Did the Spartans ever use the white feather or any color or number of feathers as a sign of cowardice? If not the Spartans which ancient cultures did?
Well the ancient culture of Britain… in WW1. Women gave a white feather to young men in civilian clothes they met in the streets, presumably to guilt them of not having joined the Army (that was on an all-voluntary force until 1917).
The meaning was from a book of early 20th century, with three soldiers going to war and the fourth receiving three white feathers from their spouses, prompting him to go.
I was wondering if the British copied that tradition from the Greeks or Romans. I haven’t been able to trace it further back before WWI.
According the the Wikipedia page, it derives from cockfighting.
The use of the phrase “white feather” to symbolise cowardice is attested from the late 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED cites A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), in which lexicographer Francis Grose wrote “White feather, he has a white feather, he is a coward, an allusion to a game cock, where having a white feather, is a proof he is not of the true game breed”.[3] This was in the context of cockfighting, a common entertainment in Georgian England.
IWW poet and organizer Joe Hill wrote a song about a strike of railway navvies in British Columbia in 1912, and one line has a striker saying “we’ll show no white feather where the Fraser River Flows”