Permit me to be the first to thank and congratulate Una Persson (the former Anthracite) for a wonderful guest contribution staff report on Whether Spartan mothers really told their sons, “With your shield or on it?” … which will appear officially this coming Tuesday.
You know, I was wondering who this Una Persson person was… Excellent report, Una!
Watch out! If Dex likes your work, he’ll find a way to get more outta you. You’ve been warned.
Thank you very much, and it’s too late - Ed should already have another one of mine in the queue to inflict upon people, and I have two more I’m working on right now. 
Catherine Cornelius’ lover, of course.
But you’re still the Coal Goddess, right?
And congratulations! I’ve been wondering when they were going to lasso you in to writing Staff Reports.
Una is a light that shines on my little corner of the universe.
The perpetual “death before dishonor” attitude of the Spartans was set into sharp, satirical relief in the poetry of Archilochus (700 BC), who wrote:
Today my shield belongs to some proud Seian,
for, despite my good intentions,
I dropped it by a convenient bush
as I fled the battlefield.
Why should I care for an old shield?
I can get another just as good
When again I take the field
Hope I got it right. I’m quoting this from memory.
An excellent column, by the way. Just can’t get enough of those wacky Spartans!
Hello all,
Is it plausable that perhaps women weren’t quite this brutal? I mean, could it merely be that men wrote history and therfor they gave it a bit of a twist? Or that the author is basing the account of women on one or two? Like judging all women in England today by how the Queen acts and what she says?
Not just an attitude, Kizarvexius, but a reality. It was not so much a queston of "death before dishonor: as “death anddishonor”.
Archilochus was writing perhaps before the invention, certainly before the spread, of hoplite tactics in Greece. As Una noted in her article:
Archilochus could get away with his flight (and his attitude) because he was fighting in the individual arisstocratic style memorialized so effectively (if probably anachronisticly) by Homer. If he had tried that a century later, he would have left a gap in the phalanx – and left the hoplite on his left suddenly undefended – that would have earned him a shunning, if no worse, when he got home.
We ought to remember that Sparta was one end of a spectrum, not an freak occurence, in classical Greek society. The citizens of other poleis weren’t as gung-ho for the “beautiful death” in battle that the Spartans were (or claimed that they were), but they had a healthy respect for military discipline, brought about by sheer need.
It is always possible that, since men wrote most of the history, that there would be a certain flavour to it. This is always a danger, especially so in the case of accounts of Spartan attitudes written several years (or centuries) ex post facto.
Several other reports of actions and attitudes of both Spartan women and the culture in general bear up a “tough” characterization. One item was the frequent exposure of weak, sick, or deformed children to be killed - one would think that any maternal instincts a woman might have would cause her to most strongly protest the death of her child. Now, other Greek and related cultures have done the same, but not to the level that was seen in Sparta. Another was the training of Spartan girls in athletics and light warfare, something not generally seen in that part of the world at the time. Spartan girls went to their “training school” at a very young age - perhaps as young as 5 to 7 years. They lived together separate from the boys and men, and the girls reputedly lived a very rough life of hard work, training, privation, tests of endurance (including dancing endurance), gymnastics, etc. However, this was not done so Spartan women could eventually fight alongside the men, but seems to have been mainly done as a sort of a primative eugenics program - strong women being believed to produce mostly strong boys, who would grow to fill the hoplite ranks.
This separatist, competitive, and athletic culture may have had other side effects - a recent programme I saw on BBC even went so far as to say that it was some of the rough and tumble athletics and games, coupled with segregation of the sexes in their youth, that led to a report of “opportunistic lesbianism” being “commonly practiced” among Spartan teenage girls.
Speaking strictly, strictly out of scholarly interest…what programme might that be?
Excellent article btw. Quite fascinating.
Thank you for the answer Una. I love history.
I have the same vested scholarly interest as Wierd al.
On a different note, isnt “opportunistic lesbianism” what we now call “experimentation at college”??? I’m sorry I had too.
“Only zool”
HA, I just saw that. Great line from a great movie.
Excuse me, but I believe the concept is "Come back with it = VICTORIOUS or on it = DEAD’.
Even now, many Muslim women are telling their children to be a martyr in the jihad against the infadels. There should be no debate that some if not many Spartan women would tell their sons to conquer or die.
Loved your report. One quibble - you write:
Surely an illiterate mother could dictate a letter and have someone read her son’s replies to her.
I agree - there were likely many avenues for them to communicate via writing. Literate slaves were not unknown, and there were of course other literate Spartan men and women who could assist. IIRC, there were professional scribes who would write letters and documents for the general (paying) populace.