The Spartan Way: What Modern Men Can Learn from Ancient Warriors

By The Art of Manliness

In this short ebook, we dig past the exaggerated portrayals of Sparta in popular culture, lifting the veil on this mysterious city-state to uncover the real details of how its warriors grew up, trained, fought, and lived out lives of friendship, martial glory, and even humor, music, and manners. The nature of the famousagoge, the importance of the men's nightly dinners, and the secrets to how the Spartans became such effective warriors are all explained, with an eye towards inspiring the men of modernity to live with greater fierceness, fraternity, and honor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780999322222

Book preview

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

To some, the Spartans represent the ultimate warriors—fierce, fearless, liberty-loving, physically-ripped superhero-esque figures. The epitome of rough and ready virility.

To others, the Spartans are a repugnant people—brutish, cruel, one-dimensional proto-totalitarians. Holders of slaves, exacters of infanticide, practitioners of pederasty.

Neither view captures the complexities—not to say conflicting accounts—of the city-state known anciently as Lacedaemon.

Courageous warriors? Surely the Spartan reputation for martial prowess was well-earned. But the Spartan warrior did not fight in the way we most often idealize—in single combat, for individual glory—but rather subsumed as one cooperative member of a larger phalanx.

Nor was the Spartan man a one-trick pony, possessed solely of martial skill and knowledge. Rather, he was an aristocratic gentleman, schooled not only in war, but in music, singing, dance, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, and disciplined comportment as well. He was a literate lover of both sports and poetry, physical sparring and oral repartee. As opposed to the image of a barren, artistically and intellectually austere culture, the philosopher Sphaerus asserted that no one was more devoted to music and song, Spartan dance and choral festivals attracted visitors from near and far, and Socrates argued that The most ancient and fertile homes of philosophy among the Greeks are Crete and Sparta.

When it comes to slavery, infanticide, and pederasty, the evidence is conflicting as to the exact nature and extent to which these customs were practiced. The Spartans did subjugate the Messenians but they were more like medieval serfs than slaves and enjoyed many more privileges than did those held in other parts of ancient Greece; for this reason thousands of slaves from Athens fled to Sparta for better treatment. It is said that the Spartans killed babies deemed unfit to live by exposing them or throwing them off Mt. Taygetus, but the remains of no infants have been found there, and however and wherever infanticide did take place, it was hardly unique to Sparta but practiced in Athens and other city-states as well. As to pederasty, there are certainly sources that attest to its practice, but also those—like the account of the

Reviews for The Spartan Way

[doktordoktor · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Refreshingly short and straight-to the point writing, Laconian style goodness for all men.

[duncan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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