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.]

Greek contempt for archers

Vain archer! trusting to the distant dart,
Unskill’d in arms to act a manly part!
Thou hast but done what boys or women can;
Such hands may wound, but not incense a man.
Nor boast the scratch thy feeble arrow gave,
A coward’s weapon never hurts the brave.

-- Alexander Pope, The Iliad 11.493-8
(inspired by Homeric Iliad 11.385 and 388-90)

In the Iliad, these words are spoken in battle by the hero Diomedes, straight after he has been injured by an arrow. It’s not surprising he’s cross. The question is whether his animus against archers is typical. Did the Greeks despise archers?

Heracles shooting arrows: sculpture from east pediment, temple of Athena Aphaia, Aigina, ca. 500-480 BCE. Glyptothek, Munich (source: Wikimedia.org)

Spoiler alert: it’s pretty much a myth. It’s not quite simply flat-out false: it’s at least true that different weaponry kits did have certain social implications. But it definitely wasn’t a case of ‘swords good, bows bad’. The position of archery in ancient Greek perceptions of warfare isn’t a matter of moral character, and it doesn’t have its roots in aristocratic prestige. It’s about economic practicalities and material costs.

Yes, ancient sources will occasionally set archers in opposition to hoplites -- that is, spear-warriors, like the Spartans in the film 300 -- but if you read those sources in context, they’re never quite that straightforward. In the Iliad passage, above, Diomedes’ critique of archery comes in the context that an archer has just successfully beaten him in combat. Of course he’s cross at archers!

Some relatively experienced people fall for the myth too. Here’s one writer who should certainly know better:

When the hoplite dominated Greek warfare, archers were generally looked down upon as men who lacked the bravery to engage in hand-to-hand combat. A fairly typical utterance is ‘the measure of a man is not archery; rather he who stands fast in his rank and gazes unflinchingly at the swift gash of the spear [is a brave man]’ (Euripides, Heracles, 190-192). This attitude may have existed as early as the Lelantine War if the evidence for the ban on missile weapons during this conflict has any value. The attitude probably developed even further with Greek exposure to foreigners such as the Persians and Scythians, who used the bow and not the spear as their principal weapon.

-- Iain Spence, Historical dictionary of ancient Greek warfare (2002), p. 59

Spence treats the status of archery as purely a moral thing, and that distorts things badly. He also commits some real howlers.

1. Get the citation right. First, a basic error: Spence’s Euripides quotation comes from Heracles lines 162-4, not lines 190-2.

2. Says who? Spence treats the sentiment as ‘typical’. This requires forgetting that the speaker in the play, Lycus, is no ethical paradigm: he’s unquestionably a villain, a usurper and tyrant, who wants to murder Heracles’ family unjustly, for no reason other than just to be a complete bastard. He is not typical.

3. Fair and balanced? Haha, no. Picking out Lycus’ testimony is a really really bad case of cherry-picking. Spence cites Lycus’ words at 162-4, but neglects to mention lines 188-203, where Amphitryon answers Lycus’ claim and rejects it completely. Amphitryon speaks of a hoplite as someone who is ‘slave to his arms’ and to his neighbours in the battle-line. He also argues that archery is tactically superior. That doesn’t mean that’s Euripides’ own verdict on the subject, of course! But it does show that it’s tendentious to call Lycus’ words ‘a fairly typical utterance’. Amphitryon, the good guy of the scene, gets the last word.

4. The Lelantine War. Spence’s second piece of evidence is a treaty according to which archery was supposedly banned during the Lelantine War. Even at the best of times, the Lelantine War poses historiographical problems. It’s a very early war, and our earliest testimony about it is nearly 200 years later than the war itself. Evidence for the supposed archery ban is weaker still -- so weak that it undermines the story more than it supports it. The earliest sources for the war, Herodotus and Thucydides, make no mention of any ban. The ban only appears in Polybius and Strabo, another few centuries later. And Strabo’s testimony makes it clear that the alleged treaty wasn’t about archery, but about all forms of ballistic missile -- and at the time of the war, that would have included spears as well as bows! In other words, this supposed treaty banned both of the two weapons most commonly associated with aristocratic warriors. In the present day, consensus is that the ban was almost certainly invented by Polybius’ and Strabo’s source, Ephorus of Cyme, a historian who wrote ca. 350 BCE, some decades after Herodotus and Thucydides. Why did Ephorus come up with the story? Well, in light of Strabo’s reference to all missiles rather than bows and arrows, Wheeler (1987) suggests that Ephorus’ concerns were probably not about archery at all: he may have been thinking of early 4th century BCE developments in large artillery.

Odysseus slaughters the suitors: illustration by John Flaxman, 1805 (photo © Tate, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported))

In 5th century BCE sources it is possible to detect a less high regard for light-armed troops than for hand-to-hand hoplites. That’s not really about archery, though: it’s more to do with the class connotations of being a hoplite. Hoplite arms were very expensive -- much more expensive than being a slinger, or what the Greeks called a peltast (peltastēs), that is, a javelineer. Hoplites were more prestigious because they were richer; light-armed troops were proles. It wasn’t about archery itself, it was about economic class. That didn’t stop 5th-4th century combatants from recognising the advantages of ranged warfare (see for example Xenophon Anabasis 3.3.6-10). In the late 5th century, throughout the Peloponnesian War, whenever hoplites came into conflict with light troops, the hoplites consistently got massacred if they didn’t have support from their own light troops or cavalry. The first ever time that a band of Spartan hoplites threw down their shields and surrendered unconditionally in a land battle was when they were utterly trounced by an army consisting of archers, peltasts, and slingers. It’s hard to argue with success.

I wonder if people are tempted to see hoplites of the Classical period as successors to Homeric heroes. Well, in a way: there’s a certain continuity in their armour. But not in their tactics. Hoplites fought in phalanxes; Homeric heroes fight in melee (or if they do fight in phalanxes, it’s far from obvious). And they don’t use their spears in hand-to-hand combat, as Classical hoplites did. They throw them. Homeric heroes are all warriors-at-a-distance.

Now, that’s not to say that Achilles is a peltast. Iliadic combat is in a kind of in-between state. At the time of the Iliad, in the second quarter of the 7th century BCE, Greek warfare saw a transformation in the use of spears: pictorial depictions show a transition from soldiers holding multiple spears, evidently for throwing, to a single spear, evidently for hand-to-hand combat. There are hints of the same transition within the Iliad: in combat, spears are always thrown, but when Patroclus is arming for battle he takes two regular spears rather than Achilles’ one special ultra-heavy spear (Iliad 16.139-144; the special spear appears again at 19.387-391); and it’s only through divine intervention that Achilles gets to have two spear casts at Hector (22.273-277). Patroclus’ two spears sound like peltast javelins; Achilles’ one special spear sounds a bit more like a hoplite weapon.

Be that as it may. Spear-throwing is relevant -- it would have been banned under the mythical Lelantine War treaty, remember -- but it’s archery that we’re here to talk about.

Archery was prestigious, not contemptible. Do we really need to spell out that the supremacy of Heracles and Odysseus in battle was largely thanks to their prowess in archery? Or that archery is key to winning the Trojan War in Sophocles’ play Philoctetes? Or that one of the most revered gods of the Greeks, Apollo, was an archer god? Or that among aristeiai in the Iliad -- that is, setpiece scenes where a Greek hero excels in battle and goes on a rampage -- one of the outstanding heroes is an archer, Teukros? (a.k.a. Teucer; the brief aristeia is at Iliad 15.442-483, with an arming scene unusually at the end, 478-483.) Or that the greatest warrior at Troy, Achilles, is laid low by an archer? Or that in Archaic depictions of sympotic scenes, when aristocratic homes have weaponry hanging on a wall as decoration, that weaponry will typically be shields, swords, and bows, and only rarely spears?

‘Teucer’, by Hamo Thornycroft, 1881 (photo © Tate, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)). (Backdrops can be deceiving: this statue is 2.4 m high!)

No matter how many positive icons I mention, though, it’ll just never be enough to dispel the idea that the Greeks despised archers. Because one particular archer outweighs them all in the popular imagination: Paris. Other characters in the Iliad really have it in for him. Diomedes’ rant, at the start of this post, is aimed at Paris. And here’s how Paris’ brother Hector addresses him at one point:

Hector berated him when he saw, using harsh words:
‘Wretched Paris! Beauty specialist, woman-crazy seducer,
if only you had never been born, that you had died without marrying!
I genuinely mean that: it would really have been much better
than to be a disgrace and have others roll their eyes at you. ...’

-- Iliad 3.38-42

And so on. Later, Paris’ wife Helen scolds him for not being on the battlefield (3.427-436); further on Hector and Helen both lambast him at the same time (6.325-353); and then of course we get Diomedes’ rant in book 11.

Other characters’ loathing of him is so marked that he seems to have become iconic of all archers. But other archers in the Iliad, like Teukros and Meriones, should show that the treatment of Paris is not typical. And neither Hector nor Helen reproaches him for being an archer. It’s only Diomedes that does that, and of course that’s because he’s just been beaten. In fact, Hector is very complimentary about Paris’ abilities in combat (even if Paris wasn’t good enough to stand up to Menelaus in a spear-duel in book 3):

In answer shining-helmed Hector addressed him:
‘You oddball! No man who is reasonable
would ever dishonour your action in battle: you’re a sturdy guy!
It’s that you give up willingly, or you’re unwilling. That’s why my heart
grieves in my spirit, when I hear shameful things about you
from the Trojans, who have long suffering on your account. ...’

-- Iliad 6.520-525

Archery is one of his virtues, not a flaw. It’s how he beats Diomedes; one day (not in the Iliad), Achilles himself will become another victim. Paris is so unconquerable with his favoured weapon that one day (again, not in the Iliad), the Greeks will have to bring in another archer specially, just to get rid of him: Philoctetes, armed with the bow and arrows of Heracles himself.

Actually the most damning thing said about archers in the Iliad has nothing to do with Paris. It’s about the Locrians, mainland Greeks led by Aias son of Oileus:

Now, the Locrians were not there with great-hearted Oileus’ son:
for their heart did not stand fast in close battle,
for they didn’t have bronze horse-haired helmets,
and they didn’t have circular shields and ash spears;
but in the bow and fine-spun sheep wool (i.e. slings)
they trusted when they came to Ilios. ...

-- Iliad 13.712-717

Not sturdy enough to be there with the front fighters -- sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? (Note, incidentally, how being in the front line involves using a spear? That ain’t how people use spears in the Iliad...) Yet even here, the narrator recognises that it’s more about tactics than about prestige. Of course you don’t put slingers in the front line. Once again, it’s hard to argue with success --

... As a result, with those (weapons)
they would break through the lines of the Trojans by shooting.

-- Iliad 13.717-718

In Homer, as in real life at the battle of Sphacteria, archery beats hand-to-hand.

References

• Van Wees, H. 1994. ‘The Homeric way of war: the Iliad and the hoplite phalanx.’ Greece & Rome 41.1: 1-18, 41.2: 131-155.
• Wheeler, Everett L. 1987. ‘Ephorus and the prohibition of missiles.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 117: 157-182.

Salt and salary: were Roman soldiers paid in salt?

A few weeks ago, we looked at myths to do with ploughing over cities and salting the earth. Today we’re looking at a kind of companion myth. The basic idea is that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, or received an allowance of ‘salt money’.

Salt money? (photo by Benreis; CC licence)

A few other ancillary myths tend to come along with it too. Take a look at these gloriously mangled pieces of misinformation:

I thought you might like to know just where your salary comes from. The word, at least. The source seems to be the Latin ‘salarium’ (‘sal’ being salt) which is a word tied to the payments made to soldiers in the early Roman salt trade. In those days, salt (regular ordinary table salt) was a prized and valuable commodity. If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘you are the salt of the earth’ or ‘worth your salt’, both are referring to the high value of salt.

a 2009 blog post

A soldier’s pay -- consisting in part of salt -- came to be known as solarium argentum, from which we derive the word salary. A soldier’s salary was cut if he ‘was not worth his salt,’ a phrase that came into being because the Greeks and Romans often bought slaves with salt.

Time, ‘A brief history of salt’, 15 Mar. 1982

(The blog post, in particular, has been uncritically copied, paraphrased, and plagiarised on many other parts of the web -- like this page offered up by the European Parliament’s Terminology Coordination Unit.)

First, the accurate bits. (1) The English word ‘salary’ does indeed come from Latin salarium ‘stipend, money allowance’. (2) Salarium does indeed appear to be linked to sal ‘salt’, via the adjective salarius ‘pertaining to salt’. And there the accuracy ends.

---

Here’s the simplest form of the myth.

The word ‘salary’ comes from the Latin word for salt because the Roman Legions were sometimes paid in salt.

Wikipedia, ‘History of salt’

Pure fantasy. There isn’t the tiniest scrap of evidence to suggest this. At all, to any extent, ever.

The allure of this myth comes simply from the link between salarius and salarium. Naturally everyone wants to have the true explanation of what exactly the link is. Unfortunately no ancient source tells us one. And so we end up in the situation where people invent explanations for themselves.

Folks who propagate this myth don’t usually try to cite sources, but when people do go looking for sources, they end up drawn to two pieces of ancient testimony. First is the 1st century CE writer Pliny the Elder:

honoribus etiam militiaeque interponitur salariis inde dictis ...

(Salt) is also related to magistracies and duty abroad, and that’s where we get the word ‘salaries’ ...

Pliny Natural history 31.89

And second, testimony about state taxes on salt. For example, the historian Livy reports how the Roman censors imposed a new tax in 204 BCE:

vectigal etiam novum ex salaria annona statuerunt. sextante sal et Romae et per totam Italiam erat; Romae pretio eodem, pluris in foris et conciliabulis et alio alibi pretio praebendum locaverunt. id vectigal commentum alterum ex censoribus satis credebant ... inde Salinatori Livio inditum cognomen.

(The censors) also imposed a new tax on the annual salt production. Salt cost a sixth of an as in Rome and throughout Italy; they set it to be offered at the same price in Rome, but more in town squares and marketplaces, and at other rates in other places. It was widely believed that just one of the two censors devised this tax ... As a result (the censor) Marcus Livius was given the nickname ‘salt-dealer’.

Livy 29.37.3

Elsewhere Cato the Elder is quoted as talking about salinatores aerarii, treasurers of the salt taxes, as a specialised post in the 190s BCE (reported in Servius auctus, commentary on Aeneid 4.244). These passages, along with Pliny, are close as we get to a link between salt and money in any extant Roman sources.

The trouble with citing Pliny as a source for the myth is of course that Pliny doesn’t say anything of the kind. The problem is exacerbated by Wikipedia, which bald-facedly re-writes Pliny, and has been quoted very widely:

the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who stated as an aside in his Natural History’s discussion of sea water, that ‘[I]n Rome...the soldier’s pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it...’.

Wikipedia, ‘Salary’ (the addition of this line dates to 2004)

This is a mistranslation, just to be clear. And this wording doesn’t even appear in the linked source. And Pliny isn’t writing about sea water, but about salt itself. None of that has stopped this fake quotation being repeated in countless books and websites.

Note, 18 Jan.: this error, and the other Wikipedia excerpt quoted above, have since been corrected. However, some other parts of the articles are still inaccurate: see below.

Brine refinery at Fuerteventura, Canary Islands (source: tourist blog). Ancient Roman salinae worked in more or less the same way: see Pliny Nat. hist. 31.81-83.

If you take a global view, of course you’re bound to find some times and places where salt could act as a means of storing value and facilitating exchange. The most famous example is Ethiopia in the modern era. Here’s how it’s reported by Ray’s Travels, a classic 17th century piece of travel writing:

In trading, they make no use of coined money, as the Europeans do, but their money are pieces of fifteen or twenty Pics of cloth, gold, which they give by weight, and a kind of salt, which they reduce into little square pieces like pieces of soap, and these pass for money. They cut out that salt upon the side of the Red Sea, five or six days journeys from Dangala, as you go from Cairo, and the places where they make it are called Arbo.

John Ray, A collection of curious travels and voyages, vol. 2 (1st ed. 1693, 2nd ed. 1705), 1738 printing, p. 486

This 1949 book, this 1977 essay, and this 1994 book report that salt bars called amoléh continued to serve as an important medium for exchange -- one among many; others included Maria Theresa thalers, clothing, iron, gold, and cattle -- all the way up until the beginning of the 20th century. Reportedly the chief source of Ethiopian salt bars was the Afar depression, next to the Red Sea, a region that includes present-day Djibouti as well as slivers of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia.

Just bear in mind that this has nothing at all to do with Roman soldiers. The fact that salt could mediate exchange in 17th-19th century Ethiopia has no bearing on ancient Rome. Salt money might be a plausible thing in and of itself, but we have absolutely no reason to imagine salt currency in Rome. It’s just that when you go hunting for something specific across the whole of human history, you’re likely to find it.

A few more examples. This 2013 book claims that salt has also been used as ‘money’ (the word is tendentious: ‘a medium for trade’ and ‘money’ are not the same thing) in China, pre-Columbian Mexico, Borneo, and elsewhere. A person who uploaded this photo to Wikimedia.org claims it is a sample of salt currency from early 20th century Angola, held at the Royal Ontario Museum. And Wikipedia alleges that American soldiers were paid in brine during the War of 1812. This last one appears to be completely fictional, like the Roman case: apparently it’s some kind of distant distortion of the British salt embargo during the war, and the development of several important brine refineries in the USA throughout the 1800s-1810s.

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‘Roman soldiers were paid in salt’ may be the simplest form of the myth, but it’s also a secondary form. I’ve done some searching around in Google Books with date constraints, and that seems to indicate that people first started writing about the idea around the 1860s (here, for example).

The older, primary form of the myth is that soldiers were given ‘salt money’, that is, a monetary allowance for buying salt. This, too, is a modern invention. It isn’t nearly as daft as ‘soldiers were paid in salt’, but it’s still only a conjecture, unsupported by any ancient testimony.

The phrase ‘salt money’, or in Latin salarium argentum, is an invention of 18th and 19th century Latin dictionaries. The phrase was coined by dictionary-writers as their best guess for how salarium ‘salary’ came from salarius ‘pertaining to salt’. Here’s one of the two standard Latin-English dictionaries, Lewis & Short, on the subject:

B. sălārĭum, ii, n. (sc. argentum; cf.: calcearium, congiarium, vestiarium, etc.); orig., the money given to the soldiers for salt, salt-money; hence, post-Aug. (v. Dio Cass. 52, 23, and 78, 22), in gen., a pension, stipend, allowance, salary (cf.: honorarium, annuum, merces, stipendium)

Lewis & Short, A Latin dictionary (1879), p. 1618, ‘Salarius’

The key bit is in the first line. The supposed meaning ‘salt money’ (‘sc[ilicet] argentum’, i.e. ‘with argentum implied’) is not actually attested anywhere. It’s inferred by analogy with some other, real, expressions: calcearium (‘shoe money’, from calceus ‘shoe’); congiarium (‘distribution of largesse’, from congius ‘half an amphora’s worth’); and vestiarium (‘clothing money’, from vestis ‘clothing’). Unlike salarium argentum, these terms actually do appear in various ancient sources, with the correct meanings.

Lewis & Short didn’t invent the conjecture: it also appears in the older Latin-German dictionaries of Freund (1834) and Scheller (1804). It seems to have its origin in the 1st edition of Facciolati and Forcellini’s Totius Latinitatis lexicon (‘dictionary of the entire Latin language’):

Salarium, ii ...: proprie est annona salis, quae olim dabatur militibus.

‘salary’ ...: strictly, the annual salt revenue, which was once given to soldiers.

Totius Latinitatis lexicon (1st edition, 1771), vol. 4 p. 15, ‘Salarius’

This was already a very muddled rendering of the evidence. Facciolati-Forcellini go on to cite Pliny, though as we have seen Pliny doesn’t actually say this. It looks like what’s happened is that they've conflated the Pliny passage with the Livy passage. Livy referred to a tax on the salaria annona ‘annual salt production’. Annona can mean either ‘annual production’ or ‘annual revenue’, and Facciolati-Forcellini have taken Livy’s phrase and used it with the other meaning: annona salis ‘annual salt revenue’. Later on, Scheller and Freund realised that Pliny didn’t say what Facciolati-Forcellini claimed he did, but they liked the idea so they instead supported it with the analogies of ‘shoe money’, ‘clothing money’, and so on. And the idea stuck.

All these dictionaries are engaging in conjecture. No ancient source ever actually uses salarium to mean ‘salt allowance’. It’s a guess. It isn’t a terrible guess, but it’s still a guess. One thing that weighs heavily against it is that even Pliny, who’s trying to link salarium to ‘salt’ as closely as he can, doesn’t try to get away with inventing ‘salt money’.

The current standard, the Oxford Latin dictionary (1968), very properly avoids taking any view on the question. It just states that salarium comes from sal. Unlike the older dictionaries, it doesn’t make any inferences about how or why the two words are related.

‘Salt money’ certainly isn’t as ridiculous as the idea of paying soldiers in salt -- it does have parallels that make it at least a reasonable conjecture -- but there’s still no evidence for it.

Sea water refinery in western France (source: ISSLR.org)

I don’t have a perfect explanation for how the Latin word for ‘salty’ gave rise to the word for ‘salary’. Of course I don’t: that’s why we have this myth floating around. We don’t have the evidence to settle on a single explanation.

As I said above, ‘salt allowance’ isn’t a terrible guess. But I strongly suspect it’s much more metaphorical than that. Compare how the Greek word for a salary was opsōnion, literally ‘(money) for buying opson’, where opson means ‘fish, relish, sauce’. That doesn’t mean Greek workers were given a ‘fish allowance’: it means that there was a generalised idea that wages went on traded goods like fish, and not on things like barley which land-owners would grow for themselves. Similarly, in Rome, grain allowances were a common thing; it could easily make sense to interpret salarium as ‘everything-else-money’.

This interpretation is less specific, slightly metaphorical, and it’s still just a conjecture. But I’d say it’s more plausible, and certainly a more economical explanation, than inventing a specialised category of wages out of thin air.

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We still haven’t dealt with this:

A soldier’s salary was cut if he ‘was not worth his salt,’ a phrase that came into being because the Greeks and Romans often bought slaves with salt.

Time, ‘A brief history of salt’, 15 Mar. 1982

Oh dear oh dear. This one has made it into Wikipedia too (‘soldiers who did their job well were “worth their salt”’). Unfortunately for Time and for the thousands of people who have repeated this idea, the phrase ‘worth one’s salt’ is definitely not Roman. It is first attested in the 1830s (Etymonline.com; for sources, see OED under ‘salt’). The thing about buying slaves with salt is fictional too.

And then there’s ‘salt of the earth’, which comes up in the 2009 blog post I quoted at the start. I mentioned this in my previous post on ‘salting the earth’. It’s nothing to do with Roman soldiers: it’s biblical, from Matthew 5:13 in the New Testament. This means that (1) it isn’t a Roman phrase, but at closest, Helleno-Christian; (2) it’s later than Pliny’s mention of salarium; (3) it’s about using salt as a fertiliser as much as anything else, as I argued in my earlier post.

World salt production in 2012. That year, China produced between 22.5% and 27% of the world’s salt, well ahead of the USA, India, and Germany (in that order). (Generated using OpenHeatMap, based on Wikipedia figures)

Salt was certainly a significant strategic resource in antiquity. But calling it ‘prized and valuable’ is silly. Yes, it’s the single most common preservative agent ever used, and it is by far the most common seasoning. The Roman salt trade was under state control from the earliest times (see e.g. Livy 1.33.9, 2.9.6); the Via Salaria or ‘Salt Road’ owed its name to its role in salt transportation; the Etruscan city of Veii owed much of its wealth to salt production; and access to salt even provoked a war between two German tribes at Bad Salzungen in the 1st century CE.

But ‘prized and valuable’ -- no. That suggests a special cultural status which isn’t supported by any evidence. No one thought of salt as an heirloom, or used it for jewellery. No one talks about awarding salt as a prize for contests. There’s no evidence anyone used salt bars as money -- not even as one among many forms of exchange, as in 19th century Ethiopia. Salt was not a prestige object.

Modern people who repeat these myths sometimes emphasise the high value of salt in the Roman world. Well, sure, the salt trade was valuable ... that’s because it was traded in such high volume. But in 204 BCE, when Marcus Livius ‘the salt-dealer’ imposed his tax on salt, Livy quotes the price of salt at a sextans: that is, one sixth of a copper as, or one 60th of a silver denarius (or in a civilian context, a sextans was one 96th of a denarius). Polybius, writing in the mid-100s BCE, quotes a foot-soldier’s pay as ‘two obols’ per day, that is to say, one third of a denarius (Polybius 6.39.12).

In other words, a Roman pound of salt (ca. 330 grams) cost one twentieth of a foot-soldier’s daily wages.

Important? Of course. Expensive by modern standards? Maybe, depending on the price of salt where you live. ‘Prized and valuable’? No.

Actually that deserves more than a ‘no’. It deserves a hearty laugh followed by a ‘no’. Thus: ‘Ha ha ha ha! No.’ There, got it right now.

Salting the earth

At the end of that space, a second Scipio, the son of Paulus Aemilius, the conqueror of Perseus, took the city by storm, and destroyed it, razing it to the ground, passing the ploughshare over its site, and sowing salt in the furrows, the emblem of barrenness and annihilation.

The New American Cyclopaedia, vol. 4 (1858) p. 479

The setting: the Romans are sacking Carthage in 146 BCE. Supposedly the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus salts the earth to eradicate Carthage for good, making a fertile land into desert.

The destruction wrought by the Romans was absolutely real, and truly horrific: Appian’s account of it is real nightmare fuel. The salting-the-earth story, though, is pure myth. There isn’t a shred of ancient evidence to suggest that it happened. The story didn’t appear until the 1800s.

The myth evaporates easily enough. But it’s still a very interesting topic. For one thing, there was such a thing as ploughing over a city and salting the earth — it’s just that it didn’t happen to Carthage.

For another thing: when we look closely, it turns out ‘salting the earth’ isn’t about destroying fertile land and turning it into desert. Oh no. The salt is actually meant to be a fertiliser.

Confused? Read on.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The capture of Carthage (1729; NY Met)

Even some professional ancient historians believed the salt myth until the late 1980s, when it got torn to shreds by a cluster of articles in the American journal Classical Philology. First, in 1986, an article by R. T. Ridley dismantled the myth and criticised scholars who had helped perpetuate it. The earliest example Ridley could find was in a volume of the Cambridge Ancient History from 1930. In 1988 another three authors — including one Ridley had criticised, B. H. Warmington — added afterthoughts to Ridley’s article (plus an apology in Warmington’s case). Between them, they managed to push the date of the salt myth back to an essay published in 1905.

One of them, S. T. Stevens, argued that the myth was an extension of the symbolic act of ploughing the land when founding a city (widely attested) or destroying it (attested in one Greco-Roman source). Long before the salt myth came along, it had been widely believed that Carthage had been ploughed over. Now, the ploughing myth has no foundation either. But it pops up in some eminent historians in the late 1800s; it also appeared in the 3rd edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 4 p. 215, in 1797, and was repeated verbatim until at least the 6th edition in 1823.

In fact the ploughing myth goes back a lot further. In 1299 Pope Boniface VIII personally reported how he demolished the city of Palestrina, as part of his feud with the Colonna family, as follows: ‘I subjected it to the plough, following the example of Carthage of old in Africa’. He goes on, ‘we also made salt in it, and commanded that it be sown over, so that it should have neither the condition, nor name, nor title of a city.’ There are strong connections between the ploughing myth and the salt myth: we’ll see more about these connections below.

So the ploughing myth goes back at least to the 13th century. What about the salt myth? Moving on to the internet age, and Wikipedia, we find that it has now been pushed back to 1863. In fact it’s a little older still: its earliest appearance is indeed in Ripley and Dana’s New American Cyclopaedia, but the volume with the ‘Carthage’ article dates to 1858 (see link at top).

Most observers agree that the modern idea of salting the earth is inspired by an incident in the Hebrew Bible, in Judges 9:45, where the Israelite king Abimelech ‘razed the city and sowed it with salt’ at Shechem.

Cover of the 2012 album Salt the Earth by Carthage, a deathcore band based in Maryland

In 2007 The Straight Dope covered the myth. There, Cecil Adams tried to estimate how much salt you’d actually need to make land effectively infertile. His estimate: 31 tons per acre. This works out to 7 kg per square metre, or a coating of about 6 mm. In the 3rd edition Britannica and the New American Cyclopaedia, Carthage’s walls supposedly had a perimeter of 23 miles (37 km). I haven’t tried to find out where they got this factoid from. But assuming they’re right, that limits its area to 109 square km. The amount of salt required to make it infertile, then, could be up to 7.63 × 10⁸ kg, or 763,210 tonnes. Standard Roman merchant ships in the Republican era could carry between 70 and 150 tonnes. So to transport this much salt you’d need a fleet of somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 ships, all packed to the brim with salt.

Here endeth the myth. All nice and tidy. There is a little more to talk about, though. And you know what happens when we get into the details ...

First: given that you’d need such a vast quantity of salt to make a place infertile, why then do we find ‘salting the earth’ going on in the bible, and in Pope Boniface’s misdeeds at Palestrina? And second: if it turns out that they’re not literally making the area devoid of life, what is really going on?

Ploughing and salting in the ancient Near East

Parts of the answer to the first question can be found in the Wikipedia article I already cited. There’s a handful of parallels in mediaeval accounts. But much more interestingly, there’s a whole set of parallels for ploughing over cities and salting the earth in several ancient Near Eastern sources. Here they are, all reported by Ridley (1986: 145):

• a record of the proto-Hittite king Anitta of Nesa (ca. 1720 BCE), who destroyed the city of Hattusa and sowed it with weeds (‘and in its place I sowed weeds’, pe-e-di-is-si-ma ZÀ.AH-LI-an a-ne-e-nu-un; source. Dörfler et al. 2011: 113-14 interpret the weeds as a bioweapon, suggesting that they might have been bearded darnel, which can devastate wheat production, or greater dodder, which destroys legumes and survives for years in fallow soil);
• an inscription where the Assyrian king Adadnirari I (early 1200s BCE) destroys the city of Taidu and strews something called kudimmu over it, a plant whose identity is unknown but which may be linked with salt somehow;
• another Assyrian inscription where Shalmaneser I (mid-1200s BCE) destroys Arinu and strews kudimmu over it;
• another (Grayson, Assyrian Royal Inscriptions vol. 2 no. 238) where Tiglath-Pileser I (early 1000s BCE) destroys Hunusa and strews something called sipu-stones over it;
• another where Ashurbanipal (600s BCE) destroys Elam and scatters it with salt and sahlu seeds, where sahlu is an unknown plant;
• the Hebrew bible, Judges 9:45, written in the 7th century BCE, reporting how Abimelech destroyed the city of Shechem: ‘he razed the city and sowed it with salt’;
• and the latest parallel, again in the Hebrew bible, Jeremiah 26:18: ‘Zion shall be ploughed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.’

Most of the mediaeval and modern examples owe a lot to the incident in Judges 9. But the blend of salting and ploughing is not a modern invention. It wasn’t invented by Pope Boniface VIII either.

Salt = fertiliser

In the Hebrew bible, salt is regularly a symbol of barrenness: see Deuteronomy 29:23, Jeremiah 17:6, and Psalm 107:34. Yet in the other ancient testimony cited above, it’s strikingly clear that the salt is not meant to make the soil infertile. Ashurbanipal uses both salt and seeds; Judges 9:45 specifies that the salt is sown (וַיִּזְרָעֶהָ), not dumped in a layer.

Boniface, too, clearly meant his ploughing-and-salting at Palestrina to have fertile results. His exact words were

ac salem in ea etiam fecimus & mandavimus seminari

and we also made salt in it, and commanded that it be sown over

bull of 1299, section 6

In the 21st century, and back in the 20th century too, most of us are accustomed to thinking of salt as something that eradicates life. If soil is too saline, nothing will grow in it. This is going to be especially on your mind if you’re thinking of places like the Dead Sea, or the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah: both of them salty as all hell, both iconically barren places.

Will Smith drags an alien across the Bonneville Salt Flats (Independence Day, 1996)

In fact, salt was regularly used as a fertiliser in the past. You have to be much more careful with it than with other fertilisers — too much will kill off the plants, it only works for some plants, and you don’t put it on the roots (according to ancient sources, at least) — but within those limits, it has been used regularly and, it may well be, very effectively. Plants need salt too. Even in the modern era, there were many experiments with salt as a fertiliser in the 1800s (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4). And yes, we’re talking specifically about sodium chloride, not Epsom salt or saltpetre.

Nowadays salt has mostly gone out of fashion. Soil salinity is a real problem. Growers in the past may have had success with salt, but it is really really easy to overdo it. It does still see some use: some cattle farmers use it for growing feed, as cows need a lot of salt. Some organic farmers use it too. But before you try this in your own garden, check the salinity of your soil first.

On to the actual testimony. Greco-Roman witnesses have a fair amount to say on the subject. First, Theophrastus’ On effects in plants:

Still, saline water is beneficial even for some vegetables, as cabbage, beet, rue and rocket, ... This improvement occurs, and in a word salinity is good for these vegetables, because they have a certain bitterness in their natures, and the salt water, by penetrating the plants and as it were opening outlets, extracts it (which is why cabbage is best in briny soil) ...

Theophrastus De causis 2.5.3-4 (tr. Einarson and Link)

And again:

We said earlier that salinity is also suited to some vegetables, and that soda is used with others. And so it seems we must accept the salinity here too [in pomegranate and almond trees] as appropriate to the plants, since it is evident that the sweetness of these vegetables comes from the saline water and the food.

Theophrastus De causis 3.17.8

Elsewhere he repeats that cabbage and purslane grow sweet and have little bitterness in saline soil (De causis 6.10.8); and he claims Egyptian olive oil isn’t as good as the Greek stuff because it doesn’t get enough salt (Historia plantarum 4.2.9).

But he really goes all out when it comes to date palms. Ancient date growers didn’t just add a few grains of salt, according to Theophrastus. To borrow a phrase from Quentin Tarantino, they drowned ’em in that shit.

(The date palm) likes a soil which contains salt; wherefore, where such soil is not available, the growers sprinkle salt about it; and this must not be done around the actual roots: one must keep the salt some way off and sprinkle about a hēmiekton (i.e. about 4.3 litres; ca. 5 kg). ... When the tree is a year old, they transplant it and give plenty of salt, and this treatment is repeated when it is two years old, for it delights greatly in being transplanted.

Theophrastus Historia plantarum 2.6.2-3 (tr. Hort, adjusted)

Elsewhere he mentions that Babylonian date growers use salt but no manure for their fertiliser, and that another method of application is manually applying lumps of salt to the trees (De causis 3.17.1-4; also Historia 4.3.5). Theophrastus’ experience must have been with very salt-starved soil. Modern research has shown that date palms do tolerate relatively high salinity, but as with anything, that tolerance has limits. According to this 2015 study, the limit is around 9 to 12.8 dS m^-1 (roughly 6-8 g per litre of soil). Modern date growers don’t use salt as a fertiliser, even in the region that was once Babylonia.

Theophrastus’ enthusiasm about salt isn’t quite as visible in other ancient sources. They do mention it though. Pliny the Elder comes up with a rather imaginative explanation — he obviously doesn’t have as much growing experience as Theophrastus —

salsaeque terrae multa melius creduntur, tutiora a vitiis innascentium animalium.

And many (plants) are better entrusted to salted earth, as they are safer from being harmed by animals breeding there.

Pliny, Natural history 17.29

Pliny is also aware that cattle, sheep, and yoke animals love salty pastures, and that the salt improves their milk and cheese (Nat. hist. 31.88).

A much more striking allusion is in the New Testament, in the gospel of Luke

καλὸν οὖν τὸ ἅλας· ἐὰν δὲ καὶ τὸ ἅλας μωρανθῇ, ἐν τίνι ἀρτυθήσεται; οὔτε εἰς γῆν οὔτε εἰς κοπρίαν εὔθετόν ἐστιν· ἔξω βάλλουσιν αὐτό.

Salt is good; but if the salt goes bad, in what how will it be used for seasoning? It isn’t suitable for the ground or for a manure heap. They throw it away.

Luke 14:34-35 (my translation)

As with almost anything in the New Testament, I need to add a caution. These verses are paralleled in Mark 9:50 and Matthew 5:13, but those passages aren’t as clear about the use of salt as a fertiliser. As a result, New Testament scholars tend to debate the meaning of the passage in Luke.

Digression: there are two other translation problems here, though neither of them has an impact on the bit about using salt as a fertiliser. I mention them because they are bugging me. ἐὰν ... τὸ ἅλας μωρανθῇ is more conventionally translated as ‘if the salt loses its taste’. That translation is driven by the parallel in Mark, which does mean something like that: ἐὰν δὲ τὸ ἅλας ἄναλον γένηται, ‘if the salt becomes unsalty’. But Matthew and Luke use the verb μωραίνω, in the passive, which elsewhere always means ‘become μῶρος, become foolish, be stupefied’. There are no parallels to suggest it can ever mean anything like ‘lose its taste’. (μωραίνω is a moderately common word; just within the NT cf. Romans 1:22, 1 Corinthians 1:20.) ἐν τίνι ἀρτυθήσεται is obscure. The verb ἀρτύω means ‘to prepare, season, salt’, so literally the phrase means ‘With what will (the salt) be seasoned?’ My translation above, which takes ἀρτύω as ‘to use as a seasoning’, strains the syntax a bit. However, the conventional translation ‘how can its saltiness be restored?’ (NRSV) is much more of a stretch: interpreting ἀρτύω as ‘to restore the taste of’ is a strain on meaning, not just syntax.

The salt-as-fertiliser reading does however expose another allusion in the parallel in Matthew 5:13 ‘You are the salt of the earth’ (ὑμεῖς ἐστε τὸ ἅλας τῆς γῆς). The idea there isn’t just that people are flavoursome, and good for preserving foods — they’re also good for growing things!

So no, Carthage wasn’t ploughed and salted, but some other places throughout history have been. It was indeed ecological warfare: the idea was indeed to eradicate a city forever. But not by eradicating all life. Rather, the idea was to turn a once-bustling city into a green space, covered in weeds. And for that purpose, you don’t need an outrageous amount of salt at all.

References

• Dörfler, W; Herking, C.; Neef, R.; Pasternak, R.; von den Driesch, A. 2011. ‘Environment and economy in Hittite Anatolia.’ In: Genz, H.; Mielke, D. P. (eds.) Insights into Hittite history and archaeology. Leuven: Peeters. 99-124.
• Ridley, R. T. 1986. ‘To be taken with a pinch of salt: the destruction of Carthage.’ Classical Philology 81: 140-6. [JSTOR]
• Stevens, S. T. 1988. ‘A legend of the destruction of Carthage.’ Classical Philology 83: 39-41. [JSTOR]
• Visonà, P. 1988. ‘Passing the salt: on the destruction of Carthage again.’ Classical Philology 83: 41-2. [JSTOR]
• Warmington, B. H. 1988. ‘The destruction of Carthage: a retractatio.’ Classical Philology 83: 308-10. [JSTOR]

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.