As an adjective, Spartan means austere, tough, without luxury.

This comes straight from the ancient stereotype of the Spartans,

the inhabitants of Sparta in southern Greece.

The Spartans were the ultimate warriors, raised from childhood

to endure terrible suffering and hardship.

The Spartan character is summed up perfectly

by the ancient accounts of the Battle of Thermopylae.

In 480 B.C., the Persians invaded Greece

and the Spartan King Leonidas, with 300 Spartans,

held the pass against them and died in the attempt.

They didn't succeed in stopping the Persian advance,

merely slowing it down,

buying precious time for their fellow Greeks

and giving their lives in the process.

The battle exemplifies so much of what we admire about the Spartans.

Their loyalty to a cause bigger than themselves.

Their devotion to liberty and the preservation of their homeland.

In the course of their fighting they managed a kind of grim humour,

which is familiar to us today from all sorts of action heroes whose

pithy one liners are uttered at the moment of ultimate peril.

For example, when the Persians demanded that the Spartans

lay down their arms, Leonidas famously replied...

Likewise, when a hail of lethal Persian arrows blocked the sun,

Leonidas quipped to his companions...

We can also admire the Spartans' association with great physical

fitness and toughness and endurance.

In the present day they have given their name to a particularly extreme

kind of obstacle race, which challenges people to achieve

their own athletic and physical best in the face of enormous hardship.

What is more, Spartan women were just as tough and as strong as the men.

We're told by the ancient sources that they exercised,

they received an education,

and they were able to own property in their own right.

All things denied to the women of other parts of Greece.

However, I think there are some ways in which we need to hesitate

before accepting the Spartans as the perfect icon

of our modern values today.

First, they can become figureheads of the xenophobe.

The Battle of Thermopylae can start to stand for holding out against

the encroachment of an alien invader.

The most pernicious example of the Spartans usage of this kind

is in 1930s Germany, when they came to stand for the ancestry of the

Aryan master race and essentially legitimated anti-Semitism

and other extreme forms of xenophobia.

Another question is whether we today really want to claim the Spartan

paradigm of masculinity.

Emotion was anathema.

The individual was nothing.

The state was everything.

As we realise more and more the need to encourage people to express rather

than deny their emotions and to show the distress they might be feeling,

maybe the Spartan ideal of masculinity is not the one

we actually want to claim for the present day.

It's no coincidence that the Spartans inspired the British public school

system of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

A system in which ideals of discipline, endurance and austerity

were paramount.

Even the toughness of Spartan women is suspect.

The ancient sources tell us that they trained their bodies to produce

strong sons, so even the athleticism for which they were famous

serves ultimately the Spartan war machine.

And the grim joy with which they saw their sons go to their deaths

in battle is unpalatable today.

Spartan women are said, by the author Plutarch, to have told their

menfolk going off to war...

On one's shield of course meant dead.

Evoking Sparta is often a way of trying to recover values which

are thought to be lost or receding.

Old fashioned values of resilience and self-denial,

which some in modern society feel that we have squandered.

In fact, however, historians of ancient Sparta have long challenged

the historical truthfulness of the ancient stereotype of the Spartans.

For decades now, they have been trying to put forward an alternative

Sparta with a richer, more complex culture.

Art, music and a much more complex range of values

than have traditionally been attributed to them.

There is no sign however of this happening.

We are too addicted to the Spartan stereotype, however inaccurate,

to give it up in favour of a more complex and nuanced reality.

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