Re: is ancient Sparta an influence on you?
The following is an excerpt from a private exchange. I am sharing it with permission without disclosing the identity of my correspondent.
[…] is sparta and the mythology around their toughness/discipline/focus on “real things” an influence on you? That’s the image I have of sparta from pop culture but you might have a different view because you are Greek
No, ancient Sparta per se does not inspire me. Though the ancient Greek values, which the Spartans shared, do inform my way of life.
I think the pop culture view of the Spartans is exaggerated. Or, to be more precise, the Spartans have a reputation that is not specific to them. They were militaristic and austere, yes, though (i) austerity is part of the Greek life in general throughout the aeons and (ii) all Greeks had variations of the landowner-citizen-warrior (ιδιοκτήτης-πολίτης-οπλίτης) theme.
With few exceptions, Greece was never a wealthy nation compared to its peers. Not if we were to judge it against the rich and vastly more populous areas of Egypt, Messopotamia, Persia, and, further east, India and China. The Greeks have always been relatively few in number and poor by comparison (the population dynamics are true even today). The geography plays a big part in this.
Modern Greece is known for its beaches as a tourist attraction. This it is, though if you think about it in terms of the ancient world, the seaside does not give you any money. The soil is saturated with salt and you cannot cultivate anything there. The winds are stronger than in the hinterlands because there are no obstacles in their way.
Check out the small Aegean islands to get a sense of such a place: those islands effectively are formations of rock surrounded by undrinkable water. The only source of food and a modest income is fishing—and it too is difficult due to strong winds during the winter. The Greek mainland is rocky and full of steep mountains. It does not lend itself to large-scale agriculture.
The Greeks thus had to rely on maritime trade, which led them to set up small coastside colonies across the Mediterranean and the Black sea. The Greek mainland was not an economic powerhouse or, if it was for a while, that period was short.
The point is that austerity is inherent to the Greek way of life. The word we have to describe our comfort with few things is “oligarky” (ολιγάρκεια), which is not to be confused with “oligarchy” (ολιγαρχία). Oligarky literally means “few+enough of” or “few+content with”. By contrast, oligarchy means “few+rule”. Another variation of this theme is “autarky” (αυτάρκεια) which means “self+enough of” or “self+content with”, which practically says that you live off of your own produce. Again, this is not to be mistaken for “autarchy” (αυταρχία) which stands for “self+rule”.
At around the turn of the 21st century of the common era, the Greeks lived through a period of unprecedented economic growth which was fuelled by unsustainable capital flows brought about by the creation of the European single currency (the Euro) and the concomitant convergence of bond market interest rates. That fair-weather edifice unravelled in the post-2008 financial crisis; a crisis whose chilling effects the world still suffers from.
For the Greeks in particular, this came as a cultural shock because people who were young adults at the time were raised with a Disney princess view of the world in which you are entitled to everything and in which there is a happy ending just because of who you are. The middle finger they got from the markets has hopefully brought them back to the primordial Greek reality of living within your means and of working through hardship with vigour, creativity, and a good sense of humour (humour is a powerful coping mechanism). In this world there is no space for self-styled indignant protesters (elsewhere “indignados” or the various “occupy” movements) who twiddle their thumbs at the city square waiting for the authorities to give them the princely life they were promised.
Anyway, not to run off on a political tangent… The gist is that the ancient Spartans are not special in this regard.
Then we have the wider theme of toughness, an expression of which occurs through militarism. This too is not an ancient Spartan exclusivity. Just look at the Greek gods to get a sense of how every single Greek colony thought of itself. The aesthetics of a people tell you a lot about their underlying values. If they appreciate an athletic body, it is because they necessarily respect and promote discipline, commitment, and hard work, for there is no other way to maintain that kind of body. Plus the obvious appreciation of sheer strength.
If their greatest religious event is athletic at its core (the Olympic games), it shows how they thought of spirituality as a facet of the human condition that is rooted in the vigorous body. To them, the spirit is not more important than the body and, conversely, they would not treat the body as something to be feared or loathed or, indeed, to be hidden from sight.
If their goddess of wisdom (Athena) is a warrior rather than some pacifist academic figure, it is because they understand that sometimes you have to stand your ground and be forceful. When “sometimes” is the right course of action is what wisdom is all about. To put it differently, wisdom consists in the judgement one applies to suspend their own rules in order to avoid absurdity or annihilation.
Athena is a woman whose presence engenders awe: an unambiguous way to communicate the ancient Greek value that strength, ferocity, and perfect poise are not limited to manhood (same can be said about Artemis, for example, and nobody would want to mess around with Hera, anyway).
I can go on about the symbolism germane to all the gods, but the point is this: the Greeks did not want to be seen as pitiful and to compete with each other over who is the most victimised. This is a perversion of the excellence they aspired to. It is a race to the bottom that is celebrated as success and valorised as propriety.
It then follows that whatever you want in life you earn it the hard way. There are no shortcuts. Not because you are entitled to it. No. You get what your deeds yield—and what they can return depends on the prevailing political conditions so, in other words, on what others are and have been doing. Combine that with the austerity you are raised in and you get a set of values that are at once communitarian and individualistic.
The community is the milieu in which the landowner-citizen-warrior is realised and the space where the religious experience is made whole. It is the place where typically all your friends and relatives—your clan—are. The individual is the person who seeks excellence, in accordance with the Olympic ideals, and who nonetheless has to operate with moderation to avoid hubris.
Hence the Apollonian cult of knowing your limits and of not being reckless (and Apollon was the patron of Sparta, by the way), embedded in the three Delphic maxims of “μηδέν άγαν” (“nothing in excess” or “nothing in deviation” [of the middle way], so avoid exaggerations), “γνώθι σεαυτόν” (“know yourself”, so that you can be mindful of your limits, which nonetheless requires that you investigate your world), “εγγύα παρά δ’Άτα” (“assurances stand beside Ate (the goddess of ruin)”, so do not be full of yourself and reckless in what you do and thus, again, work within your means).
There is an element of honour that connects the communitarian with the individualistic. It is at the root of interpersonal relations. People are expected to recognise excellence, to value family and friendship, and generally to not disturb the boundaries between the house and the city. We have a word which I will expound on in some future philosophy video called “φιλότιμο”. I would render it in English as philotimy or philotimia. It literally means to be a friend of honour, kind of how philosophy is friendship of wisdom. (And “friend” in this context is a form of love, but “love” proper is called “αγάπη” (agape).) In short, honour is what inspires a person to be honest, to not seek to cheat, to not be a swindler, to respect someone’s household, to not violate anybody’s sacred sites, and the like.
Those who lack honour have their reputation tarnished for an eternity. In closely knit societies this is a powerful mechanism to enforce the norms because those who are punished cannot make a living anymore. The Greeks care about their reputation so much that we have a word for it: υστεροφημία, which means one’s fame after they die. Let me call this hysterophemy. One tends to their hysterophemy when they pursue excellence, because if you are going to do something well, you might as well leave a legacy for the aeons. And, conversely, if you lack honour all future people will loath you and your descendants will carry that stigma in shame. An example of this is the traitor of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae (the famous “300”), whose name was Ephialtis. That was a regular name at some point that no sensible Greek will ever name their son after, given the dishonour of treason.
With those behaviours in place, you effectively get a society that works decently even when there are no strong rules enforced by a central government. This, too, has been a fixture of the Greek world which was for millenia a patchwork of small colonies and city-states. That is now changing with the creation of the centralist and centralising nation-state which, unsurprisingly, has led to an erosion of the communitarian ethos and its accompanying philotimy.