquité, 1881, pp. 31–34). ‘Pre-lunar’ is an obscure epithet used of Arcadians in a handful of ancient sources; for a discussion by someone who’s actually sane, see Dueck 2020. Addendum, 13 March: this paragraph has been edited in light of feedback from Cesar Uliana, below. Originally I referred to the modern planetoid impact theory, rather than Darwin’s fission theory.

These crazy ideas weren’t confined to Nazi Germany: this map (with my highlighting) is from an article by a French botanist, Jean Gattefossé, who shared the idea of Atlantean-Hyperborean migrations passing through Morocco, and the idea of a ‘lunar catastrophe’ causing Atlantis to become the moon. Gattefossé’s migrations have some common points with Wirth, but many divergences: Gattefossé imagines Atlantis as a former island where western Africa now is, rather than in the ocean; his Hyperboreans migrate to Atlantis, rather than the other way round; and Gattefossé is apparently uninterested in Greek migration legends. (‘L’Atlantide et le Tritonis occidental.’ Bulletin de la Société de préhistoire du Maroc 6.2 (1932): 53–155; map at 153–154; reference to Rathsamhausen and the ‘lunar catastrophe’ theory at 116.)

Atlantis, Hyperborea, and the idea of Dorians invading Greece from the north: these are all integrated into Nazi ideas of racial history, based on no evidence whatsoever, a bundle of 19th century racist nonsense tied up by the thinnest of excuses.

If you’re sane, if you aren’t a Nazi, if you don’t go around making wild claims about Hyperborea or Atlantis — then please don’t go repeating other bits of the same bundle. Not even offhand remarks like ‘when the Dorians arrived in Greece.’

It’d be going too far to say that the Dorian invasion and Atlantis were integral to Nazi ideas. The Nazis didn’t murder Jewish people in service of crackpot theories, they seized on the theories to rationalise the murders.

But these notions were bundled into Nazism closely enough to generate a comic book superhero. When Mort Weisinger and Paul Norris were inventing a character to fight the Nazis in 1941, they seized on Atlantis. Weisinger, who was Jewish, must have been particularly happy to turn the Nazis’ own nonsense against them. Aquaman, originally the son of an explorer who discovered Atlantis, was later retconned as the king of Atlantis: he remains popular today.

Scenes from the very first Aquaman story, in More fun comics 73 (November 1941); written by Mort Weisinger, art by Paul Norris.

References and further reading

• Dueck, D. 2020. ‘A lunar people: the meaning of an Arcadian epithet, or, who is the most ancient of them all?’ Philologus 164: 133–147. [DOI link]
• Edelstein, D. 2006. ‘Hyperborean Atlantis: Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Madame Blavatsky, and the Nazi myth.’ Studies in eighteenth-century culture 35: 267–291. [DOI link]
• Goodrick-Clarke, N. 2004. The occult roots of Nazism. Secret Aryan cults and their influence on Nazi ideology. London, New York.
• Kennedy, R. F. 2018. ‘The Dorian invasion and “white” ownership of classical Greece?’ rfkclassics (Jan. 2018).
• Kennedy, R. F. 2020. ‘Debunking the Dorian invasion myth.’ YouTube (Aug. 2020).
• Losemann, V. 2007. ‘Classics in the Second World War.’ In: Bialas, W.; Rabinbach, A. (eds.) Nazi Germany and the humanities. How German academics embraced Nazism. London. 306–340.
• McDaniel, S. 2021. ‘Did the Dorian invasion really happen?’ talesoftimesforgotten (Jan. 2021).
• Pringle, H. 2006. The master plan. Himmler’s scholars and the Holocaust. New York.
• Rabinbach, A. 2020. Staging the Third Reich. Essays in cultural and intellectual history. London, New York.

Spartan losers

The battle of Thermopylae resonates incredibly strongly with alt-right white nationalists. This is especially striking considering that the Spartans lost that battle. And, so far as we can tell, achieved nothing.

‘White pride’: members of the Shield Wall Network pose with their ‘Spartan’ shields. The lambda symbol adopted by this group in Mountain View, Arkansas, is ‘supposed to signify the defense of Europe against "nonwhite hordes."’ (Source: ADL, retrieved 31/10/19.)

We’re being topical here, for a change. On Wednesday 23 October 2019, twenty-eight Republican members of the US Congress trespassed in a secure space, or SCIF (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility). Many of them took recording devices, made phone calls, used WhatsApp and Twitter, and took films on mobile phones while inside the SCIF. They delayed the process of law several hours. And not one of them was arrested or charged.

Note: a press release from the office of Rep. Matt Gaetz named 41 members of Congress; 13 of them were on committees involved in the hearing, and so were authorised to be there (but not to take photos or films). The other 28 were committing a crime. Press release, 22 Oct. 2019.

The ringleader of the trespassers, Rep. Matt Gaetz, spoke as follows:

Interviewer. Anyway you just single-handedly led a group to shut down this entire impeachment investigation right now. And what were you thinking about?

Gaetz. We were, uhhh ... like ... the 300, standing in the breach to try to stop the radical left from storming over our democracy. And I think we have made the point that President Trump deserves due process.

TMZ, 23 Oct. 2019

Commentators quickly pointed out that Gaetz evidently doesn’t remember the story of the 300 very well. The Spartans who fought at Thermopylae lost. They all died.

What part of the 300’s experience was it most like?

The part where every one of them was killed?

The part where Leonidas’ head was cut off, fixed to a pole and paraded before the cheering Persian troops?

The part where Xerxes took the Spartans’ arms?

Myke Cole, Twitter, 23 Oct. 2019

(Entertainingly, after Gaetz tweeted from inside the SCIF, he realised belatedly that it’s very very illegal to do that. So he posted a follow-up tweet, claiming

**Tweet from staff**

Matt Gaetz, Twitter, 23 Oct. 2019

— presumably hoping no one would notice that his staff tweets are on a different account, and use Media Studio or the Twitter web interface. The problematic tweet was posted on his personal account, using the Android app. Oopsie!)

Thermopylae and the alt-right

Anyway, Gaetz’s language about the 300 is nothing new from alt-righters and white nationalists. Thermopylae, the 2007 film 300, and the 1998 comic book it’s based on, are all part and parcel of the language of modern racism.

To document this fully would take a large book. Tharoor (2016), Bond (2018), and Cole (2019a, 2019b) make a start, though.

Tharoor points out that a motto associated with the 300 Spartans, molōn labe (‘come and get them’), has come to be closely linked to alt-right merchandise, nationalists, and gun rights activists. (See for example here; here at bottom; here.) He mentions a YouTuber called ‘Aryan Wisdom’ who in 2016 edited Trump and his political opponents into scenes from 300.

Bond discusses Steve Bannon’s fondness for Sparta, and the historical use of ‘come and get them’. She gives an incisive analysis of the problematic relationship between Hellenistic-era Spartan propaganda and modern America, especially in relation to eugenics.

Cole reports that in 2012 a representative of Golden Dawn — a Greek political party that instigates racial violence — described present-day immigrants as ‘descendants of the first waves of Xerxes’ army ... wretched people’. A prominent supporter of the terrorist acts in 2011 that left 80 people in Norway dead went by the pen-name ‘Angus Thermopylae’.

In his more recent essay Cole points to an Italian fascist political party using panels from Frank Miller’s 300 in its propaganda posters. He also reminds us that members of the UK Conservative Party’s Brexit wing, the European Research Group, call themselves ‘the Spartans’ — language echoed by the far-right newspaper Daily Mail. I’ll add that according to a March 2019 report, some hard-line Brexiteers refer to themselves as the ‘Grand Wizards’ — in other words, they see ‘the Spartans’ and the KKK as interchangeable.

Leonidas in the film 300 (2007) is modelled on the painting Leonidas at Thermopylae (1798–1814), by the French artist Jacques-Louis David. David carries the main responsibility for the modern myth that Spartans fought in the nude.

Why does Thermopylae resonate so strongly with racists, nationalists, and terrorists? I can think of a bunch of possible reasons. They’re all based on naive readings of the historical battle.

• Thermopylae can be imagined as a battle for racial purity: ‘pure’ Spartans versus ethnically diverse Persians.
• Thermopylae can be imagined as one force defending its home against an external threat.
• If alt-righters think of themselves as a minority defending a set of values against a tyranny of the majority, they will readily imagine Thermopylae as a tiny force of 300 making a heroic stand against a vast faceless enemy.
• Thermopylae can be imagined as a conflict between individualism and freedom (the Spartans) versus coercion and autocracy (the Persians).
• Thermopylae can be imagined as a religious conflict by proxy: western Greeks stand for Christianity, eastern Persians stand for Islam.
• Thermopylae can be imagined as a case of self-sacrifice, and can additionally be used to rationalise terrorist acts: kamikaze squad and suicide by cop aren’t worlds apart.
• Thermopylae can be imagined as an instance of losing the battle but winning the war.

Each and every one of these characterisations is wrong — or probably wrong — with the partial exception of the last one.

If only that weakened the battle’s potency as a symbol!

The problem is, how the battle is depicted is more important than what actually happened at Thermopylae. These bullet-points, above, that’s how Frank Miller and Zack Snyder depicted the battle. So, in the popular imagination, that’s what Thermopylae represents. In 300 the Persians are darker-skinned than the Greeks, they’re an external threat attacking without any sensible motive, the 300 Spartans are left to fight all alone, Greekness represents freedom, Xerxes represents enslavement, Miller and Snyder are both militant islamophobes. Add in a touch of homophobic/homoerotic self-hatred, and bang, you’ve got 300.

That hasn’t always been the subtext. In the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, the conflict was political, not religious: capitalism versus communism. But the way the battle comes to have this meaning is much the same:

‘O stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their word.’ This last message of the fallen heroes rallied Greece to victory. First at Salamis, as predicted, and then at Plataea. But it was more than a victory for Greece. It was a stirring example to free people throughout the world — of what a few brave men can accomplish once they refuse to submit to tyranny.

The 300 Spartans (1962), closing voice-over

West versus east, Xerxes in blackface, self-sacrifice, losing the battle but winning the war, freedom ... the name of the enemy is different, but the racism and the symbolism haven’t changed much.

The historical battle

I don’t expect to persuade any committed alt-rightists and racists, but for the sake of interest, and for the record, here are a few notes on the real-life battle in 480 BCE.

1. The Spartans lost. Take heed, all self-proclaimed ‘Spartans’. (Incidentally, there have been several battles of Thermopylae over the millennia, the last one in World War II. The pass has never been defended successfully. See Londey 2013 for full details.)

2. The Spartans didn’t stand alone. They were a minority of the southern forces — only about 5% of the force initially stationed there, less than 15% of the force that remained and died. Besides the Spartans there were 700 Thespiaean troops, 400 Thebans, and several hundred Laconian perioikoi and helots; one source reports that there were 700 perioikoi. (Laconia was the region that had Sparta as its capital; perioikoi were residents without citizen rights; ‘helots’ were an enslaved ethnic group.)

3. It wasn’t a racial conflict. There were more Greeks fighting for Xerxes at the battle than against him. Herodotus reports a figure of 300,000 Greeks in Xerxes’ army. That’s certainly an exaggeration — Xerxes’ entire army probably didn’t have that many soldiers — but we can be certain that it was still more than the 11,000 or so southerners defending the pass. There’s an excellent chance that the defenders were slain by Greeks. This was a north-south conflict as much as a west-east conflict.

4. It wasn’t an ideological conflict. Various parties involved did use religion for propaganda purposes — Xerxes, on his way over to Greece, supposedly paused at Troy to make sacrifices to Ilian Athena, and visited other cult-sites too — but it was certainly not grounded in religion.

It wasn’t a conflict of political systems either. Yes, Persia was ruled by a single king, while the Greek world was a cluster of city-states, but Persian subjects typically enjoyed greater freedoms and economic benefits than people in Greece did. (Go ask one of the Spartans’ helots how much Greek ‘freedom’ is worth.)

Persia wasn’t simply making a territory grab. They were dealing with a clear and present danger. Their territorial possessions in Anatolia and the east Aegean had been threatened by Greek unrest for decades, so from the Persian perspective, mainland Greece was a threat that had to be neutralised. (A nationalist might argue that Persia didn’t have a legitimate claim to those territorial possessions: if you want to play that game I’ll be happy to shift the goalposts too.)

5. It (probably) wasn’t a heroic self-sacrifice. Not intentionally, anyway. That’s how ancient sources cast it — but these are the same ancient sources that tell us in tremendous detail what happened towards the end, when there were supposedly no witnesses who survived.

Some historians in the modern era have seen the battle as a heroic self-sacrifice too — Paul Cartledge (2006: 130) compares them to Japanese kamikaze pilots — but it’s never backed up by any reasoning. There’s no good reason to think of self-sacrifice as an effective strategy. There was nothing to be gained from suicide by cop suicide by Persians.

And don’t go suggesting that a three-day delay was an essential military goal, to get Athens evacuated or something like that: even ancient sources don’t try to get away with that notion. The ancient writers suggest instead that the idea was to delay the northern forces until reinforcements could arrive. Even if there’s any truth to that, it still isn’t the whole story. If reinforcements had arrived, there was no way they could engage the northern army. The whole point of Thermopylae was that it was too confined for a large engagement.

One thing that the ancient sources do agree on is that Leonidas ordered a withdrawal of the bulk of the southern forces. The question is whether the Thespiaeans, Thebans, and Spartans remained to spend their own lives in cover the retreat of the other southern forces, or whether it was supposed to be a graduated withdrawal — that the Thespiaeans, Thebans, and Spartans were intending to withdraw too.

My money is on the latter. The remaining troops would cover the general retreat, then they would leave as well. It should have been a full withdrawal, like that of the Greeks who defended Thermopylae against the Celts in 279 BCE, or the ANZACs who defended it against the Fascists in 1941. However, Persian troops managed to scale the hills and get in behind the defensive line. That’s the reason that the southern Greeks were surrounded and cut off. It was too late to complete the withdrawal, and so they died.

Some of the key locations and cities involved in the battle of Thermopylae

Chris Matthew goes further. He argues (2013: 73–83) that Leonidas’ intent was actually offensive, not defensive. Before Leonidas ordered the withdrawal, there were somewhere between 6000 and 11,200 infantry stationed there, with a naval force of 280 ships and over 50,000 men stationed at Artemisium. The southerners may well have believed that that was plenty to hold the pass — 10,000 infantry had been stationed for the defence at Tempe, further north. Matthew proposes that the idea wasn’t simply to delay Xerxes’ army, but to trap it in a position where it had no access to food or water. The figures we have for Xerxes’ army are outrageous — ancient sources claim he had 1,700,000 Persians and 300,000 Greeks — but even if we assume these numbers are exaggerated by a factor of 20, the northern army was far too large to live off the land while staying in one spot. Eight years after the battle the playwright Aeschylus wrote that

The land itself is an ally to [the Greeks] ...
killing with hunger an army that is far too numerous.

Aeschylus, Persians 792–794

If the southern force could delay Xerxes for even a week, and southern reinforcements came via another pass and appeared behind the northern army at Heraclea in Trachis, Xerxes’ forces would be trapped at the very moment that they were weakening from hunger, thirst, and disease. The southerners might have annihilated them. But, as it turned out, they couldn’t hold the northerners that long. Leonidas only managed three days. It wasn’t enough.

6. The 300 Spartans weren’t Leonidas’ personal guard. This myth is widely reported in modern accounts of the battle, and also in 300. The idea is supposedly that Sparta refused to engage its military officially, because of a religious festival or for some other reason, and so Leonidas decided to ‘go for a walk’ with his own retinue. In reality they were regular soldiers, sent by the Spartan state in an official capacity. The actual royal guard was 100 in number, not 300, and their function was to protect the king(s) while officially on campaign (Herodotus 6.56). Matthew shows that 300 was a typical number for Spartan contingents on special assignments (2013: 71–72).

7. Spartan soldiers weren’t invincible killing machines. The typical alt-right caricature of Spartan soldiers is an anachronism. The Spartan agōgē as seen in 300, the idea that a Spartan phalanx was unbeatable in the field, the trope of ‘Never give up, never surrender’ — all these things were invented as Spartan propaganda, centuries after the battle.

In the 300s BCE, Sparta was reduced to a minor power with big ideas about itself. The south did not rise again. Instead, Sparta drew on its propaganda successes from the 400s BCE to create a national image of a glorious past, which ended up being more for the tourist trade than anything else. Plutarch’s stories of Spartan military training and Spartan laconicisms are products of that period of self-invention.

Late archaic/early classical Sparta did have a better organised military than most other states, that much is true. They were very good at propaganda — why else would a crushing military defeat like Thermopylae be celebrated? But they didn’t have their well organised military because they were autonomous freeholders, as the likes of Victor Davis Hanson fervently believe. They were able to specialise because they owned an ethnic slave caste.

There’s probably some truth to the notion of a Spartan ‘heroic code’, as idealised in the poetry of Tyrtaeus. But then again, Tyrtaeus wasn’t Spartan. He was an immigrant. Tyrtaeus was a weeaboo. If you look at actual Spartan poetry, by Alcman, you’ll see it’s largely about men leering at dancing girls.

Some outstanding spear-throwing from The 300 Spartans, 1962. (Hold up ... why are they throwing their spears?)

Despite their military specialisation, the Spartans were very beatable. When a Spartan hoplite phalanx faced another hoplite phalanx, sure, they’d never be at a disadvantage. But when they faced mixed forces and mixed tactics, they regularly lost. The first time a band of Spartan hoplites threw down their shields and surrendered unconditionally in a land battle was at the hands of archers and slingers. And Thebes found out in 371 BCE that, even in a phalanx-on-phalanx situation, Spartans could be totally trounced. When Sparta tried to resist Roman forces in 196 BCE, their soldiers fled for their lives at the sight of Roman standards; the Spartan king Nabis made a complete capitulation after three days of fighting (Livy 34.28-40).

Being Spartan wasn’t about independence and choice. It was about exerting power over other people. They weren’t racially pure plucky freeholders: they were just people. They had a powerful city-state, and the power of that city-state rested on slavery.

And often, it seems, three days was all it took to beat them.

References

• Bond, Sarah E. 2018. ‘This is not Sparta.’ Eidolon, 8 May 2018.
• Cartledge, Paul 2006. Thermopylae: the battle that changed the world. Pan.
• Cole, Myke 2019a. ‘How the far right perverts ancient history — and why it matters.’ Daily Beast, 2 Mar. 2019.
• Cole, Myke 2019b. ‘The Sparta fetish is a cultural cancer.’ The New Republic, 1 August 2019.
• Londey, Peter 2013. ‘Other battles of Thermopylae.’ In Matthew and Trundle 2013: 138–149 and 208–211.
• Matthew, Christopher 2013. ‘Was the Greek defence of Thermopylae in 480 BC a suicide mission?’ In Matthew and Trundle 2013: 60–99 and 178–196.
• Matthew, Christopher; Trundle, Matthew (eds.) 2013. Beyond the gates of fire. New perspectives on the battle of Thermopylae. Pen & Sword.
• Tharoor, Ishan 2016. ‘Why the west’s far right — and Trump supporters — are still obsessed with an ancient battle.’ The Washington Post, 7 Nov. 2016.

[Note: edited two days after initial post. In the previous version I missed Sarah Bond’s essay for Eidolon, which I regret.]

Upward attribution and ‘Go tell the Spartans’

The epigram for the 300 Spartans who died at Thermopylae is a strong candidate for most famous epigram of all time. As far as most people are concerned, it was composed by the poet Simonides of Ceos. Today we’re looking at why that attribution is wrong.

Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῆιδε
    κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

Stranger, report back to the Spartans that here
    we lie, obeying their dictates.

Or in the more famous phrasing of Steven Pressfield,

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
    that here obedient to their laws we lie.

Modern plaque at Thermopylae commemorating the battle, with the ‘Go tell the Spartans’ epigram (and no mention of Simonides)

It’s a wonderful little poem, full of sentiment and ambiguity, and it genuinely was written on a 5th century BCE memorial for Leonidas and his crew at Thermopylae (as well as the modern one pictured above). And Simonides was a real poet, easily the most famous and successful Greek poet of his day. It’s just that he didn’t write it.

The misattribution to Simonides is a case of upward attribution.

Upward attribution

Upward attribution is an attribution error gone viral. It deserves to be a more common term in literary history. When a poem, or a quotation, or a book, is more memorable than its real author, and it gets attached to the name of someone more famous -- that’s upward attribution. And it is frighteningly common.

Here’s a modern example:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

-- not Albert Einstein

First, let’s point out that this is a hopelessly inaccurate and misleading picture of mental illness. This aphorism has done a lot of damage to public understanding of mental illnesses.

Now, on to the attribution. It isn’t Einstein, of course. The idea of linking insanity to repetition can be traced back to the 1890s, according to Quote Investigator, but the closest matches for the wording are much more recent, from the 80s.

Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.

-- ‘Narcotics Anonymous’ (privately printed, 1981), ch. 4, p. 11 (scanned PDF)

The most immediate source for the modern wording is a 1983 novel:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.

-- Rita Mae Brown, Sudden death (New York: Bantam, 1983), ch. 4, p. 68

Why aren’t the correct authors given credit? It’s because the aphorism is much more memorable than the names. If you’re quoting a witty aphorism and you want to be taken seriously, Narcotics Anonymous just isn’t going to cut it. And Rita Mae Brown is a perfectly respectable author, but I’m sure she’d agree that she doesn’t have quite the brand recognition that usually goes along with popular aphorisms. Her name isn’t on everyone’s lips in the same way as, say, Shakespeare or Austen.

‘Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is?’ -- Vaas, Far cry 3 (2012). At least he doesn’t cite Einstein.

Upward attribution isn’t usually a deception. It’s what happens when a bunch of people have an interest in a quotation, or poem, or whatever, but they’re not so interested in the author. Or maybe they have imperfect information about the author. In that situation, errors can go viral.

Famous names are magnetic. Here are a few more examples:

• the films The nightmare before Christmas (1993) and James and the giant peach (1996), almost invariably attributed to Tim Burton instead of Henry Selick
• ‘the Windows 95 song’, often attributed to Weird Al Yankovic instead of Bob Rivers
• an enormous number of poems misattributed to John Donne in the 1600s

The further back in time you go, the stronger the effect. There’s a lot of upward attribution in ancient texts. Hippocrates didn’t write the Hippocratic Corpus, Euripides didn’t write Rhesus, Seneca didn’t write Octavia, Apollodorus didn’t write the Library, Aristotle didn’t write the Problems, and Aeschylus probably didn’t write Prometheus bound (though I’ll grant there’s disagreement over the last one). If you poke your nose into academic work on Greco-Roman literature you’ll be inundated with ‘pseudo-’ authors: pseudo-Plutarch, pseudo-Plato, pseudo-Hyginus, and so on. Nearly all of these are upward attributions.

The epigram

Why does anyone think the epigram is by Simonides?

The modern attribution comes from the fact that the epigram appears under Simonides’ name in two sources: the Byzantine-era Palatine anthology (7.249), and the 1st century BCE Roman politician Cicero (Tusculan disputations 1.101).

Consequently, the epigram does appear in many modern editions. It is fr. 78 in Hiller’s Anthologia lyrica (1904), fr. 92 in Diehl’s Anthologia lyrica graeca (1922), and fr. 119 in Edmonds’ edition of Lyra graeca (1924). Campbell’s anthology of Greek lyric poetry (1967, revised edition 1982) uses Diehl’s numbering and includes it, and Campbell actually adds a note in his commentary, ‘There is little doubt that Simonides wrote it’ (p. 399).

The most recent edition of early epigrams, Page’s Epigrammata graeca (1975), gives it as Simonides fr. XXII(b) -- but Page adds a note explaining why it isn’t actually by Simonides. His notes are in Latin, unfortunately, so his point will be missed by a lot of modern students who know Greek but not Latin -- not to mention people who don’t know either language.

Campbell’s newer Loeb edition of Greek lyric (1988-1993) copies Page’s numbering and so includes it too, but by this time Campbell has softened his tone. He acknowledges that ‘an ascription to Sim[onides] in e.g. Palatine Anthology is worthless’ (Campbell 1991: 519).

The epigrams are normally published separately from Simonides’ elegiac output, even though they’re all in elegiac metre. I don’t actually know why, but I imagine it’s because only a tiny proportion of the epigrams are authentic. (Hence you won’t find the epigrams in West, Iambi et elegi graeci, 2nd ed. 1992; or in Gentili and Prato, Poetarum elegiacorum testimonia et fragmenta, rev. ed. 2002.)

Who did write it, then?

We don’t know. No alternative evidence exists. Get used to that kind of thing in ancient literature. That shouldn’t mean that we default to accepting bad evidence.

How do we know that it isn’t Simonides?

The original source for the epigram is Herodotus’ Histories, written around 425 BCE. Herodotus gives the most famous account of the battle of Thermopylae. After the battle, he says, three inscriptions were set up to honour the dead. The second one is the famous one.

They were buried in the exact place where they fell, as were the people who died before Leonidas gave the command to withdraw. The following inscription was made for them:

Here, against three million, there once fought
    four thousand men from the Peloponnesos.

This inscription was made for all of them. There is a separate one for the Spartiates:

Stranger, report back to the Spartans that here
    we lie, obeying their dictates.

This one is for the Lacedaimonians. And the following one is for the seer:

This is the gravestone of famous Megistias. Once the Medes
    crossed the river Spercheius and killed him.
He was a seer, and he knew his approaching fate in advance,
    but he refused to abandon Sparta’s leader.

The Amphictyons (local rulers) are the ones who honoured them with inscribed monuments, except for the one for the seer: Simonides son of Leoprepes is the one who wrote the one for the seer Megistias, because of their guest-friendship.

-- Herodotus 7.228

(Herodotus mentions Simonides in one other place too, 5.102.)

In other words: Herodotus knew his Simonides. He knew the famous epigram. And he knew perfectly well that the two had nothing to do with each other.

You can already tell this is going to be a feel-good movie with a happy ending

So on the one hand we have Herodotus, writing about 50-60 years after the battle; on the other we have the Greek anthology. What’s the right way of weighing them up?

The Greek anthology is the clear loser. The Anthology began to be compiled 400 years later, in the 100s BCE, when Meleager compiled a first phase of the anthology called the Garland. But epigrams from Simonides’ era never ever bear the name of the poet. We have lots of inscribed monuments from that period, with epigrams honouring the dead, and not a single poet’s name in sight. The Anthology is OK evidence for poets from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE onwards, but for earlier poets, its attributions are worthless.

This isn’t controversial, by the way. Here’s how Michael Tueller puts it in his preface to the Greek anthology:

Inscribed epigrams were not ‘signed’ by their authors, but their collectors nevertheless often attributed them to Simonides, Anacreon, or others -- a judgment that in general implies nothing more than an ancient opinion that they sounded like the sort of thing that Simonides, Anacreon, et al. would have written. Hence, ascriptions of epigrams in the Greek Anthology to any figure from before the late fourth century BC must be regarded as speculative at best.

-- Tueller 2014: xii

You might think it’s more compelling that Cicero attributes the epigram to Simonides too. Hey, independent corroboration! Well, unfortunately, no, Cicero isn’t an independent witness. Cicero was subject to the same bundle of misattributions that got into Meleager’s Garland.

Simonides has a reputation in some circles as an epigrammatist (Britannica; New World Encyclopedia). That reputation is a distortion: of the epigrams linked to him in the Anthology, only two or three appear to be authentic. For the others, upward attribution had probably already happened before Meleager came along. Two of them, Anthology 7.258 and 7.296, refer to events after Simonides’ death. (The authentic ones are 7.511, 7.677, and 13.30; the second one is the Megistias epigram, from Herodotus, and the other two seem to be from longer elegiac poems.)

The particular case of the ‘Go tell the Spartans’ epigram isn’t very controversial either. Scholars don’t usually address the Simonides attribution directly -- the Anthology’s unreliability makes it a moot point, not worth arguing over -- but when they do, they more often reject it (Wilamowitz 1913: 204-205 n. 1; Podlecki 1969: 258; Page 1975: 18).

How did it get linked to Simonides?

Simonides had a reputation for writing elegiac poetry, and he had a reputation for writing poems about the Persian Wars.

And on these counts, at least, his reputation is justified. He genuinely did write lots of poems about the Persian Wars. We have substantial fragments of elegiac poems about the battles of Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataeae (frs. eleg. 1-4, 5-9, 10-17 West); and lyric poems, for singing, in praise of the Spartans who died at Thermopylae, and about the battle of Artemisium (frs. 531, 532-535 Page).

(This means, incidentally, that when scholars talk about Simonides’ Thermopylae poem, they’re talking about the lyric fragment, not the ‘Go tell the Spartans’ epigram.)

That’s more than enough, without even thinking about his reputation as an epigrammatist. The Greek anthology has a bunch of epigrams about the Persian Wars which it links to Simonides’ name (7.248-251, 253, 431, 442 and possibly 443, 512, 677) -- but of these, only the Megistias epigram (7.677) has Herodotus to vouch for its authenticity.

Why would anyone defend the epigram’s authenticity?

As I see it, the main reason is that people like to fill in gaps in our knowledge of the world. When there are gaps in the evidence, people will often cling doggedly to bad evidence -- even evidence as bad as the attributions in the Greek anthology.

[T]he evidence of H[ero]d[o]t[us], who is concerned only with the setting-up of the epitaphs, must not be taken as indicating that S[imonides] did not write the first two as well as the third.

-- Edmonds 1924: 353 n. 2

Why ‘must’ Herodotus not be taken that way? Who gets to fill in the bits that Herodotus forgot to say? Boas (1905: 12-13) invents a pretty story that the Amphictyons commissioned Simonides to do all three epigrams, but he waived the commission fee for the third one. Can I do it too, or are only Edmonds and Boas allowed? There are no reasoned arguments here. It’s just denial.

As Tony Podlecki has put it, literally the only reason for linking Simonides to the first two epigrams in Herodotus 7.228 is because they’re juxtaposed with a real Simonides epigram.

Positively to deny them to Simonides may seem heartless, but their ascription rests on nothing sounder than guilt by association with the undoubtedly genuine Megistias-dedication.

-- Podlecki 1969: 258

It isn’t as though we have the epigram attributed to Simonides, but there’s good reason to doubt the attribution. No: we have no attribution at all. (We already established that the Anthology is bad evidence.) To link the epigram to Simonides at all is to say something that Herodotus didn’t say.

Hartmut Erbse argues for attribution to Simonides -- the only substantial argument I know of from the last century -- but at the core is still the argument from juxtaposition. As Erbse sees it, Herodotus’ wording implies that ‘Simonides stood in connection with the Amphictyons’ (Erbse 1998: 215). And that demonstrates authorship. Somehow.

Erbse adds that the three epigrams in Herodotus 7.228 have a ‘unity of thought’. That’s never been a strong argument for authorship of anything. Here, it doesn’t even apply. If you have some texts attributed to a particular author, but there’s some reason to doubt the attribution of one of them, then OK, ‘unity of thought’ might carry some weight. But that isn’t the situation here. What we have is two anonymous epigrams, and an epigram linked to a named author. Ioannis Ziogas (2014: 119-121) quotes some surviving inscriptions that are also stylistically close to the ones in Herodotus, including one that starts ‘O stranger’: that doesn’t mean they’re by Simonides.

The further Erbse goes on, the more tenuous it gets. Eventually we find him declaring (1998: 218) that the third epigram, for Megistias, couldn’t even exist without the ‘Go tell the Spartans’ one, and that in turn couldn’t exist without the first one. Er, what? I love your editorial work, Erbse, but this is just nuts. Take a look at the modern memorial plaque at Thermopylae: you’ll notice there’s only one epigram there. Take a look at the introduction to the Wikipedia article on Simonides. That epigram is perfectly capable of standing by itself.

Unlike the poor Spartans. Ziogas points out that the epigram doesn’t so much focus on their valour, but rather on who’s responsible for their deaths. We’ll never know exactly how things went down, but I find it hard to believe that it was ever meant to be a suicide mission: if it was, it didn’t achieve anything. My personal suspicion is that Leonidas’ order to withdraw was an attempt at a full retreat, but the withdrawal wasn’t completed before the Spartans, Thespiaeans, and Thebans got cut off. (Hey, you want another myth dispelled? If you read Herodotus book 7 you may notice that the Greeks north of Thermopylae joined the Persian invasion force. The defenders at Thermopylae may well have been killed by fellow Greeks.)

References

• Boas, M. 1905. De epigrammatis Simonideis. Groningen: J. B. Wolters.
• Campbell, W. A. 1982 [1967]. Greek lyric poetry, new edition. London: Bristol Classical Press. Orig. publ. Macmillan Education, 1967.
• ---- 1991. Greek lyric, vol. 3 (Loeb Classical Library 476). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Edmonds, J. M. 1924. Lyra graeca, vol. 2 (Loeb Classical Library, w/o no.). London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Erbse, H. 1998. ‘Zu den Epigrammen des Simonides.’ Rheinisches Museum 141: 213-230.
• McDermott, W. C. 1944. ‘Simonides, fragm. 92’ (subscription required). Classical Journal 40.3: 168-170.
• Page, D. L. 1975. Epigrammata graeca. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• ---- 1981. Further Greek epigrams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Podlecki, A. J. 1968. ‘Simonides: 480’ (subscription required). Historia 17.3: 257-275.
• Tueller, M. A. 2014. The Greek anthology, vol. 1 (Loeb Classical Library 67). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Orig. published under the name Paton, W. R., 1916-1919.
• Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von 1913. Sappho und Simonides. Berlin: Weidmann.
• Ziogas, I. 2014. ‘Sparse Spartan verse: filling gaps in the Thermopylae epigram’ (subscription required). Ramus 43.2: 115-133.

Paying the iron price: Spartan money

We do not sow! Game of Thrones, HBO, 2016
(... that’s because sowing is the helots’ job)

Welcome to 2018! Our first topic for this year may not actually be a myth. When modern people hear it, they often think it’s a myth, because it sounds pretty daft. But it’s actually pretty plausible that the early and Classical-era Spartans really did use iron spits as a kind of money. It’s just that there are some solid, sensible reasons why they might have done so.

The main piece of ancient testimony comes from Plutarch, a 2nd-century-CE essayist, biographer, and priest:

For first, [Lycurgus] voided all gold and silver coinage, and decreed that they should use only iron; and to this he assigned only a small price for a large weight and volume, so that a value of ten mnai required a lot of storage in the home, and a pair of oxen to transport it. When this was ratified, many kinds of crimes disappeared from Lacedaimon. For who was going to steal something, or take bribes in it, or steal it, or take it by force, when it wasn’t possible to conceal it, to possess it jealously, or even to make a profit by cutting it up? For the red-hot iron was quenched with vinegar, it’s said, so that the hardening took away its usefulness and value for any other purpose, making it weak and unworkable.

Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 9.1-2

Now, Plutarch’s story is certainly distorted. Most of the stories of Spartan exceptionalism that are still popular today -- about the Spartan agōgē, killing ‘defective’ babies, military supremacy, and so on -- were shaped by centuries of myth-making, long after Sparta’s actual heyday. Some of them are pure fiction. Plutarch is one of the most unreliable sources we have for classical Sparta.

So you’d think there’s good reason to raise eyebrows at Plutarch’s story. And yet, there may be a kernel of truth in it. Pre-classical and classical Sparta may have used iron to store value. But it wasn’t a novelty introduced by the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus, and in context, it makes complete sense.

Plutarch’s biggest mistake is that coinage wasn’t invented anywhere until the 6th century BCE, when Sparta’s military dominance was already at its height. That’s when coins were first developed in Lydia, a kingdom that dominated western Anatolia. A few decades later, Greek states like Aegina and Athens started making their own coinage.

Lydia doesn’t have a big public profile nowadays, but there are still two names from ancient Lydia that are pretty famous: king Midas, who really was a historical figure, even if we take it as read that the story about turning things to gold is fictional, and king Croesus, who was famous for being wealthy, and for losing his kingdom in the most ironic way possible, and who still survives in the proverbial saying ‘as rich as Croesus’. (The saying is a bit out of fashion now: maybe it’s better known via Terry Pratchett’s parodic version, ‘as rich as Creosote’.)

Anyway, by the time coinage arrived in the Greek world, myths of Spartan exceptionalism were well on the way. The oddity of Sparta isn’t that they adopted iron currency: it’s that they held off on adopting coinage for a few centuries, until the 200s BCE. That delay ended up being built into the self-image of later Sparta, which was fixated on nostalgia for a distant past that was largely fictional.

As to the use of iron, rather than silver: it was completely normal to use base metals to store value. Anyone who has ever read the Homeric Iliad or Odyssey (mid-7th century BCE) will have noticed that when people give each other wealth, it’s often in the form of metal household utensils: namely, tripods. These tripods were metal stands used to support braziers and the like. And it’s not just Homer: tripods are a frequent subject of interest in the surviving Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Greece. Homer and the Mycenaeans had a real thing about tripods.

Possibly not the best person to burgle: Herakles gets caught red-handed stealing a tripod from the god Apollo (Attic hydria, Madrid Painter, ca. 530 BCE, Museo Arqueológico Nacional of Spain)

That isn’t because of a fetish, and it’s not because they’re made of valuable materials. (They’re normally bronze: even baser than iron.) It’s because

1. Metal utensils are fungible. They’re interchangeable commodities which will have a similar use-value and exchange-value everywhere.
2. Metal utensils don’t degrade, they’re hard to damage, and they’re easily transportable. All of these things make them a hell of a vehicle for storing value.

We do see other measures of value in early Greek history, too, like clothes, barley, and oxen: they had fungibility too, but not all the advantages that metal had. Grain spoils; oxen die. Transporting them poses various challenges. On the other hand, they had other advantages: grain and oxen can produce more grain and oxen. So they were strong measures of productivity, more than ownership.

For stored value, metal tripods were the most prestigious unit. But a tripod is a pretty big object, and they have to come in whole numbers. You can’t buy an item for half a tripod, or a twelfth of a tripod. Tripods are for rich people: they’re the $1000 note of the ancient world. What did people do for smaller values? Did they pay bills in bags of grain? Were there shops that sold trinkets for, say, a hat and one shoe? Could a poor girl have a time-share in a cow as her dowry?

All of those are very feasible. But they may also have used smaller metal utensils. And the leading candidate for the utensil of choice is the spit -- the kind used for roasting things over a barbecue. The value of spits wasn’t just tied up in their metal content: they had potential ritual and social functions, which could make them good not only for storing value, but also for exchanging small values. If bronze tripods were the ancient $1000 bill, metal spits were the ancient payWave.

One of the most important venues that involved a large number of small transactions was the communal sacrifice. One relatively well-off person holds a sacrifice, and to spread the cost, invites a whole community to take part. Everyone likes this idea, because meat was a very small component of the ancient Greek diet: a sacrifice like this is where you get an awful lot of your protein. In exchange for a small payment, each participant gets a share of the meat and settles down with their family for a feast. The result is a combo of religious festival, picnic, and restaurant.

And in that context, what better way of paying the entry fee could there be, than the one metal utensil you’re actually going to need at the event? This function is suggested in the terminology: the Greek word for ‘spit’ is obelos, and in cities that adopted coinage, the word for a small-denomination coin was obolos. We’re a single unstressed vowel reduction away from a definite link.

A ‘handful’ of obeloi at the Numismatic Museum, Athens: could the Spartans have used these as currency?

(The larger unit, the drachmē worth six obols, is often thought to come from a dragma or ‘handful’ of spits. But it could also have an independent origin. Hesychius tells us that drax, another form of the same root, was a ‘handful’ in the sense of a quarter of a xestēs ‘pint’: that suggests a measure of grain rather than a handful of metal spits. See Hesychius δ.2319; similarly LXX 3 Kings 17:12.)

We don’t have 100% certainty (a) that this is how the word ‘obol’ came about, and (b) that when Plutarch reports a story about the Spartans using iron money, the story is actually about iron spits. That’s the theory that we find in some lexicographers, like Zonaras, but there’s no guarantee that they weren’t just guessing. But it does look plausible enough to treat it as the standing theory on the subject.

Even Plutarch’s more limited claim, that the Spartans prohibited silver and copper coinage, needs some careful interpretation. The Lycurgan ban is certainly fictional -- if Lycurgus was ever a real person, he died before coinage was first invented -- but Plutarch reports on another ban of other cities’ coinage in 404 BCE, which could well be historical (Plutarch Life of Lysander 17). Yet it’s a pretty common principle of ancient history that bans like that happened because the practice was actually going on fairly commonly -- that’s why the ban was needed. Moreover we have a report from a 4th-3rd century BCE writer, Dicaearchus of Messana (reported in Athenaeus iv.141c), that when Spartiates brought food contributions to their dining societies (syssitia) they also regularly brought a cash contribution of 10 Aeginetan obols. So even in times when there was a ban on other cities’ currency, Spartans may well have used it on the black market pretty regularly.

There’s no certainty here: we have no guarantees that the obolos ‘small denomination coin’ and obelos ‘spit’ are related, and that the Spartans really did use iron money. They may have simply used other cities’ coinage. But the weaker form of Plutarch’s story has something going for it: that the Spartans may well have used metal utensils to store value, as many people did in archaic Greece; and/or that there was a genuine ban on foreign currency in 404 BCE.

Naked Spartans

Spot the difference. Left: Richard Egan as Leonidas (The 300 Spartans, 1962). Right: Gerard Butler as Leonidas (300, 2007).

Ancient Greek art often shows legendary heroes fighting nude. When did the modern imagination decide that this was also how historical soldiers ought to be imagined?

Zack Snyder’s hit film 300 (2007) makes a big thing of this. The comic book it was based on, Frank Miller’s 300 (1998), does the same -- in the film the Spartans have less crotch exposure, counterbalanced by more bulgy muscles and fat starvation. In both, the Spartans’ armour consists only of shields and helmets, sometimes supplemented by greaves.

In a 2007 Entertainment Weekly interview, Miller explained his clothing choice:

The inaccuracies, almost all of them, are intentional. I took those chest plates and leather skirts off of them for a reason. I wanted these guys to move and I wanted ’em to look good. ... I was looking for more an evocation than a history lesson.

A complete list of inaccuracies in 300 could fill many, many pages, but most of them can be hand-waved away with the reasoning, ‘ahistorical but AWESOME’. This one is the one that really puzzles me. Naked Spartans aren’t awesome; they’re weird. Really weird.

Left: Greek hoplite fighting a Persian soldier (Attic, 5th cent. BCE). Note the presence of clothing and breastplate. Right: heavy-armed soldiers on the ‘Chigi vase’ (Corinthian, 7th cent. BCE). Notice that the nearest Chigi warrior is going commando: the one item that Spartans in 300 wear consistently, the leather Speedo, is precisely the one that was optional in antiquity ...

Miller’s explanation to Entertainment Weekly was no post hoc rationalisation: he wasn’t just trying to wriggle out of admitting he’d made a mistake. Previously, he had given a fuller explanation to the New York Times:

The real Spartans, for instance, wore heavy body armor, clunky stuff that weighed about half as much as they did: handy in a pitched battle, but hardly sexy or eye-grabbing, certainly not for an action comic.

‘My first versions of the soldiers looked like beetles,’ [Miller] said. ‘They looked like they couldn’t move faster than two miles an hour.’

So Mr. Miller ditched the armor in favor of a more natural look. In his series, Leonidas and his warriors wear red capes and little else; when in battle, they cover their privates in what appear to be leather Speedos. ‘When you look at the ancient Greek vase paintings, you’ll see that soldiers are drawn nude, for the same reason I did,’ Mr. Miller said.

-- New York Times, 26 Nov. 2006, page A9 (subscription required)

So, according to Miller, soldiers in pitched battle are more ‘natural’ if they’re naked. Now, there are many levels of explanation for this. One obvious element is the very strong current of homoeroticism. Carol Borden puts it succinctly in an essay written for The cultural gutter:

It’s not like sex is necessary in a war story and nothing’s more irritating than Freud when he’s right, but this whole comic is tumescent. And I’m not sure it’s even fair to call the sexuality repressed, what with naked Spartans sleeping [with] spears between their legs and those spears later erupting from the mouths of Persian scouts. ... But the homoeroticism is denied and the Spartans presented, historical sources be damned, not only as not homosexual but as homophobes, spitting insults at ‘pretty’ Athenian ‘boy-lovers’ in an attempt to provide a different context for lines like, ‘I’m ready for my punishment, Sir.’

-- Borden 2010: 131-132

In a more academic vein, some commentators have interpreted the Spartans’ nudity as just one side of a clothing-based symbolism:

[T]he digitally perfected, semi-nude bodies of the Spartans stand in contrast to the monstrous, disfigured horde of their Persian enemies ...

-- Beigel 2012: 66

He presents the Achaemenid Persians as morally deviant and corrupt and as ethnically Africans and Arabs. ... [T]hey are a bizarre and frightening collection of characters, with a variegated appearance that contrasts with the simplicity of the Spartan costume.

-- Fairey 2011: 159-160

Miller uses Persian piercings and gimp suits to suggest sexual deviance; for vanilla, it’s homoeroticism disguised as straight, dressed up with spears, Speedos, and lots and lots of white skin (tanned, but not too tanned ... but we’d better not stray into the subject of Miller’s racism). Both sides have bare flesh bulging through taut leather straps for no apparent reason -- but Xerxes wears more of them.

So we’ve got plenty of potential motivations for Miller/Snyder to adopt the trope of hoplite nudity. That doesn’t explain where the trope comes from, though. Miller didn’t invent hoplite nudity for 300: he just exposed it to a bigger audience.

Here’s a 2005 online forum where one user is bizarrely certain, based on nothing whatsoever, that Greek hoplites fought in the buff, but without any apparent awareness of the 1998 comic (the user describes it as a ‘relatively new’ discovery); here’s a 2001 war-gaming page claiming that hoplites fought naked, but only in ‘the earlier period’ (so the writer must be thinking of mythical scenes on vases); here’s a 1999 article in The Onion which surely doesn’t take knowledge of 300 for granted; here’s an article that appeared in an obscure journal called The Longbow in 1990. It gets harder to trace the trope the further back we go, but this is plenty to show that Miller didn’t invent it out of thin air.

So where did it come from? As far as I can make out, there are four possible origins.

1. a misunderstanding of the word gymnēs, which is related to gymnos ‘naked’ but means a ‘light-armed infantryman’ (i.e., expressly not ‘hoplite’);
2. a mistaken generalisation of the fact that Greeks competed in athletic games nude and trained at the gymnasion (literally ‘nudity place’);
3. the ancient custom of sometimes depicting mythological figures in the nude (so-called ‘heroic nudity’);
4. the French neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825).

Miller claims inspiration from option three (see the New York Times interview, above). But for my money, I’d bet option four played a more important role.

Jacques-Louis David caused a certain amount of consternation among his contemporaries when he depicted The intervention of the Sabine women (1796-1799) with an unclothed Tatius and Romulus. This was in sharp contrast to an earlier treatment of the same theme (1633-1634) by Nicolas Poussin. David went on to produce another famous painting, Leonidas at Thermopylae (1798-1814), which shows a Leonidas with remarkable similarities to the Leonidas of 300.

Jacques-Louis David, Intervention of the Sabine women (1799); Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814).
(Louvre; source: Wikimedia.org)

However, we need to add some provisos to that explanation. For one thing, David was himself influenced by ancient art (see option three). And for another, it is perfectly feasible that, subsequently, modern people sometimes may have bolstered the myth by drawing on options one and two.

David based both Tatius and Leonidas on the same model, an Italian named Cadamour. But he had not always painted classical heroes in the nude. In The oath of the Horatii (1784) David has the legendary Horatius brothers comfortably wrapped up. When it came to the Sabines, he stirred up controversy over his heroes’ nudity, perhaps deliberately, by charging admission to the exhibition -- an unusual move, making his public display non-public, and adding more than a hint of pornographic theatre -- and by distributing a brochure to all the visitors entitled Note sur la nudité de mes héros (‘note on my heroes’ nudity’). In it, David sums up:

En un mot, mon intention, en faisant ce tableau, étoit de peindre les mœurs antiques avec une telle exactitude, que les Grecs et les Romains, en voyant mon ouvrage, ne m'eussent pas trouvé étranger à leurs coutumes.

In a word, my intention in making this painting was to depict ancient traditions with such exactness that the Greeks and Romans, if they saw my work, would not have found me alien to their customs.

The public profile of Greek art had enormously increased around that time, with publications like Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1762) and the work of Winckelmann. So the adoption of neoclassical nudity was a predictable move. But David was the first, so it was also bold and new. As well as that, the Sabines painting stirred up a class controversy, documented in an interesting article by D. G. Grigsby (1998): in David’s painting, the plebeians ironically have rich clothing, while the elites have none -- a touchy subject in Napoleonic France.

Leonidas, fifteen years on at the tail-end of the Napoleonic era, takes all that for granted. There, David abandons his earlier claim to a faux historicity, and he makes the artistic tradition the chief consideration. Here’s how one art historian explains it:

The climax of David’s pursuit for artistic purity, a purity free of both academic prescriptions and adherence to historical realism, can be found in the painting Leonidas at Thermopylae, completed in 1814 ... As in the Sabines, the heroes in Leonidas are nude and are not fully integrated into a dramatic context within the scene; instead, each is meant to have an individual impact. Thus, they become citations of works of art, and in creating his central figures David borrowed generously from existing works, such as those found in Winckelmann’s publications.

-- Kohle 2006: 79

Degas, study for Young Spartans exercising
(1850s; Chicago)

Now, David’s ahistorical, discursive approach wasn’t the only model for post-1814 depictions of Greek hoplites. The nudity in Degas’ Young Spartans exercising (ca. 1860) seems to be based more on ancient texts than contemporary art: where David worked from ancient statues, Degas was thinking more of Plutarch’s account of the Spartan agōgē --

... as they grew in age, their bodily exercise was increased; their heads were close-clipped, and they were accustomed to going bare-foot, and to playing for the most part without clothes. When they were twelve years old, they no longer had tunics to wear, received one cloak a year, had hard, dry flesh, and knew little of baths and ointments ...

-- Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 16.6

Plutarch’s account is late, wildly untrustworthy, and in any case only refers to Spartan children, not fully-armed hoplites. But there’s no doubt that it was Degas’ inspiration.

Miller and Snyder went along with that at least partially. In 300, the adolescent Leonidas has his head close-shaven, and he’s barefoot. But for adult warriors, it seems to me they were thinking more of art. Not the ancient statues that David drew on, in spite of Miller’s words: rather, David himself.

Snyder is the more self-conscious about this. He’s on record as having visited the painting at the Louvre, and he called David the ‘Michael Bay of French painters’. In the film’s final battle he actually quotes David’s painting. There is a failed attempt on Xerxes’ life (is this Miller’s invention, or an adaptation of Diodorus’ account?), then Leonidas is struck by a couple of Persian arrows -- the first of many -- and for a moment he collapses into the pose of David’s Leonidas (YouTube link).

Left: Zack Snyder's 300 (2007). Right: David's Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814).

References

• Beigel, Thorsten 2012. ‘With your shield or on it: the gender of heroism in Zack Snyder’s 300 and Rudolph Maté’s The 300 Spartans.’ In: Renger, A.-B.; Solomon, J. (eds.) Ancient worlds in film and television: gender and politics. Leiden: Brill. 65-78.
• Borden, Carol 2010. ‘Frank Miller’s hot gates.’ In: Borden, C., et al. (eds.) The cultural gutter. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. 131-133.
• Fairey, Emily 2011. ‘Persians in Frank Miller’s 300 and Greek vase painting.’ In: Kovacs, G.; Marshall, C. W. (eds.) Classics and comics. Oxford: OUP. 159-172.
• Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo 1998. ‘Nudity à la grecque in 1799.’ The art bulletin 80: 311-335.
• Kohle, Hubertus 2006. ‘The road from Rome to Paris: the birth of a modern neoclassicism.’ In: Johnson, D. (ed.) Jacques-Louis David: new perspectives. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 71-80.